Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Mar. 24-30

Free Time, The People's Joker, reading two books, plus some theater and also... mockumentaries??

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’m watching, reading, playing, and listening to. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my career in culture writing full-time, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. Feel free to follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Sprout check

Everyone has been messaging me all week, saying stuff like, “Please continue to update me on your tomato sprouts.” Well, here you go, you sickos! My tomato plants continue to thrive.

But wait — there’s more:

Maybe you thought… I was only growing tomatoes… but look: my sage plants sprouted as well. These ones said they were take a little longer, but when the tomato plants popped up last week and these didn’t, I was like, “well, I’ve fucked this up for real.” Thankfully that’s not the case. My sugar snap peas, however, have yet to sprout and I think the birds are stealing them — based on the fact that sometimes the soil looks a little picked through and also earlier this week Phil did literally see them stealing them — so I’ll figure that out in a month when I decide to just give up and plant more tomatoes. Tomatoes! You use them for pasta sauce.

Speaking of pasta sauce — readers of the other week’s Reread Diary will know that I was revisiting Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley for an essay I was working on for Bright Wall/Dark Room about how much I love Gwyneth Paltrow and Marge. That essay is now up! With amazing art by Marc Aspinall. I’m really happy with how the piece turned out.

I wanted to shout two quick pieces on The Cut essay of the week, both by friends of the magazine, BDM and Max Read. I love when there is a crazy thing we can all talk about, and I love when the crazy thing is actually “about” something else. It makes me feel like it’s 2015 (in a good way).

Beyond that, we celebrated the semi-unofficial 100th issue of Fran Magazine, and I realize with four days’ hindsight that I should have dibsed two tables at a bar so there could be an informal celebration. Fran Magazine! It’s real and there are at least 100 of them. Lots of good stuff is coming this spring: this week, I’ll announce the May book club pick. Merch will be here for summer. It’s all happening!