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.

On Saturday, @skyferrori posted a photo of the Pope looking incredibly chic in an oversized, pearlescent white puffer coat with the caption “OKAAYYY.” It spread like wildfire, reaching the curation account PopBase less than three hours later, which, unlike the original poster, noted that the image was made using AI. The photo was so good it fooled many, many people, including celebrities and internet culture reporters, but we also got delightful spinoffs, including Abraham Lincoln in matching drip, and crossover memes referencing The Devil Wears Prada and Seinfeld.

It also led to this story and tweet: “SCOOP: I spoke to the guy behind Balenciaga Pope for @BuzzFeedNews, who was (a) tripping on shrooms when he made the image and (b) thinks it means we should regulate AI.” The Guy in question is 31-year-old construction worker Pablo Xavier, who declined to give his last name to BuzzFeed and said he created the photo using the AI tool Midjourney. Pablo said, “It just dawned on me: I should do the Pope. Then it was just coming like water: ‘The Pope in Balenciaga puffy coat, Moncler, walking the streets of Rome, Paris,’ stuff like that.” Sure, require AI disclosures on photos, but please keep making them because they are incredible (and definitely not a problem for misinformation ahead of a crucial presidential election, whatever do you mean?).

Days later, it keeps going. On Thursday, Twitter darling and photoshop king Darth the red panda invoked the coat when returning from his annual hibernation. Welcome back, Darth, the internet got you this. —Susan Rinkunas

I think I have a condescension kink—that is, I thoroughly enjoy having my cultural intelligence annihilated by people cooler, more internet-brained, and more fashionable than me. This is the service the Polyester Podcast, “a feminist pop culture podcast [that] pulls apart the #discourse,” so generously provides on a weekly-ish basis. It is an offshoot of a self-published digital zine of the same name, created by editor-in-chief and English cool girl Ione Gamble to “bridge the gap of URL cyberfeminism with the IRL world,” with a digitized cherry bomb aesthetic that matches my Myspace page from 2006.

A melancholic girl can only be so online before she self-combusts, and this is where I lean on Gamble and her co-host and managing editor Eden Young to keep me informed of the goings-on of TikTok’s deepest corners—like CoreCore, cloutbombing, and the manosphere. Wanna know if coquettes are in or out? How about if the Sofia Coppola resurgence is all hype or not? Are vapes the new ciggies (yes)? Polyester knows! Am I simping? I think I’m simping. —Emily Leibert

What are your thoughts on happiness? Do you, too, believe that your experience of it is intrinsically linked to the vocal stylings of one Faith Hill, mother of ‘90s, ‘00s, ’10s, and yeah, I’ll predict it, 2020s radio-friendly country music?

Then here, watch this TikTok (and before it gets banned I guess??). It’s about 30 seconds long, and it will rearrange your entire molecular structure. It’s centrifugal motion, baby. It’s perpetual bliss.

Relatedly, here is a video of Hill’s husband, who is just some guy, dancing to “good 4 u,” which she very proudly posted on Instagram. Look how happy he is. That’s the Hill effect. —Sarah Rense

A lot of people have a lot of opinions about Friends right now, and the chatter sparked by cringe comments from Jennifer Aniston this week has compelled me to do a little rewatch of my personal favorite episodes. Or, in other words, the episode in Season 2 wherein Rachel dumps Ross in what I rank as a top 10 moment in her-story.

I enjoy Friends! I enjoy it specifically as a comfort rewatch, a fun little time capsule into a society where even uttering the word “lesbians” sparked a hearty dose of laugh track. I find it frustrating that alums of popular ‘90s or 2000s shows, like, say, Aniston or varying The Office stars, push disingenuous narratives about younger audiences ostensibly “canceling” their shows, which many of us actually love to binge for nostalgic purposes. Granted, specific to Friends, sure, it has its critics—but even among large swaths of said critics, it’s an enjoyable hate-watch.

I can’t say I necessarily recommend spending your weekend watching Friends, but if you find yourself getting bored enough or cowering from the Sunday scaries, it’s certainly something to do! And, hey, I’d wager that a drinking game that includes taking a sip of wine every time someone laughs at the word “lesbian,” or whenever Ross is annoying as hell, will more than take the edge off. —Kylie Cheung

If you enjoy a book that fucks you up and makes our current reality seem like a utopia, this collection of short stories by South Korean author Bora Chung will provide that specific level of escapism times 10.

These stories are equal parts hilarious and horrifying: a woman who gets pregnant from birth control pills and whose lack of a “father for the child” becomes catastrophic; a fox that bleeds gold turns the man that finds it into a money-hungry monster who really, really redefines what it means to be a monster; a cursed lamp brings revenge and tragedy upon the family of a greedy CEO and his gross corporation; and a woman haunted by a head in her toilet made up of all her waste is something I’m worried I will remember for the rest of my life. It’s gruesome and sidesplitting—even if you never really know if you’re laughing because the writing is funny, or because the scenarios are so terrifying that your brain has no idea how else to react. That’s not meant to dissuade you from diving in, it’s meant to get you excited for a once-in-a-million-books reading experience. —Lauren Tousignant