FNC - Long weekend reads + recs!
Welcome to Friday Night Chats! I have lots of links and recommendations for you to enjoy during your long weekend (apologies to those who will not be having one!). Usually Friday Night Chats is just for paid subscribers but I thought I'd open it up to everyone. And if you like it and want to get it every week - please subscribe.
Let's go!
Well, what can I say but: OH THE WEATHER! I hope you're all safe and you all coped with the wild weather!
If you listen to one thing this week, I really recommend episode 204 of Brandon Kyle Goodman's podcast Tell Me Something Messy. The episode is "Sometimes This Is How I Get Free" with Lena Waithe. I cried! So many powerful truths!
The perfect companion to the "difference between wanting to have a child and wanting to be a parent" chat is The Auntie Bulletin.
It's a newsletter I just discovered, and I love it so much. I really think we need to normalise choosing not to have children and remove the societal stigma and shame around it. I also sometimes find 'child-free' spaces hold some really messed-up anti-community views that are a product of colonisation and racism. So I'm stoked when I see a thoughtful and considered space like The Auntie newsletter.
I also always want to talk about how we all get to decide what 'family' is. I consider my best friend to be a co-parent with me. I love her to the end of the Earth. I love her just as much as I love my husband or blood family (tbh probably more than my family lol). Love like that is pretty standard in the queer community, but I forget that I'm in that bubble when people are confused.
Some folks weirdly think that you cannot have powerful, essential, life-affirming, romantic love with someone who isn't your lover.
Anyway, I love the Auntie kaupapa. And I especially love this:
I’m increasingly feeling like our hurting, fractured, fearful culture needs us to name our generosities. We need to normalise the idea that showing up and caring for others is part of a good and happy life – indeed, it’s essential. Our culture badly needs Auntie narratives right now, and one of the ways we can cultivate those is by first sharing and celebrating them among ourselves.
Amen to that.
(BTW: I didn't cry because I worry about that question, I have always wanted to be a parent. But the talk about feeling like a burden as a child, and all of that generational stuff got me in the feels.)
I would love to talk about this more!
Moving right along: The Pillion press tour is the gift that keeps on giving!! I've been sent clips and pics by 800,000 people. Love that my brand is Horny On Main.
I am also very excited about this party I'm helping to host! Haute Take Presents: Everyone Got Made Redundant But Fk It - We’re Dancing! Tickets are almost sold out. You should absolutely come along!
We all deserve a Christmas party that is not with anyone we work with lol.
What I'm reading:
My friend lent me Daniel James Brown's excellent book: The Indifferent Stars Above - The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride.
I read an OK smutty book, Never Will I Ever, which is the second book after Don't You Dare, which I read last week, by C.E. Ricci. It was pretty good. It was an easy read.
Here's an absolute must-read from one of our country's best journalists, Kirsty Johnston: New Zealand guts climate policy it bragged about on the world stage.
Israeli Media’s Distorted View of the War in Gaza
Extremely Offline: What Happened When a Pacific Island Was Cut Off From The Internet
The Good Pervert - A friend’s life, a brutal death
The Coloradans Exercising Their Right To Die—and a Doctor Who Helps Them Find Peace
This is such a good piece - House Arab.
I understood then that he was not going to chastise me, that he was seeking common ground with me, the only Arab on the magazine’s editorial staff. I was not untouched by the gesture, though I was pretty sure that he knew my family was Egyptian.
They’re in Cairo, I said, far from the bombing. But we’ll see how things progress in the coming months.
It’s so sad. I don’t understand. Why would Hamas do this?
I didn’t understand why he would ask that. It seemed evident to me that “open air prison” was not a metaphor.
I don’t know, I said. To die on their feet, maybe?
He stared at me, appalled. Look, I don’t agree with it, I stuttered. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just—
That’s really hard for me to hear right now, he said.
‘I Love You Too!’ My Family’s Creepy, Unsettling Week with an AI Toy
Could an MMA fighter defeat a chimpanzee in hand-to-hand combat?
Ceasefire is not the end – what six months in Palestine showed me
29 Halloween Costume Ideas for Your Couple, Throuple, or Toxic Situationship
Sacrificing Everything To The New Gods - How OpenAI's Sam Altman, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg & former Google CEO Dr Eric Schmidt believe in something that will kill us all.
What I'm watching:
Loot is back on Apple+! I love Maya Rudolph so much. I am so excited about this season! It's such a good brain fluff TV show.
Doc on TVNZ is also back. So I am catching up on that.
I saw The Perfect Neighbour. It is incredibly distressing and depressing. I cried a lot. But I do think it's an essential watch if you can stomach it. Though I think most of it stems from racism, there's also a real 'children should be seen and not heard' element. I have seen some commentary on the documentary that blames the kids, and I can't help but think of that line - "you're entitled to a child-free life, not a child-free world".
Review: The Perfect Neighbor review – a notorious shooting through the eye of a Florida cop’s body-cam
Companion reading: The Perfect Neighbor is a wake-up call
There are also new episodes of 9-1-1 and 9-1-1: Nashville out tonight. I had to add that because my editor is my son - he catches all my spelling and grammar mistakes and tells me what I missed in each post.
If you're a long-time reader, you'll know I'm obsessed with chimpanzees killing people. So I am very pumped about this horror movie where a chimpanzee kills people. It's called Primate.
Back in the earliest days of Emily Writes Weekly I wrote about whether I could kill a chimpanzee with my bare hands.
It's probably a sign of how bad the last five years have been that I think I'd just let the chimp kill me lol.
What I'm listening to:
I started listening to Incels. It's so depressing. So I stopped. But not until after I listened to the interview with 19-year-old Veronika Weiss' mother.
Incel Elliot Rodger murdered Veronika in a shooting that took the lives of five others. Her mother showed so much empathy and talked so powerfully. She talked about how sad and angry the shooter was and how happy and full of life her daughter was.
It was her first interview ever about her daughter, 10 years after her murder. And it was a powerful sign I think of what happens when we give people space to grieve and feel and try to rebuild after tragedy before being interviewed.
I think a lot about my friend's dad, who was interviewed the day of her terrible death, and I think about how damaging that was. Before we even knew what had happened, he was being interviewed on live TV. It was excruciating for everyone to see him exploited in that way.
Things online that made me happy this week:
- Duck with a prosthetic leg
- Kid Cudi trippin balls to MGMT (an oldie but such a goodie)
- Aunty puts baby in a pumpkin
- This is hilarious (and great parenting)
- My friend is really ADHD, she's renovating her house on a budget, and I'm enjoying it a lot because it's very relatable (prep is a conspiracy theory).
Halloween is next week! I am very excited about Halloween because I love seeing kids all dressed up. Hammy is going as Wednesday. And I have been assigned Morticia. My eldest is going as a banana. This is the first year they haven't had homemade costumes! So I feel sad. The years of being 'a bubble' or 'kangaroo' are over!
But my garage will be full of tweens, so I'm excited about that. I'm making them some cute little Halloween treats in the hopes of winning them over. I AM A COOL MUM.
What are your plans for the weekend? What are you reading? Watching? Listening to?
Still bored? I was scrolling the other day and saw this clip, and NOTHING I have ever seen is a more accurate depiction of my brain than this.
Also, sign this petition to withdraw the Regulatory Standards Bill. It probably won't work, but you may as well sign it.
Registrations are open for Ōtaki Summer Camp! Supported tickets are $30, and earlybird tickets are $110. The camp involves four days of politics, discussion, speakers, art, music and the environment.
