On my radar: Lena Dunham’s cultural highlights

Lena Dunham was born in New York in 1986. While a student at Oberlin College, she started making short films. Her breakthrough came in 2010 with the award-winning feature film Tiny Furniture, and she capitalised on it with the HBO series Girls, which ran from 2012 to 2017, bagging two Golden Globes. Dunham wrote and directed the 2022 films Sharp Stick and Catherine Called Birdy. Now, with her husband Luis Felber, she’s created the Netflix series Too Much, following the travails of a New Yorker (played by Megan Stalter) starting a new life in London, as Dunham did in 2021. 

The Modern House

My mother raised me to basically consider real estate listings my personal porn. If I’m stepping out in my marriage, it’s with a house not a dude. The website of estate agent The Modern House is London’s premier source for notable, singular properties. I have a house I love, yet I can quote the location and price of basically every listing on there. I did go see one house three times (shout out to Torriano Cottages in Kentish Town!) because I felt connected to it. I also enjoy the Inigo website.

Millie Savage

The jewellery by this Australian designer is a little bit Victorian, a little bit Sailor Moon. She started out in her shed in Melbourne working with ethically-sourced precious and semi-precious stones, particularly Australian opals; now she has shops in Shoreditch and New York. Her heart motifs mixed with bold silver are the perfect mix of bad-bitch business lady and the silly little girl inside me.

The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey

This book is hard to explain and even harder to categorise, but if you’ve ever dumped someone, been dumped or needed to comfort a dumped person, it’s for you. I was furiously underlining quotes the whole time. Lacey [whose earlier books include Pew and Biography of X] is a brilliant writer and she always makes me think about form in an interesting way while feeling deeply for her female characters, whose femininity is the least interesting thing about them.

Bubala

This is my favourite food in London, or maybe anywhere. I’m a vegetarian – I have pet pigs, that’ll do it – and so often you feel like you’re just being served all the leftover garnishes in a mixing bowl. But Bubala’s food makes me use words that I find vaguely embarrassing like “hearty” and “flavourful”. My favourite dishes on their prix-fixe menu are the burnt butter hummus, the halloumi with honey, which my husband now copies at home, and the grilled oyster mushroom, which has delicious crispy charcoal edges.

What It Feels Like for A Girl (BBC Three)

This show, based on Paris Lees’s 2021 coming-of-age memoir, is funny, wise, intimate, sexy and disturbing. It begins with Lees’s troubled home life in small-town Nottinghamshire and moves towards her eventual gender transition, with plenty of sex, drugs and criminality along the way. With the current law-making around trans lives and gender-affirming care, it feels so joyful and important that this is on television creating a human portrait of the lives of a teenager who happens to be trans.

Lumenate

I saw an ad for this app, which claimed to offer a psychedelic experience through “neural entertainment” using your phone’s torch. I was sceptical, but there was a testimonial from Rosamund Pike [now a creative director at the company], who I find inherently trustworthy. This is trippy and meditative and really transports you, and I find my dreams afterward are super compelling. I won’t tell you about them, though, because dreams are only compelling to the dreamer.