TueDo List: Tulip Mania + Tough Names + Jeans We ❤️
Plus a wild story about the fertility treatments of the future
THIS WEEK
❤️ GIVE: None of us can stop thinking about the horrific shooting of Ralph Yarl, who simply rang a doorbell at the wrong house. If you’d like to help, you can donate to his GoFundMe page, or MomsDemandAction, or the NAACP. And read this beautiful piece by Imani Perry.
📖 READ: The best essay about spring you will ever read. How to hack insurance to get the menopause hormones you need. Can the quest for self-love lead to loneliness? The wild future of fertility medicine. How to behave in public with a smartphone.
👀 LOOK: Succession fashion. Sarah Snook, actually pregnant. The return of volumizing mousse. And of “the bubble bob.” Inside the queer Tennessee salon of Paramore’s Haley Williams.
🎧 LISTEN: “Prizefighter” by Youth Lagoon. Taylor Swift’s acoustic version of “Lavender Haze” feels like a totally different song.
🛒 ADD TO CART: Hinoki forest soap. Outdoor furniture season. Melamine tableware season.
📺 WATCH:
Tonight: How to Get Rich: Ramit Sethi gives spending advice for a life you love (Netflix).
Thursday: The Diplomat: Keri Russell is the American ambassador to the U.K. (for real) in this political thriller set in London (Netflix).
Friday: Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni & Tupac Shakur: A five-part documentary series about the rapper and his Black Panther mother (FX). Judy Blume Forever: A documentary about the beloved author (Amazon Prime Video).
Sunday: Somebody Somewhere. Season 2 of this delightful comedy set in the Midwest (HBO).
STORY: 14 Things Only a Person With a Tough Name Would Understand
By Siobhan Adcock
1. I grew up with a tough name. Siobhan Adcock. Look at it. There’s almost no part of that name that’s not sort-of a pain in the ass.
2. People don’t tend to remember it, and when they do, they can’t pronounce it. Siobhan is an Irish name — it means Jane, or Joan, or Joanne, or if you’re feeling like a sparkly unicorn fairy, “sea foam blowing off the waves.” My father told me (incorrectly as it turns out) that it means “Queen of the Emerald Isles.” He and my mother had heard of it by way of Siobhan McKenna, the famous Irish stage actress who was in Dr. Zhivago. (But not the famously beautiful actress who was in Dr. Zhivago. And also not the second-most beautiful actress in Dr. Zhivago. The other one.)
3. My father’s name, by the way, was Dick. They don’t really name kids that anymore. Especially with a last name like Adcock. Dick Adcock, Jr. Because his father’s name was also Richard. So when my dad was growing up, there was Big Dick Adcock and Little Dick Adcock. No one, apparently, in the early 1950s, thought that was a problem...
OBSESSED: Surviving Tulip Mania
By Garance Franke-Ruta
I missed tulip mania by several centuries, but somehow I caught the bug anyway.
It all goes back to Joan McClure.
She was a former Vogue advertising copywriter who lived in a lovely West Village townhouse with window boxes that lit up her small block with yellow daffodils each spring. But her real gardening joy was her tulips, which she grew in a neat U-shaped border around a central patch of pea gravel in her townhouse’s back garden, and which I would come to visit each spring.
My mother met her when they were advocating for an extension of Abingdon Square at the end of the block. Back in the 1980s the traffic triangle near it was all asphalt and car accidents and the closest place to see flowers was in Joan’s backyard at her annual Tulip Party…
#GENXAPPROVED: Question of the Week
This week in #GenXApproved, TueNighter Ruth needs our help: “I haven’t shopped for jeans since before the pandemic and now only have skinny or straight jeans that every Insta and TikTok video show as being sooo out of style. 😳 Anyone have jeans they love in the newer high-waist styles? Looking for ones that don’t cost a fortune and work on an hourglass figure. Appreciate the help!”
🤔 ASK YOUR OWN QUESTION! If you’re a premium subscriber, you can learn how to submit your questions here or head straight to the new section to chime in with your recommendations.
Tiptoe through the tulips, TueNighters!
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CONFESSION: I started using mousse in the 80s. And I. Never. Stopped. It's still the best tamer of my weird, wavy mane. I am mousse but I am free.
Wide leg, high-waisted jeans are BACK and my weird (floppy from pregnancy/weight loss/peri-menopause, thick thighs, and short torso) body is having a moment. The one thing I’ll always remember from What Not to Wear, a show I now think was mostly bullshit, is that your pants are most flattering if they fit at the widest part of your waist/hips and then fall straight down. See also: most comfy. I’m anywhere from a size 12 to 16 and have found some delightful, able to finally sit cross-leggable, options from Banana Republic, Lane Bryant (gasp...I know) and TARGET (#mothership)