Rich Text

In honor of the "Love Island" USA season 8 reunion, we are making our July episode featuring Anna Peele, author of "Enter the Villa: The (Unauthorized) Reality Behind 'Love Island,'" free for all Rich Text subscribers.
By the beginning of July, I have entered my now-annual "Love Island" fugue state. I fall asleep watching new episodes, and I wake up and immediately reach for my phone to scroll social media reactions. I try to recap the major plot points to my husband, who is usually baffled by the onslaught of details and my feverish emotional state. It's all I know how to think about about at the moment. So I was thrilled to get a chance this week to chat with, Anna Peele, contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of "Enter the Villa: The (Unauthorized) Reality Behind 'Love Island.'"
As a relative newbie to the "Love Island" universe, I'm always looking for more insight about the show's history, influences, and impact, and Peele's deeply researched and reported book is the motherlode. She analyzes the show's forerunners and how executives put together the show that has evolved into an international mega-franchise, and breaks down that franchise's rocky introduction to the American market. She offers insight into how producers actually shape – or don't shape – storylines and character arcs, and into how contestants perceived their experiences.
In our conversation, we discuss the evolution of the "Love Island" format, what made it tricky to bring to America and how it contrasts with "The Bachelor," the significance of the show's hosts and inimitable narrator Iain Stirling, how contestants experience being in the bubble of the show's set, our takes on the most recent "Love Island" USA seasons, and much more.
Hope you enjoy! xo
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Recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she was freezing her eggs during the August recess. In fact, in a very AOC move, she documented the entire process on Instagram, and used her videos to speak directly to her followers about her decision, the experience of freezing eggs, and policies she believes could provide childbearing people with more options for planning their families. Predictably, MAGA mockery and backlash ensued. AOC was accused of using her fertility for a campaign stunt – and, still worse, tricking normie women into believing they could put career first and still have kids.
Meanwhile, Anne Hathaway hit the red carpet in a Prabal Gurung crop top that showed off her baby bump. The 43-year-old is currently expecting her third child with husband Adam Shulman. And this, too, drew mockery and backlash. Hathaway was not only criticized for conceiving a child at such an advanced age, but scrutinized for evidence that her bump was an advanced prosthetic for a fake pregnancy.
In this episode, we discuss the contours of these two backlashes and what they say, individually and together, about the right's view of fertility, pregnancy, and women's rights. We talk about the puritanical disgust for women's bodies – and pregnant bodies – evinced by the freakout over Hathaway's bump photos, and the reactionary belief that pregnant people are inappropriate for public view. We also get into the frequent conspiracy theories about celebrity women's baby bumps, and the underlying attitudes about what kind of woman can be a mother. And, of course, we dig into the far-right pronatalist outrage at women having children after 35 – at least, women who aren't tradwives and don't already have 10 children. Plus, we look at how the increasingly punitive and rigid pronatalist ideology being advanced by male conservatives is deepening a rift between men and women on the right.
Hope you enjoy! xo
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CW: Pregnancy and childbirth are discussed in detail in this episode.
It's a big week on Rich Text, because Emma is back in the (metaphorical) building! On the two-month birthday of her daughter, we recorded her first postpartum podcast, and it was such a pleasure to be back to our old tricks. (She will be taking more time before returning to Love to See It, so don't be alarmed to see that Leigh is still manning the cohost mic in the coming weeks.)
Given the huge event that just took place in Emma's life, what topic could be more natural, more fitting, than her birth story? In this raw and personal episode, Claire asks all of her burning questions about the labor and delivery, how Emma got through the hormonal rollercoaster of the first few weeks postpartum, her feeding journey, and what her daughter's personality is like (so far? mostly ravenous) – and Emma shares the ins and outs of her wild couple of months getting acquainted with parenthood.
Plus, we get into the unbidden arrival of mom guilt, the still-more unbidden arrival of hospital bills, and all of the structural supports that would make this life-altering experience easier and healthier – like universal healthcare and childcare, home health visits, and subsidized pelvic floor therapy – which our country refuses to provide for birthing people and new parents. Hope you enjoy! xo
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In the opening scenes of the new (certified fresh!) Netflix movie "Don't Say Good Luck," Sophie Birenbaum (Sunny Sandler) is abuzz with pleasurable nerves. She's rehearsing her audition song for her high school's production of "Waitress," helping get her twin brothers off to school, giggling with her best friend. By the end of the day, she has learned – thanks to a poorly timed butt dial from her dad's cell phone – that her mother's cancer has returned. Shaken, she gives such a raw and vulnerable performance in her callback for a secondary part that, in a shocking upset, she lands the lead role.
It's an overwhelming scenario for any teenage girl to face, with excitement and anxiety and fear all jumbling together with the already potent adolescent blend of hormones and budding independence. And it's one that I had heard a version of before, because it's based on the real experiences of my dear friend Laura Hankin, the novelist and screenwriter behind the original screenplay.
I had been eagerly anticipating this movie for years; Laura had been at work on the script, her most personal project yet, for half a decade. As a devoted reader of her books, I knew that the story would be thoughtful, tender, and funny. But now that I've actually watched the movie, I'm bowled over by it. The script, co-written with Jordan Horowitz and Julia Hart (who also directed), is big-hearted, nuanced, and at times hilarious. The performances, from a truly stacked cast (including Melanie Lynskey as Sophie's mom and Max Greenfield as her dad), are touchingly real. It may be a cliché to say that I laughed and I cried, but there was nothing cliché about how loudly I was snort-laughing through my sobs by the final third of the film.
So I was thrilled to get to sit down with Laura to talk about the winding path that led to this movie being made, the joys of collaboration, the details from her own life that made it into the final movie, the finer points of high school theater culture, the thematic resonances between "Waitress" and Sophie's story, how becoming mothers has changed our perspectives on losing our own, and much more. In the 20 years that Laura and I have known each other, we have shared many long conversations about loss, grief, motherhood, ambition, and art, and this is by far the most personal, and emotional, one we have ever recorded. (Though I remain partial to our 2023 conversation about "The Lizzie McGuire Movie"!)
I hope you enjoy – and I hope you stream this gem of a movie.
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The Bravo and Bravo-adjacent cinematic universe has been in full swing in recent weeks, and I needed to talk to an expert. So this week, Gibson Johns (entertainment writer and host of Gabbing With Gib) joined me to discuss ex-"Vanderpump Rules" star Stassi Schroeder's return to reality TV with her Hulu series "House of Stassi," the back half of "In the City," and the finale of "The Valley."
First, we got all the way into Stassi's comeback show. Gibson came to the show with years of prior knowledge of her as a reality TV character, whereas I had never seen Stassi in her element. The long-time "VPR" star was fired in 2020, along with Kristen Doute, after a racist incident in which they reported a Black castmate to the police for crimes she had nothing to do with. Like Kristen, she has now made a full comeback from what Stassi terms "cancellation." This time, she is the undisputed center of the show – and clearly sees herself as The Big Boss. The creators of "House of Stassi" are certainly trying to do something different with this show; the visual language of the series, with lush cinematography and ornate title cards, draws more from prestige scripted TV than it does from the Bravo-verse, and the tone (played up by winking on-screen annotations) is darkly comic. Though we rarely see cameras, Stassi and her crew are very forthright about their awareness that they're making a reality show; the fourth wall is discussed so often it's practically a character in its own right. But has Stassi herself changed? The show frames her as an almost monstrous antiheroine – controlling, narcissistic, hypocritical – though the hangers-on who surround her are nearly as unlikable. We discuss all this, plus the flipped gender-role conflict between Stassi and her reluctant stay-at-home husband Beau that anchors the season.
Next, we caught up on the end of "In the City," a first season that gathered momentum and ended with an explosive fight about Friendsgiving room assignments and Whitney's claim that Lindsay always pulls the "single mom card." We got into our takes on the standout moments of drama, as well as overall assessments of the show's freshman season and its rookie castmembers.
Last, we dipped into "The Valley" for a brief chat about the finale, Luke's comments about putting pregnant Kristen in a "coffin," the Solo cup bonk heard round the world, and Danny and Nia's future on the franchise. Where can the show go from here, after yet another season relitigating drama that the cast shows no interest in resolving and moving forward from? This is a TV genre about conflict resolution! Let's see some, people.
Hope you enjoy! xo
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