A Cairn for A Cozy Finish to Fall
“November comes, and November goes. With the last red berries and the first white snows.” - Clyde Watson
We’re starting something new! After about six months of writing the Cairn, we’ve chatted and realized that providing strictly booklists is a very one dimensional view of the content that we consume and perhaps does not constitute a true “cairn” as a marker of where we are in time and space.
We will still post book recommendations here but most of our books-only “stacks” will appear on our Instagram account. In this newsletter, we will publish periodic Cairns that contain the content, media and topics we’re engaging with most recently. We will also continue to publish personal essays here as that was what this project was borne out of - a calling to hold ourselves and each other accountable to writing more frequently.
We hope that this new format is still interesting to our small-but-mighty subscriber base and we welcome any and all feedback.
Love, Meghan + Courtney
I didn’t consciously decide to lean so heavily into nostalgia this month but perhaps it’s an unintended outcome of some current health issues that have caused me to feel as though I’m half-hibernating through life these days. This autumn, I’ve found myself revisiting older shows, books and movies and finding much comfort in these.
This is an incredibly niche piece of cultural commentary but I think one of the reasons I am loving older films and shows is because of the regular-looking teeth. I’m becoming increasingly aware of how many people - mostly famous, some not - who have chiclet style veneers. It’s nice to watch things where people have normal teeth and some wrinkles and other elements one would expect of normal human bodies, especially while dealing with age-related issues in my own body. It’s also validating to see how handily many cultural elements hold up across decades. Perhaps there’s hope for our elder millennials and we’ll hold up too? One can only hope!
📚 Cozy has been the name of the game this season and The Starter Villain fits the bill. Think: a hapless young man who is down on his luck inherits his mysterious, estranged uncle’s estate and hi-jinx ensue, plus talking animals.
📚 The ultimate rom com for those who are not normally into this genre. Plus a tropical setting for those who would like to practice a little escapism as the temperatures drop.
📚 Nora Ephron. Need I say more? I can’t recall why I decided to take Heartburn out of the library but I read it in one sitting. Bonus: there’s a documentary I spotted on HBO from the mid-2010s I am planning to dive into this weekend.
📺 MomTok has a hold on me. I hope it will survive this!
📺 I was a little too young when THIS popular and well-loved series first came out (and we didn’t have cable!) but my husband and I have been tucking into a slow rewatch lately and something about the 90s/early 00s nostalgia is hitting the spot.
📺 I don’t drink very much anymore but when I did, Meg Ryan movies were my go to for low anxiety hangover viewing. While this one is my favorite, around this season I especially like this one.
🎧 The P.Diddy arrest was a blip on my radar when it first went down but the low-key conspiracy theories surrounding him have kept me busy for weeks. This podcast has a good breakdown for any fellow pop culture heads who are not yet up to speed.
🎧 Recently found this new-ish podcast that feels like listening to your two most intellectual friends talk current events and analyze pop culture happenings over wine.
📰 Very late to the game but this two part article on the Karen Read case is riveting - part one and part two.
📲 If I were to ever come into a sizable inheritance, this would be my one extravagant expense. Unrelated: if anyone is a wealthy older person who does not have any family and is interested in a surrogate niece or granddaughter, hit me up!
📲 A thirty day series of haunted lakes. I may have added one or two to my travel wishlist? Others were just too scary!
📲 Brilliant craft idea to help those of us (ahem, myself included) break the addiction to our phones.