By Eleanor Black
Pandora Sykes is a British journalist who is probably best known for the wildly popular podcast The High Low, which she co-hosts with Dolly Alderton. The pair discuss race, gender, sexism, fashion, books, art and popular culture with salty wit, intelligence and heart but everything is overlaid with privilege: here are two posh white women trying to understand how to be better participants in this messy, bewildering world.
They are acutely aware of this, and so is the audience, but their chatty musings can feel uncomfortably class-specific and so does Sykes' first book, the essay collection How Do We Know We're Doing It Right? (Hutchinson, $40). Sykes takes deep dives into the cult of wellness, the way people define themselves through work, the stress associated with being always-available, and other topics that only matter to people with a certain amount of money and status. That's not to say the topics aren't valid – they are, especially for women bowing under the pressure of being all things to all people all of the time – but in 2020 they feel a little ... indulgent.
The essay "Get the Look" is ostensibly about the almost unbelievable popularity of a "buffet-style" polka-dotted dress from Zara, which erupted on to social media feeds this time last year – but is really about the paradox of choice. At a point in time when fast-fashion chains like Zara can turn around a whole new collection in a week, we look for uniforms: safe, comfortable, crowd-approved outfits we can throw on without thinking. And so you see a fairly bland but versatile dress get its own Instagram account with 25,000 followers.
Social media also plays midwife in Outraged: Why Everyone is Shouting and No One is Talking (Bloomsbury, $33). Ashley "Dotty" Charles (aka rapper Amplify Dot) argues that performative outrage splashed across Twitter and Facebook is displacing real-world activism with the potential to produce real results. "Introducing clicktivism: it wants to be activism but it just can't be arsed," she writes.
Charles takes on agitators like Katie Hopkins, the far-right British columnist who delights in cruel provocation for its own sake and Rachel Dolezal, the white Oregon woman who posed as African-American to advance her career. Both women are infamous, difficult to like, and are given ample space in this book to explain themselves. Hopkins comes across as a bold, sneaky child who likes to trample the ants' nest, while Dolezal is painted as a mildly deranged opportunist who inadvertently blew up her life.
Charles covers a lot of ground in 135 pages and, while not all of her arguments land, her main point is sound: outrage is easy. Instead of inciting a Twitter s***storm when Jamie Oliver attempts to sell packets of "punchy jerk rice", for example, perhaps we should do something useful to support the Jamaican community his idea rips off.