Jane Austen, forever. Plus: trans inclusion in sports

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Jane Austen, forever. Plus: trans inclusion in sports’

Lilah Raptopoulos
In 1813, Jane Austen wrote what would become her most famous sentence.

Clip from ‘Fire Island’
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Those are the opening words of Pride and Prejudice, which you may know is a classic novel about five sisters. The person you’re hearing is the actor Joel Kim Booster in a recent adaptation called Fire Island, as a male Lizzie Bennet. Fire Island is actually a gay adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. It was really popular. And in it, instead of Lizzie Bennet and her four sisters, it’s Joel’s character and his four best friends.

Clip from ‘Fire Island’
Bitch, I knew I smelled some bottoms! (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Fire Island is the latest in a string of recent Austen adaptations. There’s Persuasion on Netflix. There’s Pride & Prejudice, the musical in the West End in London. There’s a new version of Emma that came out in 2020. And my colleague Brooke Masters has been obsessed with Austen since she was a teenager. And she and I have been chatting about these adaptations for months. Like, every time we bump into each other in the newsroom, we talk about it. So I invited her on, alongside her childhood friend, Caroline Bicks, who’s an English professor. We wanted to get into it. Brooke is so into Austen that someone she dated once knew that the best way to court her was to compare her to her favourite character.

Brooke Masters
There was an extraordinarily charming guy in my life who was, you know, slightly unattainable, slightly, or definitely was messing with my mind.

Caroline Bicks
I told you, this is the guy. Everyone knows this guy.

Brooke Masters
It is the guy. He compared me to Lizzie Bennet and he’s like, Yeah, you remind me of Lizzie Bennet. You know, it was part of the whole thing. I was totally suckered by it and I later learnt he had never even read the book.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What?!?

Brooke Masters
Yes, so . . . and I’m still mad. Could you tell, I’m still mad! (Laughter)

Caroline Bicks
Oh, my God. He probably just read the CliffsNotes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today, we talk with Brooke and Caroline about all things Jane Austen. Thirty years ago, when the two of them were kids, Austen was considered old-fashioned. But now she’s thought of as kind of a feminist icon. We get into why she’s not only endured, but come back around 200 years later. Then we talk about sports and gender. Last month, the organisers of the Boston Marathon announced that the race would add a new non-binary gender category. My colleague Sara Germano and I discuss how different sports are handling trans inclusion. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

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Jane Austen is sometimes known as Lady Shakespeare. She wrote six novels, all of which are based around strong women characters. The three best known ones are Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility. But we don’t just know Jane Austen from her books. Her adaptations are a genre of their own. There have been Bollywood takes like Bride and Prejudice.

[CLIP FROM ‘BRIDE AND PREJUDICE’ PLAYING]

There’s a zombie take called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

[CLIP FROM ‘PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES’ PLAYING]

And there are some you may not even know are adaptations, like the cult 90s film Clueless.

Clip from ‘Clueless’
You’re a virgin who can’t drive.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s based on the novel Emma.

Clip from ‘Clueless’
Oh, that was way harsh, Tai.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Because Brooke and Caroline’s love of Austen began with Pride and Prejudice, that’s where our conversation began, too. Brooke and Caroline, hi. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Caroline Bicks
Thanks for having me.

Brooke Masters
It’s a pleasure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mmm, so Brooke, you and I have been talking about doing this for a while because I know you’re a huge Jane Austen fan and you are not alone. (Laughter) So my first question is just how you know each other when you became Austen fans?

Brooke Masters
Sure. Caroline and I have been friends since kindergarten.

Caroline Bicks
Yep.

Brooke Masters
And I think we must have discovered Austen about the same time, because we went to this very precious girls school (laughter) that was very serious about its literature. And we just started studying her, and she’s just fabulous.

Caroline Bicks
Yes. And you know what? I would say she, she broke the mould for the classical literature that we had been reading, because I believe the first time we read Jane Austen was eighth grade, and it was Pride and Prejudice. But previous to that, we had been reading, like Great Expectations and Separate Peace and all these guy books, really. And you hit Pride and Prejudice, and finally you’ve got this whole parcel of girls and sisters. For me, that’s what hooked me on her. Because really, before that, my favourite book, I think honestly, was The Little House on the Prairie series. Like I had been told I had to stop reading it because I was reading it too much and I realised what I loved about that book is that it’s like this group of sisters, right? And then when it hit Pride and Prejudice, I was just like, Oh my gosh, Elizabeth Bennet, she is, she is an upscale Laura Ingalls. (Laughter)

Brooke Masters
And she’s smart and nobody’s fool.

Caroline Bicks
Yep. Mm-hmm.

Brooke Masters
And she gets in trouble, actually, for expressing her opinions. That’s the whole point of her.

Caroline Bicks
Yes.

Brooke Masters
And none of this sort of Ophelia drowning in the stream crap. (Laughter) You know, some guy is rude to Lizzie and she takes it amiss and she is fighting back.

Lilah Raptopoulos
In case you haven’t read Pride and Prejudice, here’s the plot. The novel is about five sisters who need to marry rich to stop their family from falling into poverty. Two rich boys named Darcy and Bingley arrive in the neighbourhood. And Bingley really likes the oldest sister, Jane. But Darcy is suspicious of the whole thing. And he tells his friend to be careful. What if she’s just out for his money? Lizzie Bennet, our protagonist, overhears this and she gets mad.

Clip from ‘Pride and Prejudice’
Darcy: It was made perfectly clear that an advantageous marriage . . . 

Elizabeth: Did my sister gave that impression?

Darcy: No! No, there was however, I have to admit, the matter of your family.

Elizabeth: Our want of connection? Mr. Bingley didn’t seem to vex himself about that

Darcy: No, it was more than that.

Elizabeth: How, sir?

Darcy: It was the lack of propriety shown by your mother, your three younger sisters, even on occasion, your father.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But over the course of the book, Darcy actually does a lot of good stuff for the family. So despite themselves, Lizzie and Darcy fall in love.

Caroline Bicks
So ultimately, finally, Lizzie and Mr Darcy are able to come together to realise they both were being a little proud, they both were a little prejudiced, and they just had to learn something about each other.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The other Austen novel that’s adapted a lot is Emma. That one’s about a rich girl who likes to meddle in her neighbours’ business. If you’re watching Clueless, Emma’s actually named Cher, and she’s a Hollywood rich girl who likes to meddle in her classmates’ business. OK, let’s talk about adaptations, which are some of your favourites, like if you were to really definitely recommend the best adaptations of Jane Austen novels? I’m hoping Clueless is on there.

Caroline Bicks
Definitely.

Brooke Masters
Oh yeah.

Caroline Bicks
I mean, Clueless is, it’s just fantastic. There’s nothing bad about it. And it has cutie Paul Rudd. So I mean, there’s really nothing bad. Alicia Silverstone is hilarious. It’s a great send-up of so many different aspects of, you know, Hollywood culture.

Clip from ‘Clueless’
Can I show you the loqued out Jeep Daddy got me? It’s got four-wheel drive, dual side airbags and a monster sound system. (Screeching sound) I don’t have a licence yet, but I need something to learn on. (Crash sound) Boy! They came out of nowhere!

Caroline Bicks
It’s brilliant. It captures the essence of that book. And that, to me is a brilliant adaptation when you can still hold on to what is the essence of the original, but do something that’s so different to it.

Brooke Masters
I have to say, Colin Firth and the traditional BBC adaptation, six parts, virtually verbatim.

Caroline Bicks
Yeah.

Brooke Masters
You know, what’s really interesting about that one is you really hear Jane Austen’s words. Clueless is there are no Jane Austen words. It’s just Jane Austen’s essence. This one is Jane Austen’s words. And Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth are Lizzie and Darcy. And they will never . . . no one else will ever be that good, you know.

Caroline Bicks
Not even Keira Knightley and um . . . ? (Laughter)

Brooke Masters
I’m . . . Not even close. I also, I have a soft spot for The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which is an online vlog where this woman is being Lizzie Bennet and re-enacting, it’s entirely modern. And that’s just really fun because she acts out characters and she acts out Mrs Bennet, who is this, they’re her mother who’s this totally ditsy woman, and she gives them this crazy Southern accent. And that one I really like. And I guess the most recent Emma, which again is fairly classical. I think I really like as well because it captures Emma. What’s interesting about Emma is she’s really again really bright and really playful, but she’s also kind of bossy and it and it manages to be affectionate about the fact that she’s bossy. So you really see her flaws, but you like her anyway.

Caroline Bicks
And I would also say people should put Bridget Jones’s Diary on their list as well, because that is such a brilliant and meta adaptation, because it’s adapting the Colin Firth-Jennifer Ehle, by having Colin Firth return in the role of modern-day Darcy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’ve put all these adaptations in the show notes, as you can hear I wasn’t joking. There are a lot of them, but I wanted to get to the meat of the question: what makes Jane Austen so enduring and so good? Why do we keep going back to her? So I would love to talk about what you think makes Austen still so relevant. Like what makes her so popular now? It’s been more than 200 years. What’s so enduring?

Caroline Bicks
Definitely, there’s that way that she just captures that enduring question about how much should we give ourselves over to this idea of romance and love, which seems can be very dangerous and means being very vulnerable? And how much should we hold on to our beliefs and be who we wanna be? And, you know, ultimately, what she reveals again and again is it’s OK. You actually can be both. And I think there is something really romantic about that idea that you can still be yourself and still have love. I think it’s also, it understands the problems of class privilege, right, and having blindness. Clueless captured that really well. And I think that’s an idea that increasingly people are interested in. Like what, what does it mean to be either blind to, you know, your racial privilege or to your class privilege and both? Something like Emma, I think it’s gonna have a resurgence again. And I think because of that particular theme in that one, I predict that.

Brooke Masters
I think you can’t underestimate also how funny she is. You know, I gave Pride and Prejudice to my then-19-year-old son who was like, oh, god, mom, do I have to read, like, your books? And he laughed out loud. (Laughter) Her descriptions of people and her ridiculous characters, because every book has a couple of really silly, very amusing characters who are, like in Pride and Prejudice, Darcy’s aunt is the one person with that title. She is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and she is the snob of all time.

Caroline Bicks
Oh. Yeah. Like, everyone knows that person. Like it’s true. These are all these types.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Another thing that seems very compelling and, like, interesting that it’s still relevant now is that these are old novels where women get centre stage that can still feel a little bit rare. And also these are women who are like following their desires, willing to contradict men. I mean, it’s within the constraints of the time, but it still feels a little feminist. (Laughter)

Brooke Masters
Transgressive.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Transgressive. Yeah.

Caroline Bicks
Absolutely. And what’s also really remarkable, I mean, especially in Pride and Prejudice and in Sense and Sensibility, where, again, you have these groups of women, that it allows for an exploration of different kinds of what it means to be female, to be a woman. When you’ve got multiple female characters, it allows you to really breathe and say, OK, what would it look like if you had someone who was sort of that type but also encapsulates other kinds of things and other qualities?

Lilah Raptopoulos
There’s another thing that Austen’s known for. It's that will-they-won’t-they energy. It’s part of why Colin Firth’s depiction of Mr Darcy is so iconic.

Caroline Bicks
There’s so much telegraphing between him and Lizzie, you know. All the way through. It’s just so brilliantly acted and, you know they are gonna get together. But it’s that frisson. It’s that oh, the way they’re looking at each other. It’s like (groans excitedly) they kind of know, they must know, but they’re not talking about it. So I think that’s another thing that’s incredibly attractive. Here we are in this culture where everything’s like text, text, blah blah I’m on Tinder. (Blah blah blah) This immediate, you know, response that you’re getting, that’s what someone thinks about you. What’s so brilliant about what she does and gives us is like very few words, but so much in there.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. Bringing us to today, it seems like there’s this renewed interest in Austen. There’s been this big boom in period dramas across the board, Dickinson, The Gilded Age, the great Bridgerton, you know? Why are we so into this now, beyond just Jane Austen, you know, period dramas in general?

Caroline Bicks
I mean, I think there’s a larger existential issue going on here with this moment wherein, where the future isn’t looking so great. You know, and the present is pretty sucky, too. (Laughter) So going to the past, going to history seems really attractive. Even if it’s a rewriting of history, at least these are people who existed, (laughter) who survived and thrived in their time and their stories are continuing. And I think there’s something really comforting about that.

Brooke Masters
Yeah, I think also, if you look at a lot of the modern-day adaptations, they tend to be, they’ve improved on it, like they add the black characters who were written out of history. They empower the women who have been dismissed as annoying or sidelights or whatever. So we’ve gone back and fixed it. It’s an agreed time that we all survived. But they also it’s idealised in many ways.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Brooke Masters
It’s better. Like, I mean, you know, Bridgerton, Queen Charlotte is suddenly, instead of being vaguely darkly skinned and frankly white, she’s black. And they’ve included people who got left out. And it’s the sense that you can stick them back in there, that maybe we can make it work now. I mean.

Caroline Bicks
Mm-hmm.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Last question for both of you. Are there any Austen interpretations that have not happened yet that you would really love to see? Like, what’s your dream Austen adaptation?

Brooke Masters
I have a real soft spot for these different communities claiming Jane Austen and the best ones to claim are Emma and Pride and Prejudice. Because clearly, we both like those books best.

Caroline Bicks
Mm-hmm.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Mmm, Caroline and Brooke, this was really fun. Thank you so much for doing this.

Brooke Masters
It was great fun.

Caroline Bicks
Oh, thank you. It was so much fun.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
I’ve linked to everything mentioned here in the show notes. Brooke Masters is the FT’s US investment and industries editor. She’s also been a columnist, our opinion editor, our companies editor and so much more. And Caroline Bicks has the coolest job title in history. She is the Stephen King chair of literature at the University of Maine.

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Last month, the Boston Marathon made an announcement. Runners will now be able to sign up in a non-binary category for the upcoming 2023 race. The next day, the London Marathon followed suit, which meant that five of the six biggest marathons in the world now accommodate a third gender category. But the Boston news is big.

Sara Germano
The difference for Boston is that Boston is the one major marathon in the world that you have to qualify to get into, which means you are actually you have to have run a previous marathon under a certain time threshold to get into the Boston Marathon. And it’s dependent on your gender and it’s dependent on your age.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Sara Germano. She’s our US sports business correspondent at the Financial Times. And Sara’s been covering how different sports have been grappling with the rules around athletes who aren’t cis-gendered. “Cis-gendered”, if you don’t know, or “cis”, means people who identify with the gender they were given at birth. This summer, Fina, the world swimming federation, banned trans women from taking part in its sporting events altogether. They did this after the American swimmer Lia Thomas became the first trans swimmer to win a national college championship in the women’s category. Their reasoning was that it’s unfair for someone who was born biologically male to compete against cis women. Other sports have made different calls. Cycling, for example, has said that it would allow trans women to race after they’ve maintained a low enough level of testosterone for two years. It’s messy, though, because criteria by definition are not nuanced, but gender is nuanced. And where you come down in this debate, it’s almost a philosophical issue.

Sara Germano
I’ve spoken to people in the governance space who said that, you know, this is among the most difficult issues in sport today, because what you’re effectively trying to do is balance a person’s human dignity with creating a level playing field.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I hate to break it to you, but we are not going to solve the ethical dilemmas that come up in this segment. But I still wanted to wade through the issues at play. Sara, hi. Welcome to the show.

Sara Germano
Thank you for having me, Lilah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Because this is like such a nuanced topic, who is running in the non-binary category? Is it people who don’t identify as either gender and trans people, like, can you sort of clarify to listeners what the non-binary . . . group . . .?

Sara Germano
Yes. So yeah, so just to clarify, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of terminology being thrown around. Non-binary is a, you know, according to human rights advocates, non-binary includes people who, you know, identify as neither male nor female, maybe male and female. It can also include transgender people. So non-binary can be inclusive of trans people, but they’re not mutually exclusive terms.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so non-binary is a term for people who don’t identify with one of the two binary genders, which is woman and man. Transgender people identify with a gender other than the one they were assigned to at birth. Cisgender, which we went through is by far the largest category of people. And the Boston Marathon is basically saying if you don’t identify as cisgender, you can feel free to sign up in this new category. But how do you decide the qualifying times for a brand-new gender category that includes so many people — trans men, trans women, people somewhere in between? It’s really broad.

Sara Germano
So for this year, the qualifying times align with those that are available on the women’s category. I spoke to someone at the BAA, which is the Boston Athletic Association, which puts on the race, and they said they’re talking with stakeholders now about, you know, what’s going to be best practice for determining a qualifying standard. But they will be reviewing, you know, the race results not only at this race but at other races, you know, sister races around the world and talking with trans groups and human rights groups about what will be, you know, the best course of action for determining this.

Lilah Raptopoulos
On the surface, all of this seems reasonable, even if it’s still in progress. You create a third gender category for people who don’t feel like they fit into a male or female category. You let people self-identify or pick their own category, and because the category is new and broad, you pick the lower of the thresholds for entry, the women’s threshold, until you can do more research. It seems easy, right? But in the world of elite sports, it’s not, because it’s so competitive. Athletes are fighting for a handful of competition spots, and the pool of endorsements is really small, too.

Sara Germano
You know, all . . . every human being, you know, has an intrinsic right to health and liberty and happiness and security and to be heard in all of this. And I think there are a lot of well-meaning people in sports and in other industries around the world who want to be inclusive and to celebrate all of our individuality. That said, Lilah, you and I, you know, we work together, we hang out. I don’t think either of us are, you know, really fast runners or really fast swimmers, like we, you and I don’t have an intrinsic human right to compete in the Olympics . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Sara Germano
. . . just because we’re human beings. It is, at the end of the day, a contest of the fittest, the fastest, the strongest. And I think that’s what’s making this such an interesting and nuanced conversation, because how do you determine who belongs in elite spaces . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah.

Sara Germano
. . . at the same time that you’re having a conversation about making sure spaces are inclusive to everyone?

Lilah Raptopoulos
The majority of the controversy here is about trans women. Again, that’s people who were assigned male at birth, but think of themselves as women. And if you were born male and are taking female hormones as part of your transition, the assumption is that you’re naturally gonna be stronger.

Sara Germano
So at the one extreme end of it, you have sports like swimming, which are effectively banning trans women from competing with cis-gendered women. They’ve determined it’s not good for that sport. Rugby has said the same thing, effectively owing to safety concerns. And then we have other sports, including soccer, which are taking a pretty liberal approach and suggesting that there may be a possibility where athletes self-identify with the gender category that best suits them. And then we have sports like cycling, which are taking somewhat of a middle ground by saying, you know, we will allow the participation of transgender women and transgender athletes if they abide by a certain framework, which is, you know, they have to go through a period of around two years from when they begin their transition before they can compete in the women’s category in order to mitigate the effects of hormonal imbalances.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I wanna talk about that middle category for a second, the approach that cycling is taking. Some studies suggest that trans women who are just starting gender-affirming hormones can have a 15 to 31 per cent advantage over their cis-female athletic opponents. And the theory is that after one year, that advantage can decline to about 9 per cent. So as of this summer, cycling decided to make trans women wait to compete until they’re about three years into transition. But again, here’s where it gets more complicated. We’ve just recently started testing athlete hormone levels at all. Athletes have been asked to submit more biological data over the years, mostly to fight doping. And what we’re learning is that cis athletes who don’t identify as trans and non-binary sometimes also have hormone levels that don’t fit into a range that’s considered normal for their gender. So is there even a point in defining a norm? Maybe you’ve heard of Caster Semenya.

Sara Germano
There is a very famous athlete named Caster Semenya who is from South Africa. She’s won the gold medal in the women’s 800m at two consecutive Olympics. She’s a phenomenal runner. She’s a phenomenal competitor. She is a woman with differences in sex development. And while she was not the only woman in this review case by World Athletics, she eventually became the poster child for it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Here’s what happened to Caster. In 2009, after winning her first world championship gold, the world track-and-field governing body at the time made her undergo sex testing. They found that Caster has an intersex condition that causes naturally elevated testosterone levels, and they cleared her to compete again. Because Caster thinks of herself as a woman, has trained as a woman and looks like a woman in her external development, she was shocked and embarrassed by the sex testing because she never doubted her own sex or gender. So, OK, time goes on. Castor went on to compete for a decade. She won two more world championships and those Olympic medals. But in 2019, the governing body came up with a new set of rules defining the hormone ranges for women’s and men’s categories.

Sara Germano
And effectively what happened is World Athletics came up with this very specific set of rules that said, if you are a woman with differences in sex development and you seek to compete in any of the events between 400m and a mile, you have to take hormone-suppressing drugs in order to be at a level playing field with other women who are in this event.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.

Sara Germano
And she appealed and said, you know, this is not a medically necessary treatment. You know, this is not something that my doctors are telling me that I need to do for my personal health. This is clearly like an arbitrary, you know, determination by you to set the standards of competition. And, you know, you’re violating my human rights, essentially. And she lost that appeal. It went all the way up to the Swiss Federal Supreme Court. The effective ruling that they came down with is, you know, while they’re sensitive to her claims, it’s within the jurisdiction of World Athletics to determine what’s a fair competition.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Caster has not taken drugs to suppress her testosterone, and she’s appealed these restrictions to the European Court of Human Rights. But it’s worth mentioning that her condition isn’t the only one that can cause higher testosterone levels. So is the governing body right to limit what it considers a normal woman’s range? Sara, it’s, like, this is part of the reason why we were so interested to have you on to talk about this, because it’s in that space where it’s very early.

Sara Germano
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And as you said, it’s one of the hardest decisions that sports officials are making right now. You know, it sounds like a lot of people seem to be putting this debate in terms of fairness versus inclusion?

Sara Germano
Mm-hmm.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can you tell me about that?

Sara Germano
That’s really the heart of this whole debate, right? Sports especially, you know, what we consider to be the Olympic umbrella of sports, you know, track, swimming, gymnastics, cycling, rugby, all that. These are sports which, you know, aren’t the, you know, multibillion-dollar global industry is like football, like American football, like baseball, which command a lot of money and ample broadcast time on television. There is an underlying desire and need by these sports to be welcoming of the next generation, younger viewers and younger participants. And I think having a progressive attitude towards who is an athlete, who competes in these events, what will the future of these global events look like, you know, motivates them, motivates authorities in these sports to think like, how can we be as inclusive as possible? How do we make sure that there is a future for all kinds of participants in what we would call like, non-core sports? And then you have, you know, the fairness question of it. These are elite sports. They are exclusive by definition. You know, you can’t, you know, just walk up to a world championship in any of these events in gymnastics and figure skating and badminton, you name it, and just say, well, I like playing the sport, so I therefore have a place to compete against the best in the world. So squaring those two issues of how do we be the most inclusive with these are by nature exclusive events, they are elite events, is what’s making it so difficult for authorities in all of these sports to make this determination.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Sara, this was so informative and so thought-provoking and interesting. Thank you.

Sara Germano
Thank you for having me. It’s a tough conversation.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But an important one.

Sara Germano
Yeah.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. Next weekend is so good. We have the producer of the film Woman King with Viola Davis on the show. Her name is Cathy Schulman. She convinced Hollywood executives to get a historical epic of this magnitude made. And she tells us how. Then we talk about meatless meat, like Beyond Burgers and Impossible Burgers, which, if you remember, were going to be the future of sustainable eating. And then everyone kind of stopped talking about them. So I asked my colleague Emiko Terazono on to explain what happened.

If you’d like to say hi, we love hearing from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@FT.com. I read all those emails. The show is on Twitter @ftweekendpod and I’m on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. You can keep up with call-outs and cultural conversations and behind-the-scenes photos, all that stuff on my Instagram. Links to everything mentioned today are in the show notes alongside a link to the best offers available on a subscription to the FT. I personally like the FT Weekend in print. It’s a really good deal. Those offers are at ft.com/weekendpodcast. Make sure to use that link to get the deals. I am Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my first-class team: Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and special thanks go to Manuela Saragosa and Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful weekend and we will find each other again next week.