Rich Text

If you’re a Substack subscriber, go check your email for a gift link to access Rich Text! (If it's not there, it will be within an hour or so.) Everyone else, welcome! 
A little over five years ago, we started Rich Text on Substack because we needed a change. We had been at HuffPost for a decade, from the peak of its heyday to its somewhat ignominious acquisition by BuzzFeed. We had cycled through different positions as writers and editors, and we had survived round after round of layoffs. We had started Here to Make Friends, a feminist reality dating show podcast, and it had lasted despite occasional attempts by management to pivot it to video. We had been lucky enough to collaborate with brilliant editors, writers and producers, but we had also watched those colleagues leave. We were burnt out and rudderless. Our hope was that a little side project on Substack would give us a low-stakes, chill place to mess around, blog, try random stuff, and get back in touch with our voices. A creative refresh, if you will. 
Then, almost exactly five years ago, the layoff cycle finally came for us. We were called into our virtual HR meetings with a taped (but unedited) “Bachelor” recap still dangling. It was never published. But we weren’t ready to say goodbye to podcasting, and we were suddenly energized by the possibility of taking control of the show, of our writing, and of our creative futures. Substack became not just a space to experiment, but the home base of our entire body of work. And our wonderful subscribers allowed us to keep doing that work – while paying our bills, including Claire’s eye-popping daycare tuition.
In so many ways, our time at Substack gave us all of the things we had ever hoped for. We were able to build, brick by brick, a tiny media company of two. We were able to pay for our health care (Emma) and child care (Claire). We found a vibrant community full of brilliant, challenging, funny people – all of whom wanted to analyze culture in the way that we did! After years of being limited to “Bachelor” recaps on our podcast, and following the whims of editorial leadership when it came to story selection, we were able to truly take the reins, writing and podcasting about all the reality shows, rom-coms, weird viral essays, prestige dramas, and sociopolitical trends our little hearts desired. And we got to do it all on our terms, for the best audience in the business. We have never taken these gifts for granted, not for one single day. We recognize how very lucky we are to be able to make a living doing something that we truly love, and we're incredibly, profoundly grateful to all of you for supporting our work.
But as with any media ecosystem, even a relatively scrappy indie one, there came challenges. After years of natural growth and support from Substack staffers, both waned. The platform began to prioritize bringing over large, institutional publications and celebrity writers over mid-size publications like ours. Discoverability became more challenging, and Substack kept ending up in the news because of its tacit support for Nazis and transphobes. The latest big development is that Substack has partnered with… Polymarket. All of these things left us with the looming sense that we would have to make the leap to another platform at some point in time. But, of course, making a big change is really fucking scary. Especially when that change could upend your ability to pay your bills. 
So when Patreon reached out, it felt like a golden opportunity to make a leap with real support – and one we might never get again. Patreon is a platform built originally for podcasters, which is a big part of what we do on Rich Text. We loved the idea of being in a place where audio content is truly valued, and where we can be an active part of shaping what the newsletter product will be in the future. We loved that the financial investment that Patreon was willing to make into our scrappy little media project would allow us to rebuild without complete and total panic haunting us at every turn. 
Patreon, of course, isn’t perfect. No platform will be. But the hope is that we can write our next chapter sustainably. We want to set ourselves up so that Rich Text is something we can continue making for the next five years and then another five years after that. And we feel like some of the new features we’ll have access to on Patreon – organized collections! The ability to pay for one-off posts or series! More tier options! – will allow us to grow in a healthy way.
Now that we’re here, in our unfamiliar new home, surrounded by moving boxes and art we don’t know where to hang yet, it feels a little scary and stressful. There’s a lot to do. But that also means a lot of possibility. All the same things you knew and (hopefully) loved back at Substack will be here: weekly recommendations and podcasts, occasional essays, subscriber chats. We’re also looking forward to experimenting with new features and bonus content – and implementing your feedback from our big reader survey last month! – as we figure out what will make Rich Text itself an even richer text in the coming years. There will be more conversations about the motherhood divide, our personal lives, reality television scandals, bizarre made-for-streaming holiday rom-coms about sexy snowmen and viral essays that set your group chats ablaze. There will be more writing about girl culture, the ways fatherhood is treated vs. motherhood, books we love, TV we love, and progressive politics. 
Trust us: We KNOW that asking you to change over your subscription to a whole different platform is super annoying. The whole point of a subscription is that it’s seamless! You should never have to think about it! We, too, hate dealing with the process of moving our information over to a new app, linking up custom podcast feeds again, etc. We did not make the choice to inflict this on you lightly. We really believe that Patreon will be a more sustainable and welcoming space for our work and for this community. And we are here – along with the REAL HUMANS of the Patreon team – to make this transition as easy as possible!
⚠️ Important note for Substack subscribers
If you’re coming from Substack, we're gifting you access to our paid membership on Patreon. You should have received an email with your redemption link and details on how to claim it.
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What’s included on Patreon?
Free Membership
Weekly Recommendations: Get our weekly dispatch on what we’ve been reading, watching, listening to, buying, and making.

Weekly Podcast Previews & Occasional Full Episodes: Listen to periodic full-length episodes of the Rich Text podcast.

Essays: Read our occasional musings on topics cultural, political, and personal.

💬 Frequent Texter ($6 per month) 💬
Access to Rich Text Podcast Episodes: Access our weekly member-only podcast, and the full archive of episodes.

Weekly Recommendations: Get our weekly dispatch on what we’ve been reading, watching, listening to, buying, and making.

Essays: Read our occasional musings on topics cultural, political, and personal.

Comment Access: Post comments on any post and join the community!

Rich Text Chat: Connect with other members and discuss your favorite topics, from appointment TV to political news to random gossip, in private, subscriber-only spaces.

Reminder: If you’re coming from Substack, your gifted access link is in your email. (If it's not there, it will be soon.) Make sure to redeem it so you’re all set.
Thank you for being here! xo Claire & Emma
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The bosoms, they are heaving. The corsets, they have been unlaced. With the release of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” a film that offers such a stickily horny and romanticized take on Emily Brontë’s tale of emotional trauma and Gothic horrors that multiple critics glossed it as “fan fiction,” it seems that the cultural triumph of the spicy historical romance has been made complete. The arrival of “Bridgerton” season 4 part 2 (the sexy half!) just a couple of weeks later only underlines this. And, generally speaking, we’re not complaining! (Though, in the wake of the overwhelmingly steamy “Heated Rivalry,” the bar for success has been raised.)
But, after absorbing the sight of Jacob Elordi lifting Margot Robbie effortlessly by the corset strings to the throbbing beats of Charlie XCX, we’re left wondering if things have been taken a bit far. What is lost from “Wuthering Heights” when it is reduced to a tale of star-crossed lovers who have a boinkfest all over the moors? Is our obsession with smut giving all of us, including Fennell, just the teensiest bit of brain rot?
In this episode, we discuss the ongoing boom in sexy costume dramas and its implications. Then we dig into “Bridgerton” season 4 part 2, which manages to bring most of its storylines to a satisfying conclusion after a part 1 overstretched with table-setting. We get into the impossibility of a happy ending for our class-crossing couple that didn’t rely on one fortuitous exception for one lucky illegitimate maid, and the rather rote sex scenes. In an unlikely twist for the romance series, the heart of this drop was its depiction of grief, which was the subject of its most deeply felt and moving scenes. We also discuss Penelope’s retirement, Varley’s return, Lady Danbury’s voyage, and what seems to be coming next for the series.
Finally, we turn our focus to “Wuthering Heights.” We share our prior relationships with the Brontë novel, our first impressions of the movie, and our reactions to all the finger-licking and smashed egg yolks. We try to figure out why Robbie and Elordi felt like uncanny dolls, or children in adult bodies, and we talk about Sara Petersen’s essay about the removal of mothers and motherhood from this adaptation. We also discuss the discourse around the whitewashing of Heathcliff and the notable choices Fennell made in casting and storytelling that seem to pointedly center whiteness — and intentionally sanitize the central couple to present them as romantic heroes.
References and reading:
“Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Is Fan Fiction,” by Annie Berke
“‘Wuthering Heights’ Is Pure Fan Fiction,” by Emma Camp
“Finally, a Smooth-Brained Wuthering Heights,” by Allison Willmore
“Wuthering Heights Has No Space For Mothers,” by Sara Petersen
“Margot Robbie’s hot take on filmmaking goes viral as critics slam her latest movie, ‘Wuthering Heights’,” by Jude Cramer
“Wuthering Heights: Emerald Fennell Defends Her Controversial 'Version' of Emily Brontë's Classic Novel,” by Benjamin VanHoose
“Wuthering Heights is at its heart a story of class and race. Emerald Fennell has got it all wrong,” by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
“How the Latest "Wuthering Heights" Interpretation Is More Than Just Whitewashing; It’s a Pattern,” by Jess, the PrideBrarian
“Jacob Elordi, Heathcliff and the Controversy Over ‘Wuthering Heights’,” by Esther Zuckerman
"Is Heathcliff White?” by Jasmine Vojdani
Timestamps for easy listening:
0:00 — What’s going on with all the period piece smut?
6:27 — The second half of “Bridgerton” S4
41:50 — Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”
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In 2009 on “Tell Me Lies,” Lucy’s life is crashing and burning right into the ground. In 2009 in the real world, Tyra Banks was teaching young women how to “smize” on the hit show “America’s Next Top Model.” This week, we dive into both versions of the late aughts — fictional and reality.
After three dark, twisted, and completely fucked up seasons, “Tell Me Lies” came to an end on Tuesday. Showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer announced the news on Instagram on Monday night, writing that “this was always the ending my writing team and I had in mind, and we are insanely proud of it.” She added that the audience’s “incredible response to this season inspired us to explore whether there was another organic way to continue the story, but ultimately we felt it had reached its natural conclusion.” So in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, viewers were left to see if the team could stick the landing and wrap up all of the chaos that had been building in both the 2009 and 2015 timelines.
The result was a mixed bag. Some major plot holes that left us yearning for a fourth season, but also some “imperfect justice.” The series’ ambiguous final moments leave some things up to viewer interpretation, and as two culture critics, we often find that that’s where the real fun begins. (Plus, that “Toxic” needle drop was simply perfection.)
We also traveled back in time to the glory days of “ANTM,” via Netflix’s new documentary, “Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model.” The three part docu-series, which features interviews with Tyra Banks, Ken Mok, Jay Manuel, Nigel Barker and Miss J. Alexander, as well as prominent former contestants like Shandi Sullivan, Danielle Evans, Whitney Thompson, Keenyah Hill, attempts to grapple with the dark and complex legacy of the reality juggernaut.
And boy is there a lot of darkness to sort through.
“Reality Check” attempts to contextualize “ANTM” within the racist, homophobic, fatphobic time period it emerged during, and the even more racist, homophobic, fatphobic industry that it was attempting to broaden. But what becomes clear is that whatever lofty goals Banks had when she created “ANTM,” were overshadowed by the utter lack of protections in place for the cast members — who were predominantly vulnerable, very young women. Not only were the aspiring models cast subjected to microaggressions — Ebony Haith, a Black cast member from Cycle 1, has her hair texture mocked by white stylists during makeover day; Thompson, who won Cycle 10, shows up to castings where they’ve refused to pull clothes in her size — but also to physical dangers. (Sullivan’s story of being sexually assaulted on camera in Milan during Cycle 2, and then being framed as a cheating harlot on national television, is particularly harrowing.) And unfortunately, the decision makers interviewed still seem unwilling to take full accountability.
In this episode of the Rich Text podcast, we get into it all, from our own experiences watching “ANTM” as teenagers, to the lingering questions “Tell Me Lies” left us with. We hope you enjoy!
Timestamps for easy listening:
0:00 — The “Tell Me Lies” series finale
43:12 — The twisted legacy of “America’s Next Top Model”
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A decade or so ago, it seemed like the coolest kind of mom to be was a bad one. They blew off PTA meetings, were fueled by rosé, and wrote irreverent blogs about their children’s tantrums and diaper blowouts. They rejected the sentimentalized idea of motherhood as a sacred calling in service of which a woman must relinquish her independence, her sexuality, her anger, her very identity. Smash cut to 2026, and the mothers of America seem to be locked in a constant, frenzied battle about who can gently, authoritatively, attachedly, and and intensively parent the best. The government lionizes white, conservative mothers who bear large broods, while separating immigrant mothers from their children and smearing liberal women who oppose the administration as “gangs of wine moms.” The labels of “good mom” and “bad mom” seem more oppressive than ever. How did we get here?
In journalist Ej Dickson’s new book “One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate,” she unravels the trope of the bad mother, from its origins as a tool in upholding white supremacy to its proliferation into a host of bad mom archetypes we now encounter every day. Lately, we’ve been thinking a lot about these labels — how they are used to determine which women in our society deserve support, grace, freedom, and even life. So we were delighted to get to chat with Dickson about her entertaining and enraging book, which explores the idea of the bad mom largely through reconsiderations of cultural figures (Stifler’s mom, Mommie Dearest, Mama Rose). We also talked about some of the good/bad mom types that are on our minds the most lately, like gentle moms and MAHA moms.
Toward the end of our conversation, Dickson brought up the short-lived aughts reclamation of the “bad mom” label. Why did it end? Should we bring it back? Or is there another path to escaping the tyranny of the bad mom label? We may not have the answers, but we gave it a shot!
We hope you enjoy this conversation, and if you do, we recommend checking out “One Bad Mother” — we didn’t have time to even scratch the surface of this fantastic book.
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The central theme of this season of Netflix romance series “Bridgerton” comes into sharp focus at the end of the first episode.
After charming rakish second son Benedict Bridgerton at his mother’s masquerade ball with her witty banter and sense of wonder, our masked heroine rushes home. We see her remove her formal glove, shoes and mask. Suddenly, she is staring into the humble mirror in her bedchamber, her full face in view for the first time. And instead of finery, she is dressed in a maid’s outfit. The major roadblock to a relationship between Sophie Baek and Benedict Bridgerton will not be a misunderstanding or a clash of personalities or a one-sided desire to end a bloodline. Instead, it will be something quite tangible, especially during the Regency era. It will be about class.
It’s a fascinating moment for this season to hit our screens. On the one hand, as many viewers have noted, the uneven power dynamics of a Cinderella-inspired story — as this one definitively is — feel less fun to explore in fiction when we’re seeing the very real rollbacks of the rights of women in this country. (Part of why “Heated Rivalry” felt like such a salve to so many women viewers.) On the other hand, it’s clear that the writers injected some real class consciousness and modern labor politics into the text of the show. And that revamped text feels quite timely. (See: Mrs. Varley telling Lady Featherington off for using the language of “family” as a way to underpay her for two decades.)
In this episode, we get into it all: the class dynamics, the power of AAPI representation, the ways in which the Cinderella tropes work and don’t, the many ancillary B-plots, and the pointed ways that the writers changed the plot of the show from its source material. Hope you enjoy! Xo
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