Newsletter exclusive: an astrology column from executive editor Karolina Waclawiak

Even though Mercury has been out of retrograde since March 28th, we have another retrograde to contend with. Sorry! On April 10th, Jupiter entered a period of retrograde that will last until August 11th. Before you go and stare into a black hole of despair, let me just say that Jupiter will probably wreak less havoc on your life than super-potent Mercury. It’s a slower-moving planet, which is why its retrograde last longer, but it doesn’t control the things that can really mess up our lives, like communication or electronics. Instead, Jupiter is about growth, which feels perfectly timed with spring. Think of it as having an opportunity to take a breath and look at how the first months of the year have affected you, and what the takeaways might be.

Though Mercury is no longer in retrograde, its backwards turn left a long shadow in its wake. I have been dealing with difficult life changes and I know a lot of friends who have as well — broken relationships, illness, burnout, life not going as planned. I have at least one group chat totally devoted to Mercury’s shadow period right now. That shadow could feel like a never-ending emotional hangover, but there’s another way to look at it: While difficult things are happening in your life, it’s an opportunity to take more time to process what’s going on. Pausing is a difficult and necessary action. Doing nothing in the face of difficulty — when you don’t have all the answers — is a choice. And sometimes the best one, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

Growth is sometimes painful. Coping mechanisms work for us until they don’t. And while it often feels more comfortable to stay in the lanes we’ve created for ourselves than to change our approach, sometimes change has to happen whether we like it or not. Jupiter’s retrograde is the perfect time to gain some awareness of how to approach the hard parts of your life and see if your coping mechanisms are outdated and if they need retooling. The flip-side of this is how you approach the good parts of your life, too. Are you practicing gratitude? Or are you letting the funk of the winter cloud your vision around the positive things in your life?

We often want changes to happen right away (rip the band-aid off!) so we can move through them quickly. We often want the cash and prizes without the work. But if you do the work, the eventual cash and prizes you receive will feel earned — and you can actually fully enjoy them.

Features

Rachel Mummey for BuzzFeed News

This 61-Year-Old Woman Just Gave Birth To Her Own Granddaughter by Shannon Keating

Matthew Eledge and Elliot Dougherty of Omaha, Nebraska, needed a surrogate to carry their baby. They never expected she would turn out to be Matthew’s mother.

How Killing Eve Became The Perfect Show For These Wild Times by Kate Aurthur

Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer, and the team behind BBC America’s stylish spy comedy talk about “the most fucked-up relationship on television” and what’s in store for Season 2.

Why Fillers Are The Go-To Beauty Hack For Millennials by Zan Romanoff

Cathryn Virginia for BuzzFeed News

The relative ease and ubiquity of injectables — especially compared to surgery — means “having work done” no longer carries the stigma it used to.

Courtney Stodden Knows Exactly What Happened by Scaachi Koul

At 16, Stodden married a 51-year-old man and became the punchline to a creepy tabloid joke. Now, at 24, she’s ready to rewrite her own story — and get a divorce.

Books

37 Amazing New Books To Add To Your Spring Reading List by Arianna Rebolini

A mapmaker who can shift geography, an unlikely horse race champion, a testament to the long history of human failure — and much, much more.

Elizabeth McCracken's Bowlaway Is BuzzFeed Book Club's April Pick. Here's The First Chapter by Arianna Rebolini

A mysterious woman is found unconscious in a cemetery — next to a bag containing one corset, one bowling ball, one candlepin, and 15 pounds of gold.

Sally Rooney Writes Books Millennials Want To Read by Elisabeth Donnelly

Molly Snee for BuzzFeed News

The author of Conversations With Friends and the upcoming Normal People, writes about sex, love, and economic precarity in a way that’s recognizable to many twenty- and thirtysomethings.

5 Books We Were Obsessed With Last Month by Ciera Verlade

It's never too late to start again.

Women In A Mennonite Colony Were Raped For Years. This New Novel Tackles The Aftermath by Maris Kreizman

Rachell Sumpter for BuzzFeed News

Miriam Toews talks about “keeping that particular agony inside of me” while writing her new novel about abuse in a remote Mennonite colony.

Cultural Criticism

Jeff Gentner / Getty Images

Why People Love To Hate Kris Jenner, The OG "Momager"by Zan Romanoff

The Kardashians have rebranded the meddling “stage mom” — but a new word can’t erase the very real conflicts of interest when managing your child’s career.

Meet The Man Who Gave The World Justin Bieber by Amos Barshad

Scooter Braun is a veritable hitmaker — and he started with a 12-year-old nobody singing R&B covers in Stratford, Ontario. (An excerpt from Amos Barshad’s No One Man Should Have All That Power.)

Why Are So Many Bisexuals On TV Also Sociopaths? by Hannah Harris Green

BBC America

Villanelle in Killing Eve is the latest in a long line of bisexual characters for whom lust and bloodlust go hand in hand.

In Us And Pet Sematary, History Is The Scariest Thing Of All by Alison Willmore

In Jordan Peele’s new movie and the latest Stephen King adaptation, the real bump in the night might be decades of suppressed trauma. Spoilers ahead!

I’m So Happy To See Fat Characters Who Don’t Hate Themselves by Kaye Toal

Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News; Getty Images

So many stories about fatness have been about sadness and self-loathing. But as Shrill, Dumplin’, and Isn’t It Romantic show, they don’t have to be.

Another newsletter exclusive: an interview with a writer we love! This month: Namwali Serpell, whose debut novel The Old Drift is out now.

What are you reading... Namwali Serpell?

Courtesy of the author

“I've been reading a lot of genre fiction. This partly because I just taught a graduate course on "American Genres" at UC, Berkeley. When I put my syllabus together, I went full bestseller: Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Iceberg Slim’s Pimp, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Stephen King’s Carrie, Charles Portis’s True Grit, Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity, Danielle Steel’s The Gift. Needless to say, these are not the novels that usually get taught in a university setting. They're considered trifling, the fast food of fiction. The story we tell ourselves is that they aren’t rich or ambiguous; they’re self-evident, simplistic even.

But as it turns out, the books I've been reading — while they fit the “formula” of genres like crime fiction, the Western, fantasy, romance, the spy thriller, science fiction, etc — are weird and interesting and delightful. In fact, I’ve developed a theory that the most recognizable of these books, the highest of the supposed "lowbrow," are all deeply interested in their own form. They're not just using genre gimmicks to sell books. They're smart about genre, and about the elements of fiction in general — character, point of view, plot, setting — precisely because they don't pull their punches.

The more recent works I've been enjoying, like Carmen Maria Machado's collection Her Body and Other Parties and Victor LaValle's The Changeling, are similar: They sing their genres with their whole chests. Reading these novels has changed how I feel about our tendency to rank fiction in a hierarchy. What happens if we take this truth to be self-evident: that all genres are created equal? I'm starting to think of genres as colored lenses: different but equal ways of seeing the world.”

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