Your new favourite newsletters trust me

I’m assuming newslettering is the new blogging these days – everybody’s doing it! Your mum’s got one! That girl who never spoke to you in high school! Your kid’s teacher’s dog! It’s the analog version of our social media lives and if you’ve been here for even two minutes you’ll know I back that one all the way in. It’s mega old-school, which I find extremely soothing in these fraught digital times.

If you too want some – especially obviously because I’ve never been able to write a newsletter two weeks running despite having one for oh about six years now and clearly you have a hole in your inbox waiting to be filled – allow me to point you in the direction of greatness:

The first is that we’ve never loved our animals more. I mean, I’m not saying that Hazel Hudson is living high on the hog, but this morning I cooked her two over-easy eggs, and by the end of May I will have enough pictures and videos of her – just from this spring – to put together a small gift book and maybe a line of coffee mugs. 

I LOVE Sophie – her podcast, her Instagram and her reissued newsletter. She is so freaking funny, which is made even better by being funny in a Southern accent. She just can’t be beat. Her most recent newsletter issue Let’s Talk About Snacks & Also Other Things is here, I suggest you start there and work backwards. And call me when you’ve made Sophie’s mama’s cheese grits from her Ouida Wednesday recipes! You KNOW they’re on my list.

Subscribe to Sophie’s newsletter here.

When I think of my grandmother, my mind’s eye strays to the glass jars she had lined up on a shelf above the kitchen counter. She had survived the Khmer Rouge and, with my grandfather, had left Cambodia for France as a refugee; the jars were stuffed with dozens of the free sachets of seasoning she’d squirrel away whenever we ate out. She told us about the ration of salt they’d been allotted each week in those terrible hungry years, and how preciously she’d held onto it. She out her palm to us, tracing with one finger the shape of a mound of salt, no larger than an almond – the difference, in a thin bowl of bobor rice porridge, between life and death. She told us, too, of the watermelons she’d grown from seeds in a hidden plot of land, and the corn cobs she’d stolen from neighbouring fields – both offences punishable by death. For her, leaving salt and sugar sachets behind was unthinkable.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE this missive, even though it’s the antithesis to what we’ve come to expect from digital mailouts. It’s long-form, it’s light on graphics, and heavy on Five Star Quality Writing. If you love food talk that tells a goddamn story (often from voices that don’t always get a platform), head on over. Issue 2.11 “Bobor” is a recent one I particularly enjoyed – find it here

Subscribe to Vittles here.

“In Battersea in the early 90s a group of us would go to a local Italian every Sunday night as it offered 50% off your bill. It was incredibly popular and packed to the rafters with punters including, like clockwork, Helen Mirren.”

This is your PROPER wink-wink-nudge-nudge celebrity gossip column that lords it over everyone else who has ever tried (I am looking directly at you, Perez, directly). It’s the fucking business. It feels like 1990s time every time and that can only be a good thing. Check out the latest issue Old Dogg, New Tricks here.

Recently during the Covid crisis, they started sending out an issue every single day and I’ve never been so grateful. They also do a musical trivia for free and if you think I didn’t stay up until 1am last Saturday night trying desperately to remember the name of “you know, that techno song from 1992”, you’d be wrong.com.

Subscribe to Popbitch here.

Subscribe to their Daily Tonic (and catch up on previous issues au revoir your productivity) here.

 I’ve blanketed my bedroom with photos of Elizabeth II, and have been marveling at all she has done (and worn!) in her nearly seven decades on the throne. It felt particularly nostalgic as a report emerged from The Sunday Times that we won’t be seeing Her Majesty for some time. It’s the only responsible plan for the 94-year-old monarch, given her vulnerability in this global pandemic, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Elizabeth Holmes has slid all the way to the top of “Needs No Introduction” status, so that takes care of a sentence or two (thanks mate). Her So Many Thoughts on the British Royal Family has expanded in the best way into a global empire (one of only a handful I will accept in my curmudgeonly periodical ranting at the state of the goddamn internet), which includes – you guessed it – a newsletter. Royal news! Personal news! Funny bon mots! Wordplay! Emojis! Images she’s paid actual money for, for our enjoyment! Interesting, topical things she recommends to read! If I was grading newsletters, hers would get an A+, and you can find her recent issue here. Actually she’s much faster at sending her newsletters out than I am finishing a post, so her RECENT recent issue is here. Oy.

Subscribe to Elizabeth’s newsletter here.