thistleingrey mentioned that it was a solid depiction of academia and characters in academia, which immediately piqued my interest. I have read Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis and enjoyed it, and I know Hazelwood is in academia, but I sometimes thought... well, let's just say that it's a romance between a grad student and the young hotshot professor in her department, and... okay... that part... is totally realistic actually... but I feel like I kind of got stuck a lot in all my feelings about the potential deep pitfalls. Hypothesis was also, I think, much more concerned with primarily being a romance novel and secondarily a novel about academia.

Anyway, this is unabashedly a romance novel, complete with marriage-of-convenience and sometimes even the one-bed trope, but without any particular kinks like professor/student :P But the thing that makes it interesting (to me) is that it's at least as interested in both the experiences of the precariat (*) and also familial relationships as it is in the romance itself. In fact, it does not have a conventional romantic Act 3; here the Act 3, as well as the understandable but frustrating misunderstandings that prolong it, is passed squarely on to the familial relationships rather than the romantic ones. Which I personally really like!

The two main characters, Jonah and Sadie, are adorably academics. (**) I laughed out loud when Jonah said, "I'm all for radically revised gender roles in the heteronormative institution of marriage, but I should still pay for my wife's engagement ring," if only because I've never heard anyone else talk that way in a romance novel -- though if you have, please rec it to me. (Their engagement is the aforementioned engagement-of-convenience and the ring is $27.99, I hasten to append, and she pays for his ring.) (lol, I think I actually paid for my engagement ring, because it was an important transaction involving me and an important piece of jewelry -- what?)

Anyway, I rarely like romance novels, but I liked this one!

(*) I did not know the term precariat: the precarious proletariat, that insecure class of unstable work and low wages -- but I was familiar at least by reputation with the academic pre-tenure-track life that the term describes, in the sense that it is one of the many reasons why I did not pursue academia

(**) Jonah likes using footnotes; I guess your mileage may vary but I found it adorable, perhaps inevitably

okay, I was not expecting to have quite SO MANY feelings about Operation Mincemeat, the musical, but indeed I do. (I have listened to the cast recording about seventy times and have not been able to see it live, though I, uh. Have now seen it, see end of post.) I don't think I have had so many strong feelings about a musical since Hamilton, only in many ways they are wildly different feelings?? Hamilton is a fancy big-chorus-dancing musical that is concerned predominantly with valorizing a particular hero (Alexander Hamilton) in a eh-mostly-historical way while offering up somewhat revisionist-considerations of some of the other US's famous Founding Fathers, with a major thematic concern of race, but which adheres to pretty standard gender considerations. OM is a budget-vibe musical starring five people who are both the big parts and the chorus, that is concerned predominantly with both rather revisionist-considerations, in a mostly-historical-fiction way, of a particular type of hero (a heavily fictionalized Ewen Montagu) who is known for his part in the WWII shenanigans of Operation Mincemeat, while at the same time offering up larger parts to people who were not at all famous, with a major thematic concern of gender.

( Starting with: There are FIVE people in the cast! )

okay I had SO many feelings about this 2024 Vienna Don Carlo. Watching another whole Don Carlo in early 2026 was not actually in my plans (having watched lots of bits and pieces in late 2025), but uh I may have written a fic involving a fictional staging of this opera that doubled the role of Posa, and then Ladybug_21 mentioned that they'd heard of a production with doubles of all the historical characters -- meaning not Posa but the other main characters -- and of course I had to go find it. I am here to report that it is this absolutely wild regie modern AU that I adored and found completely riveting. Those of you who dislike regie would greatly dislike it (although the singing is great, consider listening to the audio) and those of you who like regie would quite enjoy it, I think. The director is Kirill Serebrennikov, and now I want to see any opera he ever does. I found the staging (with a couple of exceptions) a rather coherent and fascinating concept.

(So as to put this outside of the cut: this is the 4-act version. Joshua Guerrero is Carlo, Étienne Dupuis is Rodrigo, Roberto Tagliavini is Filippo, Asmik Grigorian is Elisabetta, and Eve-Maud Hubeaux is Eboli. I had not heard or watched any of them except Dupuis, but I thought all of them were great, the singing was just gorgeous and their acting is wonderful too. I am really loving the modern trend of opera singers being great actors.)

( I went in unspoiled except for the above and LOVED being unspoiled, so I'm putting all of this under cut, just in case -- spoilers for the entire production. )But tl;dr: I did feel like the updating of the setting did drive home what an opera of big themes and big emotions Don Carlo is, and how the relationships (except for Filippo-Rodrigo, in this production) drive the big emotions that drive the opera. (Interestingly, the singers don't touch very much; Rodrigo and Carlo do a little, and Elisabetta and Carlo touch hands very briefly in their last duet, and then of course embrace right before Filippo walks in -- but as opposed to that heartbreaking Bastille Don Carlos I saw, it still all works without the touching, and just highlights how our society is much less touchy-feely than it could be.

I really liked it, and I was both thinking about it days later and humming little bits of the score.