Welcome to Juvenescence

Hi, it's Leah.

Juvenescence means “the state or process of growing young.” 

I did not choose it as the name for this newsletter because I plan to write about miracle facial serums, gene therapy or the obscure Tik Tok trend of “benjamin buttoning” (though I might) but because, increasingly “growing young” is what life today feels like. Or at least it does to me.

The more I learn, the less I know. Do you find that? The older I get the more I find myself overwhelmed, knocked sideways and flattened like a penny on a railway track, by the extraordinary beauty, sheer hilarity and general screwed-up-ness of the world.

The characters you meet, the stories they tell, the astonishing things you can learn just by walking down a city street or ducking into a library or noodling around on the internet is truly staggering, and fun. This is a newsletter meant to be a reminder of the stuff of life you might otherwise forget to notice. For me, it’s a practical thing. My work requires a lot of digging and noodling and often I end up with buckets of stuff that doesn’t fit directly into a book or an article I’m writing but that I’m wildly excited about just because… it’s cool. So this is a newsletter devoted to all that stuff, the arcane and fascinating day-to-day ephemera that fuels a well-lived life of the mind.

Case in point: I have a thing for old books. Not fancy first editions but obscure ones, the more battered and forgotten the better. I stumble across them in the most unlikely places. I swear it’s as if they find me, in the way starving stray kittens know to rub up against the ankle of a softed-hearted tourist. In a grocery store in Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire, a market town in remote South Wales, I recently discovered a second hand copy of O Canada: An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture by the New Yorker writer Edmund Wilson. It was on one of those second hand giveaway shelves, sitting primly with its pompous outdated title, an austere little hardback surrounded by the dog-eared Agatha Christies and Maeve Binchy’s, looking about as relaxed as Jacob Reese Mogg at the Burning Man mainstage. I took Mr. Wilson home and dipped into his “notes' on mid-60s Canada (oh, to know what a learned American made of our “sad young culture” 1964!) and found myself sucked back in time, to an era that seems both eons ago and just yesterday, when the rise of Quebec separatism and the decades-long language and constitutional debates it spawned, dominated the politics and culture of my birth country in a way that was just as exhausting, maddening and hopelessly divisive as the seemingly-never ending “post-Brexit debate” feels in Britain today. Awkward as Wilson’s commentary seems today, reading it was instructive and heartening. What I’m trying to say is that there is stuff to be gleaned from fusty old books you find at the Llandeilo Co-op. Like many fascinating but seemingly irrelevant aspects of culture, old stuff can broaden your perspective in a way that even the most lauded prize-winning books of the moment and the algorithmic undulations of social media simply  cannot.

To be a thoughtful, engaged sort of person you don’t need to be up on the latest trends and reviews or read the London Review of Books or the New York Times Literary Supplement cover to cover each week or work your way through every prize shortlist (though obviously if savvy polymathery is your thing, go for it!). Interesting ephemera can be intellectually nourishing. This is the Juvenescence rule thumb, one that applies to all aspects of culture and is, in my view, well worth remembering.

You’ve probably heard the news. (Spoiler alert if you haven’t.) Apparently the whole world is a petrol-fuelled hellfire at the moment with no rescue brigade en route. Nothing makes sense, except the acknowledged truth that things – literally every single thing you grew up taking for granted (a pension, for instance, reproductive rights, yellow breasted buntings on the bird feeder, democracy, the naive idea that if you went to university then got a job in a creative field you’d end up with a nice house on a leafy street) has been thrown into question. We’re all trying desperately to connect but somehow instead we’re cancelling each other out. The Queen could go at any minute, there’s a war in Europe, truth has been superseded by truthiness, the pandemic was a global trauma from which we may never recover, Elon Musk is buying up the internet and celebrities are awesome at toxic court battles but rubbish at love and marriage. 

It get it. I see it. Pollyanna, I ain’t. I’ve covered politics and finance and I read the news and I understand what’s going on. I also see that a lot of how we interpret the world is based on a take – or a series of increasingly polarised takes drawn from profoundly compromised mediums. I feel the fragmentation and disconnection in my bones and I have spent dozens of hours obsessively reading and listening to interviews with the foreign affairs specialist Fiona Hill and countless more shuddering at the thought of what fresh hell might be unfolding inside that big botoxed head (Putin’s, obviously, not Hill’s). Yes it’s important to think about this stuff and there are loads of brilliant people who are reporting the news and parsing it for sense every minute of every hour and many of them are here on Substack.

I consider many such writers my colleagues and friends – but I am not one of them. At least not here and now, with you. This is not to say that what you’ll find on Juvenescence won’t be serious or relevant or applicable to the world today. It absolutely will be. But I won’t be the jerk at the meeting who repeats the smart stuff that’s already been said in a lofty, more sonorous voice. 

Instead, Juvenescence will give you other stuff to think about. Surprising observations, smart self-help, historical insights and flights of fancy you can quickly absorb, and chewier stuff that aims to nourish your imagination. I will not be telling you what to buy, but there will be deep dives into history and art, insights into philosophy and poetry, as well as a sampling of simpler delights, like Nigel Slater’s recipe for Japanese quick pickles and the story of how getting an outdoor shower on my roof deck literally changed my life. More than anything I promise you stories – so many stories! – conversations and introductions to the best, brightest and funniest creative minds I know.

Attracting the attention of thoughtful readers, even for a few minutes each week, is both a seduction and a big ask. As a journalist and author I’m acutely aware that it’s my job to be worth your precious time. With this in mind, I will, for the first while, be posting everything on Juvenescence for free. If you like what you read and are curious for more I urge you to hit the Subscribe button below. 

In the interests of professionalism and feeding my family, I will at some point in the not-so-distant future, be offering a selection of the best stuff for paying subscribers only. I won’t be charging much – just $5 a month – hopefully enough to keep me afloat so I can dedicate a significant portion of my time to surprising, educating and delighting you further. If you want to subscribe right off the bat it would be an act of enormous goodwill. Just few coins tossed into the gaping maw will ensure that I can keep on keeping on bring you more and more stuff like this:

 I picked this doorstop of pejoratives (first published in 1949) in a second hand bin at an open-air Amsterdam flea market. Did you know that “muggled up” is 1920s British slang for “high on marijuana,” and that “figure dancer” is an American term from the 1850s that refers to the once rampant art of altering figures on banknotes? Also, “punk grafter” means an older tramp who tricks a young boy into doing his begging and chores? And there’s more where that came from – 804 pages of spivery and filth. I flip it open at least once a day for a laugh.

I’m a journalist and author (my latest, a memoir called Where You End and I Begin comes out in North America and Britain next month – more on that later) and my work involves a great deal of library trawling and rabbit hole diving, intellectual deep sea fishing, rumination, source-pestering, maddening uncertainty and apparent-false-starts, all of which always, eventually lead me back to the same place: A tiny unheated writing shed in the city garden of my London terraced house. I’m in here almost everyday, working away like a magpie, weaving little nests out of buttons and bits of twinkly foil and string. By nests, I actually mean places for my readers to alight and rest for a while, transported by a good story, or when time doesn’t permit, simply delighted by an insight, a reflection, a recipe, a joke or a poem.

I think of Juvenescence is a cabinet of curiosities: A place where I can share what I’ve recently read, watched, forgotten, remembered, become overjoyed or infuriated by and most importantly learned (or unlearned as the case may be) and where you – the reader – can do the same. The books, art and stories I’m taken with, as well as minor and major obsessions along the way — the stuff that excites me: The wankiness and weird magic of yoga, new narrative non-fiction, serial narrative podcasts, gender politics, the perverse addictiveness of cold water swimming, the history of female werewolves in Europe, the Faustian bargain/cost-benefit analysis of marriage and motherhood, medival Welsh folklore, the largely unreported recent tsunami of crypto-currency scams (taken together an astonishing multi-trillion dollar epic global fraud), home cures for peri-menopausal mortal dread and the hilarious and amazing things children say, for instance: 

Is the Queen actually real?

Both my very-British sons and older stepson asked me this question, very earnestly, around age five. Like all great philosophical queries it’s both easy and impossible to answer definitively, though as a dual Commonwealth national I heard myself reply automatically each with, “Why yes darling, of course!” What else could I say? Actually a lot, and we’ll get to that soon.

So welcome to Juvenescence. A diary, a digest, a gallery of the best, weirdest and most exciting half-forgotten stuff our culture has to offer. It’s a writer’s notebook, a spellbook for self-betterment, a never-ending conversation and a meeting place for creative, restless, curious, frantic and thoughtful people everywhere. The newsletter you didn’t know you were waiting for. 

Now take my hand and let me tell you a story that will change your life.