This week I listened to the audiobook for Yesteryear, the 2026 debut novel by Caro Claire Burke. It’s about a tradwife influencer with about ten kids and ten millions of followers. White, Christian, she lives on a farm in Idaho and makes soap, sells raw milk, that kind of thing. But when she wakes up one day on the same farm in 1852, she must face up to a parallel version of her own life where all those traditions she’d previously marketed become a lot less Instagrammable.

I can’t lie, I’m not very interested in writing a review. I’ll say that like: the book had author and readers off in a corner together psychoanalysing a reel of Nara Smith cutting fresh fruit in a ballgown at 5AM. The accounts that copied her; the accounts that couldn’t because their kitchen didn’t have good enough lighting. This book is gossip as criticism. Gossip as a way to play out hypothetical scenarios to their most extreme ends until those hypotheticals seem so probable, actually, that we must all be fortune-tellers (or bestselling authors).

It is exhaustive in its character development. At its best when it got so tongue in cheek I could hear the spittle crack. I wished it had started closer to the end, or remained closer to the end? I wished it had raced on instead of spelling everything out so… maternally. But mostly I wished that Instagram and TikTok were less dominant IRL, especially for young women, so that we didn’t need these books. There have to be more meaningful investigations than ‘what does it mean to perform an identity to strangers online, and would you be the same person you are right now without the audience?’ or ‘isn’t it weird to be advertised a better version of yourself, or to be made to believe in the advertisement in the first place.’

The book unravels all of these thoughts carefully. It’s just too American for my taste. The last hour was genuinely entertaining but I know I wouldn’t have made it that far if an audiobook hadn’t been reading it for me. Zarina said she thought Yesteryear was more about the way political orientation codes women to think about womanhood. It is about all these things, but I think Naomi Klein’s The Mirror World probably better helped me think through that mess, especially when it converges with social media, faith, wellness culture and conspiracy theorists. Pure poison.

Honestly, I just think that when it comes to Yesteryear, I am not even interested in my own opinion. I am a left-wing childless 32 year-old in England who cares more about travelling and cats than breeding myself. I do not care if white people go extinct. I cannot allow myself to think more about US politics than what is going on here. And so, if anything, I want the Nara Smith review. I want a Mormon housewives bookclub debate. I want Elon Musk’s surrogates to leave something for us on GoodReads but I am not holding my breath.

This morning, I fed those cats of mine and got back into bed with a protein yoghurt and a box of cherries and watched a few videos on YouTube about cloudbusting.

I’ve just finished translating 89 letters that my Chilean granddad sent to my Nan when she was in England with their kids. It took me two months because there were over 40 thousand words, he couldn’t spell for shit, and Chilean Spanish is hard at the best of times but this was a man from the countryside writing in the ye olde 1960s. He would come out with sentences like ‘it rained here yesterday thanks to those idiots, the French, who shot their shotguns,’ and I would be like, what the hell is he going on about?

It turns out that during the time he was writing, French scientists were busy firing guns and cannons at storm clouds because they believed it would stop the hail from forming and therefore protect crops — but the people on the ground said it just turned hail into torrential rain. The Wikipedia page about the French hail cannons led me to the one about cloudbusting in which an Austrian psychoanalyst had, back in the 40s, strapped copper tubes together and pointed them at the sky. He hoped he could focus some energy at the clouds to make them rain. Kate Bush made a song about it. Men still post intense videos about how this technology definitely works but the government won’t let us have it.

The images of people in the 20th Century hoping to bend the weather like magicians; the images this week of helicopters launching seawater over hectares of burning heather. That’s where my head is hung right now, in the semicolon between those sentences. I went to the shop down the road so that I could print the translation of the letters for my aunty. I told the man in the printers what I was picking up and he asked if I’d just put the letters through AI. I’ve been doing Chilean lessons for two years. Like, did you see the Cambridge paper on AI data centres raising the temperature of the areas around them by 2-9 degrees celsius? God, I just saw that picture of the mammoth bones emerging from a river bed now that half the UK is in drought.

But that book, yeah, sorry — what did you say? I was thinking about something else.

🇺🇸 if you’re here at the end of the text, comment a flag emoji 🇺🇸 on our instagram so i know you stopped by

🇺🇸 that cambridge paper i mentioned

🇺🇸 and don’t forget i started a new podcast called art dates fourth episode coming this week!

🇺🇸 now some kate bush – the guy who was cloudbusting got jailed in the US and died in prison, and kate bush is singing from the perspective of his son:

i wish all songs were this long