5 Years Of Covid + Lorazepam's Big Moment + Free Wendy Williams + Bradley Cooper's Righteous Gemstone + Rachel Corrie + Columbia University's Big Crisis + Gavin Newsom's End Game?

Mar 17, 2025

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Y’all it’s been 5 years since the Covid shutdown kicked off.

FIVE YEARS.

I feel like I remember every minute of every day leading up to the shutdown. I started a new job and had to go to London for two weeks of onboarding. BBC News tickers were already flashing red, schools were closing over there and bodies had already started piling up in Italy’s streets. From Gatwick to LAX, I was only asked by the gate agent if I’d “been to China in the last two weeks.” I landed at LAX and walked right into the country, right into an Uber, and right into this city.

On the night before L.A.’s stay at home order went into effect, I went to The Pikey (RIP) with a friend who’s not a friend anymore and drank champagne. The Pikey closed and never reopened.

Everything from the onset of the pandemic is extremely vivid and extremely traumatizing, and I’m saying this as someone, who I guess by comparison, had it easy.

I lost my job for a few months and got it back. Got an even better job before the year ended. I had savings to use while waiting months for my unemployment checks to show up. No one in my immediate family was hospitalized or died. I didn’t have kids to support or manage through virtual school. It was just me in probably the best case scenario.

Still, I was living through one of the most traumatic moments of my adulthood. Operating on fear and panic and hourly uncertainty and however it all burrows into your bones. Far away from your brain, which puts itself on autopilot to keep you breathing and eating, even though there are refrigerator trucks full of bodies in New York and doctors wearing garbage bags to work. And you’re in block-long lines to get into the grocery store, and an equally long line just to check out. I remember shopping at the Vons across from The Vista and there were EMTs in there shopping and I could hear their radios and every call was for “respiratory distress.”

I didn’t set aside processing time for that until last year. How could I, really? I finally feel like I’m coming through the other side of it. I feel more like the version of myself I was for the 34 years before it showed up. I’m closer to being her now, though I’m about to be 40. Impacted, yes. Evolved, yes. But the version of me that lived through that feels like such a stranger to us.

Of course, there is no prize for suffering alone, but my god I’m just grateful that stranger didn’t run into the arms of the ugliest man off Tinder and spend the last five years pushing out his kids. I lost so many of my homegirls to that plague within a plague.

Anyway…

The glass-eyed glaze of a white woman with only two states: trembling chihuahua or fully comatose.

Thanks To The White Lotus, Lorazepam Is Having A *Moment* (NYT)
Normani Gets Engaged (Vogue)
USA v. Mangione Hits Federal Court This Wednesday 3/19 (LMInfo)
One Month To Go… And Coachella Still Hasn’t Sold Out (Coachella)
Someone Please Remind Glamour’s Stephanie McNeal About Blake Lively and Woody Allen (Glamour)
Gucci Has Investors, Gen Z, And All Of Us Confused (Reuters)
Rocco’s Weho Get A New Owner (WehoTimes)
Mystery Surrounds Teen Twins Found Dead In Georgia (WCNC)
Alex Jones Would Probably Call This A “False Flag” (ABC)
Wendy Williams’ Judge, Guardian, And Assisted Living Facility Must Be Investigated (TMZ)

Bradley Cooper, as your biggest hater, they (me) could never make me (me) hate you.

I don’t know where to put this in the newsletter, but the season premiere of The Righteous Gemstones gave us one of my favorite TV episodes ever and it didn’t include a single member of the regular cast. My hoagie-making king Bradley Cooper took time from slapping #wiz on cheesesteaks to deliver the perfect performance of the perfect origin story. Danny McBride directed and the whole thing was so good I’ll let the continuity mistakes that had a wagon full of dead men appearing, disappearing, and re-appearing every time the camera cut… slide.

“…But once you have seen the ocean and lived in a silent place, where water is taken for granted and not stolen in the night by bulldozers, and once you have spent an evening when you haven’t wondered if the walls of your home might suddenly fall inward waking you from your sleep, and once you've met people who have never lost anyone. Once you have experienced the reality of a world that isn’t surrounded by murderous towers, tanks, armed “settlements” and now a giant metal wall, I wonder if you can forgive the world for all the years of your childhood spent existing—just existing— in resistance to the constant stranglehold of the world's fourth largest military—backed by the world’s only superpower—in it‚s attempt to erase you from your home. That is something I wonder about these children. I wonder what would happen if they really knew.” - Rachel Corrie in an email from Palestine

This week marks the twenty-second anniversary of Israel’s murder of American activist Rachel Corrie, killed in Rafah by an IDF bulldozer in 2003. Rachel’s parents spent nearly 10 years suing the Israeli government for Rachel’s death, asking only for a $1 settlement and admission of harm. Israel’s courts found Israel not liable and no one is suprised.

We’re almost there, Rachel.

It’s been over a week since Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident, was detained and disappeared by ICE agents, targeted for his role in organizing campus protests against the university’s refusal to divest from their academic/financial/political ties to Israel. Depending on the publisher, that last statement will be framed as “pro-Hamas,” “pro-Palestine,” “anti-Israel,” “antisemitic,” or “anti-Zionist.” Whatever.

Khalil has not been charged with a crime, but was immediately transferred out of New York state to a detention center in Louisiana, thousands of miles away from his pregnant wife and lawyers.

Elsewhere…

As you know I’m legally required to use this photo of him every time.

Gavin Newsom is only one thing — a politician.

Many of you have asked what’s going on with this man and honestly I don’t know. I’m not going to give him any credit for running some secretly strategic grift. The signs were always there. Mayo. Red. MAYO. RED. MAYO (WHITE). RED (MAGA HAT).

But, then again

5 Years Of Covid + Lorazepam's Big Moment + Free Wendy Williams + Bradley Cooper's Righteous Gemstone + Rachel Corrie + Columbia University's Big Crisis + Gavin Newsom's End Game?

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