It's Mahjong Madness. And More.
A quick note: this Substack has a new name. I rebranded to Between Friends Media!
I love media. I’ll say it. I love producing it, I love reading it, I love sharing it. I grew up obsessed with music videos, got into reality TV, The Hills specifically, then Glee, then started HelloGiggles, built it, sold it, and then took a sharp long turn into CPG spices. Random or burnout or culinary curiosity. I’m still not sure.
Media used to be my job. Then it became my hobby. Then honestly it became my boredom disease. I have a group chat and, this is the embarrassing part, a Slack, for my friends, where we send posts and things I cannot stop thinking about. I do this because I cannot help it and because someone needs to and because the algorithm is not going to do it for us.
So it’s time to make it a job again. I relaunched this as Between Friends Media. I am extremely online and also extremely emotionally intelligent. Get you a girl who can do both. Rather than ration off who can handle my links and posts, I’m putting it all here for you to enjoy or ignore. Maybe a podcast next. For now we start here. You know exactly who to forward this to.
MAHJONG MADNESS
It’s still March Madness and it’s also Mahjong Madness. The only thing I really know about March Madness is when Obama went on ESPN and did his bracket picks and I remember thinking that was a pretty cool move.
For the uninitiated: mahjong is a tile based game that is one part strategy, one part memory, one part luck, and one part trying to look like you know what you are doing while absolutely not knowing what you are doing. It is so hard but maybe fun? You are building hands from 152 tiles trying to match a winning combination listed on the annual card. Four players, but you’ll need to invite ten people because people flake. I am that person. Text ten. You will get four. That is the math.
Mahjong was something my friends’ parents or grandparents did, not mine. My family are a different kind of immigrants. Their Moroccan culture read egg shells for fun. Different world view entirely. But the last few years the ladies are gathering and the last few weeks the ladies are flocking. There is an energy in the air where people are trying to lock down their version of a sorority and apparently it involves tiles. I have never been in a sorority or even gone to college but watching the college version of all my friends new and old is endearing.
My friend Emily invited us over to be taught by the one and only Marvelous Mrs. Mahjong — an excellent teacher with equal parts charm and genuine confidence in us, her students. The tiles are beautiful. Whether that makes up for how confusing the whole thing is remains to be determined. But I will continue playing.
The game itself is Chinese, became an American version in the 1920s, and Jews absolutely ran with it. Jewish women in the Catskills were playing because they weren’t allowed in other clubs so they made their own veryclassic move. The National Mah Jongg League was founded in 1937. The founding president was Ruth Unger and now her sons Larry and David run the nonprofit, publishing the annual card that determines the winning hands for the year. We are almost getting our 2026 card. I am told this is important and I believe them. My friend Emily kept saying we need a full profile on Larry and David. And we do. Those women in the 1920s were certainly sipping on something because the rules are real confusing but there is a consistency that confusion that feels cozy.
How to get in: Get a set ($30–$80 on Amazon, $150–$300 at The Mahjong Line for the ones you actually want on your coffee table). Get the annual card from the National Mah Jongg League — $14, large print $15. Practice at Real Mah Jongg online. And find your Marvelous Mrs. Mahjong — every community has one. I learned from mine and she made me feel capable even when I was absolutely not.
EVERYTHING I AM INTO RIGHT NOW
Harry Styles’ new album. I loved the Runner’s World cover. Very cool move. It is clear he has found a very particular frequency aka maybe MDMA and the album lives entirely inside it and honestly good for him. American Girls and Taste specifically. I am not a runner but I think it is hot when others are. Full marathons under three hours or bust. None of this casual half marathon energy, leave that for literal children. The album is a pleasure and I am in the car a lot and I am giving it my full attention.
Made this March This playlist. Just listen.
LA Material. Just launched and anything that makes Los Angeles feel legible is for me. City politics is one of my pleasures, it is just gossip. The team is Julia Wick, who won the 2023 Pulitzer for breaking the LA City Council tape scandal, her sister Sarah who ran Crooked Media, two-time Pulitzer winner Matt Hamilton, and my friend Hayes Davenport. Free weekday newsletter. Subscribe here.
“Transference in the Afternoon” — Granta. Obsessed with this story. Jesse Barron spent years on a piece about a therapist and her hedge fund patient who had an affair nearly every week for ten years. Both married, always in her office, him still paying cash. Then he goes to therapy school, learns about erotic transference, and rewrites the entire decade. Was it an affair or was it abuse? Both of them have a version. Neither is wrong. He went through 6,000 pages of their emails. Also: sleeping with your therapist in NYC is considered rape. Scary stuff. It makes you feel like you could be any of these people. Secrets and shame collapse time. Ten years. Gone. I know the feeling! I’ve had a 13-year situation that defies logic and time! A real Bat Mitzvah of a relationship. It’s a dense read but the kind of story that is very fun to bring up at a dinner party.
The Class by Taryn Toomey I am apparently the last person in Los Angeles to take this class and I loved it. It is a somatic workout which means it is cardio but also it is crying, if that is what needs to happen. Bodyweight movements, repetition, music, and at some point beautiful women in Cartier bracelets are moaning somatically and you stop questioning it and join in. I left feeling euphoric but also sad that so many people are going through it. Go. First three classes for the price of one right now.
This notebook. My friend Jamie suggested it for morning pages and I have been writing the most unhinged jibberish in it every day and I mean that as the highest compliment. If you are doing The Artist’s Way or just need somewhere to put the noise, this is the one.
Starbucks. I know. I know. But the app is genuinely the best loyalty program in existence I said what I said and my order is a pistachio cortado and a cold brew with coconut foam and I will not be taking questions. The points system is so good it should be studied.
BOOKS I AM RECOMMENDING BUT HAVEN’T READ
Clutch by Emily Nemens. Published February 2026 and already getting attention from the New York Times Book Review and the LA Times. Five women, twenty years of friendship, all turning forty, all of them in the middle of the biggest moments of their lives at the same time. Careers imploding, marriages fracturing, IVF, addiction! Described as White Lotus with more sincerity and heart. That sounds like a diss but I’ll see the positive in that . This book sounds like a group chat.
The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff. Emly recommended this to our Mahjong group. Getting into it and reporting back.
SO…
I am against peptides now. Something about them feels creepy and I am going with that instinct. If I get a little rounder I get a little rounder. The too-skinny aesthetic is aging people and it is not chic. This is my position until further notice.
Retatrutide. Everyone is on it. Where Ozempic targets one hormone receptor and Mounjaro targets two, retatrutide hits three at once. Which is apparently why it is producing the most dramatic weight loss numbers ever recorded in a clinical trial. Not even FDA approved yet and here we are. What I keep hearing about is the hunger shift, it is not like Mounjaro where the food noise just goes quiet. With retatrutide the food noise gets replaced by a very specific and insistent desire for protein. A friend told me it is making him feel like a “little protein pig.” All the gay men are apparently bulking on it, doing what Mounjaro couldn’t and actually adding muscle. I find all of this fascinating and am watching from a safe distance while taking my creatine. Do not quote me on any of this.
TMJ. TMJ is real and it sucks and it is deeply annoying because it ruins both my sleep and my mood. Got a face massage at Sousla where the woman told me the jaw is where we hold emotional pain. This used to really get me, tying anything physical to the emotional or the spiritual realm. Now it soft triggers me. But I just want my mouth massaged and it was a perfect massage.
That’s what I’ve got this week. Some of it will land, some of it won’t, all of it is genuinely what is living in my head right now. Forward it to the person you always forward things to. Subscribe if you want more of this. And if you have something I should know about: an article, a take, a class in Venice, a drug that is not FDA approved.. send it my way. That’s the whole point.
See you next week.
— Sophia