KR | Under The Covers Newsletter - July 2026

Welcome to Under The Covers, a monthly newsletter that aims to expand your sensual sphere with cultural recommendations.

Summer in the city turns everyone loose. The clothes get thinner. The nights run longer. People linger on stoops and rooftops with a drink in hand, in no rush to go home.

The heat does something to us, and there's research to back it up. Two psychologists once tracked years of online searches and found that our appetite for sex and romance climbs twice a year, in the dead of winter and again in early summer.

So this month, consider this email your permission to chase it. Every recommendation below leans into heat, skin, and wanting more of both. Sultry, a little sexy, a little naughty—that's the whole point of July.

Here are this month's recommendations:

I. A Bigger Splash (2015, dir. Luca Guadagnino). Film.

If you want a film that feels like a hot afternoon, watch this one. Luca Guadagnino sets it on a small volcanic island off Sicily. A famous rock star, played by Tilda Swinton, is resting her voice after a throat surgery. She has the sun, the pool, and her younger boyfriend (Matthias Schoenaerts) all to herself, until her old flame shows up uninvited with his grown daughter and wrecks the calm.

Guadagnino puts the heat right on the screen, and you can almost feel it radiating through. The way he films sweat dripping on skin, juice trickling down, and long looks across the pool that carry an old debt or a fresh craving. Ralph Fiennes plays the ex-lover as a man who has never once been told no. Swinton barely speaks the whole movie yet commands every scene she’s in.

Here's what I love about it, and what I tell couples in my sessions: the eroticism lives in the waiting. A single loaded glance between them carries more than any sex scene could. Watch it on a warm night with someone you want, and pay attention to who you find yourself rooting for. Your answer says more about you than about the movie.

II. Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin. Book.

Here's a book to keep on your nightstand this summer. Anaïs Nin wrote these fifteen stories in the 1940s for a private collector who paid her by the page and kept telling her to drop the poetry and get to the sex. She refused. The erotica she wrote instead is some of the most beautifully written in the English language, published after her death in 1977, and has been in print ever since.

Every story is about someone chasing what they want: A veiled woman picks up strangers in a fancy restaurant. A con man seduces rich women and vanishes with their jewelry. Nin knew that desire starts in the mind, and she writes straight to it. As she puts it in the preface: "I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of women's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate."

Read one story before bed, or out loud to a partner if you're feeling bold. I recommend this to clients whose sex lives have gone flat and practical. Nin brings back the fantasy, the tease, and the slow build.

III. The Pornographic Imagination by Susan Sontag (1967). Essay.

Kind of a challenging text as most of Susan Sontag’s writing, but I still hand it to clients who need it. Sontag wrote it back when critics dismissed anything sexually explicit as garbage, deemed unworthy of serious attention. She disagreed, in public and at length. Her argument is that explicit writing can be real art, and that it has something true to say about desire, shame, and how much feeling a person can stand.

She makes her case through French novels you will probably never read, and that's fine. What makes it worth reading is the respect she gives the subject. She treats sex and desire as serious material, the way a critic treats a great painting. Most of us were taught to do the opposite, to look away and keep quiet. She, instead, looks straight at it.

I think of this essay every time a client apologizes to me for a fantasy. What turns you on is not a flaw to fix. More often it's the most honest thing about you. You'll find it in her collection Styles of Radical Will. Go slowly. It's worth the read.

IV. Misattribution of Arousal (Dutton and Aron, 1974). Session.

Here's one reason summer leaves you hungrier than any other season. Your body can't always tell the difference between one kind of racing heart and another.

In 1974, two Canadian psychologists ran a study. They had men cross one of two bridges over a canyon in Vancouver. One bridge was high, narrow, and scary. The other was low and safe. On the far side, an attractive woman stopped each man, asked him a few questions, and gave him her number in case he thought of anything to add later. The men who crossed the scary bridge called her far more often.

Their hearts were pounding from the height. Their hands were sweating from the fear. But standing in front of a beautiful stranger, their bodies reached for the simplest explanation, and the simplest explanation was getting her. Fear had read as attraction. Psychologists call this the “misattribution of arousal,” and it tells us a lot about what gets us going.

That is summer's trick. On a hot night your body is already worked up before anyone even touches you. Your pulse is high from the dance floor, your skin flushed from the heat and the cold drink in your hand. Albeit less dangerous, that is the same state those men were in on the bridge. So when someone catches your eye across the room, your body takes all that buzz and reads it as attraction. The heat gets your body going. You get to decide who it's for.

So use it I say! Take your partner somewhere that gets the heart going: a steep hike, a loud concert, the top of a Ferris wheel. Then notice how you look at each other on the way down. Arousal is easy to redirect. You should give yours something to work with.

V. Sade, "The Sweetest Taboo" (1985). Song.

This song evokes a yearning that feels unhurried and assured. Sade Adu sings like the room is already warm and the night already belongs to her. The beat moves slow, the horns soft. She calls wanting someone a taboo and then makes it sound like the most natural thing you could do.

Here's the detail I love: partway through, Sade sings "there's a quiet storm." That's also the name of the late-night radio format built for songs exactly like this one, slow and smooth and made for the dark. It's a love song with the quietest intensity. Put it on at dusk, pour something cold, and let it set the pace for wherever the night goes.

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And that's July. The heat is doing half the work for you this month, so let it. All you have to do is stay awake to what your body is already telling you.

Stay cool out there. Or don't.

Keeley

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