Once more, with feeling 02

In a world of numbness, here are the cracks.

Each week, you'll get a round-up of moments that cut through the fog of indifference. From poignant articles to fleeting TikToks, songs, texts, memes, places, objects—no thing and no feeling is off limits. Since everyone's infinite scroll is curated to their own little universe, each edition will include one pick from me and a few from guest contributors. Hopefully, something in here opens your cold heart too.

Today’s installment features two of my very favs! Will was one of my first friends in San Francisco when I moved there 10+ years ago. Brilliant, hilarious, Will possesses a quality that I have never known anyone else to have—there is no such thing as discomfort with Will. He can dissolve even the most painful silence just by being in the room. Will has also taught me every single life hack I know of—from the ease of the dark web to keyboard shortcuts. I love him so so so so much!

Our other feature is from Britt, a friend I met through none other than the aforementioned Will. Britt is smarter than you. Smarter than me too. Britt knows it but won’t be a dick about it either. Currently getting an English lit PHD, I like to imagine Britt as the fun loving Elle Woods mixed with the intensity and passion of Jessica Lange’s best roles. TLDR; Britt is a good time, but never try to debate. You’ll lose.

Will, Product Dev

I got back from Fire Island last week and my body immediately fell apart. I developed a 102-degree fever and the most insane cough, and all I could do was sweat, lie in bed, and drift in and out of consciousness.

During the first half of my illness, I mostly watched Dateline. Something about Keith Morrison’s campy dread paired nicely with the feeling of impending death. I eventually switched over to old seasons of RHONY and made it all the way to Season 7. It was a lot of brain rot, I felt terrible, and no one was giving me the sympathy I deserved.

But by last night, I was starting to feel normal again. I wanted to watch a movie—something with a plot—and landed on Marathon Man.

Have you seen it? I hadn’t heard of it, but for all I know it’s famous af and everyone has seen it. Either way, I turned it on.

But to answer your question: Marathon Man made me feel something.

For one thing, it’s just fun to watch a movie set in NYC circa 1978. It makes me feel nostalgic and depressed for something I (quite literally) have zero connection to or understanding of. A time when jogging isn't a thing. When villains aren’t just metaphorically Nazis, but actual literal Nazis. When stealth gay subplots make total sense. All fun, melancholic stuff.

But what really got me was this one torture scene. I guess Iwon’t spoil it, but it involves a very calm, very German Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman strapped to a chair. It is upsetting. So upsetting that, while I was watching it, my fever came back and I ended up having to call out of work again the next morning.

Either way, it was a fun movie that kept my attention and didn’t involve a housewife yelling at me. The real lesson here is that 1) we’re all sleeping on Paramount+, and 2) sometimes it’s better to watch something that doesn’t just kill time or fill space. Marathon Man just barrels ahead—stressful and paranoid—trusting you’ll catch up. Eventually, I did.

Britt, grad student and unprofessional cultural critic

https://www.instagram.com/poeticdweller/

A few years ago, I told the guy I was on a date with that my favorite genre of film is “Woman Going Through a Hard Time.” Many actresses can vie for the position of queen of the genre: Nicole Kidman (of course), Cate Blanchett, Amy Adams… If it were up to me—and, in a way, it is—I would crown Julianne Moore. Her filmography is crazy; she should have, like, 7 Oscars. Safe, Magnolia, Maps to the Stars, A Single Man, The Hours, Far from Heaven, The Big Lebowski, Boogie Nights… An underrated entry in her impeccable catalogue is Gloria Bell, Sebastián Lelio’s English-language remake of his 2013 film Gloria, starring Paulina García (who won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival for the role). The original movie is honestly better, but I come back to Moore’s performance every now and then because nobody plays a melancholic-but-resilient upper middle class white woman better than she.

Gloria Bell is about Gloria Bell, a middle-age divorcée in Los Angeles who escapes the drudgery of her own life by frequenting night clubs around the city and dancing to iconic songs from the 80s. Her life does kinda suck: her kids aren’t really that great to be around, her romantic interest (played fantastically by John Tuturro) is obsessed with or trapped by his ex-wife and their daughters, and her job seems soul-sucking. The movie bumbles along, pushed forward by an underwhelming script, though Moore (as expected) does wonders with what little she has. For me, the entire thing is saved by the final scene. After the breakdown of her romance, she attends the wedding of her friend Vicky’s daughter. Bathed in pink and blue light (that reminds me of Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own”), she stares vacantly into the crowd as Laura Branigan’s cover of Umberto Tozzi’s “Gloria” plays, which she quietly sings along to. A man asks her to dance, and she demurs. The camera pans to Vicky, who calls her onto the dancefloor. After not much prodding, Gloria relents and marches into the crowd. Her hands are up, her eyes are closed. She dances around (in that embarrassing way all parents do) without regard for anyone else. Surrounded by dozens of other people, she’s all alone in her own little world. For a moment, she pauses, as if she feels the weight of her life and all her problems bearing back down on her. No matter, though: the chorus hits—“Gloriaaaaa! Gloria!”—and Gloria begins to whirl, arms splayed out and a huge smile stretches across her face, which is lifted to the ceiling. She looks like Christ, the Redeemer on a turntable, or a child. The screen turns black, the credits roll, and I’m crying.

It's a scene of tremendous resilience, but Moore and Lelio don’t portray it as some radical act of defiance. This isn’t a girlboss-nevertheless-she-persisted thing. No, this is a whatever-fuck-it-who-cares kind of moment. It’s an arresting and inspiring scene of relief—release. Gloria’s hasn’t solved her problems, the next day is going to be hard, but she let them drift into the back of her mind. Her joy is magnetic and infectious and cathartic. For the last two minutes, as “Gloria” washes away all of Gloria’s worries, Gloria Bell washes away all of mine; the only thing on my mind is this Woman Going Through a Hard Time But Having a Good Time Anyway. There’s a message here (though it doesn’t come from a stern didacticism): Life’s hard, it’s so hard, yes, but you can dance, you’ll hear your song and can dance and spin around and, for a little bit, it’ll be easier, easy. Mary Oliver wrote in a poem that “Joy is not meant to be a crumb.” Sure, but sometimes that’s all you get. Gloria Bell lets me know that even a crumb can sometimes satisfy, can be enough, if you let yourself have it.

Isadora

I’ve never considered myself an academic nor would I call myself simple-minded. I’ve spent most of my life obsessing over every corner of culture, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Andy Cohen, from existentialism to The Real Housewives. And honestly, I think that’s pretty standard for my generation. We contain multitudes.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how this cultural duality, the highbrow and the lowbrow, shapes our beliefs, even our activism. (Yes, I’m going there.)

As someone socialized as a woman in the 21st century, my understanding of womanhood is paradoxical. I’ve drawn inspiration from Lilith Fair and riot grrrl anthems, Roxane Gay and her essays—alongside the equally radical influence of Lil' Kim, Nicki Minaj, and French porn icon Ovidie. These might seem at odds with one another, but they all speak to different aspects of the same truth.

In 2025, deep into the era of fourth-wave feminism, this contradiction isn’t really a contradiction at all—it’s the point. There’s a general consensus now: all expressions of femininity are valid even if they sometimes feel regressive.

Want to stay home, raise kids, and bake pie all day? Go for it—and maybe build a TikTok empire while you’re at it.

Lipstick lesbians slowly taking over from the ‘hey mama’ ones.

Posting full-frontal content on OnlyFans? Yes bitch, more (pussy) power to you.

There’s a real freedom in how we’re redefining “powerful woman.” But! And! Also! It’s confusing. Because so much of what we’re celebrating today still circles back to the ideals of the nuclear family. And even five years ago, those same choices might have been labeled anti-feminist.

I’ve been reading Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert (recommended to me by Isabella of Everything is My Favorite), and it’s been reshaping how I think about all of this. The book tracks the contradictory ways pop culture over the last 30 years has shaped modern feminism—both expanding and distorting it.

It’s a fascinating read—I highly recommend it. There are parts I agree with, others I don’t. But what’s stuck with me most is Gilbert’s take on the profound influence of pop culture’s most “menial” offerings.

“Popular culture isn’t an innocuous force; we don’t go through adolescence—watching scenes and reading books and hearing jokes and listening to all kinds of dialogue—while wearing an invisible force field that bounces bad ideas away. We learn an awful lot of what we know from the stories we encounter.”

I’m only halfway through the book, and I’ll definitely be sharing more thoughts. But this week, I’ve found a strange comfort in giving a hyper-critical—maybe even intellectual—look at things like Jessica Simpson’s dad, Sasha Grey, and the endless social mirror that is reality TV.

Maybe that’s the beauty of it…the fact that we’re finally giving ourselves permission to take the so-called “lowbrow” seriously. To admit that reality TV, pop stars, sex work, and social media moms are just as worthy of analysis as any canonical feminist text. Because these are the spaces where so many of us actually learned how to be women—or at least, how to perform it.

Once more, with feeling is a weekly installment and anyone is welcome to submit. Send something that broke through your feed, stopped you in your tracks, etc. A song, a scene, a text, a tweet, a food, a person, a weird object on the sidewalk. Anything is fair game! We’ll include a few in next week’s roundup—an ever-expanding archive of the unfiltered, the uncynical, the accidentally profound.

DM, Email, or shout into the void. Just don’t keep it to yourself.

instagram.com/isadoruh

youreinlimbo@gmail.com