fun facts

Susan Sontag, Sephora Shopper

Photo: Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet/Getty Images

UCLA’s Library of Special Collections has enabled your voyeurism by making public everything that was once on Susan Sontag’s Power Mac G4 and iBook. And when they say everything, they mean it: The digital archive contains all 17,198 of her emails, Word documents, and MP3s, from the 1990s to the early 2000s

Among her music collection (lots of Édith Piaf), email exchanges (one from her son about excessive carbs is a winner), and countless lists (e.g., “The Best White Wines” and a 162-page collection of adjectives located in a folder called “Word Hoard”) was this comforting piece of consumer flotsam, discovered by the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Sontag died a decade ago, but there is something compelling about knowing that she was on Sephora’s mailing list.”

Susan Sontag: groundbreaking American essayist, imposing intellect, and a Sephora beauty-junkie, just like us.

Susan Sontag, Sephora Shopper