Lady Business: Culminations, favorites, and resolutions; #MeToo subtleties

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 89th issue, published January 5, 2020.
 

New Years and Victory Laps

 
Happy new year, and new decade! I kind of love the interim period between Christmas and the first Monday after New Year’s, the post-holiday days when sure, maybe there’s some work to do and some social obligations, if you want; but also, no one will know or judge if you spend most of your free time at home watching old seasons of The Great British Bake Off and cleaning out your closets and finally making those trips to Goodwill you’ve been putting off since, um, July.
 
In fairness to my clothing-donation backlog, I was crazy busy last year! But there are years where “busy” seems like a state of being, when working all the time doesn’t have much visible pay off; and then there are years where the work finally culminates in something. 2019 was a pretty terrific year for seeing my work pay off! I published my first book and several big articles that I spent months each reporting, including:
 
--A feature on doing business in Saudi Arabia, and the fraught politics of trying to commercialize women’s empowerment in a restrictive and controversial country
 
--A feature on food politics, foie gras wars, and the singular businesswoman who’s spent 35 years trying to navigate the two
 
--Inc.’s viral Female Founders 100 list
 
--35 issues of Lady Business, including this essay about my trip to Morocco and the financial tradeoffs of solo female travel
 
I also got an exciting new job, at a magazine I’ve always wanted to write for. And 2019 wasn’t all work. I traveled to Morocco with friends, Mexico City and Colombia and Budapest with family, and Costa Rica by myself. One of my 2020 resolutions is to spend another week continuing to learn how to surf. (Recommendations welcome!)
 
I wrote here recently about transitions, and the process of finding a new equilibrium. I’m closer to finding my routine now, and excited to be working on some new projects for 2020. But I’m also grateful for the transition period (and the navel gazing that’s especially allowed during the turn-of-the-year period), because sometimes it’s hard to realize, or appreciate, just how much has happened until you’re past it.
 
So thank you for letting me take this 2019 victory lap in your inboxes! And if you have a biggest brag for the last year, let me know and I’ll share them in next week’s newsletter.
 

Lady Bits

--In addition to The Great British Bake Off, I finished The Morning Show over the winter holidays. I remained pretty entertained by it, even if I agree with most of the critiques of its writing misfires. (Did the co-anchor main characters played by Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon like each other or hate each other, or had they found a grudging respect for each other? Yes! All of those, over and over again, sometimes within the same episode!)
 
Vague spoilers: I did end up really admiring how the show chose to reveal and depict the abuses of Steve Carrell’s Matt Lauer-like character. It was a subtle and sophisticated #MeToo take from a show that otherwise ran away from subtlety. Carrell’s Mitch was a mid-level predatory opportunist, not an exaggerated Weinstein-type monster -- and, The Morning Show argued, that’s plenty bad enough. #MeToo men aren’t divided along a “rapist/non-rapist” binary; mid-level predatory opportunists who abuse their power still can and do cause very real damage to the careers and lives of the people they work with. (I didn’t love the over-the-top gratuitous tragedy in the last episode, because there goes the subtlety again, but kudos for everything leading up to that.)
 
--Oh, I also saw the last Star Wars. Sigh.
 
--“Among the reasons: it offers Helen of Troy a way into the growing prestige hair category.” Sometimes M&A reporting produces some truly amazing sentences.
 
--Should be furious, am instead just feeling vindicated I never wasted time filling out a claim: “Consumers who sought a cash settlement from Equifax won’t be getting the full $125 as initially expected. … [It's] down to $6 or $7 [per consumer] now. Maybe even less than that.”
 
--Calling out racism is somehow controversial, romance novelists edition.
 
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