If you have a favorite corner of the internet that you’d like to share, send it my way at hellomobile@buzzfeed.com with the subject line “reSEARCH.” —Alexa
We’re already 25% of the way done with 2023. Depending on how your year is going, this realization may make you feel like time is moving either extraordinarily fast or slow. If you’re the rare person who thinks, Actually, time is moving at the exactly appropriate rate for me, well, good for you. I frankly don’t even know how to react to that.
For me, I can barely wrap my head around the reality that it’s already April. My natural instinct in moments like these is to catastrophize — about how we’ll be in the thick of summer before I know it, about how I should probably start brainstorming Halloween costumes because it’s basically fall, about how quickly I’m barreling through not just the year, but life itself. While this self-imposed crisis about the passage of time can be a refreshing adrenaline rush, lately I’ve been trying to intervene and force myself to take each day as it comes.
If you’re in need of a similar intervention, here it is. Days will become weeks and months regardless of whether you’re hyperaware of them or not. Ultimately, all any of us can do is make good use of the time that we’re given.
These are the things Incoming readers and I have been uplifted by this week. Hope you enjoy it.
Revisiting
“How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. This 2018 New York Times feature is one of the best celebrity profiles ever written. Full stop. I don’t care what you think about Gwyneth Paltrow, you are doing yourself a disservice by not reading it.
“In February, G.P. invited me over to dinner at her house, which lay heart-stopping beneath the Los Angeles palm trees and an impossible sky. She wore a white shirred-neck dress by Tibi that would be advertised in the Goop newsletter the next week as she stood in front of her stove, steaming clams and grilling bread in her devastating kitchen,” Brodesser-Akner writes. “She wore no apron and cooked the meal herself right in front of me. She wore no apron and cooked it herself right in front of me and drank a whiskey on the rocks.”
Obsessing
Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs by Jamie Loftus. When a hot dog place opens, it never closes. I don’t know what to do with this information, but I’m unable to stop thinking about it. Most of them opened like 95 years ago, and they’re all still going, Loftus writes. Raw Dog, a food memoir and travelogue, follows Loftus as she travels the US and eats an unthinkable number of dogs. The chapter “Here Is How You Make a Hot Dog” is decently upsetting and will have you rethinking your life choices. This book has me acting up; let’s just say I wasn’t vegan when I started reading it. Tor is publishing Raw Dog on May 23. —Emerson
Streaming
“Missing Out” by Syd. At the time of its release in 2021, “Missing Out” was Syd’s first solo song in four years and a promise of what was to come with her second album, Broken Hearts Club. It was a formidable comeback: Grand, kaleidoscopic synths accompany a self-assured breakup track that’s neither bitter nor excessively lovelorn. "Hope you findin' what you need or what you seek / 'Cause now I'm free," she sings in a voice dripping with swagger and honey simultaneously. A gorgeous reintroduction to her fans — and the dating game —“Missing Out” is Syd at the height of her powers.