The Week with Sarah Cooper

Dedicated to all the recovering people pleasers out there.

I decided to practice my Melania Trump impression with a sketch about The Criterion Collection. No books or movies were harmed in the filming of this sketch.

If you missed it, here’s Chapter One. On a quiet Sunday morning at home, Susanna watched Trevor with resigned contentment. They were not as happy as they once were. Still, her love for him felt settled. Theirs was a tall but modest merchant house, built from stone with two oriel windows that jutted out over a quiet cobblestone corner in the heart of Colchester. The most recent plague had passed, and with it the worst of the poverty.

“It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” - Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” - Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon In the end, it was the islanders who survived. The cattlemen, the gardeners, the keepers of hens. The ones who could conjure bread from grain and light from tallow.

Hi everyone! Welcome to my every-so-often newsletter of recent Substack publishings and updates. Thanks for reading sarahcpr! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Here’s what I published on my Substack recently: 10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings My Spec Script for AppleTV’s The Studio The Only Teacher Who Ever Hated Me And now for updates! Well, folks, I learned a lot about myself this year. I learned I am not a blogger, I am not a vlogger, and I am not a podcaster.

The Studio just won big at the Emmys, proving my adoration for the show is completely justified. A few months ago I wrote a spec script for The Studio called “The Script”. This was, of course, before I realized that if you want to write for a show, you shouldn’t write a spec script for that show. But I’m still really proud of this. It’s the only spec script I’ve ever written and it was so much fun to put together. So I’m sharing it here for anyone waiting desperately for the next season like I am.

This is a post from the archives, resurrected for the post-Covid, Return to Office world. Enjoy. Like everyone, appearing smart in meetings is my top priority. Sometimes this can be difficult if you start daydreaming about your next vacation, your next nap, or bacon. When this happens, it’s good to have some fallback tricks to fall back on. Here are my ten favorite tricks for quickly appearing smart in meetings. Getting up and drawing a Venn diagram is a great way to appear smart.

IF THERE’S ONE THING a teacher’s pet cannot stand it’s when a teacher doesn’t like them. And my elementary school music teacher did not like me. At all. His name was Mr. Joynes. Lawrence Joynes. Larry. And, like Larry on Three’s Company (who some would call the prototypical Larry) Mr. Joynes had shaggy black hair and a permanent 5 o’clock shadow. He wore baggy Dockers and Hawaiian shirts and boat shoes. But most importantly, he held the key to my dreams.

The following is Chapter 5 of my forthcoming fantasy comedy novel The Feast of St. Susanna, about a young woman desperate for sainthood in a distant future that resembles the Middle Ages. This chapter introduces Susanna’s father, a wealthy landlord. — Chapter 5: God and Gold Grahmwell, Lord of Danforth, sat alone in a pew toward the front of Danforth Abbey, head bowed, eyes closed. He seemed to be praying but, in fact, his mind was obsessively repeating a single figure: 8,000 pennyfarthings.