Good morning!

What travel-adjacent, escapist content are you enjoying these days? Since we're headed to Florence and Tuscany this fall, reading a book set in the place we'll be visiting felt like a good way to psych myself up even further for our trip. Anticipation, after all, is a good thing.

After watching Stanley Tucci's show (twice!!) *and* Bobby and Giada's show (2 big personalities in Italy = good, delicious fun), I picked up Still Life by Sara Winman last week for another dose of anticipatory content. The book is set in 1944 against the backdrop of the war and follows the lives of an English soldier and a middle-aged art historian whose stories intimately connect. It's not a travelogue by any means, but after just a few pages in, I'm loving the transportive writing and descriptions of Italian hill towns.

If you, too, are itching for such content, the NYT Books section has a new series all about "reading your way through" different cities. The first centers on Paris, which seems like a very good place to start. ❤️

Until next week,
Alisha Ramos (@alisharamos)

P.S. This month, we're donating 1% of revenues to The Loveland Foundation, an organization we're proud to have supported over the years. The Loveland Foundation's Therapy Fund provides financial assistance to Black women and girls seeking therapy nationally. Thanks to you for making this possible.

This Week's Recommendations

This Week's Reads

1. On influencer creep. (Real Life Mag) — “The mark of influencer creep is the on-edge feeling that you have not done enough for social media platforms: that you can be more on trend, more authentic, more responsive — always more.”

2. What Does the New Craze For Pet Portraits Say About the Times We Live In? (AIGA Eye on Design) — Suddenly itching to get a portrait of our pup... 🐶

3. The Numbing Rise of I.P. TV  (The New Yorker) — A great recap of why content and media feels exhausting right now. “His eyes grow wide as he imagines how events that happened in a single day might spawn two TV shows and yet more podcasts. 'So if we found one story a day,' Firstman says, 'we can have eight hundred and seventy years of content every year.'”

4. Therapists Should Build a New Cultural Competence: ‘Onlineness’ (Wired) — "Without an understanding of online life, the implied burden of explanation and proof would fall accidentally but onerously on the client, at least taking up more (expensive) session time than it should have."

5. A helpful and downloadable PDF glossary about gender. (The Washington Post)

6. The end of the millennial lifestyle subsidy. (The Atlantic) — "...if you woke up on a Casper mattress, worked out with a Peloton, Ubered to a WeWork, ordered on DoorDash for lunch, took a Lyft home, and ordered dinner through Postmates only to realize your partner had already started on a Blue Apron meal, your household had, in one day, interacted with eight unprofitable companies that collectively lost about $15 billion in one year." 🥲 

7. Confessions of A Perpetually Single Woman (ELLE) — "One thing about being unhappily single in your thirties—besides the very real biological and social pressure to reproduce—is everybody thinks there must be a reason why."