The "Come and Gone" Edition

Mar 13

Dear Readers,

Content tips for today are influenced by my first business trip in a while’s airplane mindset:

I might be literally the last one to this particular dramedy party, but “Good Girls” on Netflix is realllll good. Real fun. Real drama. Think Ozark meets Desperate Housewives. Originally an NBC mid-season replacement show (read: poorly rated), on Netflix it is now the number one streamed show in the country. Stats like this are always hard to believe, but the Nielsen-approved data** say that over 1 BILLION MINUTES of the show were streamed in this particular week. What’s that, you say? How many hours is a billion minutes, anyway? Apparently it’s 16,666,667 hours. That’s alotta people watching alotta episodes. I accounted for approximately 3.5 hours of those and I will definitely be going back for more of the 16+ million.

I watched two episodes of “My Brilliant Friend.” Also extraordinarily popular, I had never read the legendary books. I enjoyed the two episodes, everything everyone has said about the brilliant portrayal of female friendship through the lens of post-war Italy, in all it’s small town grittiness, power struggles both childish and quite adult. It was like my eyeballs and brain understood why there are literally nothing but raves but my pulse didn’t get there? Going to watch more.

Still too scared to watch Euphoria. But I’m going to! Be patient with me, Zendaya!

Two similarly named—and themed—books of short stories I read.

Men Without Women — Haruki Murakami — this may have crossed your radar because the actually brilliant Oscar-nominated movie, Drive My Car, is based on one of the stories. I loved this movie. One of the good things is that I can’t remember anything about books, or stories, or movies, within moments of having finished them! So I reread the story and then was totally surprised by the movie I recently saw. And then right this minute I looked up what the story was about and I was surprised all over again! Anyway, ostensibly each story is about a man. But to me, none of them seem to be about anything but about women. I don’t know. Women and Men: tell me what you think

Life Without Children — by Roddy Doyle — Speaking of not remembering anything, I actually may have already mentioned these two books in this very newsletter! If so, hopefully you also forgot or didn’t read it in the first place. Well anyway this book, too, seems to not have much to do with children and, in a twist, actually also seems to have to do particularly with women! Men, Women, and Children: tell me what you think.

Nobody entered my “which part of the Oslo Trilogy is my favorite” poll. But I did get some feedback about the movies. Most adored, especially a brilliant and lovely fellow and devoted reader who was the Scandinavian bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal and he said it pretty much rocked his brain in their verisimilitude and evocativeness of Oslo. Others gave me a polite “yeah, I started the first one!” Okay I’ll tell you, my favorite was for sure the first one. I love a good two couples story. It’s always a proxy for one of the two in each couple and *their* relationship which is what’s actually interesting.

If Daylight Savings fooled you — I’m sorry — it’s actually an hour later so you will, sadly, have even less time to read what I think is a superb edition of the LZ Sunday Paper. It is beyond chock full of robust, diverse news. Despite the length, I did my best to curate for you — news by, for, and about women, delivered straight to your inbox. Politics, Pop Culture and everything in between.

If you have a story you think I may have missed, email me at (click here:) LZSundayPaper@gmail.com.

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Welcome, new subscribers!

Next week will be a more manageable size, I’m guessing. Another Covid-delayed family wedding which means my time on a busy Friday and Saturday, my workdays for this thing, will be greatly reduced. So thank you, loyal co-curators, for your plethora of submissions. I really use your good and wide-ranging tastes to shape each week’s list and will depend on them even more next week.

And Happy St. Patrick’s Day!! Speaking of which I will be in Ireland soon-ish. More on that later, but in the meantime do send tips and tricks!