Jez Recs: What We Loved Watching, Reading, and Listening to This Week

We don’t want to jump to any conclusions, but we think we can confidently say that you are heading into your weekend with nary an indictment to contend with. Congrats to you! Celebrate that monumental achievement with some cool stuff to watch, read, and listen to.

This week, our Jez Recs cover the latest from the preeminent ambassadors of the broken-hearted, spoken word poetry turned into a visual feast, and yeah, because we don’t want to have to think all the time, some really fucking good TikToks and Pope memes. And more! Have at it.

boygenius dropped The Record at midnight Friday, and I’m so grateful that I get to live in an age when gay women making music together are celebrated by the mainstream.

Phoebe Bridgers’ covid-era rise to fame, combined with both Julien Baker’s and Lucy Dacus’ excellent solo records, primed me for an album of confessional love. But I still wasn’t ready for how much love the trio wanted to sing about. While the three early tracks each have a distinct Julien, Lucy, or Phoebe feel, I love how they blend on “Cool About It.” I love the guitars that dominate “$20” and that Phoebe maybe finally wrote about Conor Oberst in “Letter to an Old Poet.” I love that I will be putting “True Blue” lyrics in every Instagram caption with my girlfriend for the rest of time. I love being gay with a boygenius soundtrack. —Caitlin Cruz

I have this habit of forming parasocial relationships with people on TikTok who give far less of a fuck than I currently do about how they’re perceived online. My follower list is comprised of women like Abbey Fickley, a sober bartender and single mother sharing how difficult—and yes, even fun—it is to manage both; Hannah Lee, a stay-at-home wife and new mother who makes art of the mundane (namely, packing her husband’s lunch daily); and yes, even Alix Earle…I know. But one of my favorites of late is writer Heidi Clements’ account, Welcome to Heidi.

Clements’ account sees the L.A.-based 62-year-old doing little but getting dressed—very well, of course—and sharing anecdotes from her illustrious career and personal life that span less than a moment, but I’ll be damned if I couldn’t lose at least two hours of my day tuning in. Some highlights: horrifying men she’s brought back to her apartment with the aid of her pet potbelly pig, seeking an abortion in her 20s, and saying goodbye to her mother. She’s irreverent, she’s raw, and she’s really goddamn cool. Fuck having to grow up first. I want to be like her right now. —Audra Heinrichs

If being a “glamour girl” aka a fan of the only podcast brave enough to dissect straight culture like it’s a frog in your 10th grade AP Bio class aka Straightiolab is a crime, then call me Donald Trump and indict me, sweetie! This week’s episode of my favorite podcast brought on preeminent guest Alison Roman to join hosts Sam Taggart and George Civeris. The episode’s topic was “dinner parties,” and while normally the task at hand is to scrutinize the straightness of the chosen topic, we were served more of a deconstructed menu, if you will. (Sorry.)

Taggart, Civeris, and Roman went over dinner party etiquette (do not serve soup), the realities of being “mother” (“it’s awful”), and where Roman’s iconic dishes fall on the Kinsey scale (her Dilly Bean Stew is canonically gay). It’s always a bit of a risk bringing a non-comedian onto a discussion-based comedy podcast (that in my opinion also serves a hetero-ethnography), but Roman really holds her own. This great episode of this great podcast felt like how I assumed getting Tom Hanks on that Tom Hanks podcast must’ve felt like: predestined. —Kady Ruth Ashcraft

And now for some poetry. The Caribbean-American poet and activist (who describes herself on her website as a “surrealist blues poet”) aja monet has dropped the high-contrast black and white video for her poem “castaway,” (from her debut album when the poems do what they do out June 9 on drink sum wtr), which you can read here. A visual homage to nature and verbal homage to heritage, this is entirely arresting and nonstop gorgeous. —Rich Juzwiak

If you, like me, have over the past nine years wondered, “Where the fuck did that plane go?” have I got the Netflix docuseries for you. It’s not exactly “good journalism” or even “good,” but damn if it isn’t riveting. Each person who agreed to be a subject for this series clearly has their own agenda (and for many, that is simply “tell me what happened to my mother/father/children/husband”), which makes it feel less like it’s trying to indoctrinate you into a particular conspiracy theory, and more like it is trying to answer my years-long question. A note of warning though: It is, at times, deeply sad (after all, it is ultimately about the hundreds of people who still don’t know exactly what happened to their loved ones), and it is not ideal viewing for people who are already anxious flyers. —Nora Biette-Timmons

I can make jokes about this now because Pope Francis is set to be released after a brief hospital stay, and thank G*d, because the saga of the Pope Coat is what I needed this week.