44. READ. LOOK. THINK.

READ:  “I want to be beautiful and I want everything and I want it all.” | “All the heroines of the girls’ books I loved got their work burned.” | The hotel room is an amnesiac space. | The problem with the notion of ‘Manic Pixie dream girls,’ my friend Clem writes, is that it’s become a handy way to dismiss female characters out-of-hand. | A life. | Felicity and the joys of decent TV: “if your attention wanders even for long enough to think about what you’ll have for dinner tomorrow—the entire thing dissolves into a blur of attractive white people making problems out of nothing.” | Places my friend Jean has lived in London. | On “only” children. | Sitting in on Joanna Coles’s first Cosmo staff meeting. | Going to put aside a few hours on the weekend to read Samantha Ellis’ theatre history column for the Guardian: Curtain Up. | “i don’t believe in crazy women. i only believe in bad men.” | “After Somersault, I really felt I didn’t want to make films any more. I think I was just totally overwhelmed by the attention.” | James Wood said of his marriage to novelist Claire Messud, “I witness many of the anxieties and ambitions that [Sheila] Heti treats well in her novel [How Should a Person Be?].” Plus, excitement!

LOOK: The new aperol spritz? “as a sip of the drink confirmed, it replaces the gin in a usual Negroni with a dry sparkling wine, and that changes everything, the way recasting a part meant for Kristin Scott Thomas with Kristen Wiig would.”

THINK: I really want to write a TV miniseries about Australia’s mining boom: giant fortunes, high stakes, huge drama. | Meanwhile,Economist Ross Garnaut warns Australians to brace for a fall in living standards. | “That apartment was the most effective antipsychotic she had ever taken.” Our bodies constrain us, but our social interactions make us who we are. “The new more socially complex approach to human suffering simply takes that fact seriously again.” | Boring is productive. | Exercise can help protect against future emotional stress.

LINKNESS: My wrap up of the week’s top strategy + creativity + marketing reads on Nextness.