Time travel, Albert Einstein, and the space-time paradox of Meghan Markle
What is real? What is not? Is this a set?!
I’ve been fighting off a bad cold the last couple weeks, with varying success, and it’s taken me to some strange places. I’ve polished off a novel about time travel (with sex!), tried to understand the block universe (??!!!) and ultimately faced down the prospect that we’re all living in a simulation set in Montecito, as I watched the Meghan Markle Netflix show while mainlining lemsip. I didn’t know a mild, lemony decongestant could make you trip out, but I think there’s some overlap here.
(The Meghan show came out weeks ago, you say! Well, first, this is not a real newsletter with deadlines. And second, the Block Universe suggests that in a sense, this current newsletter and the past premier of Love, Meghan are co-existing, along with the future, in which you receive said newsletter. Ergo, no bad-mannered hot take about the People’s Beleaguered Sort of Princess is ever out of date again.)
The first thing to know is that I’m in a form of book mania at the moment, where I’m reading like civilization might collapse, and all books will be converted into a TLDR bot on X, produced by a sweaty 22 year old from Ohio. (Seems likely.)
I think other than this very-real fear, my other catalysts are texting my friend Caitlin (we’re reading the same books), a sudden passion for my local library, and importantly, not spending every free moment on my own cursed book, or reading books that are research for it, aka out of print tomes on the nuclear crisis of 1983, and physics. For example, I absolutely loved The Ministry of Time, a surprisingly steamy book about time travel, colonialism, the perils of blindly following government orders, and whether it’s ok to want to bang a colonial seafaring gentleman. Do yourself a favour and read it ASAP.
Freed from obligation, however, I even started reading Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder, and was relieved I could now kind of follow some very, very, very simple explanations. If that sounds like I’m humble bragging about my high-minded reading material (see the sexy Commodore book above), I can only say that I have recently, quite accidentally, written a book that’s fundamentally about physics, so “kind of” understanding this stuff is not exactly reassuring1.
It was this heady mix, plus an industrial quantity of hot takes (as usual, Tina Brown’s was by far the best) that prepared me to sit down and finally watch most of Love, Meghan. I had been judging hard enough from afar. It was time to make my own mind up.
My judgements, I’ll fully admit, swung wildly. Some of the show is genuinely pretty good, some of it is totally fine, and some of it is a car crash. The insane unevenness of the whole thing is because, not unlike the live-action remake of Cats, the basic concept is fundamentally confused2. (Do the human-cats have buttholes? What about hands??). Your brain spends the entire time trying to work out existential questions which Meghan will not answer. Is this real? Is it not? Does it matter? If the fourth wall is already broken, is Mindy Kaling breaking the fifth!?
As you’ll already know by now, the premise is it’s a lifestyle and cooking show, but not shot in Meghan’s real house, rather a house near Meghan’s real house, with a mix of friends, not-friends, and sometimes non-convincing internet friends. The TV crew is sometimes acknowledged, and sometimes not, and Meghan’s family isn’t there, but her dog is. Just the one dog, mostly. Sometimes both of her dogs. Sometimes neither?! The ownership and location of the cheerful beekeeper is also hard to nail down.
At its best, when Meghan simply sous chefs for a cool local chef, the show is inoffensive and enjoyable viewing. There’s an episode where they make Korean fried chicken, and I have no complaints. Meghan seems nice and pretty normal, the food looks great and interesting, the chef brings charisma and approachability, they get on well. This is the kind of truly low-stakes cooking programming I genuinely enjoy. She doesn’t want to let people into her real home? No problem! Just make it a real cooking show, starring real chefs, gracefully shepherded by normal gal, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex!
The problem comes when Meg tries to split the diff, as they say. She doesn’t want to film it in her real house or divulge any interesting information about herself other than she insists on calling jam “preserves”3, but she also doesn’t want the show to really be about other people, either.
Other than the chefs, Meghan wants to have her mostly-not-famous, not-particularly-interesting friends over (maybe they are interesting, but all they’re allowed to do is politely compliment Meghan’s homemade jam), for events that may be real, or may not be real, or are just sort of a trial-run for some future scenario. She insists her makeup artist is really visiting from New York, and later they will go over to her real house, presumably loading the bath salts they just made into the car. But later, she tells Mindy Kaling she “got to set early” to make a frittata, which was indeed shot for the episode so was not, in fact, a matter of her arriving early—why lie! What is false? What is real? What is time travel?!
Mindy Kaling, guest number two, is confused, and we are too. The “children’s party” they prep for is genuinely an ill-fated fever dream involving finicky detail work with crostinis, children’s gift bags full of small seeds they could swallow and poky stuff they can put in their eyes, lots of breakable glasswear, and no actual children.
In her episode, she exposes the cracks in the continuum by mentioning Meghan’s jam scoring (Mindy received a jar of jam labelled number 12, and wondered what it meant, thereby alluding to why Meghan is famous and so why people even care about her jam), and then by admitting she pays someone else to plan her kids’ parties, because there’s no reason a rich mom, or actually any mom, would do any of this stuff.
One episode has distinct White Lotus frenemy energy, just with three brunettes. Another episode involves one of the richest women in Argentina pretending to be amazed by homemade focaccia. Another episode hinges on the idea that Meghan and a group of female “entrepreneurs & friends” play mah-jong regularly, and will now do so in this fake house/set.
There is no way the producers, editors and crew didn’t know that the real-or-not-real, what-dimension-is-this, who-is-this-random-person dynamic was very confusing. I assume they were overruled. Other essays have concluded the production team must “hate” Meghan, partly because lots of surprisingly awkward moments were kept in the edit, including her telling Mindy Kaling her last name is actually Sussex, a moment that further confused everyone who has even a passing knowledge of Royal naming conventions4.
But as with the comparably ill-fated Cut interview in which she brought veggies to her kids’ (also very rich) classmates and used a lot of corny puns, you can’t save someone from themselves if they’re not willing to listen. I am now married to a PR manager, so I finally sympathise with those who do this difficult work.
When it comes to Meghan, the focus has often been on race. That’s valid: the British tabloids subjected her to godawful racism, not to mention deeply noxious sexism. But I’ve always maintained that something neither the British or American press really acknowledged through the whole Megxit thing is how fundamentally snobbish and resentful the British upper classes (in particular, but also Brits generally) are about Americans. And conversely, how arrogant and clueless Americans can be about Brits. The special relationship may have been intact until recently, but it always involved a lot of underhanded, dismissive sniping.
I also think the British and American press are both missing something here that’s really about class. Partly because the Brits don’t think class really applies in the U.S. And partly because (I am quoting a Harvard political scientist here, not myself, although nonetheless making a huge generalisation), Americans often don’t think much about class, either — class as distinct from money, or race.
In the Mindy Kaling episode, a brief and actually interesting moment came before the Sussex-correction, when Mindy points out that not many people would know she grew up on Jack and the Box. Meghan has just gone down the list of all the fast food she grew up eating in LA, and there’s a wryness to the whole thing: yup, she seems to be saying, surrounded by vast gardens full of organic vegetables, I ate a lot of crap. The way she ate would have been typical of most kids growing up in North America in the 90s that didn’t come from loads of money, but weren’t in really hard circumstances, either. Her mom worked so she clearly had to feed herself a lot of the time. She probably made most of her own snacks or after-school meals in the microwave.
And now, I would guess that there’s a good chance now she does not, on principle, own a microwave. Multiple times, she points out how her own kids just love vegetables.
Transplant this back to Britain, and it’s a classic story of social mobility, and whether you can ever really have it. You can get rich, sure. You can marry someone from a different background, yes. You can take on all the food-based class markers that Brits are viciously good at spotting and categorising: Duchy-brand organic crackers from Waitrose, ample garden space, sourdough breads with seeds, small children with certain accents who just love leafy greens.
To be clear, I do not agree with this. I think the class-based gatekeeping and sniping around food in the U.K. is just one more way to keep everyone in their proper place, and using hummus, or not eating hummus, as a cultural litmus stick is deranged. (I realised this a few months into arriving, when a girl in my running club mocked me for going to the local Waitrose, a cultural put-down that I was too green—and Canadian—to understand.)
The dynamic has something in common with the book Piglet, which is about a working class, British cookbook editor attempting to secure social mobility through an increasingly disturbing relationship with perfection, and food. (I did not like this book at all, but the New York Times loved it, for balance.) In the US, the markers are different—Love, Meghan is hopelessly far, I think, from a British person’s vision of truly upper class5—but there’s still a parallel. It’s not about just being, you know, a rich person—there’s plenty of those. It’s about what kind of rich person.
This leaves Love, Meghan with not just a rip in the fabric of the space-time continuum (maybe Mindy’s still out there, trapped in a phantom children’s party), but with a strong strain of self-judgement. A lot of the coverage of the show has focused on this judgement as if it’s coming at the audience, from a smug, leafy and non-incinerated perch.
But I think the impression I got is the judgement is more turned back on itself: this is not a woman who still subsists on donuts and after-school fast food. That is not how she would ever let her children eat. She worked too hard, sacrificed too much. She learned too much calligraphy! If she has to soak hand towels in lavender water, and freeze tiny edible flowers into ice cubes for some reason, so be it. She’s made it. She’s rich now, yes. But most importantly, she is not tacky, and she’s not going back.
Recommendations, etc:
I loved Kyoto, the climate change play, and got two more friends to see it, who also loved it. They sat right behind Alok Sharma! Christiana Figueras saw it at least twice! It’s depressing, yes, but so good!
Shout out to my friend Jon who said that the White Lotus Ladies showed it was time to start discussing “toxic femininity.” That said, I’m pretty sure I enjoy reading think pieces about White Lotus more than I actually enjoy watching it, which clearly holds for Love, Meghan, too.
I have Caroline Eden’s new book, Green Mountains, which is an absolutely beautiful food/photography/travel book about hiking through Armenia and Georgia. It includes a delightful tarragon panna cotta, and a recipe for ajapsandali—this is basically Georgian ratatouille—which is pure summer. This is her third book in the series: the other two, Black Sea and Red Sands, both explore eastern Europe and the Caspain region through food. (Both were written before the Russian full-scale invasion. She reissued an updated Black Sea last year.)
But my favourite of hers is Cold Kitchen, which melds cooking in her Edinburgh basement kitchen with travelling, politics and history from Istanbul, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Poland, etc. I’m really fussy about travel writing, but I loved this and I cried.
A brilliant food newsletter is Alexina Anatole’s Small Wins, which includes a lovely recipe for a tiramisu, and all kinds of other genuinely useful, straightforward recipes. She has two really lovely cookbooks, Sweet and Bitter.
And because it’s wild garlic season, if you live near a nice forest (or are willing to splash out), make Alexandra Dudley’s spectacular wild garlic lasagne, which is a vivid and lovely green, herby and not too heavy. (For a lasagne, that is.)
Griff has to wear a muzzle these days because of his passion for food theft, chicken bones, and other unmentionables. This was spurred by his second theft from the ground-level pastry case at the cafe—first a whole quiche, then a wedge of tortilla. (My Dad kept calling him a “poor bastard” and insisting it be taken off for photos, since it makes him look like Hannibal Lecter, but I maintain it’s saving us hundreds in vet bills.) This means that every time we visit our local cafe, his allotted biscuits have to be broken in half and wedged through the bars. It also means I have a lot of discussions with children, including two kids this weekend, during which I explained the muzzle wasn’t to protect them, it was to protect the enormous ice creams they were holding. (Kids generally love this. Once I explain he also likes to roll in poop, he essentially becomes the patron saint of naughty children everywhere.)
The only thing news-related I’m recommending is Tina Brown’s latest newsletter, in which she says Trump has now turned Greenland into the “French resistance on ice.” This made me LOL. It also reminded me that I once saw Les Misérables on a date, and during the climbing-the-ramparts scene I got so startled by a cannon blast that I threw an entire glass of red wine all over myself, soaking my face, ruining my shirt and requiring me to squeeze wine out of my bra. I found this very funny. He did not. We broke up not long afterwards!
A year ago, I was reading an “introductory” book on physics to try to get the gist of general relativity, and in the middle of reading about some kind of Schrödinger’s Cat/snowflake metaphor, I felt so stupid I nearly cried. I didn’t feel stupid because I couldn’t understand quantum mechanics, which apparently literally no one can, so fine. I felt stupid because it was only 3 months into writing a book on GPS that I realised that the GPS system is frequently used to teach Einstein’s theories to physics students, and since I was writing a history of GPS, I was in fact inadvertently writing a book about physics, which I was objectively completely unqualified to do.
Andy worked on Cats so I had the great pleasure of seeing an early “multimedia screening” in which it’s fundamental flaws were slightly obscured by how much the two drunk girls next to us were enjoying it. Nonetheless, it was never a great idea to make that movie. They hadn’t finished doing the hands yet by that screening, so you could also see Judy Dench’s cat-manicure-and-wedding-ring.
She says this is due to something pedantic about sugar content, but I’m not buying it. Famously, the jams were not ready for purchase when the show was officially released, which suggests unfortunately that the incineration of Los Angeles was not the major reason for the delay.
Royal naming conventions are too stupid to get into. And while I do not think it would be a justifiable use of American journalistic power during this time of democratic collapse, I am not immune to wondering what last name was signed on the Netflix contract.
I take most of my insights into the British elite these days from Sophie Money-Coutts’ very good, very funny newsletter, and a good backlog of Nancy Mitford books. My general conclusion is the higher up the posh ladder, the harsher the social punishment for being remotely cheesy or sincere, which is another underappreciated explanation for the Megxit disaster.