Preheader: Plus: Harry Belafonte, true crime, and Fatal Attraction.

View this email online by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when The Crown showed us a new couple. It was the week when AI music continued to raise eyebrows. And it was the week when Black Mirror, which somehow always seems to be with us, teased its return. Let's get to it. 'Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret' is not a universal story -- and that's a good thing When the lights go down on the new adaptation of Judy Blume's middle-grade classic Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, one of the first things you see is a note about the year in which the film is set: "1970." That's the year the book came out, too, so the film leaves the story there, in its moment.  It's very easy to imagine Margaret updated for 2023: Margaret with a smartphone, Margaret with the ability to look things up on Wikipedia, Margaret in a contemporary fandom or battling a contemporary moral panic. That's what you would do if you wanted to treat the book as a "universal story," one that every girl in every era can relate to, with the trimmings changed to match the time, the place, the pop-culture references. Rachel McAdams as Barbara Simon and Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret Simon in "Are you the God? It's me, Margaret" / Lionsgate But it isn't that, at all. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret may address topics that are familiar to a lot of kids (and former kids): puberty, new friends, issues with family and exploring religion. But respecting its impact as a classic means also recognizing its specificity -- that many stories are relatable, but none are universal. This is the story of one girl, at one moment, with one group of friends, who experiences early adolescence in a way particular to her. And that's what makes it compelling. Obviously, lots of kids still wait for their periods and try out bras and question their spirituality, but exactly what that experience looks like is influenced by all kinds of things. It matters what religion the kid is being raised in and what religion the parents were raised in. It matters what their economic status is, what kind of neighborhood they live in, what their family structure is, and what race they and the people around them are, not to mention the particular personality of the individual kid. There is no universal puberty story, no one vision of what getting your period for the first time is like. In fact, after I watched the scene in which Margaret gets hers, I turned to the friend next to me and said, "I did ... not have that experience." Leaving the story in 1970 also provides opportunities to expand on the book without displacing Margaret from her environment. In the film, the story of Margaret's mother Barbara, beautifully played by Rachel McAdams, is rounded out to explore the ways that in 1970, many adult women's lives were just as much in flux as their daughters'. Barbara, who has a loving and happy marriage to Herb (Benny Safdie), is newly a stay-at-home mom. She's throwing herself into the PTA and the perfecting of her house, seeing the idea of not "having to" work outside the home as a luxury. But she becomes uncertain about what's a luxury and what's a sacrifice, and it creates a resonant parallel between her and her searching, curious daughter. There's a wonderful scene late in the film in which the two sit on the sofa together, wrapped in each other's arms, exchanging few words, just sharing the experience of their lives being complicated and painful. Committing to the book's original moment doesn't make the film feel dated; it makes it feel lived-in by all of its characters.  The choice of setting is consistent with the restraint about the telling of this story that writer and director Kelly Fremon Craig gets just right across the board. Margaret is set in 1970, but gently, without distracting levels of period (yes, yes) detail. Margaret's parents have their own distinct identities without being types. Kathy Bates, as Margaret's grandmother and Herb's mother, is a lively and very funny (though flawed) grandmother, but she's never an over-the-top Wacky Grandma. The movie goes easy on a lot of the elements Fremon Craig could have dialed up, and it's to the story's benefit.  This is just Margaret's story. She's about to turn 12 in 1970, and these are her parents and friends. This is her experience of claiming her relationship with God, regardless of her attachment to any particular organized religion. This is her first time buying a bra, this is her first time being kissed by a boy, and this is how it feels to her when she realizes she has hurt someone's feelings. She is not every girl, she is just Margaret, talking to God.  Newsletter continues after sponsor message We Recommend I really liked comedian Zach Zimmerman's new memoir, with the great title Is It Hot in Here (Or Am I Suffering for All Eternity for the Sins I Committed On Earth)? It's about a whole lot of things, and it's funny, and it's insightful.  I had a great time watching The Flop House cover Battlefield Earth in a stream of a recent live show. You can still get a ticket to watch the stream, which is an interesting example of a more "produced" live show video that doesn't just look like somebody stood in the back with a camera. There has already been a Hulu take on the true-crime story of Candy Montgomery, who famously killed a friend of hers with an ax. Now, there's an HBO Max (I guess just MAX now?) version called Love & Death, starring Elizabeth Olsen. I'm not sure it's all that good, but I do think she has some fascinating moments, and if you watched Candy on Hulu, you might find the compare-and-contrast fascinating. What We Did This Week Alyssa Sutherland as Ellie and Lily Sullivan as Beth in “Evil Dead Rise” / New Line Cinema I recapped the fifth episode of this season of Succession, "Kill List." Stephen and Jordan Crucchiola talked about Evil Dead: Rise.  I explored the approach John Mulaney takes to telling the story of his own addiction and rehab in his new special Baby J. Aisha recommended three great Harry Belafonte performances in a discussion with Stephen about his career. Aisha also wrote about the new drama series Saint X. Glen was joined by Danny Hensel, Mallory Yu and Reanna Cruz to talk about the divisive Beau Is Afraid.  Aisha covered the Paramount+ remake of the film Fatal Attraction.  And Aisha also talked to Mallory Yu, Roxana Hadadi and Priya Krishna about the film Polite Society. What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Priya Krishna: The brokers episode of Hell Gate Podcast Roxana Hadadi: Bend It Like Beckham on Disney+ Mallory Yu: The “Starring Michelle Yeoh” movie playlist on Criterion Channel Aisha Harris: Review on Paramount+ Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: pchh@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Music, Books, Daily News and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Pop Culture Happy Hour emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy

🤑 4 Tips for talking to kids about money

Plus, how to deal with debt

View this email online Becky Harlan/NPR A few weeks ago, I received a note from my neighbor. She wasn’t issuing a noise complaint or a final plea to get my yappy dogs under control. (Though if you’re in that situation, we have some advice!) Instead, handwritten on torn notebook paper in pink and green sparkly gel pen was an advertisement for her summer pet-sitting service. She’s in elementary school.  Entrepreneurship at such a young age. It made my day! Do you remember how you first started learning about money? Setting up a lemonade stand? Or maybe watching how your parents dealt with household expenses?  April is financial literacy month, so we’re sharing some advice on talking to kids about money from Jen Hemphill, an accredited financial counselor and host of the Her Dinero Matters podcast. She helps people take control of their own money stories and aids parents in finding their family's best financial footing. Money is hard to talk about. Teaching your kids how to have conversations about money — and that it’s OK to do so — is an important investment. Read on for four tips to help you get started.  — Beck Harlan, Life Kit Visuals Editor Newsletter continues after sponsor message Start the conversation — and include the kids. Try including kids in small acts of financial decision-making. For example, if you're at the grocery store, give your 5-year-old a chance to pick the bread you’ll buy from a few options. Then talk to them about their reasoning. Know that an allowance isn't one-size-fits-all. Think about your own budget, what’s age-appropriate, your kid's money needs and any financial goals you've crafted with your child. You’ll also want to consider the terms of the allowance: Will it be tied to chores, behavior or neither? Are they required to save? Will older kids be responsible for some of their necessities? Start saving as early as possible. Make saving a regular part of life when kids are young, so it becomes a habit as they grow. Try a give-save-spend bank, which can teach even little kids to think about financial goal-setting and helping others. Don't wait. If you wait until your finances are perfect before talking to kids about money, "then you're doing a disservice to your kid," says Jen. You don't have to be perfect. You just have to start the conversation. Listen to the whole episode here ⬇️ Keep scrolling for more tips from Life Kit. Access Sponsor-Free Episodes Want to support our show? Try a subscription to Life Kit+ and get all the tips and tricks you love sponsor-free! Learn more at plus.npr.org/lifekit.  Learn More 🗣💸  More Life Kit tips on talking about money  "Credit card debt is rising at one of the fastest rates ever," says NPR’s global economics correspondent Stacey Vanek Smith. She sat down with Life Kit host Marielle Segarra to talk about how to approach paying down different types of debt. They even role-played specific scenarios, like declining a bridal party invite, because of financial constraints. Watch the video here:  One thing Stacey makes clear: talking about money is mushy and personal because “money is like an abstraction of value.”  “Money is this stand-in for so many things for people. It gets tied into feelings of security, freedom, possibility, adventure, opportunity, intelligence. So when people are talking about money, they’re almost always talking about something else, and it’s not usually what you associate with money." It’s important to remember, she says, that oftentimes two people might think they’re talking about the same thing when they’re talking about money, but they aren’t actually speaking the same language.    Here are some episodes to help you start productive conversations about money with the people in your life:  😬 How to face your own money avoidance  👯 How to talk about money with a partner  💳 How to talk about money with friends  💰 How to ask for a raise  ❌ How to tell people you won’t work for “exposure”    Coming up on Life Kit:  🖍 How to parent without being reactive 🩺 Tips for talking to your doctor  💵 Advice on a tricky money situation  Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can find more of our digital stories here. And if you liked this newsletter, share the love and forward it to a friend. 🥰 Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: LifeKit@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Daily News, Code Switch, Health and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Life Kit emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy

Plus: True crime, getting rich, and good food

View this email online by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when the possibility of a writers' strike continued to loom. It was the week when the same things just kept on getting made. And it was the week when the promise of a new 3.5-hour movie was either good news or bad news, depending on how you think about it. Let's get to it. Spoiler alert -- it's different out there these days When I first saw the first four advance screeners of this season of Succession -- and this is where you should duck out if you haven't seen it and still plan to watch it -- they came with the usual reminders not to spoil anything. But they came with another request, too. On top of not spoiling what would actually happen, the email suggested not telling people that this or that episode was a particularly important one. You know -- "Hey, people who watch this show, SOMETHING BIG happens in this episode!"  Makes sense. Even that kind of hint tips more than the show intends to tip; even that interferes with viewers having the level of surprise that I got when it finally sunk in that Logan had died. That's the approach I took in my review. Didn't say the third episode was important; didn't say any one episode was important. Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy and Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy in "Succession" / HBO Max But of course, when the episode aired, it touched off a new round of conversations about spoilers. Most of them were about how long you have to wait to participate in public conversations in a place like Twitter. Are you obligated to say nothing until the thing has aired on the west coast? Meaning that in the first moments, when you most want to talk about the show, you shouldn't? How about waiting until the next day? Lots of people think it should be the next day. Some think several days. Or a week. And in this case, very understandably, people who inadvertently found out something they didn’t want to know because other people didn’t wait long enough were really mad.  The problem with the way a lot of people define spoilers is that it's entirely subjective. It's not about whether something is a spoiler by definition; it's about whether it's a spoiler to you because you haven't watched yet. (Even people who set general rules like "How about 48 hours?" are often doing that because ... they need about 48 hours. It's understandable!) There are people who think the zipped lip should last forever, who believe you should never talk about a plot development in anything without a warning. New people discover things every day. Who are you to ruin their surprise? (This is what you might call the Darth Vader Is Still A Spoiler theory.) There are a couple things that are pretty easy to do as spoiler avoidance that seem like common courtesy to me. I don't publish things with spoilery headlines for a good while, if ever. (You'll notice the headline of this essay is not "All The Stuff We Learned About Spoilers When Logan Roy Died In The Third Episode Of The Fourth Season Of Succession." That's on purpose.) I didn't tweet as soon as that episode aired, "THANK GOODNESS NOW YOU ALL KNOW LOGAN DIED!"  That's partly because, as much as my answer tends to be that you need to watch things when they air if not being spoiled is really important to you (and it does), not everybody is equally able to do that. Sometimes it's about how many services they can afford to be subscribed to at any given time, sometimes it's that they had to work a night shift or take care of a kid and they couldn't plunk themselves down in front of HBO just then. Things happen; there's no reason to go out into the world spitefully spoiling things on purpose just to prove that you think it's fine to do it.  But conversations we all have about the movies and TV that we love are also worth protecting. They make us smarter, they're fun and funny, and they're ways to talk to new people. It's all a balance, because as I was saying to reporter Leslie Gray Streeter this week, the shows that people are eager to talk about tend to be the same ones other people don't want to be spoiled about. There's no way to force your entire social media community not to talk about things in front of you; there is only courtesy. And you can't ask courtesy to extend so far that you have the experience you want at the expense of other people having the experience they want.  It's not an easy problem to solve. Because in the wake of the Succession episode, one of the things I thought was, "I wish people knew which episodes were going to have big things happen, so they could stay off Twitter until they'd seen them." But that's not a new idea, of course. That's what's behind the episode-specific "I'm not going to tell you what it is, but SOMETHING BIG happens in this one" warnings that, as we've already discussed, can spoil the surprise all on their own.  So this is my advice: If it's really important to you not to be spoiled on something, do the best you can to make it appointment television for yourself and watch it when it's on. No other solution is nearly as effective as that. Everything else is a half-measure, unfortunately. But if you can't do that, mute a couple of the biggest hashtags that people use for talking about particular shows. (For example, #Succession and #SuccessionHBO.) It's not a perfect solution, but it will help some. (Of course, if you're tweeting about a show, try to remember to tag your tweets!)  Or just give Facebook or Twitter or whatever a little bit of a break. Because the same excitement that you feel that makes it so hard when you get spoiled is the same thing that makes people want to go find "OMG" GIFs as soon as something important happens. And for good and for ill, that won't change on either side. Newsletter continues after sponsor message We Recommend I think I recommended the If Books Could Kill podcast episode about Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus in this space a while ago, but that's not going to stop me from recommending their episode on Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Because wow.  If you're not yet caught up on the prospects of a WGA strike (which seem to me to be pretty significant), NPR's Mandalit del Barco has a piece that might help.  Sarah Weinman wrote a very good piece last weekend about truth and true crime, and even if these seem like well-covered topics, give it a read -- she's one of the genre's real experts and enthusiasts. What We Did This Week Nicholas Hoult as Renfield and Nicolas Cage as Dracula in "Renfield" / Universal Pictures I recapped the eventful fourth episode of this season of Succession, "Honeymoon States."  Glen talked to Morning Edition about Renfield. Stephen visited All Things Considered to talk about new music. Aisha and Eric Deggans tried to get to the bottom of what happened with that Netflix Love Is Blind live reunion show.  Glen and Aisha talked with Bedatri D. Choudhury about the film Showing Up.  Bedatri also joined Barrie Hardymon and me to talk about Judy Blume and some of the books we really love. Glen and Eric Deggans ran down this season of Picard. I reviewed Netflix's The Diplomat, which I like a lot. I also talked about it with Stephen and Cristina Escobar.  Glen reviewed Peacock's Mrs. Davis, which he likes a lot. (I also like it a lot, and we'll be talking about it on the show soon.) What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Cristina Escobar: No Borders, Just Flavors Linda Holmes: Erotic '90s via You Must Remember This Stephen Thompson: Big Picture by Fenne Lily and the NPR Music Newsletter (of course he also recommends the Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter)   Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: pchh@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Music, Books, Daily News and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Pop Culture Happy Hour emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy