Edition #8
Anti-aging soup. Gisele Pelicot's 'normal' rapists. Stevie Nicks. Screen vapes. WaPo's loss/the Guardian's gain. Jon Stewart. Gas stoves. Comic Sans. Rivals. An just a tiny bit of election.
I’ve been convinced that I need all my food from now on to be… wet.
Chris Gayomali, formerly of US GQ and editor of the Heavies ‘modern wellness’ Substack, published a story in the Guardian this week featuring scientist and dietician Dr Michelle Davenport whose work focuses on how food can effect our bodies’ ageing process (and by ageing she means the deterioration of our whole selves, not just the appearance of smile lines.) From Heavies:
“Davenport’s central argument is that that cooking with water and broth helps mitigate the creation of advanced glycation end products, or AGEs, which are a group of compounds that are prevalent in the Western diet thanks to foods that are blasted over high dry heat, either on the grill or in an air fryer: steaks, burgers, chicken tenders, Flaming Hot Cheetos, French fries, beef jerky, basically anything ultra-processed. All that stuff’s long been killing us and now we know why.
In fact, a mountain of scientific literature over the past decade supports the idea that AGEs are a nasty biomarker for everything from oxidative stress to inflammation to Alzheimer’s to elevated cardiovascular risk. “Basically, AGEs are responsible for total body ageing,” Davenport told me, “but it’s crazy that it all comes down to these compounds that are so easily preventable.”
By preventable she means by cooking in water or broth, which inhibits the production of AGEs (which is a very convenient name for a compound that causes ageing but is actually legitimate science and not woo-woo nutrition). So more soup and stews (I’m not a soup person so any favourite non-soupy soup recipes welcome here). Braising is also good! And apparently marinating meat in acid for just 15 minutes before frying or grilling it can also significantly reduce the amount of AGEs in your food. (As an aside, here is my favourite ever marinade.)
The Guardian also ran a story this week going into details on 35 of the 51 men on trial for raping Gisele Pelicot.
It’s a deeply unsettling read, like everything to do with this abhorrent case, but also reminds us that nightmares like this don’t happen in a vacuum.
Stevie Nicks is the gift that keeps on giving. The witchy goddess to end them all was interviewed in Rolling Stone this week and it’s absolutely teeming with little golden nuggets:
She didn’t love Barbies as a child but is totally enamoured with the two made in her likeness as an adult. I would love to give this to a child as their first Barbie.
She predicts her age of death quite specifically as “88, 89”.
She buys cashmere blankets for friends’ special occasions. She just bought one for Travis Kelce.
“ I never voted until I was 70 years old because I wasn’t at all political. I was incredibly busy, I was having a fitting, and I didn’t want to do jury duty. It’s a big regret.”
“About 10 years ago, Katy Perry was talking to me about the internet armies of all the girl singers, and how cruel and rancid they were. I said, “Well, I wouldn’t know because I’m not on the internet.” She said, “So, who are your rivals?” I just looked at her. It was my steely look. I said, “Katy, I don’t have rivals. I have friends. All the other women singers that I know are friends. Nobody’s competing. Get off the internet and you won’t have rivals either.””
She just loves other women. She defends Chappel Roan, saying her schedule is “outrageous” and calls Kamala Harris “our great hope to save the world” (and says she “might” play at her inauguration, god willing), she’s been wearing a friendship bracelet Taylor Swift gave her for a year (I do find the idea of a grown 33 year old woman giving a grown 75 year old woman a beaded friendship bracelet a little bit infantile, but whatever, if I met Stevie I’d give her my wedding ring if I thought it might make us friends). Stevie on Taylor: “She’s in a good place right now, and I think she has a good man. I hope they fall deeper and deeper in love and ride off into the sunset. He does his thing and she does her thing, and then they come back together and get married and have babies if she wants that. I just want all of that for her.”
The parentheses in this part of the story: “As long as you can dance, you are youthful. I’m 76, but I’m just incredibly limber. The dancing really comes from that.” [Nicks pauses and wraps her leg around her head to demonstrate.]
This love - “There is no more Fleetwood Mac now, because when Christine [McVie] died, Fleetwood Mac died. We cannot replace her” - followed by this burn - “We did replace Lindsey two times, and it was OK. No fighting, super fun. But Christine was different.”
“I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could. You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.”
It’s a bit confusing but I think she sort of says at one point that the reason Fleetwood Mac will never play together together is because one time Lindsey “wasn’t very nice to Harry Styles.”
She really loves Harry. “I want to travel. Harry Styles has three houses in Italy — he loves it so much. I want to go there and rent a place and stay for a while, and travel all over. “
She was a fan of the TV adaption of Daisy and the Six. “I didn’t even want to see it, because I thought I was going to hate it so much. I had Covid when I saw it. I was in my condo in Los Angeles, and I can remember saying, “Am I just watching my life go by?””
❌ jeans ❌. “I wore nothing but denim jeans for a million years. I wanted to look a certain way in jeans, and when I didn’t feel like I looked that way anymore, I stopped wearing jeans.” I can’t wait to be done with jeans.
“People say, “Who did your nails?” And I go, “Me, because I’m the best manicurist in the world.” Nobody does them as good as me, so why would I let anybody else do them?”
Screens took over nicotine as the great addiction of our generation, so of course now vape companies are combining the two, because capitalism doesn’t give a shit.
The big media/world news this week was that Jeff Bezos blocked the left-leaning Washington Post, which he owns, from publishing their already-written and prepared endorsement in the US election, something it has done for 36 years.
It didn’t go down well. According to various reports, 250 000+ readers cancelled their WaPo subscriptions by Monday afternoon (about 10% of all subscribers, a huge hit in these desperate media times), three key editorial board writers resigned, and 21 columnists protested on the pages of their own paper. We need more people reading well-reported news, so this is not a good thing. (And while Bezos insisted later in a statement that it was “a principled decision” in an effort to avoid a "perception of bias" and "non-independence”, executives from his aerospace company Blue Origin just happened to meet with Trump a couple of hours after the decision was made public, which is just erghghg.)
Luckily, the Guardian was there to pick yup the spoils. According to Semafor:
Guardian US editor Betsy Reed sent out an email to readers touting her publication’s endorsement of Harris earlier this month and soliciting membership support. The callout to readers of the American version of the British newspaper worked: They pledged more than US$1.1 million between Reed’s email going out on Friday and Saturday evening, the biggest single fundraising day for the Guardian’s US operation.
“A Guardian editorial strongly endorsed Kamala Harris for president earlier this week — and we are unafraid of any potential consequences,” Reed wrote, calling it “an abdication of our duty as journalists to sit out this election out of self-interest.”
Which maybe why there are so many Guardian shout-outs in this newsletter this week.
Related: After coming out of retirement in a valiant attempt to help save democracy in an election year, Jon Stewart is going to continue to host the Daily Show on Mondays through 2025.
His presence is the one bright spot in this whole kerfuffle for me. (And also, my hall pass.)
I knew gas stoves were bad but I didn’t realise just how bad. From the NYT.
A new study by researchers at Jaume I University in Castelló de la Plana, Spain, found that residents of the European Union and Britain are twice as likely to die prematurely from exposure to gas stove pollutants than from a car crash.
According to the researchers, gas stoves are estimated to lead to 40,000 premature deaths each year in the European Union and Britain, shaving off roughly two years of an average person’s life span. In the same region, gas stoves have led to more than a million annual asthma cases. Those cases in children alone cost an estimated $4.3 billion in additional health spending.
Obviously everyone can’t immediately go out and replace their stoves, so their advise is to ventilate, ventilate, ventilate. “That means turning on vent hoods, opening windows and keeping your sous-chefs out of the kitchen when possible.”
The NYT says that the most copied (and photographed) restaurant dish in the world right now is the Pescada de la Talla from Contramar in Mexico City.
It’s grilled snapper served butterflied with half bright green parsley sauce and half smokey adobo—I’ve had it and can confirm it’s not just a pretty face. It was one of the most delicious things I ate in a city where every mouthful you eat anywhere is an absolute sensation. I’m not a fan of dupes in general, but I don’t know when I’ll be back in CDMX so… can’t wait for it to show up on the menu at Totti’s.
Other people have pickleball or golf. I have fonts.
If I’m feeling overwhelmed and stressed, often I’ll jump on to my all-time favourite website Fonts in Use and just hang there for a while, searching up what font the Cabbage Patch Kid logo was, or the cover of the first edition of Valley of the Dolls, or all of the Cooper Black usages over time. I literally cannot believe you’re still reading this far after that outrageous display of extreme nerdiness. Anyway, according to Fast Company, Comic Sans is the Crocs of fonts and is ready to late-bloom into coolness. I cannot accept this.
Still one of my favourite videos ever. If it makes you laugh too, I’ll give you an adult friendship bracelet.
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Are you watching Rivals on Disney +?
Apparently the Jilly Cooper adaption starring David Tennent has taken the whole of the UK by absolute storm, but no-one I know is talking about it here. It’s very 80s and very saucy (it opens on a bare bum mid-mile high club and the first episode includes a game of naked, adulterous tennis) and is just an all-round wildly entertaining romp. Sort of Succession meets Benny Hill, maybe?
I’ve tried to keep this week’s edition as election-free as possible.
But know that it’s all I’m thinking about. If you’re kinda interested but not as in the weeds, just keep an eye out for Pennsylvania. Each candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win. With the U.S. being as binary as it is, Harris has about 226 in the bag, and Trump has 219, which leaves the world’s destiny in the hands of seven swing states. Pennsylvania is the largest of these with 19 electoral votes, so all eyes are on it. The NYT has a fun (well, my kind of fun) interactive path to victory tracker so you can see for yourself what needs to happen next as each swing state is called.
See you next week (unless I can’t face it) xxx
Fabulous as always Justine! Really look forward to the Sunday evening read before the new week commences.
I really love and look forward to reading your newsletter Justine! I’m not a huge fan of ‘wet’ foods either haha, but I really like this one from Smitten Kitchen. You can add rice or noodles etc to soak up some of the soup.
https://smittenkitchen.com/2019/05/braised-ginger-meatballs-in-coconut-broth/