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Gold Digger


When a young, handsome man marries a woman almost 30 years his senior, people are bound to wonder. And one of the many merits of Gold Digger—a six-episode series that is part family drama, part thriller—is that its star, Julia Ormond, who plays our heroine, Julia, doesn’t try to erase any signs of age to make her lover’s infatuation easier to accept: she is as plump, wrinkled, and careworn as any 60-year old divorcée would be after her husband runs off with her best friend. But Julia knows very little about charming Benjamin (Ben Barnes) before she invites him back to her country estate, in Devon. (The scenery is bewitching.) Her grown children and ex-husband are appalled; as the story unfolds, we find out more about the romance from many points of view. The series owes a lot to the Hitchcock classic Suspicion, but the class conflicts and family torments are exquisitely of the moment. (amazon.com) —Alessandra Stanley

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Home Farm Cooking


Twenty years after the celebrated architect and designer John Pawson published an acclaimed cookbook, he’s out with a second one, co-written with his wife, Catherine. Featuring 100 recipes developed at the Pawson family’s Home Farm estate, in the heart of the English countryside, it focuses on seasonal ingredients (for spring, an asparagus-pea-and-herb frittata is recommended), with the aim of sharing dishes with friends and family (try the lemon posset with thyme shortbread). The book’s theme unites the authors’ two loves: architecture and cooking. The result is something simple and sleek but not Insta-trendy, with photographs of dishes paired with ones of the beautifully designed house that gave the cookbook its name. ($50, phaidon.com) —Julia Vitale

The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973)Directed by Bud YorkinShown: production designer Polly Platt
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Polly Platt: The Invisible Woman


Most people don’t know anything about the woman behind Paper Moon, Terms of Endearment, and Broadcast News, which is why the podcast about her is called Polly Platt: The Invisible Woman. Part of Karina Longworth’s Hollywood-history podcast, You Must Remember This, this 10-episode, stand-alone season is devoted entirely to Platt, partly because her life was a doozy, but also because her trajectory echoes the progress of—and backlashes against—women in film from the 1960s through the 1990s. A producer and set designer, Platt read Larry McMurtry’s novel The Last Picture Show and talked her then husband, Peter Bogdanovich, into directing it. They worked on the film together—even after Bogdanovich began an affair with one of its stars, Cybill Shepherd. Platt went on to produce for James L. Brooks, write Pretty Baby for Louis Malle, and design the sets of The Witches of Eastwick. She also discovered directors such as Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson. Her story is a wild, sometimes funny, and often terrifying map of 20th-century Hollywood. (podcasts.apple.com) —Alessandra Stanley

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Unroll Me


This handy app makes de-cluttering your in-box as easy as a swipe. In fact, it works a lot like Tinder: after linking to your e-mail, Unroll Me collects your subscriptions and asks you to swipe left on the ones that are just plain nuisances, and right on those you’d like to keep. And if you want to consolidate certain subscription-based correspondences, you can opt to “Rollup” these into a weekly e-mail. It’s the quickest method I’ve found for ridding my in-box of unwanted promotional offers and the like. It also updates itself, so if I slip up and fall prey to the occasional 10 percent–off come-on, I can quickly de-enlist from the company’s future sales alerts. (unroll.me) —Clementine Ford

Issue No. 97
May 22, 2021
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Issue No. 97
May 22, 2021