This week has sort of been a weird one. I’m in a dead heat to complete the writing project I’ve been working on since January: It’s more of an archival project than anything, but it’s also the gateway to so many other writing projects I wanna complete this year, so I’m anxious to get it off my desk. Usually, when I get like this, everything else falls by the wayside…I don’t clean my house, I stay looking like a hob goblin, I barely remember to eat (or if I do, I’m super cranky and annoyed about having to take the time to feed myself) , and I ignore everything else going on in my life that is not directly related to me finishing the thing.

But in the last year or so, I’ve really gotten on myself about creating more balance in my life. So now, even though I very much want to work on this project from the minute I get out of bed until the moment I fall back into those sheets, I force myself to contain my writing focus to a set schedule of hours or writing metrics, and reserve the rest of my day for other activities.

Newsflash: This is, like, so healthy and relaxing?!?

Like, is this what you other people have been doing the whole time??

THUS, I’ve had a pleasant week of reading books, catching up on a couple of TV shows, and staying locked in and on top of all the #WhereIsKate news and conspiracy theories!

I don’t have a dissertation to deliver on the #WhereIsKate stuff. Mostly I’ve been tied to X and TikTok and my Where Is Kate Discord threads because the memes are funny and the gossip is juicy. But I cannot overstate just how BADLY the RF has handled this whole thing. If indeed Kate does turn up at Easter service in photos taken by a non-flip-phone camera and speaks in her own voice in a close-up video with 4K definition while she holds up that day’s newspaper, it still won’t answer the looming questions about why the Kensington Palace felt it was necessary to plant fake photos and leak false headlines and stories.

If you want a smart, detailed, and objective rundown on everything that’s been happening with #WhereIsKate since the beginning, I strongly recommend settling in for this article by Ellie Hall for Nieman Labs.

Read it here!

Hall was a senior reporter and official royal correspondent for (the now defunct) BuzzFeed News since 2013. She’s now a freelance journalist, and she, Omid Scobie (PS: X does this weird thing where it only shows years-old tweets from someone unless you log in or sign up - Omid’s had a LOT to say on X in the last few weeks), and Meredith Constant are basically the only people I trust when it comes to Royal news.

Right as I’m writing this, Heidi Agan, the professional Kate impersonator that people are saying is actually the Kate in the video of Kate and Will at the Windsor Farm Shop, replied to some dude named Ernie P and said it wasn’t her in the video, that she was “at work far away from Windsdor!”

But also…would she say if it was her?! Like if the Royal Family hired you to impersonate Kate in a video, would you actually reply to a reporter three days later and be all, “Actually yes! That WAS me in the video, thanks so much for asking!!”

I mean, maybe?! At this point, WHO KNOWS!!! Because that is what #WhereIsKate is doing to us!!! It is making us think and feel and believe things that we know make us sound C R A Z Y.

But this WHOLE THING is crazy!!! All they had to do was shoot a clear-ass video of Kate from the neck-up saying “Cheerio lads and lasses, I’m recovering quite nicely I am, thanks for all the well-wishes you absolute darlings, off to smash into some tea and crumpets, cheers mate!!” and NONE OF THIS WOULD BE HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

(Btw, I wrote the above and then clicked into TikTok and immediately saw this 😂)

But no - instead they had to play right in our faces and now the entire world knows about William’s affair with Rose Hanbury AND that Rose is married to (but soon to be divorced from) a very rich titled gay man named David Rock Savage, The Marquise of Chumly (I fuckin’ REFUSE to spell it the way it’s supposed to be spelled, LEARN ENGLISH you ancient Saxon fucks), who mostly lives in France with his boyfriend AND that their castle contains stolen Chinese furniture from the Quing Dynasty. All of which most of the world would never have ever known about if Kensington Palace would’ve just played it straight from the get!

(Except for Will having an affair with Rose. We’ve known that since, like, 2014, and no, it’s not a Twitter rumor that one dude made up because he was drunk and was friends with Meghan, etc. It’s been an open secret amongst the Turnip Toffs for almost a decade).

Anyway, I don’t know anything anymore! All I really know is that this whole thing has been massively compelling, if only because it has really blown the lid off of just how much power the Royal Family has over the UK media. Which we already knew from all those compare-and-contrast headlines à la Kate and Meghan, but this whole #FakeKateGate thing…for a family that is now largely useless in both their public and private roles, that is an inordinate amount of power that I frankly don’t think they deserve.

Speaking of Meghan, she announced her new lifestyle brand, America Riviera Orchard, on Friday. Montecito, where she and “H” live, is often referred to as the American Riviera, but still. That name? I don’t HATE it, but you know she probably paid thousands of dollars to some branding expert who either came up with it and/or focus group’ed it, and frankly, she demand to get her money back! I know no one knows what the name of her old lifestyle blog, The Tig, stood for either, but that was at least cute and a lil’ catchy? Like, why not just call it American Riveria? Or Remarkable Montecito, as a play off of Markle? I get that she doesn’t want a brand that’s basically her name for a myriad of legality and publicity reasons, but it would be better than whatever this is!

The branding feels very Swans of Fifth Avenue, and so I’m interested to find out if this is expensive elegance a la the Markle version of a Hermès blanket, or the kind of upscale but thoughtfully accessible goods you might find at a Target near you.

Personally, I was sort of excited for her to return to her lifestyle blogging roots and give us a daily rundown on what she’s wearing. I need the style deets!

Everything Meghan wears, I would look horrendous in…but I still wanna know!

EDIT: Literally finished writing the above sentence to see that a couple of BBC journalists have come out and called the TMZ video of Kate and Wills fake. Not sure if they’re saying that TMZ set up the lookalikes themselves or if the video they bought and posted was obviously fake. THE NEWS IS CHANGING EVERY SECOND Y’ALL!

EDIT: And then I finished writing this whole newsletter and TMZ went on the news and said “Man, even we don’t know anymore if that’s really Kate.” WHAT IS GOING ON!!!!!

Other things I’ve been paying attention to this week:

• Bachelor Spoiler Alert! The women told all at The Women Tell All last night, and Maria truly hit all the right notes: From being the one that the audience cheered the loudest for, to from effectively standing up for herself, to telling the audience to stop cyber-bullying her arch-nemeses, to being the first one to offer to move on with Sydney, Lea, and Jess, I’m calling it now: She’s our next Bachelorette. I wouldn’t be unhappy to see Jenn in the lead role, either - the girl is a DISNEY PRINCESS, like I swear she’s so beautiful and lovely that she has to be made out of bluebirds and ribbons and fairy dust - but I don’t think she has the personality to carry the lead the way Maria does.

  We also saw that Rachel got sent home after doin’ it with Joey on the Fantasy Suite dates, leaving Daisy and Kelsey as the final two. Rachel also expressed heartbreak on The Women Tell All at the absolutely bullshit racist bullying she and her family have been experiencing at the hands of Bachelor Nation, and my heart broke for her and her family (her family is GD treasure, like how fucking DARE). I hate how racist and sexist a huge segment of Bachelor Nation has been from the jump. There are always going to be fans of any show that are truly unhinged, but it feels like we have to deal with this same kind of thing almost every single season, and I don’t know what the answer is? It sort of feels like the show has to start becoming that one bar that purposefully makes the atmosphere completely inhospitable to any Nazi-looking asshole who dares to venture inside. But how do we do that, though?

• I am LOVING Summer House this season, y’guys! Just like Kyle said, the vibes are HIGH. I actually really like Paige and Ciara this season, and West is so enjoyable to watch. I don’t know if it’s because the bar for men on this show is just so below the floor, but he’s just so nice and funny and confident and cute.

• Adriana from VPR has been breaking Broadway records for her featured role in Chicago??? They’ve also extended her run until April 7th. Listen - we all know that Roxie Hart is a celeb-vanity role that has long been a brilliant ploy to promote the show, but breaking box office ticket sales AND having your Broadway run extended? I’m sincerely impressed.

• RHOBH wrapped up last week and even though the entire third part was all about Kyle, she still managed to give us literally nothing. When asked why she won’t just spill what really happened between her and Mo, she retorted, “Because it’s no one’s fucking business!” ORILLY, Kyle? You didn’t feel that way every other time one of your cast members was begging you to stop prying into THEIR personal lives?! Remember when Denise literally had tears streaming down her face and was begging you all to stop because she had children she wanted to protect and yet you kept insisting that she “just be open and honest” about rumors that she stepped out of her marriage with Brandi? Like I can’t, y’all. Be private about the demise of your marriage, be private about your romance with Morgan Wade…you are entitled to it! But not when you’re on a reality show where you are literally being paid millions of dollars to open up and talk about those exact things!!!!

Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson’s Creek: How Seven Teen Shows Transformed Television by Tea Glassman

If you’re like me, where you came of age during the nineties and early aughts and you love pop culture but you especially love the entertainment industry, then this is one of those books that you’ll want to devour all in one sitting.

H O W E V E R, this book is at its absolute best when you take the time to binge each of the seven shows before you read the related chapter. That way, you can really soak in every divulged detail and easter egg that gets dropped in the retelling of how these shows got made + impacted the cultural conversation.

And if you’ve been that person who’s been saying, “But it’s not REALLY about football” whenever someone gives you the old-hat reason for why they haven’t gotten into Friday Night Lights yet…the FNL chapter in this book will do you so, so proud.

Welcome To The O.C.: The Oral History by Alan Sepinwall

Since I had already re-binged the entire series a couple years ago, I was primed to dive right into this oral history, and it was so, so satisfying. I’ve also really enjoyed the podcast Welcome To The O.C., Bitches! With Rachel Bilson and Melinda Clarkson(except that one of them has a horrible memory and doesn’t actually remember a lot of stuff from the show??? Which always reminds me of Jennie Garth’s memoir where she gets so much stuff wrong from her time on Beverly Hills 90210 and even her own life that it’s like…girl, if you don’t remember, then don’t write a book about it??), particularly the episodes with Josh Schwartz, Adam Brody, and Peter Gallagher, but this book truly gives you all the BTS info

Apples Never Fall

I watched Apples Never Fall on Peacock this weekend, and it was fine!

It was a lovely, leisurely way to pass the time. I’ve been reading Liane Moriarty since her very first book, and APPLES NEVER FALL is definitely not my favorite one, but I decided to give it a go because how bad can it be if Annette Bening is in it, y’know? Overall, it was the performances by a cast of very-watchable stars that made the series enjoyable (particularly Georgia Flood, who plays Savannah). Like every book-to-series project, I have my quibbles about what they changed or left out, but again, it’s fine! I do not aggressively recommend it, but if you were like, “hey, I’ve got a whole weekend that I’d like to pass in an enjoyable way without having to think too much”, then I’d maybe suggest this show!

That’s all from me for this week! Hope you all have a hop-py Easter (Did you get that joke? Did you also know that I do copywriting for a living?) and I’ll see you here again for Bachelor Friday (I will be making recaps an opt-in soon!)!

-AC

PS: This content may contain affiliate links for products or media that I use and love. If you take action by clicking the link and purchasing, I’ll earn money, which I will likely use to buy the above Jesus Has Rizzen t-shirt that I will be pairing with hole-y jeans for an upcoming family reunion. Thank you for supporting me in this quest to troll my extended family. I love you.