The 'intimate goriness' of long-term relationships
Plus: the fantasy of a man who 'can handle you,' making music from bad Tinder chats, Paul Mescal in a kilt, and more.
Happy Sunday. In this week’s link roundup, we’ve got an “incel novel,” a new podcast on shame, a history of utopian reimaginings of sex and family, and much more.
A reminder: all subscribers get my free weekly essays on Thursdays, but only paid subscribers get full access to my Sunday link roundups.
To the links…
Is the hetero romantic fantasy of 2024 a man who “can handle you”?
Rachel Yoder on the film adaptation of Nightbitch: “I got very excited about portraying a long-term intimate relationship in all of its sort of gross, intimate goriness.”
Jessica Winter on the women’s mid-life crisis novel and the double helix of desire: “one strand is for wild sex with a person or persons not one’s partner; and the other is for solitude, privacy, unbroken concentration.” As she puts it, “these women want a room of one’s own, and they want to have a lot of sex in it.”