58. I'm actually grateful for 'The Valley'
Why a reality tv show might be more informative than any ‘What to Expect When Expecting’ type book.
Hi friends.
I spent last weekend in San Francisco with my best friend from childhood. She and her husband just had a baby. Things I learned: he was induced via acupuncture. She made her husband read a doula book, something I now think all husbands should do. And even though she wanted only upcycled 100% cotton clothing and organic brands of formula, people inevitably gave her polyester.
“I mean I’ll still use it if I need it…” she assured me.
The organic baby formula, it turns out, makes the baby’s stomach upset — a real blow when this particular little guy needs more food than the average baby. Early motherhood is hard. When she’s not breastfeeding, she’s pumping. When she’s not trying to get the baby to nap, she’s washing bottles. Sometimes she’s doing all of that at once.
I can see why the post-birth period can be mentally challenging for women. You spend a lot of time tethered to a tiny being who requires constant attendance. It’s like maintaining a sourdough starter: you may not be actively baking all day, but you’ve got to constantly stop what you’re doing to perform a stretch and fold.
Though my friend’s husband is one of the most involved and helpful guys probably on planet earth, he has to go to work. When he gets home he does survival tasks: walking the dog, making dinner, meal prepping her lunches. You are not hanging out together. You are optimizing your time by operating separately.
During my time there, I couldn’t stop bringing up The Valley. The Vanderpump Rules spinoff sometimes depresses me, and yet I find that I can’t look away. If you remove the fact that nearly every man on that show is a toxic manchild, you are left with one of the most honest and varied depictions of motherhood on television today.
Britney is raising a neurodivergent son while working to escape his gaslighting father, Jax Taylor, and now trying to date again.
Lala chose her child’s father the way you’d pick a restaurant: read three donor profiles aloud, made a call.
Nia is on her fourth baby and her second round of baby blues.
And Kristen Doute finally has the baby she’s been wanting, but finds herself in a tough spot with her fiancé Luke (who scored lower on the manchild scale right up until he had a child). The grievance being that Kristen doesn’t want to sleep with him while her body is still recovering.
Of course my recaps are reductive. Watching the nuances of these couples’ interactions is what pulls you in.
Though my friend’s life in no way resembles the people’s lives in the show, honest depictions of women handling motherhood are both important and rare.
“I’m really grateful for The Valley actually,” my friend said. “It was helpful to see.”
If you missed the last dispatch, here’s what it’s like being old at a music festival:
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Culture.
Food’s ultimate nepo baby. When I was in New Orleans I saw Emeril Lagasse’s restaurants were highly recommended, but now run by his son. The TV personality known for saying things like “Bam” and “Kick it up a notch,” is the antithesis of the modern day cool chef archetype, so I didn’t pay much attention. GQ just profiled E.J. Lagasse, who last fall at the age of 22 became the youngest to claim two Michelin stars. I guess that’s why they say not to judge a book by its cover.
The cover I was judging:
He is comfortable with wealth and power. In 2008, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia paid at least $50 million for Emeril Lagasse’s non-restaurant assets, including TV rights, cookbooks, kitchen products, and spice blends. His girlfriend, the ski-resortwear designer and influencer McKaelyn Guidry, is one of the twin daughters of Shane Guidry, a major player in Louisiana’s energy industry, a close confidant of Louisiana governor Jeff Landry, and one of the state’s biggest GOP donors.
In a family Instagram post from Thanksgiving, Lagasse sits at a piano in the family’s very white and beige living room, looking like a rakish young Harry Connick Jr. and playing a pitch-perfect rendition of Billy Joel’s “Vienna.” Oh right: He taught himself piano at age 10, by watching YouTube, and he has a beautiful voice. Nobody is weeping for E.J. Lagasse.
Should we be going to NJ to vacation? Apparently Hunterdon County is a little culinary mecca.
A floating banquet in the sea. Artist Alix Lacloche’s dreamy dinner for scuba divers stopped my scroll. Great job to Sway’s marketing team who posted it (Sway is a company that makes packaging from seaweed).
Olivia Rodrigo re-built Lilith Fair. I’ve been meaning to watch that documentary. Daisy Chain Fields is August 29 in Irvine, CA. All female lineup including: Chappell Roan, Doechii, Mitski, Bikini Kill, Garbage, The Breeders, plus Stevie Nicks, Sarah McLachlan (the OG, see documentary), and Karen O as special guests. Every artist is playing for free; 100% of proceeds go to charity. Sold out in 30 minutes.
Meg Stalter did an Arby’s commercial and it actually hits. Our queen continues her reign. Watch it.
LinkedIn has decided it wants to be fun. The feed now has a Real Housewives star coaching on hustle, sponsored day-in-the-life commute content, and a B2B Creator Marketplace that formalizes the influencer economy outside of consumer. The platform made $19 billion being the one place not trying to entertain you. Boring was the brand. Worth watching what happens to the moat.
Real estate / design.
Prices in the Cotswolds are dropping. Average sale prices have dropped more than 12% in both the Cotswolds and the northern Home Counties, the commuter-friendly countryside immediately north of London.
Zurich’s new beer garden is pink. A former railway site in Zurich has been transformed by Budapest-based architecture studio Hello Wood. It’s called Remise Rosa and is a timber complex that brings together a restaurant, beer garden, entertainment areas and spaces to relax, all wrapped in an unapologetically hot-pink exterior.
Life x AI.
What happens when AI models run a country for two weeks. Emergence AI built a simulated town and handed it to the models behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. They were told not to lie, steal, or be violent. Nobody said they had to listen.
The Gemini world logged 683 crimes. The Grok world was violent enough that everyone was dead by day four. The GPT world had almost no crime, but everyone died anyway — they just didn’t prioritize survival. The Claude world had zero crimes and a stable population, but its agents approved 98% of everything they voted on and almost never disagreed with anyone. The easy read is Claude is the safest model. The harder one: Anthropic recently published research showing Claude is acutely aware of when it’s being tested. It just doesn’t say so.
Bernie Sanders wants to nationalize AI. His American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would impose a one-time 50% tax on the stock of the largest AI companies, creating a ~$7 trillion fund that pays every American more than $1,000 a year. The fun part: OpenAI and Anthropic had both already proposed the concept before he introduced it.
A24 took $75 million from Google's AI lab and its fans are losing their minds. Google DeepMind isn't getting A24's library, it's buying a seat inside the filmmaking process, watching how the best indie studio in the world actually makes things. The r/A24 subreddit is in full meltdown, with multiple posts of people canceling their AAA24 memberships. This comes as Kane Parsons, the director of Backrooms — A24's biggest hit ever — said earlier this month that if he could snap his fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, he probably would.
Speaking of which, the lore behind Backrooms is interesting.
Taste.
The Adidas World Cup ad is the best argument for taste as a business strategy I've seen all year. "Backyard Legends" is a five-minute film starring Timothée Chalamet assembling a street soccer team — Jude Bellingham, Lamine Yamal, Trinity Rodman — to take down a legendary unbeaten trio, with Messi, Bad Bunny, Beckham, and Zidane in the mix. It reportedly cost around £50 million. You can feel it. The cast, the sets, the way it moves between languages and locations all points to $$$. Everyone talks about taste as a differentiator. This is what it looks like when someone actually spends on it.
Looking human is in again. Great news IMO! The past few years in beauty have been defined by overly pillowy lips and puffy faces; a.k.a. Mar-A-Lago face. Now Beverly Hills plastic surgeons report that reversal rates have gone from 10–15% to 20–30%, with a 30% uptick in breast reductions over the past 18 months.
Ok bye! 🍊
Thanks for reading!
Early motherhood is hard, indeed