The other day someone re-shared a very funny video I’d seen before but hadn’t watched in a while, so I gave it another look, and you know what? Still great. Here, go watch it yourself and then come back. Firstly, it’s always a delight when a dumb internet video really holds up to multiple viewings, and this one absolutely does, for reasons of a. his friend roasting him IMMEDIATELY when she sees what he’s doing (and laughing even harder when he tries to reference his “followers”) and b. it ascends to a higher plane of existence once the voice effect is accidentally activated. But it also has this innate sweetness to it that makes me smile, because it reminds me of all the times I’ve been sitting around with friends not doing anything in particular and then something silly happens and suddenly you’re both crying laughing at it. And you try to share those stories later on with other people and it’s impossible to capture in words what was so funny about it.

I think this kind of thing happens often when you’re a teenager because you spend a lot of time kind of doing nothing? But with friends? You can’t go out to bars and hip restaurants and you don’t have adult responsibilities that take up your day and you don’t want to be at anyone’s house because you’re experimenting with independence and so you end up doing things like drinking giant sugary iced coffee drinks in a car with someone and talking about nothing.

If you’re lucky, you continue to have those kinds of friendships into adulthood, and every now and then one of you can really catch the other person off guard with one of those moments. If this hasn’t happened to you recently, maybe you should try casually turning on a voice effect mid-conversation and see if that does the trick?

What I’m Reading Online

This week is former child star week here at Leisure Time. I’ve only seen bits of Drew Barrymore’s talk show, but I liked this profile about the radical emotional honesty that infuses the show, and how that’s an extension of who she is in real life.

And those who know me well know I’m a big Jenny Lewis fan. She’s doing a lot of press right now because she has a new album out, so I’ve read a few features. There’s a nice NYT feature on her, but I’m partial to this Rolling Stone piece because they got her to say this about a potential Rilo Kiley reunion tour: “I’m open to it, for sure. It just has to be the right alchemy and the right timing. I think we owe it to each other to play those songs again, because that’s the magic of being in a band. It’s just the four people in a room and the energy that creates.” Yes, Jenny. Yes.

Big news for those of us who like to curse over text: Apple says it’s finally fixed the ducking problem in autocorrect.

Are you from the ’90s? Do you want to read a story about pranks between Eve6 and Third Eye Blind? Here you go!

Open to reveal an intriguing dinosaur theory!

Did you know that scientists have used wastewater tracking to figure out that there’s a single person who lives in Columbus and commutes to a town called Washington Court House and has apparently had Covid nonstop for two years? Can you imagine being tracked down because you have globally important poo?

What I’m Watching

This week I picked up Deadloch, a Tasmanian show on Amazon Prime about a murder in a small town and two detectives with very different styles who are trying to solve it. This show has the weirdest tone! It’s very funny but also it’s not a satire—the murder is gruesome and it’s a real mystery. But then also in the premiere someone accidentally vomits on the corpse. It took me a full two episodes to realize that one of the detectives, who came in from out of town, did not bring any clothes with her and had been wearing the same hideous stained t shirt, cargo shorts, and Hawaiian shirt in every single scene. She also only wears Tevas. It’s quite a look. Although honestly that does seem quite comfortable.

I also saw the new Nicole Holofcener film, You Hurt My Feelings. I’ve been seeing Holofcener movies since Lovely & Amazing came out when I was in high school, and her stuff is so consistently good and funny and particular in its focus. The new one is about a semi-successful writer (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) who accidentally overhears her husband (Tobias Menzies) say he doesn’t like her new novel and then has a meltdown about it. It’s a pretty small scale plot, but JLD is like, a national treasure at acting? I kept noticing during the movie how often laugh lines happened because she scrunched up her face at the exact right moment in reaction to something. Just tremendously skilled at deploying a very expressive face. Also, a funny coincidence about this movie is that it is the second thing I’ve seen where Tobias Menzies accidentally says something disparaging about his partner when she can overhear it, the other one being the show This Way Up, a Hulu comedy about a young woman (Aisling Bea) trying to put her life back together after a mental health crisis. Tobias, please be careful out there, you’re ruining all your relationships.

What I’m Reading in Print

I picked up Daughters of the New Year, by E.M. Tran, which is about a family of Vietnamese immigrants in New Orleans. It starts off in the present day, going through the lives of three sisters and their mother, but then it starts moving backwards through time. So you get a sense of where they are now, and then you start to see how they ended up in those places, and the choices and events and traumas that lead them there, and then it goes back further, and further, all the way back to Vietnam and into the family’s history there. It’s a really interesting way to structure the book, if at times a little frustrating–Tran sets up all these interesting plotlines in the modern era, but you have to be satisfied with learning why they’re like that now instead of finding out what happens next in their lives. The matriarch of the family is also a keen follower of the Vietnamese zodiac, and so she’s constantly interpreting what’s happening to the family through that lens, and the daughters are annoyed by this but can’t help being influenced by it, and then you see how prior generations thought about it, too.

What I’m Listening to

On Friday, it will be Jenny Lewis’ new album, but since the worker bees in the content mines got the newsletter ready for Thursday this week, I’m doing some throwback listening to her first solo album (and my personal favorite) Rabbit Fur Coat.

Stay safe out there! Boston has been in better shape than some of the other east coast cities this week, but it’s still been smoky and hazy at times. I’ve been using this map to check on air quality status here (today we are moderate, for any parental readers of this newsletter who are worried).