Seeing Harry Styles 3 times in 3 months has left me with a very unexpected feeling, which is one of disillusionment. The closest thing I can compare the feeling to is when a food tastes so good that I eat it many days in a row and tell everyone about how delicious it is, and then I reach a threshold at which I don’t want it anymore. It hasn’t suddenly become bad and yet I know that I have to avoid the probably excessive amount of that food that’s in my fridge because otherwise it will becomes a thing I can’t enjoy anymore.

When I went to my first Harry show, I was excited to relay to my uninitiated friend all his bits. This is a family show! Dads! I knew these bits because I had watched hours of videos on YouTube from his other shows. To finally be there, in person, felt like I was a part of something - I was in on the joke.

I still largely felt that way, four years later, standing in the crowd at Madison Square Garden in September. I was days away from my birthday, with two of my most favorite people, and just so incredibly happy to be there. When Harry performed “Cinema” - a song I had spent months bitching about - I turned to Christina and yelled, “I take back everything I said about this stupid song! It is meant to be consumed live!” I wore a feather boa because on the last tour so many people had been wearing them and I wanted to be in on the fun.

That I bought tickets for three different shows this year was something of an accident. When tour dates were announced, I had already been loosely planning a trip to New York to celebrate my birthday, and the fact that Harry was going to be there around the same time seemed like a special opportunity. Then, the week before on-sale, I received a large, unexpected bonus at work which resulted in my freaking out about money and what I was supposed to do with it. After I got tickets to the New York show I thought, “maybe I should get some in LA in case the trip falls through. And going to multiple shows might be fun.” And once I had that second set of tickets, the part of me that was uncomfortable with my recent influx of funds said, “Buy a third set of tickets. Because you can.”

I'm putting Casually Obsessed on hiatus while I focus on other projects (namely: The Bi Pod and my revising my novel). I'm hoping the extra space in my schedule will also give me time for more reading and watching and listening (and, therefore, more to tell you about later).

In the meantime, I have a few quick 2021-Year-In-Review type items to share with you.

If you're looking for reading recs, or just curious about what I read last year, you can find my 2021 reading list here (This year is already off to a good start).

You can find my most-listened-to songs of 2021 here. About half the tracks on that list are in my book playlist, which means I listened to them on repeat while working on the book - it definitely skews the numbers, but I guess the fact that I've been listening to those tracks over and over for (in some cases) years now is its own kind of endorsement.

I have a rule that I don't consume content that begins with the murder of a girl. What I'm actually trying to distance myself from is shows like "True Detective", where a dead girl makes for the genesis of a story about a man (see also: fridging). I'm not interested in the meaning men make out of women's trauma; it's boring.

I am interested in how women make sense of a world that is trying to destroy them.* I love girls who are butterfly like a knife not butterfly like a nectar-eating insect. I like seeing them sharpen their hard edges and learn who they can be soft with. These characters feel not so much like a subversion of gender expectations as a natural reaction of them. In a world that wants them to be small so they can be stepped on, they become a thumbtack hidden in the carpet.

There are two whip smart, hard-edged girls that I've been thinking about a lot lately who qualified for exceptions to my rule.

The CW's "Nancy Drew" starts with a dead woman (Tiffany), a teenage ghost (Lucy), and the eponymous Nancy trying to figure out who killed both. Leigh Bardugo's "Ninth House" begins with a murdered townie (Tara), and Alex Stern, an accidental Yale student who can see ghosts. Both Nancy and Alex are told not to look into it, to leave the investigating to the professionals and not risk their comfortable lives, but neither can let it go. The search for answers turns their lives upside down and shakes something inside them loose.

When I first started telling people that I was starting Casually Obsessed, everyone wanted to know when I was going to talk about Harry Styles. I'm sure he seemed like an obvious early subject because everyone knew I loved him. And his second album had just come out, something I enthused about to anyone who would listen. So, I get why people assumed I would be using this new platform to publish all my thoughts about Harry Styles.

Except, being asked to articulate how I feel about Harry Styles is like being asked to tell you how I feel about the ocean. Do you want me to describe the characteristics of the water, or what it's like to be immersed in it? Should I give you a memory of the ocean, or how it exists in my imagination? Should I tell you about the water with the assumption that you've also felt like I've felt, or tell you about it like you've only ever seen a swimming pool?

All this to say: Harry felt like too much for me to capture and so, nearly two years in, I've yet to turn the Casually Obsessed spotlight his way.

But this week, standing in the pit at his Sacramento show — a concert I bought tickets for 723 days earlier — I realized something I wanted to write to you about: Harry’s dancing.

I love books. Reading them and writing them and collecting them. Having them in my house, perusing them in book stores, sending them as gifts to friends.

I will be honest and admit that I usually assume anyone that loves books has a relationship to them that looks like mine, which is a wild thing to assume since a relationship to books is highly personal!

As a nosey person with a newsletter I decided to right that wrong and do a bit of a survey; I ask some of the book people in my life about their own book collections and buying habits. Reading their responses was really delightful and now I'm tempted to send these questions out to everyone I know (if you're so moved, I encourage you to send me your responses).

I've been thinking about the role of the group chat ever since Bad Art Friend (I'll link out for clarity, but if you haven't been exposed to the Bad Art Friend/Kidney Person discourse I encourage you to stay pure). A good group chat can serve so many functions — logistics planning, emotional support, scathing criticism of something stupid, pop culture discourse. If this were a group chat, here are the things I would have sent over the last few weeks.

Pop Pop Pop

Sun Worshiper: Lorde Doesn’t Want to be a Messiah—or Does She?

I've been wrestling with my thoughts on Solar Power since it came out, and I really appreciated the nuanced analysis here for the album and Lorde's general positioning around it.

Guinevere isn’t Guinevere.

That’s one of the first things we learn in Kiersten White’s “The Guinevere Deception.” The novel is an Arthurian retelling through Guinevere’s eyes. Or rather, through the eyes of the wood witch posing as the princess. Magic has been driven from Camelot, Merlin banished. The sorcerer sent Not-Guinevere in his place, tasking her with marrying Arthur as cover for a secret mission.

The book, the first in a trilogy, has a lot of secrets. Secret identities, secret passageways, and plots. The perfect crucible for a heroine whose deepest desire is to be known, to be seen and recognized for all that she is. Though sometimes even she’s not sure who she is. She's given up everything for this and the deeper she gets into Camelot, into Arthur’s confidence and Guinevere’s life, the less sure she feels.

Our story opens with Arthur's knights escorting his bride to Camelot. It's Guinevere's first test and without meaning to she makes small mistakes that could give her away. She realizes quickly that her slip-ups aren't going unnoticed. Mordred — Arthur's nephew, and most trusted knight — is watching her."Mordred, always watching. He was beautiful, smooth-faced, with mossy-green eyes. She was reminded of the elegance of the snake gliding through the grass. But when she caught him staring, his smile had more of the wolf than of the snake."

For the last few months, my tolerance for unfamiliar content has been fairly low. I've been more excited for sequels than new titles; for several weeks the only thing I could even get myself to read was fan fiction; I put off recommendations from friends for shows I genuinely do want to watch. I just didn't have the capacity for parsing through new things.

The fog seems to be lifting now, and I'm remembering how pleasurable it can be to be surprised by something. Not just surprised — confused. I've been thinking about the particular joy of not knowing what's going on.

When I started reading "Harrow the Ninth", I had no clue what was happening. It's the second book in The Locked Tomb series, the follow-up to Tamsyn Muir's "Gideon the Ninth." The first book has a lot of mystery elements, which meant a lot of unknowns, but I wouldn't say that I found it confusing. The sequel, on the other hand, had me disoriented from the very first page.

The premise of the series is hard to describe, but the tag I've been using to recommend "Gideon" is, "necromancers. In Space. In a mystery mansion." There's also an oft-referenced God King and a lot of meme humor and sword fighting, but I feel like the essential, genre-bending elements are captured in that tag. The book is from the perspective of the titular Gideon, following her in a close third person. She makes stupid puns and dirty jokes and all of that is injected into the narrative tone of the book.

There’s a particular pleasure in the referential. A well-used allusion can trigger nostalgia, add depth, provide context. A lot of work can be done by evoking other work.

"Only Murders in the Building" — the new Hulu mystery-comedy starring Martin Short, Steve Martin, and Selena Gomez — runs on invocation. It's a murder mystery, while also commenting on murder mysteries (true crime, specifically). You know how I love a good 'is the thing and is commenting on the thing.'

The premise is that the trio all live in the same building, The Arconia. Martin Short plays a washed-up theater director, Steve Martin is a one-hit-wonder actor hiding away from the world, and Selena Gomez is a secretive, hard-edged millennial drifting through her own life. They're brought together when, by chance, they learn that they all love the same true crime podcast. They're united when a murder in the building prompts them to start an investigation (and a podcast) of their own.

This week I'm thrilled to be bringing you an essay from the brain of one of my most favorite people — Christina Brown. Christina is a pop culture scholar and a breakup art expert. She's especially obsessed with one particular breakup album and I'm stoked to share some of her thoughts on it with you! Enjoy.

The first time we see Charlize Theron in the blue light of "Atomic Blonde" she's emerging from an ice bath. The bruises across her pale white skin look like the veined marble of the bathroom. One eye doesn't look quite right— like the blood vessels were recently burst. When she flips on the vanity light, we're taken from dim twilight and thrust into a clinical whiteness. The bruising on her face and throat, her split lip, the eye. It all makes her look more like one of the undead than the heroine of an action film.

It's a striking image— stark and brutal. It might also be one of the only times I've seen a woman on screen looking truly trashed as a result of something other than intimate partner violence.

While we meet our protagonist here, most of the film takes place several days prior. As a result, we get to see exactly how she ended up this way. The fight sequences are stellar throughout the film, but it's this last one that's the real standout. It takes place in an old, empty apartment building in Berlin. Over the course of the scene, Theron takes on three different assailants — two in the stairwell and the third in an abandoned apartment. The fight is made to look like a single shot — the cuts are seamless — which gets more and more impressive as the fighting goes on. The scene lasts nearly 7 minutes.

It's Labor Day here in the US, so I'm celebrating other people's labor by sharing a few pieces of my favorite cultural commentary - old and new-ish.

Cause célèbre

Jennifer Lawrence and the History of Cool Girls

• This piece came out in 2014 so in internet years it's ancient. At the time the mis en scene of Buzzfeed quizzes and weird videos, not a lot of reporting, and I remember sending this to so many people and saying, "okay it's on Buzzfeed but it's really good. Like, really good." (Honestly, I probably said some version of that way past when it was relevant. Change is hard.)

• There's also a 2018 follow-up that I stumbled upon while putting this email together. It's a good continuation! Maybe next year we'll get a part three...

There's this episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" called "The Body." It's one of those episodes that always gets mentioned when talking about the show because it's so well done, and so impactful. It, and many of the other commonly-mentioned-by-name episodes ("Hush"; "Once More With Feeling"; "Tabula Rasa"), stands out in part for all the ways it breaks from the regular format of the show.

In every generation a Slayer is chosen, a girl called to defend humanity against vampires and demons, gifted with incredible strength and agility. "Buffy" is a show about the supernatural. The fantasy elements are usually allegorical, standing in for some challenge of young adulthood, but it's still a show where people come back from the dead and soulless ex-boyfriends get sent to hell dimensions. It runs on the mythological. But in "The Body" Buffy and her friends have to contend with something they're not equipped for — mortality. Buffy's mother, Joyce, dies. Not from a vampire bite or a ritual sacrifice, but a brain aneurysm. Unpredictable, unstoppable, mundane.

All the show's characters struggle with the loss, but it's Buffy that really gets thrown into the unknown. Part of the conceit, and the appeal, of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is that being the slayer takes its titular character from what's usually depicted as the ultimate position of weakness (an attractive young woman - always the first to die in the horror movie) and puts her a position of power. She's nearly invulnerable and always an agent of action. But her mother's death renders Buffy intensely vulnerable to forces outside her control.

From the second she discovers her mother's body, Buffy is off balance. “Mom, mom, MOM,” she shouts— like she'll be able to wake her from her motionless, blue-lipped state. Buffy spends the episode largely directionless, her eyes wide and searching. Death has a particular finality, a kind of discontinuity, that action heroes rarely have to actually deal with. For action heroes, there's always someone to avenge, some big bad to chase, some shadowy organization to topple. A mission, a revenge quest, a higher calling, are what masculine (and masculinized) paragons run on. But Buffy's robbed of that drive. She can't conquer natural death, not really. She doesn't know what to do without a mission.

One of the ways I know that my interest in something has crossed into casual obsession territory is when I can't stop thinking about some small detail. It could be a special line or a motif, could be something in the color palette, but it's the fixation on things that maybe don't really matter that tells me I am absolutely hooked.

With "In the Dark", the hook was the way one character touches another. It's probably not a surprising hook given my interest in physical intimacy on television, but it's the kind of minutiae that I doubt other people think about continually.

The premise of "In the Dark" is that Murphy Mason, a hard-drinking, blind twenty-something sets out to solve the murder of one of her best friends when the police don't take the case seriously. My first impression was that the show sounded like some kind of bizarre TV bingo card. Broken woman plus extrajudicial crime solving plus... blindness? But it all works together somehow.

Murphy is selfish and self involved, regularly manipulative and often mean. She uses her blindness to shirk responsibility and get what she wants whenever she can (like pretending she doesn't realize there's a line at the drug store and walking straight up to the counter), but she resents and resists people trying to help her. And, like many broken women before her, she has a habit of getting drunk and sleeping with shitty men.

Have you ever noticed that the sex on television all kind of looks the same? "Game of Thrones" or "Riverdale," "Bridgerton" or "Grey's Anatomy", the shows change but the sex choreography stays the same.

Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. The shows might be in different settings, or the characters might wear period costumes, but it's still the same moves, the same angles, same same same.

If you're not sure what I mean, here's a case studies for you: two Freeform shows about women trying to navigate work, sex, and love in their early twenties.

One, the "The Bold Type" was positioned as Sex and the City for millennials; its main trio all work at Scarlet Magazine (a stand-in for Cosmo) in New York. 

I'm a recent convert to the church of Carly Rae Jepsen.

I wish I had a good explanation for why it's taken me this long, but I really don't. If you're not a member of the CRJ congregation, you might know her best as "the 'Call Me Maybe' girl". That's the song that propelled her to notoriety in the States. I was in college at the time and, characteristically, the song was everywhere. I vividly remember a sign one of my roommates created for a party that said, "Hey I just met you / and this is crazy / but I brought vodka / so party baby."

I knew all the words to "Call Me Maybe" but I couldn't have told you anything about CRJ or what the rest of her music might be. The song faded and Carly was summarily assigned One Hit Wonder status. Then, three years later, she had the audacity to put out her third album - "EMOTION". Pop enthusiasts went wild.

I missed the call in then, and missed it again when "Dedicated" came out in 2019.  

I recommend Carry On by Rainbow Rowell early and often.

It's a book (a trilogy, actually) that doesn't have any business being as good as it is. I went into it with low expectations - I was just looking for something to read and Rainbow Rowell was a big enough name in YA that I felt like I had to check out some of her work. I didn't even bother with getting a physical copy; I downloaded it to my Kindle.

I stayed up all night and read the book in one sitting.

Usually I pitch the book as “gay Harry Potter” and “like fan fiction, in the best way.” For a lot of people, that's enough of a hook to get them interested. I don’t usually describe it as being about longing, or trauma, or struggling to meet expectations. I don’t even say that it’s about friendship or falling in love or growing up, although it is very much all those things. It's a book that both is the thing - a magical school story, a Chosen One book - and is also commenting on the thing - what are the tropes we don't want to look at too deeply? What does it mean when we pour all our expectations onto a single person? Doesn't the Chosen One get kind of a shitty deal being Chosen?