NEW SERIES: The Cultural Omnivore
001: Let's get harder to categorise
In these forbidding, shallow times, when so many of us seem to be yearning for a bit more depth, and to think for ourselves in a world that won’t stop trying to think for us, I’m reading a lot about people’s desire to go backwards to nostalgic pre-digital life, or retreat away from hyperconnected modern life into analogue anti-digitalness.
I don’t know about you, but that isn’t really what I’m feeling.
For me it’s more like a drag outwards. A strong urge to resist the narrowing, meh-fying more of the same diet of ideas I’m being fed. By deliberately thinking about a weirder mix of things.
I find myself wanting to be harder to categorise. I want to be harder to sell to. Harder to manipulate. I want to confuse the algorithms!
I want to be a cultural omnivore, that person we talked about a year ago, the ones with cultural agility.
So THE CULTURAL OMNIVORE is a new series starting today.
It’s going to be a Friday thing, as the working week overlaps into the weekend. A quicker, more snacky read than my other weekly sends, which will continue.
I’ll go first for a bit, but what I really want is to invite YOU to be the cultural omnivores we profile in this series.
The many thousands of people that follow this newsletter feel like the most interesting group I’ve ever had the luck to meet. You all do, think, say and notice interesting things. You have interesting jobs. You wear interesting clothes, go to interesting places, live in interesting ways.
Being a cultural omnivore defiant-ly isn’t about just showing off what/how much you consume. Nobody cares. And nobody needs another performative list. It’s about range and strangeness.
So this series is an experiment in that. Practicing omnivorousness in a world that would rather we didn’t. That would prefer to categorise us neatly.
If you or somebody you think is interesting would like to be a guest cultural omnivore, let me know.
For now you’ve just got me.
/// THE CULTURAL OMNIVORE: 001 ///
:: THIS WEEK I’VE NOTICED…
Everyone saying Criterion is better than Netflix.
The most (only?) interesting thing out of CES’s annual expo of progressive new consumer tech was some aggressively regressive consumer tech - the privacy-focussed phone that doesn’t allow invasive tracking by the surveillance capitalists.
[also don’t you think many of the big industry events aren’t all that meaningful anymore? The ones I’ve been to over the years like sxsw, sundance, cannes lions, art basel, winter music conference etc all seem shallower and less thought-provoking than they used to be. Feels like we need new, smaller, maybe more underground gatherings that aren’t as heavily corp-sponsored and overwhelming].
These 2026 exhibitions: The Antwerp 6 show in Belgium, Nigo exhibition at The Design Museum in London, Tim Walker retrospective at Nat Portrait Gallery (he’s been prepping it for five years), which opens same week as The 90s at Tate Britain. But before all that is Dame Tracey Emin’s biggest ever show at the Tate (it’s going to include the bed).
[Tracey and her team were really kind to us when we spoke to them recently as part of a work project. It was that experience that first put into my mind the word that’s turned into my one single word of the year for 2026 (do you do that too?): audacity.]
:: THIS WEEK I’VE BEEN READING…
East of Eden. Upstairs book on the Kindle (I got an ASBO from my husband some years ago for antisocial extended use of a bedside lamp, so now I use a Kindle at night). I don’t want this book to end…which is exactly the feeling I’m chasing in these attention-flitty times. Same feeling recently with The Heart’s Invisible Furies. God.
What We Can Know. Downstairs story book to read by the fire. Ian McEwan’s dispatches from the future. The structure is very intriguing. Racing through.
Night People. Reading along with Dua.
In Writing. A window into how some of the best writers of our generation actually do it. Such a nice book to have near you. It led me to finding its author Hattie Crisell here on Substack, so I now get her in my inbox too.
Flat Earth. Kindly sent to me by John at the Book of The Month (I guess some of you are members of BOTM? We can’t do it here in UK). I think Levy’s title is clever and made sense to me only really at the end: everything and everybody is terribly flattened and numb. Also John’s zine: Vol 0.
Douglas Rushkoff’s essay on is it him that’s crazy? He’s dealing with extremely awful subject matter here but the gallows humour made me laugh.
We’ve talked lots here in the past about why we want the things we want, the psychology of impulse buying, and thinking before you shop. So I loved Angharad Jones Best this week on exactly how to do that.
:: THIS WEEK I’VE BEEN WEARING…
As much as possible. It’s -5c here! My new Toast aran jumper, vintage 501s I buy for twenty quid on ebay, and Raey mega puffer coat that’s so puffy I have to take it off to drive the car. Can’t reach the wheel!
I don’t have a pic of that uniform but I do have this variation from yesterday, severely underdressed and cold taking back overdue library books.
Carrying bags that fit books. The COS mini Cavatelli my parents gave me for Christmas. I wasn’t sure it would qualify as a BTFB, but it does.
:: THIS WEEK I’VE BEEN WATCHING…
Multi-multi Emmy/Golden Globed spy thing The Night Manager. But not the big new one, the first series from ten years ago!
Watching it today makes you realise how much basic everyday tech has changed plot-lines and narrative details…in this old season photocopies of naughty documents are flown to a different country and delivered by bike courier in an envelope. Physical metal hotel door keys hang on a wall just waiting to be pinched by baddies.
Rare to have such a lag between seasons of the same show. It makes you realise how much you forget. I loved this series first time round. It was a proper watercooler show in the offices/pubs of Shoreditch that I spent all of my time in back then. Watching it again we can’t remember ANYTHING that’s about to happen. Totally shocked by the twists. Makes you wonder what else you’ve forgotten.
:: THIS WEEK I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO…
Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis with Debbie Harry.
Ruth Rogers and Gabriella Hearst.
Rick Rubin and Mike White.
Talk ‘90s to Me.
R.E.M. - I heard songwriter Gary Lightbody (whose recent book was gorge) saying Michael Stipe’s writing has always been a touchstone for him, and how many versions of lyrics Michael would sweat to land on words he was happy with. So I’m listening back to REM trying to pay more attention to the words. If you saw me stopped at the traffic lights this week, it’s this I will have been belting out.
MAN ON THE MOON has fuelled a week-long recurring convo with my kids: who thinks they didn’t put a man on the moon? Where do they think he went instead? Do you believe they put a man on the moon Mummy? Who is ‘they’? What other things don’t people believe about? Send help.
See you next week with another essay AND another instalment of this new thing.
If you/someone you know would like to be part of this series just reply to this email or send me a smoke signal in the dms.
Beth
Thank you so much – I’m so happy you like the book.
so intrigued by this series! manifesting katie robinson is next