Philippa Snow

  • Culture April 22, 2025

    TO DATE, I HAVE SEEN EVERY SEASON of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, a dating series in which attractive, sometimes deeply unhinged people spend ten days speaking to other attractive, sometimes deeply unhinged people through a wall, in the hopes that their inability to see each other will allow them to develop “real” feelings. These “real” […]
  • Culture October 29, 2024

    PICTURE, IF YOU WILL, Joan Didion sitting on the floor of a Los Angeles recording studio in 1968, gazing up at Jim Morrison of the Doors, a band she went on to describe as “apocalyptic missionaries of sex.” If our patron saint of Californian disenchantment ever appeared starstruck, even girlish, it was surely here, in […]
  • *_Rêve de jeune fille (Girl's Dream)_ from Sophie Calle's _True Stories_ (Actes Sud, 2023).*
    Culture April 12, 2024

    ONE OF THE WORST THINGS ABOUT BREAKUPS—aside, obviously, from the heartbreak and the acrimony, the division of belongings, and the general sense of loss—is their ability to make even nominally normal people behave like abnormal people, by which I mean writers. Few other situations lend themselves quite so definitively to casting ourselves in the lead role in our own personal drama. Minor coincidences become dazzling signs and wonders, or dark omens; lovelorn anecdotes are streamlined in the telling, edited and punched up as if we were not merely recounting them to our uninterested friends, but preparing them for future publication.