When Girls creators Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner announced in July they were going to start a newsletter, they promised the same thing they deliver on HBO on Sunday nights. The tagline for the millennial-focused “Lenny” is, “An e-mail newsletter where there’s no such thing as too much information.”
Now that the first e-mail has arrived, it seems it’s not quite as overly informative as promised. Here’s how it breaks down.
A transcript of a softball interview with Hillary Clinton:
Here’s a typical question: “I think the question on every ‘Lenny’ reader’s lips is: Do you consider yourself a feminist?”
In other words, this was not the kind of interview where they got into email servers or Benghazi.
At least there was no pretence of objectivity. Dunham and Konner were upfront about their fangirl feelings for Clinton, which Dunham traces back to the third grade. The interview felt like some mix of sponsored post and Tonight Show Q&A where Clinton got to show her “fun-loving” and “human” side, while also holding forth on big-picture topics such as student debt and race relations.
Clinton was also given the rare opportunity to defend her Donna Karan off-the-shoulder dress that made waves back in 1993.
“That is one of my favourite dresses,” Clinton said.
“It’s extremely chic. I think you should bust it back out,” Dunham said.
Clinton: “You think?”
Dunham: “For a potential inauguration.”
A history lesson on a forgotten writer:
As part of an “out-of-print” series, Editor-at-large Doreen St Flix gave an eye-opening account of the career highlights of June Jordan — an architect and prolific writer who was mentored by Buckminster Fuller and had a visionary idea of how to transform Harlem in the 1960s. It never came to fruition, but she went on to publish a celebrated young adult novel, His Own Where, which was a National Book Award finalist in 1971.
A personal defence of a writer’s “queer wedding”:
Kira Garcia, a freelance writer for the New Yorker and Jezebel, explains that she was tired of being miscategorised. She also likes the fact that saying she has a wife enrages people who are opposed to same-sex marriage.
An explainer on whether your period is “weird”:
The first instalment in the recurring feature Rumors I Heard About My Body isn’t nearly as TMI [too much information] as it sounds or as you’d expect from Dunham. No Instagrams of women showing their menstrual blood or anything like that. Just a basic breakdown of how every woman’s cycle is different, and the only time to worry is when there are noticeable changes.
Pro tip: “Some women do have their periods while exclusively breastfeeding, so be careful about birth control unless you want to have two kids reaaaallly close in age.”
An origin story for the current denim explosion:
Associate editor Laia Garcia makes a case that we can trace the current proliferation back to two denim-loving Portuguese designers. It’s like The Omnivore’s Dilemma for fashion trends.
— Washington Post
