6/2/26 - 6/8/26

Another week, another work trip. I’ve really been living my 1950s businessman fantasy this year — kissing my adoring wife goodbye, slapping my fedora on my head, and boarding a plane with nothing but a corporate expense account and a dream. And yet, through it all, I simply must keep consuming! I tremble to think what would happen if I didn’t.

This week: I was baffled by the new J.Lo romcom, I watched a 90s classic thriller, I loved the new Cape Fear remake, I beheld the horrors of The Valley, I became fascinated by yet another villa of idiots, and I read a book about a sad gay.

Office Romance (2026) — on Netflix

Forget the generic, algorithmically generated title: Office Romance is one of the most deranged romcoms Jennifer Lopez has ever made. Written by her costar Brett Goldstein — who is apparently from Ted Lasso, a show I refuse to watch, and who I find handsome but in the way a video game character is handsome; like, why do his face, voice, and movements all feel AI-generated? — J.Lo stars as the CEO of an airline company who falls in love with her new lawyer. That is a very stupid idea to base an entire movie on, and feels a bit like Brett Goldstein played Mad Libs before sitting down to write the script, but I suppose there have been crazier romcom setups (many of which have starred J.Lo herself), so I’ll give it a pass.

The core plot is decent, if strange: J.Lo is the CEO of an airline company started by her dad, Edward James Olmos, and she is very attracted to her new lawyer, but she can’t get together with him without pissing off her company’s board, who all want to oust her and bring in someone they think is more competent. But this is a problem, you see, because these are two very attractive people, so they struggle to keep their distance. (At one point — and I am not joking here — Brett Goldstein’s character gets a very obvious erection just from shaking Jennifer Lopez’s hand. I actually do think this happens a lot to her in real life, to be fair.) Basically: the whole move is a little like Succession with brain damage.

The two of them have fine chemistry (more on her side, though; again, there’s something about Brett Goldstein that feels like he’s a PlayStation character come to life — he looks like his legal, government name should just be Henchman #3), so the movie hums along quite charmingly, actually. But what makes it extremely watchable is the deep bench of wildly unstable side characters, most notably Betty Gilpin, who steals the entire movie with even the smallest facial expressions, and has one of the most psychotic birthing scenes ever filmed — and it’s easily the craziest birthing scene ever put in a romcom (if you want to see for yourself, go to Netflix, fire up this movie, and go to the 1 hour 20 minute mark. I’m sorry!).

But the craziest parts of the movie have to do with the characters’ backstories. You see, J.Lo is irresistibly attracted to Brett Goldstein, we learn, because she has a British kink! This is played for laughs, of course, but also taken somewhat seriously, which is weird. Anyway, it results in them having a little sex scene in which he dresses up as a Buckingham Palace guard so she can grope him while he has to stand still. Even crazier is the reason why Brett Goldstein hasn’t moved back to London — he’s stuck in New Jersey because his sister is in prison for a genuinely psychotic reason (spoiler alert: she chopped off a man’s head with a machete!), which doesn’t really serve any purpose to the plot other than explaining why a British person would willingly live in New Jersey.

I have this complaint about every movie, but this could have been 20-30 minutes shorter and would have been a perfect, stupid film. As it is, it drags at times, but I didn’t care. I haven’t met a Jennifer Lopez romcom I haven’t loved, and the dumber they are, the better. Thankfully this is one of her dumbest (but not the dumbest, unfortunately; that honor still goes to The Boy Next Door, in which she is famously gifted a “first edition” of The Odyssey). The woman is so charming she can life literally any material she’s given, what can I say!

The Game (1997) — on Criterion

I can’t believe The Game hasn’t been remade yet. It’s perfect for our current era of billionaire bloat and corporate paranoia. (Although you could argue that, in a weird way, The Chair Company is a The Game remake. Really, think about it!) This is such a fun, silly, perfectly 90s thriller about how rich people are so bored they’ll pay someone to hunt them for sport. I loved its absurdly spiraling web of conspiracy, and I also loved being reminded that, unfortunately, Sean Penn was very cute in his heyday.

Cape Fear, episodes 1-2 — on Apple TV+

I wrote a few weeks ago about how Apple TV is still so random to me, but now that they’ve got Widow’s Bay and Cape Fear on at the same time, I might have to start giving them more respect. The best thing about Cape Fear — other than the incredible star quality of Javier Bardem, Amy Adams, and Patrick Wilson — is the fact that they kept the 90s pulpy thriller tone instead of trying to modernize it. This show is campy and a little trashy, in an airport paperback novel way, and it’s better for it. Javier Bardem is the most charismatic man to have ever lived — even when he’s playing a psycho killer, I’m just so charmed by him I end up smiling at the screen the whole time he’s on it. I want to kiss his tattooed little face!

The only downside to the series is it features two of the most deeply annoying teenage characters I’ve see in a while. I hate Amy Adams’ and Patrick Wilson’s children, and it’s never a good thing for a show that, every time the heroes’ kids are in danger, I’m yelling, “Kill them!” at the screen. But that’s a small price to pay for a fun, steamy, retro thriller, and the chance to watch Javier Bardem leer sexily and menacingly at Amy Adams for the next few months.

The Valley, season 3 episodes 1-8 — on Peacock

Without the demonic entity possessing Jax Taylor on the show anymore, the beginning of this season dragged. It’s okay to admit that this show unfortunately needs abusive men to be compelling! But thankfully Jax’s absence allowed attention to be shifted to other abusers hiding in the cast — namely, Danny.

I’ve had my eye on this small man since the first episode of the first season; something about his beady little eyes and the way he hides behind Christianity made it obvious there was something menacing lurking below the surface. But Nia, his belabored wife (literally — she’s on child four and considering a fifth!), protected him from ever exposing his darkest truths, whisking him away from the cameras whenever he started lashing out. But this season the mask has started to slip — or possibly Nia has finally decided to let her husband humiliate himself on TV in the hopes that he’ll possibly learn a lesson — and we’re getting to see the monster underneath.

In the kind of absurd scene that could only happen on the dark horror comedy that is The Valley, the girls decide to put their husbands into drag during a cast trip, and drunk-ass Danny decides to take it way too seriously as usual. The resulting scene, in which Danny mercilessly berates his wife for putting the wrong color foundation on his face (“Match my skin tone,” he spits at her, acting like a Drag Race contestant who escaped from the insane asylum), is a perfect encapsulation of why I can’t stop watching this show. It’s hilarious these people act like this in their 40s, but also genuinely horrific to see a man treat his wife like this. “If this is how he speaks to her in public,” says Lala (who I can’t stand but is proving her worth this season by calling out Danny’s abuse at every turn), “I can’t imagine what he says behind closed doors.”

The Valley remains the darkest and most compelling show on TV, an expose on the rot at the heart of American heterosexuality. No matter how bleak it gets, it’s important that we keep attention on it, and that we bear witness as a society to these monsters. Otherwise, you yourself could wind up married to a Jax or Danny. Save yourself!

Love Island USA, season 8 episodes 1-4 — on Peacock

I really didn’t want to give my summer brain over to Love Island again, but I started the new season “just to see if anyone can catch my attention,” I told myself, and before I knew it I was streaming it on my phone on Delta WiFi, desperately trying to keep up with the new episodes. (Between me and the teen next to me, who scrolled TikTok for literally 6 hours straight, I figured we had to be the trashiest row on the plane.) Sadly, there’s something irresistible about this stupid, brainless, psychological experiment of a dating show. It’s perfect to put on when you’re doing dishes or folding laundry, letting these idiots’ attempts at flirting wash over you, like ocean waves slowly smoothing out the wrinkles of your brain.

Here are just a few things people have said to each other on this show as they attempt to seduce each other:

• “What’s your type?” “I’ve always dated brunettes with like really pretty eyes.”

• “When you brought me the heart-shaped eggs… I can’t stop smiling about that.”

• “What do you like on your pizza?” “Pepperoni.” “Yeah, pepperoni smacks.”

Do you see what I mean? These morons are oddly compelling, and as much as I want to quit them, I’m probably going to watch another episode immediately after finishing this newsletter.

Great Black Hope, by Rob Franklin (2025) — paperback

A modern Bright Lights, Big City of sorts, about an “upwardly mobile, downwardly spiraling” Black queer man living in New York, reeling from the overdose of his best friend and roommate, and making bad choices as a result. It’s a specific portrait of a specific way of life, with sentences that are equally pleasurable and skewering of the world surrounding the main character.

It was no mystery why he and his cohort of prep-school Negroes had wanted out. They’d faced, each in their way, a lifetime of dissonance, of alternately stunted and impossible expectations to which they could respond in one of two ways: adopt the twice-as-good ethos of their parents’ generation or rebel and in that rebellion sacrifice themselves.

It’s a stylish debut novel, and clearly a very personal one for the author (in a note at the end, he explains it’s based on the actual loss of a real-life friend). For me, what I loved most was how deeply seriously it took the friendships between straight women and gay men, the sisterly — for better or worse — bonds that can be formed by gays and girls going through some shit as they grow up. It’s a relationship that’s weirdly under explored in novels, and I was surprisingly touched to see it so lovingly rendered here. We need more gay-and-girl lit!

5/26/26 - 6/1/26

I’m writing to you from a work trip to Madison, WI. Coincidentally, this is where I went to college, and I haven’t been back here in almost a decade. Between meetings, I’ve been wandering the streets having existential flashbacks on nearly every corner. Practically every 5 minutes I’m like: That’s my first apartment! That’s where I worked! That’s where my friend got fingered! It’s very odd to be a solo business traveler in a town that was very formative to you, in the state you grew up in. It’s a little like I’m Anna Kendrick in Up In The Air but also I’m Aubrey Plaza in My Old Ass. Basically: I can’t wait for my next therapy session!!!!!

This week: I saw the two big new horror movies from child auteurs and felt existential dread, I watched a sexy Brian de Palma classic, I got scared by the modern LA clown community, and I read about a Catholic cult that controls the world.

Backrooms (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park

Backrooms is a horror movie made by kids, for kids. Written and directed by a person named Kane Parsons when he was a literal teenager, Backrooms is inspired by internet “creepypasta,” and is basically an extra-long YouTube video that randomly stars Oscar-level actors. Watching it in a packed theater, surrounded by literal children screaming, squealing, laughing, and applauding, I felt the scariest feeling of all: the realization that I’m old as fuck.

As an actual film, Backrooms is a bit of a disaster. The plot, as it is, is minimal: Chiwetel Ejiofor is a depressed furniture salesman who discovers the “Backrooms,” a seemingly parallel universe accessible by walking through a wall in the basement of his furniture store. The Backrooms is a seemingly endless maze of beige/yellow vaguely corporate spaces, where something sinister possibly lurks. After he disappears, his therapist Renate Reinsve finds her way into the Backrooms to find him. As a concept, it’s fine! There are some genuinely eerie or scary moments in the Backrooms, with a lot of very good visual creepiness. Kane Parsons — who may I remind you is a child — clearly has an eye and a raw talent for creating dread-inducing moments of horror, particularly when he’s borrowing the language of found-footage horror (he was born nearly a decade after The Blair Witch Project, FYI — terrifying!). Whenever we were in the Backrooms, I was having a good time at the movies. But whenever we were out of the Backrooms, and the movie was attempting a legitimate plot, I was in hell.

The character development in Backrooms is by far the weakest part of the film, and the surest sign that you are watching a movie made by a child. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character is depressed, and even though that depression is key to the story, we never really learn much of anything about it. He’s sad because of some mixture of money problems, job concerns, and relationship issues — you know, boring adult stuff! Renate Reinsve’s character also has issues that relate to her mother, but those are equally vague and unexplored, despite the plot largely hinging on both these characters’ problems. I don’t believe for a second that Kane Parsons had any real interest in the interior lives of his characters — anytime there’s a scene with dialogue or emotions, it feels like you’re watching a kid playing house with a couple of toys. Like: “Barbie, I’m sad because of my job.” “GI Joe, I’m sad because of my mom!”

Despite all that, I legitimately do believe that Backrooms is the future of movies, for better or worse. The theater was absolutely packed, and mostly with teenagers or even literal children (one little girl, who could not have been older than 10, left clutching her dad’s hand after the first big scare — I was shocked to see a child that young at a horror film, but she probably also has an upcoming directorial debut with A24). And let me tell you, the kids were having the time of their lives. They screamed, jumped, shrieked, laughed, and burst out into applause as the credits hit. They fucking loved this movie, so it’s no surprise it’s on track to become one of the most profitable movies of all time. It’s the first box office smash to be funded primarily by allowances and lunch money!

So maybe I should stop being a curmudgeon about all this. The movie was bad, but the movie doesn’t care what I think. It has found its audience, and they’re eating it up. (It’s also showing the studios that there’s a ton of profit in finding ways to get things from the internet onto the big screen — and let me just say how happy it makes me that Mr. Beast is watching this former YouTuber’s massive success from the sidelines. Sorry, flop, you’re old now, too!)

But for all my bitching, I will say these were some of the best-behaved teens I’ve ever seen in a theater. Typically they’re acting like assholes, scrolling on their phones, watching TikTok at full volume. But this audience was rapt — it was possibly the first 2-hour stretch in these kids’ entire lives in which they didn’t touch their phones. So if Backrooms is the gateway drug to getting these kids interested in film, and if it injects a bunch of life and money into our slowly failing movie industry (it is very satisfying how thoroughly this small-budget movie made by a child is kicking the ass of Disney’s Whatever the Fuck and Grogu) — fuck it, good for Backrooms! The future of filmmaking has arrived, like it or not, and I am nothing but dust.

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Obsession (2026) — at Regal Union Square

The other horror movie made by a wunderkind that’s out right now! Made by a decrepit 25-year-old, Obsession is a much more conventional and therefore better movie than Backrooms, which also unfortunately makes it less interesting. It’s fine! I had fun! But there’s nothing groundbreaking here — this is a solid, enjoyable horror flick with some good scares and some promising new little actors, and if you like scary movies that are About The Times We Live In, you’ll have a good time. Unfortunately, I do think — thanks to this and Backrooms coming out at the same time and both destroying the new Star Wars — studios are going to learn all the wrong lessons from their success, and we’re about to see a whole bunch of shitty big-budget horror movies made by 20-year-olds. Basically: if you’re a film student at NYU, and A24 isn’t knocking on your dorm room door with a 3-picture deal, you’ve already failed.

Body Double (1984) — on Criterion

Possibly the most “Brian De Palma” Brian De Palma movie of all time. Garish, sexy, lurid, flamboyant, insane, unpredictable — I loved it! At one point, the movie inexplicably becomes a musical on the set of a porn film, all to the song “Relax” by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and if I hadn’t already fallen in love with this big, fun, stupid movie by that point, that scene sent me head-over-heels. For all its strangeness, Backrooms has nothing on the genuine, bone-deep weirdness of Body Double. Finally: a movie for adults!

“The Rise of the Fool” by Allison P. Davis — in NYMag

I hope the purchase of NYMag by one of the Murdoch boys (ugh) doesn’t destroy it, because no one is doing it like them week after week. Case in point: this exploration of the LA clown community. Midway through the article, Allison P. Davis’s thoughtful, brilliant writing about the art of clowning (sorry: the art of clown — only amateurs and idiots use the gerund, apparently) had almost sold me on the value of clown. But then she’d present a scene that instantly reminded me that, no, I’m really really not a clown guy. Just take this (long-ish) excerpt from when she sits in on a clown class:

Up next: a gamine brunette — in a spandex unitard and what appeared to be lace-up wrestling shoes — and a guy in cargo pants whom I had recently seen in a bit part on a network sitcom. Out the gate, the guy took the expressway to his innermost fears. “I’m scared of failure, loneliness,” he said. “I’m scared that one day I’m gonna, like, snap and have a mental breakdown and forget everything and everyone in my life.”

“Go off, 40-year-old king,” the brunette responded; she was doing vigorous calisthenics.

“I don’t want to be king,” he said.

“Go off, king!” she shouted.

They were not communicating well.

It went on like this for some time: him, stuck and upset, while she carried on. But soon she was crying, and it didn’t appear to be part of the game.

“I feel like a loser,” she said. “I’m crying,” she said, while crying more.

Gilkey cut in and asked them to unpack what was going on. The sitcom guy felt awful — he’d genuinely upset her. He realized now how alone she’d felt. She told him how she’d needed him to show up for her and he hadn’t. I wondered if the two were dating or if this was still somehow a clown act. The intensity made me squirm. It felt like I was watching Couples Therapy: The Clown Show.

Look, it’s brave to get on stage and bare your soul in any artistic capacity, and I can genuinely appreciate the value of professional fools making fun of a deeply evil and stressful world, but, also: I’m really scared!!!

Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church, by Gareth Gore (2024) — library ebook

If the long-ass subtitle doesn’t make it clear, this gripping and fascinating book is an investigative history of Opus Dei, the secretive and terrifyingly powerful cult inside the Catholic Church. The book is a wild, stressful read, tracing the history of the cult from its early days — when it was sheltered and helped by the reign of Francisco Franco — to its modern incarnation, where it has almost single-handedly taken over the Supreme Court and the current, psychotic Republican party. Yikes! Sadly, I don’t think this book had much of any impact in the real world — the GOP has made it very clear over the last 10 years that they’re actually super cool with cults of all sorts; in fact, they kind of prefer it! — but it’s still a nice little terrifying read to keep you up at night. The lack of splash this book made is a sign that things have gotten so bad no one can even take this on right now, emotionally. Yes, our lives are all substantially affected by a secretive bunch of extremely bigoted and rich Catholics who whip themselves at night while working to control the entire world: what do you want me to do about it???

5/19/26 - 5/25/26

Did you have a lovely holiday weekend? If you weren’t in NY, you probably did! Here, we suffered through, apparently, the rainiest Memorial Day weekend since the 1940s. Pray for the New Yorkers in your life who have had to endure the unimaginable horror of being kind of wet for a little bit. Between the weather and the onslaught of work I’ve had to do lately and the fact that I turned 39 which is famously the last year before you turn 40 and society sets you adrift on an ice floe — I think all of that combined to pull me into a slight little depressive episode, which I decided to lean into by reading and watching bleak things for most of the week. Thankfully, the sun is out and something good happened in local basketball so people on the street are happy and summer is finally here and nothing bad will ever happen to any of us! Yay!

This week: I watched two beautiful new movies that are rather difficult in different ways, I’m struggling with the new HBO show from that Baby Reindeer guy, I tormented myself by reading a bleak book about 9/11, and I counteracted all the darkness by watching Point Break!

Blue Film (2026) — at IFC Center

To say Blue Film deals with thorny issues is an understatement. Let’s just speak about it plainly: this is a movie about a sexy camboy who is hired to spend the night with a pedophile. Eek!! The entire film takes place over the course of that one night, in which the two men mostly talk but also sometimes have sex, or at least attempt it. It’s… nearly indescribable? “Brave” is a loaded word, but also possibly an understatement with regards to this film — this is the writer/director’s first feature movie, and I can’t believe he took a swing this big. This is one of those movies where the entire theater has to sit in silence during the entirety of the credits before being able to get up and leave. You just need a minute to, like, reset before rejoining the outside world.

This is not all to suggest that it’s a bleak, dreary ride. In fact, Blue Film is often quite beautiful and tender, which only makes the moments of disgust or shock even more disgusting and shocking. The two men will have these quiet moments of beautiful intimacy, which will immediately be followed up with someone saying something so deeply disturbing that your mouth drops open. This is a layered, wild film, and a refreshing sign that there’s still some life left in Hollywood after all. It felt so good to be genuinely scandalized by a movie!

It’s one of those films that’s bad to write about, because you don’t want to spoil the ride for anyone who’s going to go on it — I don’t want to steal the shock value from you, and you really should see this, if it’s showing near you (it probably isn’t). And, anyway, your feelings about my one-sentence description of the film’s plot at the beginning of this email will tell you pretty quickly if you do plan on seeing this; when I tell people about it they either immediately say, “I need to see that,” or they look at me as if I were the pedophile in the story — which is fun! You know media literacy is dead when you feel like you have to state, “For the record, I am not a pedophile,” before recommending a movie to people! Anyway, clearly I’m not as brave as the people who made this movie — I’m currently worrying if the government’s technofascist AI surveillance systems are reading this email and misinterpreting it and my door is about to be knocked in by gestapo thugs. So let’s move on!!!

Mother Mary (2026) — on Apple

Mother Mary came and went from theaters in what felt like a matter of days, and now that I’ve seen it I can understand why. This is not an easy movie! A two-hour baroque film in which two women talk obliquely about their past while designing a dress — this was never going to be a blockbuster. Anne Hathaway literally cries for 2 hours straight in this movie, and her hair is wet the entire time. I’m almost positive there is not a single man in this entire film (the Bechdel test is dead… the new standard is the Hathaway test, when men aren’t even acknowledged to exist). These are not the makings of a megablockbuster. Where are the EXPLOSIONS?

And yet I was captivated the entire time. I’ve never seen anything like Mother Mary. It’s wide open to interpretation, almost frustratingly so. It could be about how the best way to process difficult things is to transform it into art. It could be about the difficulties of collaboration. Or it could be about what it feels like to create something in service of something or someone else. Or it could be a messy lesbian film. Or it could just be about great gowns, beautiful gowns. Or it could be about all of that! Up to you!

It’s a challenging, deliberately obscure movie, and I loved the experience of trying to figure out what the fuck these two women were talking about. And as it builds into a strange, visually stunning gothic horror, I understood it less but loved it even more. Something is going on inside the mind of writer/director David Lowery, whose career has balanced kiddie Disney films with twisted, haunted films like this and The Green Knight, and I love spending time in his brain. This is a baroque, swing-for-the-fences film that has a lot to say but doesn’t care if you get it or not.

Mother Mary would work, weirdly, as a double feature next to The Testament of Ann Lee: two big, bold, beautiful films about wacky ladies who love singing and writhing and heavy fabrics and shivering in barns. They should make a gay musical Avengers where Mother Mary and Ann Lee team up to destroy men through the power of song. Now that’s a blockbuster.

Half Man, episodes 1-4 — on HBOMax

Bleakness abounds! This show, from Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gadd, is a bit of a slog, if I’m being honest. It’s got gay stuff, so obviously I had to watch it, but I’m struggling! Every episode is an endless onslaught of psychological and sometimes physical torture, a slow-burn horror series in which everything could be solved if the characters just stopped talking to each other. After every episode I feel like I can’t keep doing this to myself, and yet here I am, having almost finished the whole thing. Even though I hate all the characters! Everyone’s either an asshole or an idiot or both, and I’m not even sure what the point of it all is. (To be honest, this is also how I felt about Baby Reindeer, though I was too much of a coward at the time to speak up against all the rave reviews. That show was annoying!) I suppose, if nothing else, this show could be made for people who have irritating stepbrothers? Representation matters!

Point Break (1991) — on Criterion

To counteract a week of rather bleak and complex films and TV, I needed to watch something stupid and perfect. Enter: Point Break, the most gorgeous film ever made about surfing criminals (a packed genre). These stupid hunks and their silly little crimes! I refuse to enjoy this movie on an ironic level, to cheapen it by laughing at it — this is genuinely great. If nothing else, Keanu’s butt looks incredible in a wetsuit, and Patrick Swayze was king of the twinks. During a miserably cold and rainy Memorial Day weekend, Point Break was exactly what I needed to get me into the summer mindset. Let’s rob a bank and hit the waves!

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, by Richard Beck (2024) — library ebook

I don’t know if you’re aware, but things are bad right now! And, if you’re an elder Millennial like me, you’re probably all-too aware of the fact that it’s basically been bad and steadily getting worse since we first became politically aware (to place my own life against world events: 9/11 happened during my first week of high school, and the Great Recession hit the year I graduated college — slay mama!!!!). So, if you’re a lifelong Bush-hater like me, you probably understand the broad strokes of how we got from 9/11 to today. Even so, it’s helpful and clarifying to see the process all laid out in great detail in a book like this, which tracks the slow and steady decline our country has been going through for decades (it didn’t just start on 9/11, of course — the book argues the decline started in the 70s, though it’s clearly been accelerating lately).

A lot of the book’s history meant having to confront demons from yesteryear that I had almost forgotten about, but whose names were, apparently, indelibly seared into my developing brain — Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, and Lynndie England kept popping up like the Ghosts of Christmas Torture. I can’t believe these people just have normal lives, after all the evils they’ve committed! And yet that’s the point of the entire book: because we allowed people to act with impunity, even worse people are allowed to act with even more impunity. There’s a direct line from Bush’s torture programs to Obama’s drone-bombing of children to everything Trump has ever done. Reading this book makes you feel like every American President should be sent straight to prison the second their term ends. Lock them all up! I’m not joking!

Reading this was an unpleasant but clarifying experience, one that I did not enjoy — but that’s a commentary on the times, not the book itself. By the end, when he’s getting into the ongoing genocide in Gaza, after 500 previous pages of endless horrors, it’s all just a bit, like…….. fuck, man. What the fuck are we going to do. (Especially since his conclusion is, literally: things are going to get worse, and good luck to all of us. Fun!) Anyway, this book is important, like so many bleak things, but I wouldn’t suggest reading it over a holiday weekend. I would, however, suggest giving it to a Gen Z youth in your life who doesn’t understand why they’re growing up in a fairly hopeless society. Kids, gather round and let me tell you the spooky tale of Halliburton!

5/12/26 - 5/18/26

I returned from my month of travel and immediately got sick, and therefore spent most of the week couch-ridden, trying to get caught up on my 300 Bravo shows (I’m finally becoming a Summer House gay; the cultural FOMO from seeing but not understanding the Amanda/West/Ciara/Kyle drama was killing me… watch this space), only to emerge and discover it’s randomly 100 degrees outside already. I feel like I fell through a wormhole — when I was last in NY it was 30 degrees out, we had a zillion-dollar gap in our city budget, and the Gen Z girlies were still obsessed with the West Village. Now my shoes keep getting stuck to melting sidewalk tar, Zohran did some sort of financial wizardry/money laundering to keep libraries open, and Taylor Swift went to Bushwick. I’m scared of change!!!!!

This week: I watched four movies including one of the two new Anne Hathaways (but failed to find a showing of Mother Mary — was that in theaters for like, 2 days??), and read three books because, again, I didn’t really leave the couch. Yuck!

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park

I’m starting a conspiracy theory that this movie is a propaganda campaign waged by corporate real estate — everyone in this movie loves being at the office!!! The Devil Wears Prada 2 is pro-billionaire, pro-corporation, pro-RTO, and anti-work-life-balance. I disagree with pretty much everything the film stands for. And yet? I had a lot of fun!

It helped to go in with the lowest expectations possible; I really thought this would be fan-service slop, and though it was extremely fan-servicey (I can’t imagine watching this without having seen the first movie… it would be literal gibberish), it wasn’t slop. The bar is painfully low, and yet The Devil Wears Prada 2 cleared it. Great job, team!

Weirdly, this movie is heavily in the weeds of the media business. We’ve got discussions about page views, metrics, CRM, even Miranda Priestly saying “social pins.” The film keeps one foot firmly in reality — in its world, like ours, the media industry is rapidly dying — but its other foot is in a bizarro version of reality. In the world of The Devil Wears Prada 2 no one reads articles anymore, and yet if you’re a reporter literally everyone you run into somehow knows, off the top of their head, exactly how many views your most recent article got.

This funhouse mirror reflection of our own world makes for a somewhat strange viewing experience. The overall tone of the film is escapism — the fashion! the hijinks! the cameos! — and yet the story is mostly about how our society is crumbling, and every industry is being hollowed out by greedy, tasteless billionaires who want to gobble up everything and then bury their spoils with them when they die, like a pharaoh. Throughout the movie the plot swings wildly in tone and substance, from the horrible feeling that there’s no longer a future in your chosen career, to “yay, it’s fun to dress pretty!”

And yet this discordant tone is what I liked most about the movie — it would have been very easy for The Devil Wears Prada 2 to phone it in, to basically just be an 80-minute fashion montage intercut with Meryl Streep saying all her old lines from the first movie while winking at the camera. So the fact that they really went for it, and took some wild swings and tried to actually say something about the modern media business and the horrible economic circumstances we’re all trapped under — I’m kind of impressed! The overall message is fairly incoherent (the best way to fight an evil billionaire is to find a good billionaire? Cool, thanks!), but it’s better than nothing. I love seeing a movie try something. (Again, the bar is horrifically low.)

Weirdly, the big business parts of the film are the most compelling, while the worst parts are the frivolities. There’s an absolutely god-awful romcom subplot that could and should have been completely cut from the movie; it’s easily the most random forced-romance storyline I’ve seen in a film in ages. The movie is practically dripping with sponsors and brands — a huge difference from the first film, which reportedly brands didn’t want to be seen working on, out of fear of pissing off Anna Wintour. Now, the concept of “selling out” is dead, Anna Wintour is in on the joke (or, at the very least, knows it’s good for “the brand” to be seen as in on the joke), and as a result The Devil Wears Prada 2 has more ads crammed inside than the latest issue of Vogue. Some inclusion of brands make sense, to add real-world color to the film, but some are unclear if they’re spon-con or not (Emily Blunt’s character works for Dior, but she’s kind of the villain and uses the company’s power in nefarious ways, which seems like a weird thing for the brand to sign off on). It’s all a bit strange, but, like everything in this film, in a way that feels fairly true to life — every moment of our lives is dripping in brands now, so why shouldn’t a film like this? There’s a brand name in the damn title of the film, so I really don’t know why I was shocked by all the cross promotion.

All those real-world details, though, are mostly fun; if nothing else, they make you do the Leo-DiCaprio-pointing-at-the-screen meme when something or someone pops up that you recognize. The “celeb” cameos in particular are hilarious — if you’re wondering what kind of person I am, I’m the guy who laughed at the cameos from Kara Swisher and Jenna Bush Hager, literally gasped at the Tina Brown cameo, and stared in confusion at the random NBA guy (who google tells me was Karl-Anthony Towns, who I guess is a Knick? I’ve never seen his face in my life). For a NYer, it’s always thrilling when a modern film shoots here and you get to see places on-screen that you have longstanding relationships with. I scoffed when they went to Jack’s Wife Freda (of course they did), and I celebrated afterward when I realized that Long Island Bar — where Anne Hathaway was seen filming, and which I’ve been in a blood feud with since last summer — didn’t actually make it into the film. How’s that cutting room floor taste, Long Island Bar?????? See you in hell, bitch.

So, look, don’t go to The Devil Wears Prada 2 looking for escapism from our miserable world. But it is a half-escape, at least. It’s a little fantasy version of our world, one where every industry is collapsing but can still be fixed if you just have enough gumption. A world where billionaires look like Lucy Liu and have benevolent hearts of gold. A world where your asshole boss can also turn out to have a benevolent heart of gold — she’s an asshole because she cares, you see? A world where Anne Hathaway calls herself fat and no one bats an eye. A world where Stanley Tucci is actually, finally, truly gay for once! We can’t fully escape from our awful, crumbling world, of course, but it’s nice to at least live in a more dressed-up version of the hell we’re creating, for just a little bit.

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Clockwatchers (1997) — on Criterion

Unintentionally the perfect follow-up to The Devil Wears Prada 2, this anti-work, anti-office, anti-upward-mobility masterpiece. Clockwatchers is such a bleak look at the ways work can crush you if you let it, but it’s also about how girls just want to have fun! Lisa Kudrow is unbelievable in this, all hair and 90s glamour, her character a little bit Phoebe, a little bit Valerie Cherish, but sharper-edged. Parker Posey is the effortless cool girl, as always, with a devastating sadness lurking just underneath. And Toni Collette is perfect as the naive newcomer, until she’s suddenly not. I can’t believe Office Space got all the attention back then, when this was right there for the taking. Misogyny has taken so much from us!

Undertone (2026) — on Apple

Horror movies need to take a good, long look at themselves before going out there and claiming to be the scariest movie anyone’s ever seen. This was fine, and I wouldn’t be so annoyed by it if it hadn’t promoted itself to death. It’s not as scary as it believes it is. It relies mostly on jump scares, which are lazy and obnoxious, but it’s best when it’s slowly ratcheting up the tension — even if the story is deeply stupid.

There’s something absolutely unbearable about watching a movie about podcasters that I’m never going to get over, so the movie was kind of fucked from the start, if I’m being honest. A movie about podcasters??? If you’re going to make your main characters in your horror movie podcasters, I’m going to have to root for them to die, and there’s simply no way around that!

Magellan (2025) — on Criterion

If you’re in the mood for a slow-moving, absolutely gorgeous and bleak 3-hour film about colonialism, Magellan is a masterpiece. Every frame of this film is spectacular, a true visual painting, and Gael Garcia Bernal is possibly at a career best. This is the kind of film you need to be in the right mood for, and your phone absolutely should not be anywhere near you lest you let it suck you away from the screen in the slower moments, but Magellan kept me enthralled for all three hours. Beautiful, stunning, moving, and indulgently slow — the perfect cure for scroll-induced brainrot. Give it a chance!

Nova Scotia House, by Charlie Porter (2025) — library ebook

There are a few things I absolutely loathe in a novel, stylistically: not using quotation marks, run-on sentences, “train of thought” writing in general. And that is all Nova Scotia House is, its sentences tumbling at you in a nearly unbroken rhythm for 200 pages, as if someone just sat down next to you on the bus and just started rambling. I absolutely hate this kind of writing style, so much so that I nearly gave up on the book. But I’m so, so glad I persevered, because the deeper I got, the writing style started to make sense, until it felt integral to the story. This is a book about the AIDS crisis, after all, and how else are you supposed to capture the feeling of being trapped in a living nightmare you can’t escape from? The writing feels urgent and desperate and almost coming from a constant state of disbelief:

We were at the clinic it specialized in HIV anyone could get an appointment it was where Jerry wanted to go. Jerry was weak but Jerry was still Jerry in the room where we waited there were men who were no longer themselves I had not known them did not know them would never know them but they were no longer themselves, they had been someone else, someone other before this, they should still be someone else, this parallel universe that should not be this universe, they should not be here, we should not be here.

I’m glad I did push through, because this was one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in a while. When was the last time a book made you actually cry? Like, tears running down your cheeks cry? Maybe Nova Scotia House can do that for you! Sure, it’s a little schlocky and sentimental, but what else are you supposed to feel when men — who were literally just like you, except they simply happened to be born a decade or two before you — are endlessly dying for no reason at all? It’s not every day you want to sit and really feel the devastation of the AIDS crisis; I get your hesitation. But you also shouldn’t forget it, and this book is a lovely, brutal way to remember.

Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, by Rax King (2021) — paperback

This is a quick, zippy little collection of personal essays that mix memoir with odes to the tacky cultural touchpoints we grew up with in the 90s/2000s. There are essays on Creed, Hot Topic, Meat Loaf, and Guy Fieri (you can read that one here) that are intertwined with Rax King’s recollections on growing up alongside these cultural moments. She’s a great, fun writer, so I flew through it all, reading it the same way I used to gobble up personal essays like this, back on the messier internet days of 15-ish years ago. As someone who finds earnestness fairly tacky, I appreciate a writer unashamed to share even her most embarrassing thoughts and feelings. This is what the internet used to run on!

Butter, by Asako Yuzuki (2017) — paperback

I found this silly and fun, if a bit long. It follows a Japanese journalist who becomes obsessed with a female serial killer in prison for murdering the men she dated. The women bond over food, and get caught up in a twisted cat-and-mouse game all around eating and sex and murder. It’s fun and pulpy and deals with misogyny and body issues and sexuality in conservative Japan, but I’m not really equipped to talk about all that stuff since I’m famously not a Japanese woman, so I’ll just say I enjoyed it! The end!

5/5/26 - 5/11/26

My month of travel has come to a conclusion, and it went out with a doozy. Bear with me: this week there will be more travel complaints. But then it’s over! I’ve returned to my beloved NYC, where the weather is unstable and the pollen dust is an inch thick. I have so much culture to catch up on! I have 200 episodes of Bravo shows, an entire season of The Comeback, and somehow there are TWO gay Anne Hathaway movies out right now??? I’m overwhelmed, but nevertheless I will persist. Someone has to!

This week: I love Apple TV’s new show, I have finally turned against Glen Powell, and I experienced mayhem on an airplane.

Widow’s Bay, season 1 episodes 1-3 — on Apple TV

My only complaint with Widow’s Bay is that it’s coming out at the start of summer, when it is clearly an autumn show. I’m not in a chilly, spooky mood right now, and I suspect I’d love the show even more if I were able to watch it in early-evening darkness, snug under a blanket. But that’s a minor issue, because I have no other complaints about the show — I love it! The end!

Set on the fictional New England island of Widow’s Bay, where mysterious and evil things have been happening for generations but which is now becoming a tourist destination, Matthew Rhys plays the mayor trying to keep things together. In tone and structure, it’s most similar to the X-Files, swinging effortlessly between comedy and horror and doing both equally well (though I will admit it took me about an episode and a half to really settle into the show’s comedic tone). Similar to LOST, there’s an overriding mystery (which is literally the same mystery as LOST: what’s happening on this island??), but with The X-Files’ episodic “villains of the week.” So far we’ve already had evil fog, a killer clown, and a terrifyingly horny sea hag. And through it all we’ve got Matthew Rhys as both Mulder and Scully in one very handsome Welshman.

Apple TV always feels so random and almost all their shows are very… normie (sorry to my dear friend reading this who works there!). Like, when was the last time someone wanted to talk about an Apple TV show with you? Sure, there were those couple years when I had to endure people telling me how I need to watch Ted Lasso — even though every time I asked, “Is it funny?” they’d reply, “… It’s sweet!” — but even that tide has mercifully receded. So Widow’s Bay feels like their first genuinely weird and unique show. Much like the X-Files, I’m not sure I care that much about the central mystery, and I’m much more enjoying the weekly hijinks, but I’m very interested to see how this show develops, which is not something I’ve ever said about an Apple show. It’s so nice when our corporate rulers surprise us!

The Running Man (2025) — on Delta

This feels like it was made to watch on a plane. There’s really no reason for a movie this dumb to be this long, but on a plane that becomes a strength, as it ate up nearly half the time between LA and New York, and I could doze through it and still follow the general plot. Glen Powell’s people have really been working overtime to make him into The Guy We All Love, and though I’ll admit I’ve been charmed by him in the past, this is the first movie I’ve seen where he feels like he’s going down a highly unpleasant Ryan Reynolds route. There’s a smugness now to his onscreen persona, an exhausting, constant wink to the audience that’s like, “Can you believe someone with abs and arms like this is also goofy?” that I find nauseating. Sure, it was fun seeing Glen’s ass for a second in this movie, but that’s IT.

Wagyu filet mignon, before the chaos started — in the Delta One lounge

Traveling in America is a nightmare. We all know this. It’s always been mediocre at best, but in a post-DOGE world, stories about the misery of domestic air travel are a dime a dozen. And yet, attempting to get home from LA this weekend was one of the most frustrating and genuinely baffling travel disasters I’ve ever experienced. Bear with me as I tell you the tale of a surreal series of events that took me from the highs of travel to the absolute lows, and resulted in a near-mutiny against our plane’s pilot.

It started out fairly typical: flight is delayed 3 hours, something about mechanical issues, blah blah blah. Then it was 4 hours, then it was 5, as our original plane was swapped out for a new one in New York, before coming to LA. As the afternoon dragged on, most of our plane’s passengers hopped to other flights, which meant I continuously got bumped up the upgrade list, until, suddenly, I was upgraded to Delta One for the first time in my life. Picturing the gorgeous lie-flat seat that was now in my grasp, I remained complacent, and didn’t search for an alternative flight like everyone else. This would prove to be a terrible decision.

Meanwhile, the delays kept mounting — our new plane had arrived at LAX, but was suddenly having engine problems. I don’t know a lot about planes, but I think engines are probably one of the worst parts of the plane to have problems on! And yet, due to my upgrade, I now had access to the Delta One Lounge. So, once again, while the smarter people found alternative flights home, I was happily in one of the nicest lounges I had ever been in — as place that’s like if heaven was real and only for rich people and mid-century modern for some reason. As our flight was delayed yet again, pushing us 7 hours past our original departure time, I ordered a wagyu filet mignon. “Why not take the wine into the massage chair?” I heard a waitress ask another person in the lounge behind me, and I, too, wondered: why not take the wine into the massage chair??

My lounge bliss was cut short by the announcement that our plane’s engine problems were too disastrous to fly, so a new plane had been found, and we would begin boarding soon. I said goodbye to the gorgeous Delta One lounge, boarded the new plane, and in that time my colleague Jenny had also gotten an upgrade to Delta One — in fact, practically the entire plane had been upgraded, since most of the people who had actually paid for good seats had seen the writing on the wall and gotten the hell out of dodge, leaving us peasants to enjoy their crumbs. The meek shall inherit the upgrades!

The first class seats were practically full of first-timers like me, so people were marveling at the perks like the chimpanzees at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. A girl with braces was in the seat next to me, taking pictures of the menu, while I tried my best to look like the kind of person so used to lie-flat seats that he doesn’t even realize there are other types of seats on a plane. I desperately hoped anyone who had paid for first class didn’t lump me in with this gauche little girl. Sure, I was taking pictures of my lux surroundings as well, but I wasn’t being so obvious about it.

We pulled back from the gate, began taxiing, and then… stopped. The head flight attendant — a brassy young gal named Hayley who I would soon learn had an attitude that tells me she’s absolutely from Philly — got on the phone with IT and I heard her inform them that her screen that controlled “everything” had broken. They tried to troubleshoot over the phone for an agonizing 30 minutes, before dragging us back to the gate so maintenance could get on board. This is when a portal to Hell opened inside our plane.

Several passengers jump up into the aisles and demand to be let off the plane immediately, terrified it would crash upon takeoff. The pilot himself comes out to reassure everyone that the plane is completely fine, that it was just the flight attendants’ system that was buggy, but that didn’t placate anyone — perhaps, like me, they were remembering the beginning of Final Destination, when the overhead lights not working is a sign that the plane is going to crash. Flight attendant Hayley also doesn’t help things by undermining the pilot and saying that, yes, it is the flight attendants’ system that is buggy, but that system also controls the smoke detectors and emergency slides. “So it is kind of important,” she says. That’s really not helping, Hayley!!!

Making things worse, one passenger has let his dog out onto the seat next to him, and when Hayley asks him if it is a service animal, he tells her it is one, adding, “My girlfriend works for Delta.” As if having a girlfriend who works for Delta means you can do whatever you want on a plane? Hayley, in the midst of all this absolute chaos, takes the time to search the internal system to see if the dog is, in fact, a service animal — my messy queen!!! Of course the guy was lying, and Hayley informs him she’ll be reporting him, to ruin his future ability to use his girlfriend’s Delta privileges.

Hayley, chaos incarnate herself, is so incensed about this guy lying to her that — while we are in our 9th hour of delays, on a broken-down plane full of people in the aisles erupting into mass revolt — she goes into the cockpit to complain about the dog guy to the pilots. Hayley, what are you doing! Next to my colleague Jenny, an absolutely gorgeous woman starts sobbing at the idea that she won’t see her kids on Mother’s Day. The situation is degenerating quickly.

The pilot, seeing things spiraling out of control, gets on the intercom to announce once again that the plane is completely safe to fly, that maintenance is fixing the flight attendants’ system, and that everything is fine except for one liiiiiiittle problem: if we don’t leave in 40 minutes, he will time out, and we’ll be left without a pilot. A gate agent finally opens the plane’s door, and half the passengers rush off. Hayley takes this opportunity to tell the gate agent about the dog guy, loudly, so that dog guy can hear her complaining about him. Her priority throughout all of this remains getting revenge on a passenger for lying to her, and I have to respect it.

A little while later, there is an announcement: the system is fixed! Just some light paperwork to be done, no more than 20 minutes, with plenty of time to get off the ground before we lose our pilot. The few of us left on this now-barren flight burst into applause. The gorgeous woman sobbing next to Jenny begins smiling and laughing, relieved she’ll get to see her kids. 20 minutes come and go with no updates, and then another 20 minutes. By my count, the pilot has already timed out, and yet no one is saying anything. It is now 11pm and we were supposed to leave 10 hours ago.

A man in first class decides the best way he can help the situation is to stand up and start screaming. Meanwhile, a woman in first class, wine-drunk and deeply annoying, keeps announcing to the entire plane that “someone on this plane is not meant to go to New York, and we need to all figure out who that is! Something is preventing them from traveling!” She either genuinely believes this to be true, or believes this to be such a hilarious joke that she announces this at least three times.

The pilot comes out, and the first class man who is screaming gets inches from the pilot’s face, yelling about how long we had been sitting with no updates. I’ve never seen a person actually yell at a pilot before! The pilot now has to spend a precious 5-10 minutes in one-on-one conversation with this man, placating him, before he can get back to his important pilot problem-solving. At one point, the annoying woman interrupts to inform the pilot about her theory that “something” is preventing someone on this plane from getting to New York. He calmly nods and pretends to take this in as valuable advice, using all his decades of pilot training to keep a straight face. At this point, I start becoming convinced that this woman is the one who isn’t meant to go to New York — if nothing else, it can’t hurt the rest of us to throw her off the plane, can it?

Hayley, meanwhile, has told some of us that, yes, the pilot is timing out, but that “he can push it,” so it seems that we will be finally leaving — we are now 10 hours past departure time, and we’ve already been on this plane for 3 hours. The mechanics leave, the pilot gets into the cockpit, we all settle in, and then… nothing happens. More conversations between flight attendants and the pilot, who I’m pretty sure I hear say, “Are you fucking kidding me?” And then I am sure I do hear him say, “Snacks???” My heart sinks. Why is our pilot in an argument about snacks right now? The woman next to Jenny, who was sobbing about her kids, and then started laughing when they announced we were leaving, is now sobbing again.

After a few minutes of tense discussion, the pilot makes another announcement: the food on the plane has been sitting out for 5 hours, and is no longer safe to eat. So we’re going to take a vote — before he can even finish speaking, the entire plane has voted to just go. We don’t need to eat! I’ve never in my life seen a pilot making a plane take a vote, but I’m inspired by the speed with which we all came together. This is like an episode of an Aaron Sorkin show — Americans all putting aside their differences and coming together for the greater good! So, once again, we’re about to take off. Everything is fine. We’re going home! I can hear the triumphant music swelling.

Nope. More panic and intense conversations in the cockpit. I can hear the pilot, who for the first time is actually angry, now yelling at flight attendant Hayley. “You need to get your people together,” he yells, and she says something back at him, and I’m wondering just how bad things have to get on an airplane before your flight attendants and pilots start fighting. The pilot shamefully comes out for yet another announcement, informing us that there is actually a clause, buried deep in flight attendants’ contracts, that states that they must have meals on flights this long. So now people have been dispatched to find meals for the flight attendants in the airport. And, he informs us, he is in his final 20 minutes — if we’re not in the air in 20 minutes, he can’t fly the plane, and the flight is canceled. Even worse, it’s now 11:30 pm, so nothing is open in the airport, so no one knows where the flight attendants will get meals from. “The gravest mistake I ever made,” the pilot informs us in his serious pilot voice, “Was getting myself a hamburger earlier and not getting meals for the flight attendants.” I feel as if I am trapped in an off-Broadway play. Why is there a pilot telling me a tragic story about a hamburger right now?

People start pulling granola bars out of handbags, offering them to the pilot, who, absurdly, has to say things like, “Granola bars are not meals,” still in his serious pilot voice. After 5 agonizing minutes, a gate agent sprints onto the plane carrying trays of something, and we briefly celebrate, before learning that whatever those trays were, they also do not count as meals. We are confused and asking many questions, the kinds of questions we never thought we needed to ask on a plane before: what does constitute a meal, legally? Can flight attendants sign something that temporarily waives one part of their contract? We are lost in the murky depths of flight attendant contract law, when we should all be home in our beds.

It gradually becomes clear, but unspoken, that at least one flight attendant has deliberately triggered the meal clause of their contract, refusing to work while hungry. Relatable! I choose to blame the obnoxious passengers — namely the dog guy, the first class screaming man, and the annoying first class woo-woo woman — for being so goddamned irritating that at least one flight attendant has finally thrown up their hands and said, “Fuck you, I’m canceling your flight out of spite.” Which is also very relatable!

Miraculously, though, meals are procured from somewhere, with a mere 7 minutes left before the pilot times out. In the most dramatic point of an already dramatic night, the pilot announces, “I’m going for it,” before sprinting up the aisle and going into the cockpit. We have now gone from off-Broadway to a full-blown blockbuster, the pilot slapping the cap back on his head before taking the wheel and tearing down the runway as the clock ticks down to 0. I am exhausted and thoroughly beaten down, and yet I have also never felt more alive.

Two minutes later, he comes out of the cockpit, hat in hand, clearly having realized that maybe it’s not the best idea to rush takeoff on a plane that has been having mechanical issues for the past several hours. He tells us that he’s done all he can do, and the flight is now canceled. It’s past midnight, and we have been delayed for 11 hours, with the last 4 of those hours trapped on the plane, surrounded by chaos. We all shuffle out into the airport clutching our things, miserable.

You know the drill after that: more chaos in the airport, long lines, rebooking, assholes yelling at employees about hotel vouchers, etc. The next day, I got out on an earlier flight, while my dear colleague Jenny was stranded for an unbelievable 2nd day of endless delays, ultimately only getting home in the early hours of Monday morning. (Jenny doesn’t have a Substack — YET — so you will be missing out on the thrilling part 2 to this travel drama. I’m so sorry!) It was an absolutely absurd end to a very long work trip, and I don’t know if it is actually his fault, but I blame MTV’s Sean Duffy, who is too busy filming a reality show to bother running our country’s infrastructure. Everything is crumbling! The good news? Delta gave us $12 meal vouchers for our trouble :)

4/28/26 - 5/4/26

Wow, it’s the 100th Death by Consumption! Time sure flies when you’re consuming! It’s a privilege to be able to get on here and complain weekly at you. This started as a way to try to be more conscious of the things I’m consuming, to spend more time thinking critically about what I consume and why. To be honest……. can’t say it’s really changed my overall consumption patterns! (I did just watch all of Love Overboard on Hulu, after all…) But it’s been fun regardless. And isn’t having fun more important than bettering yourself??? Maybe by DBC #200 I’ll become the world’s most perfect consumer. Until then: let’s make fun of a really bad movie I watched!

This week: I watched the most insane movie of the century, plus two other mediocre movies from last year, I was driven to the brink of madness by petty hotel policies, and I read three lovely books.

Ella McCay (2025) — on Delta

Ella McCay launches itself into insanity faster than any movie I’ve ever seen. It opens with an older woman — the voice of Marge Simpson, in fact — speaking to camera, who introduces herself with, “I’m the narrator,” before she starts telling you about a woman named Ella McCay. Ella, we learn, is the Lieutenant Governor of a state. What state, you ask? We never learn! (The most hilarious version of the movie’s weird refusal to say what state this takes place in is when Jamie Lee Curtis says to Ella, “You’re going to be the governor of the state you were born and raised in!”). We also quickly learn that the narrator, Marge Simpson, is not just a narrator, but also Ella McCay’s assistant — why Ella’s administrative assistant is narrating her life to us, we don’t know. We are 2 minutes into the film and I already have 20 questions.

We learn a little about Ella’s backstory: she grew up living with her aunt, Jamie Lee Curtis, after her father, Woody Harrelson, had to relocate to California after some sort of a sexual harassment scandal. Her father’s sexual harassment of women at work is, for some reason, played for laughs. This is already a lot to take in, and we’re about 5 minutes into the film. In the middle of a bafflingly light-hearted family confrontation between Ella and her father over his sexual harassment allegations, Ella pulls her little brother over to the dictionary to read aloud the definition of the word “trauma,” before resuming the fight.

At no point in this movie did I have any idea what anyone would say or do next, nor did I ever understand what I had just seen after anything happened. I watched Ella McCay in a flow state, as if I were in a sensory deprivation tank, or as if I were a 6-month-old staring up at the adults speaking English, trying to figure out what all this babbling means. To watch Ella McCay is an exercise in learning to be comfortable with the unknown. I’m starting a conspiracy theory that Ella McCay was made by the government in anticipation of UFO disclosure; once you’ve watched Ella McCay, the concept of conversing with an alien species will no longer feel foreign or scary. Whatever the fuck is going on with Alpha Centauri will make more sense than anything that happens in Ella McCay.

Every single choice in this movie is deeply baffling. In one scene, we cut to the bedroom after Ella and her husband — we’ll get to him in a second, oh boy — have just finished having sex. They’re breathing heavily, and naked under the sheets — you know, normal post-sex movie stuff. Except there’s one inexplicable addition to the scene: Ella is wearing a jaunty silk scarf, ostentatiously wrapped around her neck. The scarf is never mentioned. Why does Ella have a sex scarf? Are they into erotic asphyxiation? Was there a graphic Ella McCay choking scene that was cut after testing audiences reacted poorly to it? These are just some of the infinite questions you will be left with after watching Ella McCay. The sex scarf is never revisited.

The core plot of this movie is so crazy that I truly didn’t believe it was the plot until I checked the time and realized we were more than halfway through the movie and a different, better plot had yet to materialize. So, here is what Ella McCay is about: Ella — who, again, is the Lieutenant Governor of “the state you were born and raised in” — is about to become Governor, because the current Governor, Albert Brooks(!), is getting promoted “to the Cabinet.” But Ella’s big career move is about to be ruined, because a journalist has just learned that Ella has secretly been having consensual, marital sex with her husband during lunch hours — in a government apartment! This, the mildest government sex scandal in human history, is apparently enough to derail Ella’s nascent governorship, due to arcane laws about misusing government property. You know what they say in film school: nothing builds dramatic tension quite like getting into the fine print of local legislation!

Even worse for our dear Ella, her husband leaked the story himself, for reasons that are never quite clear to me. Sometimes it seems we’re supposed to find him endearing, while other times he’s presented as a mustache-twirling cartoon villain. Her husband is a local pizza shop owner, who has scandalously been “watering down his tomato sauce,” a shady pizza parlor practice that has netted him “an extra $300,000 a year.” Mamma mia, that’s a lot of sauce!!! His mother, a WASPy matriarch who’s always in a pearl necklace, randomly appears in, like, two scenes as some sort of Lady Macbeth figure, urging her son to scheme against his wife Ella McCay for reasons that never make sense. The best I could figure was that she wants Ella to appoint her husband… co-governor? For a movie that’s deeply in the weeds when it comes to the rules around misappropriating government property, Ella McCay often seems to have no idea of how the government actually works. Kathy Hochul’s husband must have watched Ella McCay and been like, wait, we can do that???

To get ahead of this “scandal,” Ella decides to go public with the shocking fact that she’s been consensually having sex with her husband. Unfortunately this brilliant PR move pisses off her bitchy tomato sauce husband, who at this point made me start to worry he had some sort of borderline personality disorder based on his ever-shifting character traits. You see, he’s annoyed with Ella because he wasn’t consulted before she had a whole press conference about their sex life. Fair! But wait: he’s the one who told the reporter about it in the first place. Things then get even more confusing, as Ella’s nefarious pizza husband decides to go back to the reporter and bribe him to bury the story — even though the story has already been publicly confirmed by Ella herself. And this dumbass pizza boy bribes the reporter with a signed check for the bafflingly specific figure of $7,500, which then becomes another scandal in itself. This movie is, basically, Ella McCay and her husband running head-first into a brick wall over and over again while everyone else just kind of watches, confused.

Throughout all of this, there’s a strange subplot in which Ella’s brother has agoraphobia (you’ll recall, from the reading of the dictionary definition of “trauma,” that he has been traumatized by their father’s sex scandal). But he pretty much gets over the agoraphobia after Ella tells him he needs to go outside. Why didn’t anyone else try that! But while he’s been hanging out inside, he’s developed “math that helps people with sports betting” (???), and this vague math is so good that he’s making “$2 million a year.” Okay, so, to recap: watering down pizza sauce = $300,000/year; sports betting math = $2 million/year. Got it.

But wait: there’s more going on with Ella McCay’s brother! The year prior, he proposed to his girlfriend Ayo Edibiri, but then he panicked and ran away before he could get a real response, changing his phone number so she can’t contact him again. (No one in this movie has ever heard of the concept of “going to someone’s house” or “being normal.”) Prompted by Ella — who’s in rare truth-telling form thanks to the “6 doses of weed” she accidentally consumes; don’t ask, it’s a long story — he is inspired to go find out if his girlfriend still possibly wants to marry him, a year after he bizarrely stopped speaking to her. Good news: she does!!! So that’s a fun little plot to follow. Glad that got resolved so easily! There’s also another side plot that features Ella’s security detail, played by Kumail Nanjiani and some other guy, who are trying to get more overtime pay, but that is way too stupid to even get into.

What I’m saying is: Ella McCay is perfect. Watching it on a plane, I caught the worst case of the giggles I’ve had in ages, alarming the woman sitting next to me, who looked over at my screen to see what I was laughing at, and then ended up watching Ella McCay herself. I am sorry to that woman, but I hope she enjoyed it as much as I did. I have no idea what happened in James L. Brooks’ brain to make him sit down and write a movie like this, but I hope he isn’t discouraged by the reaction, because I will die if we don’t get Ella McCay 2. There are so many enormous, unanswered questions! Will Ella pass “the mom bill” she’s been “working on for years”? Can Kumail Nanjiani get overtime pay without getting in trouble? Will Ella’s husband go to jail for his pizza sauce crimes??

Ella McCay is unafraid to ask the big questions and, even bolder, to leave them all unanswered. It’s unconcerned with small-bore concepts like “coherent story arcs” and “beginnings and endings” and “character growth” and “sentences that have logic.” It’s an avant-garde cinematic experiment, a bold new step forward for Hollywood, a huge leap in the field of Covid Brain Fog Cinema. Some day soon, I think we will all look back on Ella McCay as the kind of brilliantly confusing mess that only a human brain could cook up. AI could truly never create a disaster like this, and for that we must be thankful to Ella McCay.

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Freakier Friday (2025) — on Delta

Between Ella McCay and this, I spent about 5 hours in the air watching Jamie Lee Curtis make some of the strangest faces ever captured on screen. Anyway, Freakier Friday was totally fine — it didn’t capture the fun of the first movie, exactly, but it also didn’t shit all over it, which is pretty much all we can ask for, I guess. Lindsay Lohan doesn’t quite have the spark she had as a younger actress, but she’s also better than she’s been in her Netflix slop, with at least a couple moments of actual comedic brilliance. This is fine! I see why it came and went without anyone really talking about it. This movie would have been better if Jamie Lee Curtis’s character had died, though. (But that’s true for every movie she’s in these days.)

Nightbitch (2025) — on Delta

Of the three movies I watched on the plane, it’s tragic that this was my least favorite. It’s such a good concept — Amy Adams goes so feral after giving birth that she starts to turn into a dog, or at least believe she’s turning into a dog — but the film knows the concept is good and wants to tell you how good it is at every turn. In nearly every scene, the characters tell you exactly how they’re feeling and why they’re doing the things they’re doing; because when you’ve got an actor as talented as Amy Adams, you definitely do not want to let her play anything with subtlety! Even worse, about 30 minutes in, the film runs out of ideas and just starts hitting the same beats over and over again for an excruciating 90 minutes longer, before it’s all mercifully put down.

An $8 cup of drip coffee — at the Viceroy Santa Monica

Work has sent me to LA for a wildly long 12-day business trip, where they have put us up at the Viceroy in Santa Monica. From what I’ve been told, the Viceroy was once upon a time (say, 2014) the spot on the west side for the cool and the famous, but time ravages us all, even once-trendy hotels. I’m halfway through my stay here, and it is safe to say the vibe here is a bit… upscale motel. You could argue that it’s gauche for me to complain about my free hotel, but just think: you could have spent serious money staying here during your next family vacation. I’m doing the world a favor! So this isn’t entitled whining; this is service journalism, okay?

The first and most ever-present issue for me is the coffee situation. Even your lowliest Holiday Inn Express understands the primal importance of being able to access coffee immediately upon waking up, and as a result, most hotels make it as easy and frictionless as possible to inject caffeine straight into your aorta the instant your eyes flutter open. Nearly every hotel in the world understands that quick, easy, and most importantly free coffee is a human right. But not the Viceroy.

Here, there’s no coffee maker in your room. To be fair, I was asked at check-in if I wanted to have one delivered to my room, and I said yes, but that coffee maker took days to get delivered. “Is there coffee in the lobby as well?” I asked the front desk, and — after a momentary pause that I should have seen as a harbinger of doom — the front desk woman said, “……………….Yes.” What that actually means is that you have to buy a coffee from the bar. I only learned this after shuffling downstairs at 7 am my first morning here, in flip flops and shorts, hair looking like Doc Brown’s, blinking helplessly in the middle of the lobby as I tried to locate the goddamned coffee vat. Inexplicably, there were already several business meetings happening in the lobby area at 7am, while I scurried about the corners of the lobby in search of my beloved coffee, hissing at anyone who looked at me.

Finally, I saw the sacred shimmering urn of coffee behind the bar, like a beacon. I approached and growled, “Coffee, please,” to the man behind the counter, who did his best to not look horrified at the creature in front of him. Instead of handing me coffee, he handed me a receipt and said, “Room number and name.” I looked at the paper, which informed me I was being charged $8 (including a mandatory 20% “service charge”!) for the privilege of being handed a small paper cup of medium-strength drip coffee. I was appalled. I’m still appalled! I genuinely believe charges should be brought against the Viceroy for petty larceny. 8 American dollars for a cup of coffee? At a hotel???? Ironically, I no longer needed the coffee, because my body and mind were instantly sharpened into alertness by a white, hot rage.

The next morning I awoke at 5am due to jet lag, so I shuffled down to the lobby to pay my morning coffee tithe to the gods of capitalism, only to discover a new loophole created by the CIA-trained torture squad here at the Viceroy: you can’t get your $8 coffee until 6:30 am. (For some reason, that :30 feels especially galling to me — all other hotel amenities, like the gym, for example, open at 6 am, but the Viceroy apparently doesn’t believe in caffeinated workouts.) I shamefully ambled back up to my room and waited an ungodly 80 caffeine-less minutes, before I went back down at 6:20. The coffee, I could see and smell, had been brewed, but no one was behind the bar. I stood there, looking as pathetic and hangdog as possible, my eyes begging any passing employee to take pity on me and pour me a fucking cup of goddamned coffee. Finally, at 6:27, someone asked, “Have you not been helped?” “NO,” I practically shouted, and begged him to pour me a cup. First, of course, he handed me the receipt, and I signed away another $8 before I was mercifully granted my pathetic cup.

This has become my routine here, now: wake up, shuffle downstairs, grumble if anyone so much as looks in my direction, beg for a coffee, sign the $8 receipt, retreat to my room. It’s an undignified, humiliating way to start the day, and it’s just one of the many ways I’ve started to suspect the Viceroy is actually trying to slowly drive its guests insane. The bathrooms, for example, were clearly designed by someone who’s never actually been inside a bathroom before. The door is — like every modern hotel these days — a sliding barn door, because the thing everyone wants is a 3-inch gap so that anyone outside your bathroom can hear you shitting (though I suppose at the Viceroy you won’t be shitting, because you can’t get coffee). The shower is in the deepest tub of all time, so precarious to get in and out of that I assume housekeeping is constantly finding bodies in the bathrooms of people who have died of head injuries. But most infuriating is the bathroom sink, where the faucet isn’t aligned with the bowl of the sink, so there is no way to wash your hands without water pouring all over the countertop. The bathroom floor is constantly wet, due to the waterfall pouring off the edges of the counter. Every time I go to the bathroom, and I step in a puddle of water, or practically die getting out of the shower, I think, “These people are completely insane.” Do they want me to become insane too?

I’ve lost track of my petty complaints, because practically every aspect of the room makes no sense. If I want to sit at the desk and do some work, I can’t, because the desk chair is locked into place by another chair, like so:

I knew the Viceroy had broken me when, delirious on jet lag during another miserable 5 am morning, I awoke to a sticky-hot room despite having set the thermostat at a lovely 67 degrees. I conducted a few psychotic experiments that allowed me to determine — and please go with me here, even though I know what I’m about to say will sound like I’m falling into Alex Jones territory — that the room’s AC is controlled by sensors that only activate it when someone is moving around the room. So if you’re out of the room or lying still — a thing people famously do while sleeping — the AC will turn off. It appears the only way to keep the AC on is to continuously move, which luckily you will be doing while you sleep, because you will be sweating and thrashing in your sheets all night. In the depths of my sleepless mania, I descended into an AC-triggered paranoia, trying to uncover where the sensors were in my room, and what that meant. Is the Viceroy watching me in my room? I considered buying some tinfoil and lining the walls. I still might!

The longer you stay here, the more the petty indignities pile up. When I first checked in, I tapped my room key against the door lock, and it kept flashing a red light, refusing to unlock. After several attempts I trudged back down to the front desk, where they asked me, “Did you touch the key to the lock?” and I replied, “Yes, of course!” thinking I had just passed the simplest test of all time. In fact, I could not have been more wrong, as the front desk woman informed me, as if she were talking to a dog who had somehow learned to speak, “Okay, you are not supposed to tap it on the lock.” She continued to explain, slowing her speech pattern down so that an idiot of my caliber could possibly understand: “If you touch the key to the door, it de-magnetizes. You have to hover the key about half an inch from the lock and then it should unlock!” (I’m now on my third set of room keys.) This is an insane hotel designed by insane people who want to turn the entire world insane, one guest at a time.

The Viceroy wants to be this upscale yet quirky hotel where we do things a litttttle bit different than those other guys, but all the other guys were doing quite fine and, in fact, turns out I prefer the other guys! But I love having an enemy, especially a corporate enemy, so I’m excited to discover new reasons I hate the Viceroy for the rest of my stay.

On the Calculation of Volume IV, by Solvej Balle (2026) — paperback

God, it felt so good to slide back into this book, and to fall back into the 18th of November. The rhythm of the language is so soothing to me, almost hypnotic. It lulls me into a slightly sick sense of comfort that somewhat mimics the way the characters themselves have grown comfortable with being trapped in November 18th. I suspect your experience with this series will vary depending on how you pace your reading — reading all 7 in a row, once they’re released, will feel very different than waiting months between the volumes’ releases. Right now, I’m enjoying the on-and-off rhythm of it, where I now have to wait 6 months until the fifth book comes out. It’s just lovely to dip into November 18th every once in a while! I haven’t loved a book series like this in a long time. Get on board with this series now, you won’t regret it!

The Changeling, by Joy Williams (1978) — paperback

A very strange little fairytale of a book about the horrors of having children, with the beautiful and odd language you’d expect from vintage Joy Williams. Dusk is “the hour between the dog and the wolf.” Children are “like drunkards really, determined to talk at great length and with great incoherence.” This book is funny and horrifying and mystifying, even though half the time with Joy Williams I’m like… girl what are you even saying………. But that’s my problem, not her problem.

Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Ancient Egypt’s Temples from Destruction, by Lynne Olson (2023) — library ebook

This is a fascinating little biography of a woman I had sadly never heard of: Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, a French Egyptologist who had a wild, eventful life, managed to change the world for better in multiple ways, and, least importantly but most personally, has made me feel quite lazy in comparison.

She starts her career in the 1930s, in a heavily sexist male-dominated field and we follow all the trials and tribulations of being a woman working in the field in Egypt — and, for all the anti-Arab bullshit in the media, it’s very morbidly funny that the Egyptian men treat her with way more equality than the French. Once World War II hits, the book becomes almost a spy thriller, with Desroches and a motley band of historians and artists working together to not only secretly empty the Louvre of its treasures before the Nazis can get their hands on it, but to also spearhead the French Resistance (almost all of them were caught and killed by the Nazis; Desroches’ survival is practically miraculous). After the war, and for the next 50 years of her life, she’s dedicated to saving some of the most impressive and famous Ancient Egyptian temples from destruction — pulling off some truly incredible feats of engineering and politics.

This is a wild, all-encompassing history of not only one woman’s life, but the history of Egyptology, as well as the beginnings of the United Nations and international cooperation, with lots of fun little historical tidbits, including some incredible cameos from personalities like Anwar Sadat and Jackie Onassis. There’s even good gossip about Ancient Egyptians who lived 5,000 years ago, like a temple builder who was notorious for sleeping with the other builders’ wives. Between that and the rampant misogyny Christiane deals with throughout her long career, this book is full of timeless reminders that humans really never change, like this complaint from a traveler to Egypt in the 1800s:

The worst enemy of Egyptian antiquity is the English or American traveler. The name of these idiots will go down in posterity, since they were careful to inscribe their names on famous monuments across the most delicate drawings.

Americans and the English: ruining the world in large and small ways for centuries!

4/21/26 - 4/27/26

I am, right this very minute, traveling to Los Angeles from Switzerland, where I spent the past week — I’m randomly having an unusually glam month — so forgive the abbreviated email. The email below, halfassed while typing on trains and planes, was all I wrote before jet lag destroyed me. And, really, the only things I consumed all week were wine, bratwurst, cheese, and beautiful views. And who the hell wants to hear about THAT?

This week: I tortured myself for some scones, and I ruined my sleep by re-watching a classic on a redeye, and that’s all for now, folks!

Irish soda bread scones — at Mary O’s, in the East Village, NY

Ironically, after a week of traveling around Switzerland, the most embarrassing tourist activity I engaged in this week took place in my home city. You may have heard about this scone shop, Mary O’s, from Humans of New York or another similar social media endeavor. I didn’t. But I was informed about it by my aunt, who emailed me 7 months ago, requesting that I pick up some of these (very very good, I was assured) scones, to bring home as a surprise for my mother last Thanksgiving. This small request turned into a half-year-long ordeal, which only finally concluded this week.

The first issue with Mary O’s is that it’s only open 3 days a week, starting at 7am, and only stays open until the scones run out, which happens by noon at the latest. The second issue is that it’s extremely popular, with lines frequently stretching around the corner, and waiting times over an hour. The third issue is that it’s located in the East Village, a not-entirely-convenient location to get to from my apartment. What this meant was that I would need to wake up early the day before flying home for Thanksgiving, travel into the city, wait in line for possibly an hour, purchase a few boxes of scones, and then transport said scones to Wisconsin as my carry-on.

For many reasons, this did not happen at Thanksgiving, and then it did not happen again at Christmas. It also didn’t happen earlier this year, when I met my parents in San Diego. After months of failed attempts to bring my mom these scones on behalf of her sister, I knew my aunt was getting frustrated with me. I felt like a bad nephew, a bad son, and worst of all, a bad scone-transporter. But I also really, really did not want to go to the East Village at 7am and wait in a line. And can you blame me?

But finally an opportunity presented itself, because this past week, Justin and I were traveling to Switzerland to meet up with my parents, who were themselves meeting up with my cousin and two of my aunts — including the famous scones aunt herself! Even better, Justin and I were going to be a surprise for my aunts and cousin. I knew I was suddenly faced with an unprecedented double-surprise opportunity — to not only surprise family members by popping up in Switzerland, but to surprise my aunt herself with the very scones she had been thwarted from sending to my mother, hand-delivered to Switzerland. You rarely get an opportunity like this in life, so I had to take it.

Unfortunately, what this meant was waking up early last Sunday — one of the only 2 days I had at home between my Miami trip and going to Switzerland (I told you it’s a randomly glam month) — and heading into the city on a cold, drizzly morning, to wait in line for some scones.

When I arrived at Mary O’s, the line seemed surprisingly manageable: it stretched out the door, but only about 20 or so people were lined up on the sidewalk. I estimated I only had to wait about 15 or 20 minutes before I could order. Based on my own prejudicial visual assessment, I gathered I was the only non-tourist in this line. As happy couples emerged from the tiny store front, clutching their boxes of scones and eagerly filming TikTok content, I tried to strike a casual pose that somehow gave off the specific impression that I wasn’t here to follow a trend like them, but rather for a larger reason, one more selfless and benevolent than they could even imagine.

Every couple ordered, at most, two scones per person. I mean, how many scones can one person eat? And at a whopping $6 per scone, you really don’t want to over-order. But when I approached the counter, I nervously asked for 18 scones. “Uh… let me check,” the teenage employee said, consulting with the women working on the scone assembly line behind her. After a brief discussion, she informed me I would have to wait about half an hour. I said that was fine, and went outside, where I leaned against a stoop and observed the line, which had grown immensely, and now stretched around the corner. These people had no idea I had just made their wait even longer.

As I stood there, I observed the New Yorkers walking past the line, on the way to brunch or shopping or DSA meetings or whatever everyday Sunday activities they were engaging with, and I longed to join them. “Oh my god, what is this stupid line?” someone said as they shoved their way past the line. “Jesus Christ, they’re all waiting for scones?” someone else sneered. I tried to smirk and nod sympathetically with the passing New Yorkers in a way that said, “Ha ha, yes!! These people waiting an hour for scones are such silly tourists, unlike me, a New Yorker who is doing it for reasons that are ironic but also big-hearted.” Though I was in the East Village, waiting outside this place felt like I had found myself in an offshoot of Times Square, as if a man in an Elmo costume smelling of piss should be handing out scone samples.

After a half hour of public humiliation in front of my fellow citizens, I was summoned back inside for my boxes of scones by a very friendly woman. We had to make our way to the front through a crowd that did not want to budge, not even for an employee, out of fear of losing their sacred line spot. At the front, my employee shepherd was prevented from getting around the counter by a woman who simply refused to move. “I have a hair appointment,” she announced, “So I need my scones now.” I had no choice but to respect the combination of ignorance and egotism that causes a woman to get scones from the hour-wait scone shop before an urgent hair appointment. She was finally persuaded to step aside, so that the gears of the scone factory could continue to turn at a steady pace, and I was handed my 18 scones, each in a separate bag. I shoved the way out of the place, hearing people muttering at the sheer greed of someone like me, who slowed the whole line down with a massive group order. I avoided eye contact on my way out, fearing I would be torn to pieces by a crowd of tourists suffering from scone psychosis.

At home, 3 hours after I first set out on the scone odyssey, Justin and I sampled a scone each, which were thankfully still warm, and which we dutifully doused in the provided butter and homemade jam. And, really, I am not a fan of scones, but these were pretty good! They’re significantly less dry than a typical scone, mercifully, and mostly taste of butter and jam, which is kind of all you can ask for. If you were able to just casually pick up one of these scones on your Sunday morning neighborhood coffee stroll, they’d be transcendent. But I’m not sure any scone would be worth waiting for even half an hour, let alone over an hour.

The next day, after nervously getting the butter and jam through TSA security, the scones were transported by airplane, four trains, a funicular, and a bus, to Zermatt, Switzerland, where we first surprised my family by our arrival, before revealing the second surprise back at our rental apartment — the infamous scones, hand-delivered to Switzerland, 7 months after they were first requested. And, well, I’m trying not to hold it against my aunt that the scones being in Switzerland genuinely got a bigger reaction than I did.

Notting Hill (1999) — on Delta

Our flight out was a dreaded redeye, so I just wanted to put something comforting and frivolous on, so that I could fall asleep and wake up in Switzerland, refreshed and ready to see some mountains or whatever. But I made a fatal mistake in selecting Notting Hill, which, it turns out, is still extremely watchable. After a weed gummy and 2 airplane red wines, I was positively soaring, and started convincing myself Notting Hill is one of the greatest movies ever made. Of course, it features two of the most charming actors in history, at the peak of their charm, which does a lot of the legwork.

But I forgot how strange so much of this film is — the music choices in particular are absolutely god awful, genuinely laugh-out-loud shocking. Whoever did the music for Notting Hill should be imprisoned for life. Julia’s character, as well, is a bit of a psychological torturer, which I forgot about. She toys with Hugh’s character throughout the film as if he’s at Abu Ghraib and she’s Lynndie England. Anyway, I got absolutely no sleep on the plane as a result, but I don’t regret it.

4/14/26 - 4/20/26

I spent most of last week in Miami for work, my first time ever in Florida. I was a bit unsure about the whole thing — we’ve all heard the stories of whatever the hell goes on down there — but within 3 hours of arrival I was texting everyone in my phone, “Should we move to Miami?” I found the place surprisingly charming, a little bit like someone had combined LA’s sun with New York’s attitude and tossed in Vegas’s scam-based economy. It’s a tropical playground for lunatics, and everyone seemed to carry themselves with an air of being in on the secret to happiness (which appears to just be paying for plastic surgery with crypto). After only a few days, Miami had so thoroughly infested my brain that, when I saw an elementary school’s flag at half-mast, my first thought was, “Is that for Clavicular’s overdose?” I still don’t know if it was for him or someone else, but I like to think it was. Worried about him! And, before we begin, just a programming note: this is the first of four weeks’ worth of possibly weird emails, as I’ll be traveling for a month for mostly work reasons. Hopefully these emails will still arrive on schedule, but as to what I’ll be consuming and where, no one knows. Exciting!

This week: I gobbled up Lena Dunham’s delicious new memoir, I loved Caity Weaver’s big new article about free bread, I read about the damage rich Russians are doing to London, and I watched two movies about star-crossed lovers,

Famesick: A Memoir, by Lena Dunham (2026) — hardcover

I’ve heard rumors of Lena Dunham’s memoir being difficult to track down in Brooklyn bookstores, which feels like a joke Lena would write about herself. Thankfully, when the book dropped I was down in Miami, where no one can read, so I had ample copies to choose from. I only realized once it was too late that I should have bought out the entire stock and started a clandestine book-running business, illegally trafficking Lena Dunham memoirs up the coast from Coconut Grove to Carroll Gardens. I could have made millions!

Anyway, we’re here to discuss the new memoir by Lena Dunham, a woman you have probably heard of and probably have strong feelings about, though you’re also probably not sure why you have such strong feelings about her, or where they even came from. And, as the book makes clear, Lena’s also not sure why you feel so strongly about her! This memoir is part of her attempt to answer that question for herself, as it tells the story of her life before, during, and after Girls.

I tore through the book, inhaling it in hundred-page binges at a time, unable to stop. Her writing remains as sharp and brilliant as it was on the first day of Girls, walking the knife’s edge between heartfelt and cynical. The book is full of drama as she takes us through the whirlwind past 20 years of her life — from making her first indie film and, somehow, being handed the reins to a prestige HBO show in her early 20s, to superstardom, to becoming the most hated woman on the internet, to her twisted relationship with Jack Antonoff, through her chronic illness and unraveling mental health and drug addiction, to falling completely out of Hollywood, and slowly trying to make her way back to something resembling sanity. It would be a wild story told by anyone, but in Lena’s singular voice it’s something closer to genius. She really, truly is, as she ironically foretold all those years ago, a voice of a generation.

On its surface, the most exciting part of the book — and what’s getting all the press, which surely Lena anticipated as she wrote this — is the celebrity gossip she peppers throughout, scattering it like she’s tossing feed to pigs in a trough (in a way, she is). There’s the Adam Driver stuff, of course, where she basically confirms he’s as obnoxiously self-involved and intense as he seems; and the Jack Antonoff stuff, who actually comes off fine, all things considered — he mostly seems like a young guy caught up in fame whose heart was in the right place but wasn’t ready for all the drama that surrounds Lena and didn’t have the guts to extricate himself. (But let’s hope Margaret Qualley never gets sick.)

But the most thrilling part is when she casually drops a big name out of nowhere, using a celebrity’s presence as set dressing, to show how fucking surreal her life became. When literally anyone else would use euphemisms to hide the identity of whoever they’re talking about — even when the story isn’t negative about that celebrity — Lena isn’t afraid to name names. She might actually be the last celebrity, in a post-Kathy Griffin world, to still be willing to name names, in fact. She knows that’s what we’re here for, and she knows how to put on a great show. Take, for example, the time she has a panic attack at the Met Gala, and there’s Maggie Gyllenhaal standing over her in the bathroom saying, “I know, this place is so overwhelming.” We don’t need to know it was Maggie who said that, but it sure is nice to be let in on the secret.

Or there’s this insane exchange with Barbara Walters:

“There’s a lot to talk about in this show,” she said backstage. “I mean, anal sex in the first episode.”

“Do you mean sex from behind?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “Anal sex.”

I still think about this all the time — who told Barbara Walters that the only kind of sex you could have from behind was anal? What had her twenties looked like as a result?

Lena, for all her faults, has always been brutally honest — which, let’s be honest ourselves, seems to have caused a good amount of the problems in her life — and she extends that trait to evaluating her own life. She’s merciless towards everyone in the book, but most of all towards herself. As a result, when she says cruel things about the people in her life, it doesn’t feel like malicious score-settling, because she’ll always turn that magnifying glass on herself, and worse. Her most brutal feelings seem reserved for Jenni Konner, her one-time business partner and Girls co-showrunner, who Lena portrays as a cold-eyed Hollywood shark, desperate for success and willing to squeeze every last drop out of Lena before discarding her, spent. (In possibly the most brutal moment of the entire book, after Lena has just left rehab and is struggling to get back into a normal working routine while still battling drug addiction and severe chronic illness, Lena suggests she might need to take some more time off before getting back into work, and Jenni sneers: “Or you could take the rest of the year off. Two years, even. And then I guess my kids can just pay for their own college education.” Yikes!) (But, if I can be messy for a second, I really would like a Jenni Konner memoir about these exact same years, please.)

But it’s not all score-settling and drama: there are far more moments of genuine beauty and tenderness in this, and the deeper we got, the more I was surprised by how emotional I got by the end. This woman is very hard on herself, in a way that can be uncomfortably familiar at times. I didn’t expect Lena Dunham’s gossipy little memoir to have some actually usable self-help aspects to it, but here we are! Lena has always contained multitudes, and Famesick is, if nothing else, a welcome reminder that she’s always been one of the most talented writers we have.

Between all the shit-talking and drama, this book is full of gorgeous little gems of brilliant writing, like the way Lena introduces us to Girls costar Jemima Kirke:

Jemima Kirke, the one friend in high school who had seen me as more than a comic sidekick, had recently surfaced from a rehab in Florida and come back into my life like a summer rainstorm, sudden and pleasingly violent. Although she had never acted beyond a few Stella Adler classes taken out of boredom, I knew her beauty—so disarming it stopped men in the street, and especially when we were thirteen—was enough to make her presence onscreen work. She was more luminous now—freshly sober, pleasingly curvy—than she’d been when she was the most luminous girl in high school, and it slapped me across the face: She was my muse.

Imagine being written about like that! I’d tattoo it across my entire back — I mean, she had “come back into my life like a summer rainstorm, sudden and pleasingly violent”? Come on!

No matter what crazy attention-grabbing shit Lena says, no matter how much I didn’t enjoy Too Much (let’s all just collectively forget about it, please), I’ll always be excited to watch or read whatever Lena writes next.

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“I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America” by Caity Weaver — in The Atlantic

Lena Dunham is causing drama and a Caity Weaver article has gone viral: it must be 2014! You’ve probably already been sent this article by Caity (gift link here, which I stole from an unnamed publication — hopefully it works for you!) but if you were intimidated by its length, I promise you it is well worth your time. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry (really), you’ll have the time of your life! If you doubt me, please enjoy this tiny excerpt, a sampler platter of Caity’s writing, in which she describes the end of an elaborate multi-course dinner:

I am given a plate of Ibérico ham. It tastes exquisite: nutty, salty, rich. I force it down like I am eating packing peanuts. I notice that I have begun shivering slightly, probably because of the frosty Diet Cokes. “I love Diet Coke!” I write in my notes. Tendrils of conversation from other diners drift to my table. “This was such a good dinner!” one woman declares—a demented way to describe what has happened here tonight; this is dinner in the same way that Australia is an isle.

I actually can’t believe magazines are still willing to pay for pieces like this: big, experimental, demanding financially but also demanding the audience actually sits with it. Only Caity Weaver could take a goofy article about what restaurant gives you the best free bread and turn it into a much-needed shot of adrenaline to the heart of the journalism business. Those of us who worked email desk jobs in the early aughts already owe Caity Weaver so much, for all the times she’d drop some new, brilliant, hilarious piece of writing over at Gawker right as we were hitting the 3pm witching hour, and now she’s done it again at a time when our entire nation truly needed it most.

God’s Own Country (2017) — on Criterion

Finally sat my ass down and watched Josh O’Connor’s first big gay yearning film, the one that kicked off his big gay yearning career. This was beautiful and sweet and really made me want to put on a cozy knit sweater and sleep next to a fireplace in the Yorkshire hills. If you want to feel beautifully heartbroken for an evening, this is the one! I think this Josh O’Connor fella might be one to watch…

Frankie & Johnny (1991) — on Apple TV

Did you know there’s a Garry Marshall romcom starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer (with Nathan Lane as her gay best friend!)? And that Al plays an ex-con working as a line cook at a diner, who falls in love with a waitress? And that it’s based on a stage play that starred F. Murray Abraham and Kathy Bates?? And that the movie is even more insane than I could even describe? First of all, Michelle Pfeiffer is supposed to be so unattractive that no one would even think of dating her, which… sure! But thankfully Al Pacino can see through Michelle Pfeiffer’s hag exterior to her heart of gold, even though both of them are kind of just assholes. The end of the movie is particularly shocking, the way legitimate trauma is introduced in practically the final line of the film, as if it’s a punchline, but the entire tone of the movie is manic and nonsensical, so it also somehow kind of works?

This is mostly due to the sheer charm of the stars, plus Garry Marshall’s incredible direction. Movies these days really don’t have the texture this film has. The settings feel lived-in, the scenes feel a little messy and almost unscripted, and every little side character feels like a slightly crazy New Yorker who just wandered onto set and Garry just kept the camera rolling. This movie is very, very strange, but that’s where it’s charm lies.

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, by Patrick Radden Keefe (2026) — hardcover

This book, an expansion of this article, takes the story of Zac, a young man whose mysterious death may have been linked to the criminal underworld, and uses it to explore the financial and criminal ties of modern London. It’s fascinating and well-told — Patrick Radden Keefe excels at clearly explaining wildly complicated systems (his previous books have been on the Troubles in Ireland, the opioid crisis, and the NSA, among others). When I picture Patrick Radden Keefe’s apartment, I’m imagining every single wall covered in red yarn tracking a different criminal conspiracy.

Because this is the London crime world, there are so many wild characters. There’s a guy named “Indian Dave” who may or may not be named Dave or even Indian. There’s a guy just called The Muscle, who is, predictably, huge and terrifying and very hard to kill. There’s Mickey McAvoy, who stole millions of pounds’ worth of gold bars from a Brink’s-Mat truck and still insists on his innocence despite having two dogs named Brinks and Mat. And caught up in it all is a completely normal middle-class family, wondering how they got in this mess.

The only real slight I have to the book is that Radden Keefe feels like he got a little too close to the family, and as a result doesn’t dig as deeply into matters that may have felt too sensitive to the parents. There’s a random three-page section, in which he briefly explores some evidence that suggests Zac may have been involved with some of these people in a potentially gay or bisexual way, but it’s discarded as quickly as it’s picked up. I get it — the situation is unimaginably horrific for his parents, and it really doesn’t seem like there’s any way to get any solid answers out of the still-living gangsters involved, so why push past the point of comfort if it won’t lead anywhere — but there are many areas I wanted more detail in! Still, that’s a good problem to have, wanting more out of a book, so this isn’t a real complaint.

Mostly, I’m left with more questions than I went in with, but I know two things for sure: the first is that watching your child grow up into an adult who makes their own choices, for better or worse, sounds like an absolutely terrifying experience; and the second is that London is spiritually evil.

4/7/26 - 4/13/26

The algorithms seem even more broken than ever lately. I spent years training my Twitter algorithm to only serve me reality TV gossip, but over the past couple weeks it’s somehow become 99% UFO content, with a smattering of only the strangest political stories of the day (like Eric Adams’ recent transition into an Albanian — mazel tov!). My feed is so choked with Nancy Mace’s terrifying face screaming about alien disclosure that I somehow missed the actually important news that Lisa from Real Housewives of Miami was arrested for wiretapping??? Look, I know Twitter isn’t where you get real news anymore, and I know that Elon’s algorithm has decided the best way to try to trick me into the right-wing media sphere is via UFOs, but they’ve sorely miscalculated — and I’m actually much more likely to get sucked into conspiracy theories via the Housewives, anyway. (For example: Lisa is innocent! It’s either her evil ex Jody’s fault or she’s being framed by her other evil ex Lenny! Free Lisa!) All I’m saying is, we’ve had some dead canaries in the media coal mines over the last couple years, but if a Real Housewife gets arrested and a gay’s algorithm doesn’t even bother to show him… the internet might be over.

This week: I watched an all-time classic and got distracted by Val Kilmer body horror, I enjoyed a campy recent flop, I circled back on the Beckham family drama, I dove headfirst into some truly trashy TV, and I read two fine books.

Heat (1995) — on Apple TV

I know I’m going to catch some heat for this, but I have somehow gone this long without ever seeing Heat. I know, I know! It’s one of the greatest shames of my life. Don’t get me wrong, I have seen Pacino’s “she’s got a… GREAT ASS!” scene more times than I can count — I’m not living in the damn woods! — but I had never before sat down for the rest of the movie that surrounds that scene. Last weekend, I finally did, and are you surprised to learn I loved it? I was surprised by how attracted I was to De Niro, and obviously everything Pacino does in this is legendary, but the rest of the ensemble — Danny Trejo, Ashley Judd, and Val especially — is essential to why this works so well. (The only true weak spot is Natalie Portman, who we can somewhat forgive since she’s literally a child. But really, the rest of these actors are at the peak of their abilities, while Natalie’s in a Lifetime movie.)

It’s three hours but hums along so well you hardly even notice the time passing — the only time I got distracted was when I noticed a softball-sized lump on Val Kilmer’s elbow in a scene, and needed to pull out my phone to figure out what the fuck was going on. Turns out he broke his arm filming The Doors, which resulted in a massive cyst on his elbow? And that he had it for the rest of his life??? Did you all already know this? Is this something people have been talking about for decades? Am I joining the Val Kilmer body horror conversation too late? He was such a shining star, gone far too soon, and his performance in Heat is one of the best he ever gave, and yet unfortunately all I can really think about now is this:

The Last Duel (2021) — on Apple TV

This one fell through the cracks a few years ago, but for whatever reason I decided this weekend was “watch 3-hour movies you haven’t seen before” weekend. This is possibly Ridley Scott’s campiest film, and everyone in it seems to be having a great time, even though the movie is about, well, rape. (“Medieval #MeToo” is an insane idea for a film, so I can see why this flopped at the box office, but… it kind of works!)

Everyone’s doing their own separate thing in this, but if you free yourself from such questions as, “Are these performances good?” or, “Is this a real movie or an extra-long SNL sketch?” I promise you’ll have a lot more fun with it. Adam Driver is in full thespian diva mode — this man was simply born to put on a cloak and stomp around! Jodie Comer is actually fantastic, easily balancing the subtleties of the most complicated and actually dramatic role in the film. And Matt Damon is, as always, Matt Damon, this time with some bad prosthetics and a terrible English accent that he gives up on halfway through every sentence.

But really, we’re all here for Ben Affleck, who stars as a royal playboy dripping in gold and jewels, with a terrible platinum dye job, who doesn’t give a shit about anything anyone else is doing, and eats up every scene he’s in. Denzel’s iconic quote about his role in Gladiator II — “I’m putting this dress on, these rings, and going crazy” — easily can also apply to whatever Ben is doing in The Last Duel. I don’t care what anyone says, this movie is silly and kind of stupid but I’m prepared to defend The Last Duel to the death.

“What Broke the Beckhams?” by Bridget Read — in NY Mag

Just when I think I’m out on the Beckham/Peltz family drama, this article pulls me back in. There aren’t any revelations, per se, but there are some incredible anecdotes in here that show just how deeply embarrassing everyone involved is. Take, for example, the movie Nicola Peltz wrote, directed, and starred in, using her dad’s money, which is apparently just a ripoff of The Florida Project, in which her husband Brooklyn Beckham “had a cameo, but it was apparently cut by his wife because he couldn’t stop looking directly into the camera.” That’s our boy!

Even better are the quotes pulled from a lawsuit between Nicola and Brooklyn’s former wedding planners, in which they released thousands of texts and emails from the Peltz-Beckhams, revealing that, yes, all rich people do send messages as inarticulate and sloppily as Jeffrey Epstein’s emails. Here are some of my favorite messages Brooklyn or Nicola apparently sent their wedding planners:

• “Did Megan get an invite … And Harry”

• “deSantis must be OFF THE GUEST LIST. PLEASE CONFIRM!”

• Brooklyn asked if they should get a “gun that shoots a net because theres probably gonna be drones.” [Should I get one of those for my wedding???]

• “Also david blaine is going to go around to tables on Friday night it’s for free he’s my friend.”

NY Mag excels at well-reported bullshit gossip stories like this, and I think they should simply lean in and become a full-time gossip rag. Now that TMZ is rebranding and fixing their evil eye on DC politicians, New York Mag and The New Yorker and even the NYTimes should stop writing their softball fluff pieces about politics, and instead spend their energy and money investigating and exposing celebrities.

I’m dead serious about this: if the Times and TMZ switched roles, we’d all be significantly better off. Maggie Haberman’s sycophantic style is awful when it’s used for reporting on Trump, but imagine if she used her suck-up skills to report from inside Meghan and Harry’s delusional world? Like, instead of sending reporters to the Pentagon to uncritically parrot whatever boozy lies slur out of Hegseth’s mouth, the NYTimes should send their most dogged reporters to finally uncover exactly what the hell happened with Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles on the set of Don’t Worry Darling. The Times and other “serious” publications have failed us over the past decade, and helped pave the way to fascism, so they should stick to gossip and leave the real journalism to the bloodless psychos at TMZ.

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Love Overboard, season 1 — on Hulu

First of all, Hulu’s aesthetics are nauseating. Hate when I have to get on that app. The horrible green, the library of shows that all seem like 30 Rock jokes, the Disney-adjacent vibe of it all… I shudder at the entire experience. But when I heard gay icon Gabby Windey (formerly of The Bachelor, but I look down on Bachelor Nation so I only know her from The Traitors) was hosting a stupid new dating show, I knew I’d have to wade into the Hulu dumpster and watch it. And… I guess I’m trash, too, because I actually enjoyed this stupid fucking show!

Don’t get me wrong: this is absolute brainrot TV. Love Overboard sits squarely in the white-hot molten center of trashy television. But for me, that’s its strength — because unlike other modern reality shows, which largely pretend at more noble goals, Love Overboard knows it’s trash, and openly acknowledges it. This is a throwback to early-2000s reality TV, completely and nakedly shameless in every way.

The premise is devious and designed for maximum drama: 10 or so sexy heterosexual singles all live on a yacht, with half coupling up and living “topside” in luxury, while the single people have to live “downside” and literally serve the couples. Of course, the reveal that half these people will be living a life of servitude below deck leads to some incredible meltdowns almost immediately. This is when I started thinking, oh no, am I going to end up watching this entire show? (Yes.) The only way for a downside single to escape their prison of daily drudgery is to break up a topside couple and basically trick one of them into dating you. No one is here for love — they’re all here for a chance at a slightly better view and an ensuite bathroom.

If the premise sounds manipulative, the show takes it a step further by having the producers shamelessly manipulate the cast on screen — Gabby literally tells people, “Go break that couple up!” — and they found a group that’s incredibly willing to be manipulated. Too much obvious manipulation of reality has killed many a reality show. But the fact that Love Overboard’s manipulation is on-screen and completely in the open makes this show feel, dare I say… kind of honest?

There’s a rawness and a messiness to Love Overboard that’s largely disappeared from reality TV these days — this feels more like a FOX reality show from the early-aughts, with the kind of drama you got on shows like Joe Millionaire. At one point, a man is forced to decide between two women (when you’re kicked off the show, you’re forced to walk the plank), and he’s struggling. One option is the woman he’s been coupled up with for weeks, who he asked to be his girlfriend just the night before. But the other option is a brand new woman, who just gave him a blowjob that very morning. (It must be repeated: this is the trashiest show I’ve seen in a long, long time.) And this stupid, stupid man — who is, I regret to have to tell you, a therapist for children suffering from trauma!!!!! — is completely unable to decide between his girlfriend or the blowjob-giver, forcing these two women to shiver in cocktail dresses while standing at the end of a plank for nearly an hour. Eventually, after even the host Gabby is fully screaming at him to make a decision, he chooses, and, of course, drama ensues.

Look: I’ve watched some trash in my day, and this is some bottom-of-the-dumpster, grad-A garbage TV. But in a world where Love is Blind has a whole slew of abuse-related lawsuits, and Andy Cohen and Bravo are apparently about to go on literal trial over Housewives abuse allegations, and The Bachelor just imploded because they hired a known violent alcoholic lunatic as their new star and then were somehow surprised when she acted like a violent alcoholic lunatic… it’s kind of nice to have a reality show just be like, “Yeah, we’re psychologically torturing our cast members — come watch us do it!” The world is sick, and reality TV is sick, but I’m sick, too, so I’m grateful for Love Overboard for not pretending to be anything other than a sick little show for sick little freaks.

The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins (2015) — library ebook

This was… fine? It’s a fantasy/horror book that’s got some great world-building, but the writing style was a little too Reddit-esque for my tastes. I’ve spent too many words railing against the way Marvel “humor” has bled into culture, so I won’t belabor it, but it’s upsetting to read a book that has a great premise but, for some reason, decides it needs to try to be “funny.” Maybe I would have enjoyed this more had I not read it so soon after seeing the wretchedly unfunny Project Hail Mary. If I had a time machine, I’d go back and prevent James Gunn from ever being hired at Marvel, which I think would singlehandedly save America from becoming such a deeply unfunny nation.

In A Strange Room, by Damon Galgut (2010) — library ebook

A quick little novel, told in three parts, Booker-nominated, about a man named “Damon” — this is like uncovering an ancient artifact from the autofiction Big Bang of the early 2000s. The three stories follow Damon, a writer from South Africa, who travels to various countries and has a lot of sad emotions. There are some beautiful passages in here, but my tolerance for autofiction is low (will I be reading the new Ben Lerner? Maybe!) so I was happy this was less than 200 pages.

3/31/26 - 4/6/26

Well, today feels fucking insane. We’re all waking up to do our patriotic duty of creating value for shareholders, while our deranged leader is hovering his finger over the nuke button, and the branch of government made to prevent stuff like this all have their out of office replies on while they’re all gallivanting around Disney World. We live in a hell of our own making and unfortunately I don’t even think today will be rock bottom. Anyway, let’s talk about movies???? Jesus Christ.

This week: I watched Zendaya and Robert Pattinson have some drama, I watched a bunch of conquistadors go mad, I enjoyed a documentary designed to kiss Martin Scorsese’s ass, I decided I wanted to stay forever in November 18th, and I observed Passover by reading about Gaza.

The Drama (2026) — at BAM Cinemas

Much has been made about “the twist” in The Drama, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s big new dark romantic comedy, but it’s not a twist — it’s revealed in the first 20 minutes, and is, in fact, the entire plot of the film. But it’s more fun to go into this movie blind, so I won’t spoil it, and will only say that something is revealed about someone’s past, which makes Robert and Zendaya’s characters start to question their entire relationship. The central question of the film is: if you learned something shocking about the past of the person you love, would you be able to look past it?

The spiral that follows the big revelation is fairly entertaining, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, while never losing its core darkness — this is a fun film to see in a packed theater like I did, with the audience reacting almost as if they knew these people personally. Our audience squirmed in horror and secondhand embarrassment throughout the film, occasionally letting out an, “Oh nooooo!” or a simple, “Oh my god.” People were reacting to every scene the way you’d react to a friend telling you the exact same story over drinks. (By the end of the movie, everyone had been so thoroughly worked up into a frenzy that several people let out a shocked gasp at the revelation that… Robert Pattinson’s socks had holes in them?? I’m telling you, this movie had that theater in the palm of its hand!) As a moviegoing experience, it’s fun!

Unfortunately, however, the film is all fun without much depth — it has a fantastically simple premise, but doesn’t seem interested in going any deeper than the surface. After the initial revelation, the characters spiral about what it means about the person who revealed it, but after almost two hours of people rehashing the same issues over and over and over again, you kind of just want everyone to get over it. Grow up! It was shocking at first, but now you’re just being dramatic! Much like the writer/director’s previous film, Nicolas Cage’s Dream Scenario, this film starts with a very smart premise that gradually just… goes nowhere. He doesn’t seem to know how to end his films, or even have much interest in ending them. Actually, forget ending a film — he doesn’t seem to know how to even end a scene! Nearly every scene tends to end abruptly, so that I could almost feel the writer getting bored and deciding to move on. I’m not joking: three separate scenes end with someone projectile vomiting. If you’ve backed yourself into a writing corner so the only way out is to end the scene, “She suddenly vomits,” you might need to rethink the story a bit!

It’s all a bit Emerald Fennellesque, dare I say, a little too proud of how edgy it’s being, while winking and nudging at you the whole time. My biggest gripe is that The Drama regularly employs one of my least favorite tropes: showing something shocking (screaming at someone, physically attacking them, etc.) before cutting to reveal it was only a fantasy the character was having. It’s always such a cop out, the director wanting to have it both ways, and after the 10th instance of one of these “Oops, it was just a fantasy!” fake-outs, it started to feel more than a little cheap.

I know the most boring opinion you can have about a movie was, “It was fine,” but: The Drama was fine! The central premise is great, most of the actors are great (Alana Haim is perfectly cast as a deeply annoying egomaniac — doesn’t feel like a stretch for her, sorry! — but the movie is completely stolen by Zoe Winters and Hailey Benton Gates, who need starring roles in something immediately), but the overall execution is so-so. All those complaints aside, watching it in the theater was like a fun little carnival ride: it’s quick (I genuinely thought Hollywood had forgotten how to make films under 2 hours) and frivolous and a little nausea-inducing, and a rare communal moviegoing experience.

Much like the movie, this review is kind of piddling out without saying much of anything, sorry — let me just projectile vomit so I can end this!

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) — on Criterion

A descent into Hell, both on- and off-screen. From the opening minutes, with a cast of hundreds on a miserable slog through the jungle — the Peruvian extras regularly looking straight into camera as they’re knee-deep in mud, a look on their faces like, “What the fuck have gotten myself into?” — it’s apparent that Werner Herzog went a little mad in the jungle while making this story about men going mad in the jungle. Sublime and awful, and weirdly perfect for the period we’re living in, in which deranged men drunk on power and their own importance drag us all into a hell from which we can never return. Yay!

Mr. Scorsese — on Apple TV

Absolutely devoured this docuseries and wouldn’t have complained if it were twice as long. Martin Scorsese is impossibly charming, just a real silly billy, and one of the most interesting directors we have. I mean: Mean Streets to Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to Taxi Driver to New York, New York is an absolutely insane run of films. The tonal whiplash between those four films (all made within four years!) is enough to make him a legend already, before he went on to make even more brilliant films over the next 50 years. No one has the range he has! I’ve always been fascinated by how wildly different Marty’s movies are from each other, and this docuseries does a fantastic job of showing how and why his filmography all hangs together, despite the tonal differences — there is a connective thread between Liza Minnelli tap-dancing and Joe Pesci torturing guys to death, and Mr. Scorsese does a great job showing how all those sides are contained in this one man.

The one gripe you could have with the series is it’s a bit up Marty’s ass the whole time. It’s directed by Rebecca Miller, who happens to be married to perennial Scorsese bestie Daniel Day-Lewis, so there’s no world in which she would make a genuine tell-all that exposes the darker sides of Marty. The only nods we get to anything dark in his background are vague statements — shoehorned in the final minutes — about anger issues in his younger years, which we are reassured are all fixed now. Okay, sure! If you say so! Let’s not worry about that and get back to praising Marty! Don’t get me wrong: Marty is a genuine living genius, possibly the greatest living filmmaker, but there are several points in this series in which people say things like, “You had to know if the camera was going to move to the right or move to the left, and Marty knew exactly which way it would go.” As opposed to other directors, who… don’t know which way to turn their cameras? Sure, he’s earned his accolades, but at times in this series it feels like we’re one step away from celebrating the fact that he eats food and breathes oxygen. What can’t he do!

All the dick-sucking aside, we watched the series with grins on our faces the entire time — it’s just so fun, especially with its focus on how the details of Marty’s life have shown up in his films throughout the years (my favorite bit: due to dangerously bad asthma he spent a lot of his childhood stuck inside, looking down on the kids playing on the streets outside, which is why he’s partial to high-angle shots). Sometimes it’s obnoxious and forced when people try to “explain” an artist’s work via his biographical details, but you really do need to delve into the psychology of Marty to explain how someone can so beautifully capture the Edwardian dandy fops of The Age of Innocence just a year before filming the scene in Casino where a man’s head is crushed in a vise. Marty contains multitudes, clearly, and this series is a charming and highly entertaining glimpse at the brilliant mind churning behind those beautiful eyebrows.

On the Calculation of Volume, Book III, by Solvej Balle (2026) — paperback

I am officially addicted to this series. The third book is the plottiest by far, which I was actually somewhat bummed about. I truly could have read seven books in which Tara simply sat and contemplated the time loop she’s stuck in, but I guess it’s for the best that the plot finally acquires some forward movement. I’ll keep it spoiler-free, because you really should go into the series as blind as possible; most of the joy has been in knowing nothing, and just letting the story slowly unfold a page at a time. These books are oddly calming, despite their sad and lonely tone, and it’s fascinating to map your own feelings about the world and Tara’s situation as you move throughout the series. At first I wanted her to get out of her November 18th loop and return to normal time, but now I’m not so sure — the world of the 18th is more interesting and complex than we originally thought, and I’m suddenly enjoying the fact that she’s stuck, and following the slow unfolding of the central mystery (a mystery I’m not even sure the book is that interested in solving — I’m very prepared for the series to end without any resolution).

Like Tara, I’ve grown accustomed to the time loop, and am almost finding comfort in it, in a weird way. It almost feels stranger, now that I’ve finished the third book and have to wait for the fourth to be published (next week, thankfully), to be outside the world of the novels. I’m missing the 18th of November, and I’m ready to jump back into it!

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, by Peter Beinart (2025) — hardcover

Passover felt like the right time to finally read this book, a book I’ve had on my shelf for a year, but have never picked up out of a sense of overwhelming dread. And, as an anti-Zionist Jew, there’s really nothing in here that I didn’t already know. But still, it felt somewhat comforting, at least, to see someone else grappling on the page with the horrors that have been committed in our name, especially someone who was raised, unlike me, with Zionism. I didn’t learn anything from this book I didn’t already know, but it’s still important to have it down on the page, to have it spelled out this clearly and explicitly. I hope the people that actually need to read this book will pick it up and give it the chance it deserves, even though I suspect most of them hardened their hearts to any criticism of the genocide of Palestine a long, long time ago. There’s really nothing much left to say that hasn’t already been said, and yet it’s important we keep saying it.

3/24/26 - 3/30/26

The apocalypse has never been more in the air than over the past week, and no one knows what to do about it. Our president is too busy interior decorating to care about the war he started, everyone’s telling me to stock up on beans and rice before oil hits $500/barrel or whatever, and now I have to deal with the fact that Kristi Noem’s husband is a cross dresser? It’s bleak when the only genuinely “good” news I’ve seen all week is that TMZ is turning their sociopathic attention away from terrorizing former child stars and towards harassing politicians. This could genuinely be major for us — they’ve already got Lindsey Graham pretending to be on a manly hunting trip while he’s actually prancing around Disney World with a bubble wand. We’ve regressed as a society in a thousand different ways, but a little retro homophobic bullying is a-okay in my book when it’s directed at these ghouls. Harvey Levin… welcome to the resistance.

This week: I am here to ruin everyone’s fun with Ryan Gosling’s new beloved blockbuster, I watched yet another Gwyneth film, I enjoyed reading about what the news industry was like before our country completely fell apart, and I have crunched the numbers and decided that everyone involved in the Iran War is a fucking idiot.

Project Hail Mary (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park

For a select few actors (almost always male), it’s possible to reach a point in your career and fame where you no longer have to act. Sure, they might be technically acting in front of a camera, starring in a 2-hour feature film, and they might be doing actor-y things like driving a spaceship or a car, or yelling, or crying, or looking pensively out a window, but none of it is actually acting. Instead, these men simply act as themselves, while doing the things their character does.

Harrison Ford was the pioneer in this arena — sometimes he’s Harrison Ford with a space blaster, sometimes he’s Harrison Ford with a whip — but there are many actors who fit the bill. Brad Pitt is always playing Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise is always playing Tom Cruise (and, actually, I do believe he’s jumping out of planes off-camera), and I’m willing to bet Matt Damon’s character in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey will just turn out to be Matt Damon, but in a Greek-ish helmet.But for me, the platonic ideal of non-acting actors will always be George Clooney. Quick: name one role of his that’s different from any others! Danny Ocean is Michael Clayton is Jay Kelly (I haven’t even seen Jay Kelly but I know I’m right). It all makes you wonder: why does Leonardo DiCaprio still try so hard? He doesn’t need to be doing all that, it turns out! And yet, for as little effort as some of these guys put into their work, we (me included!) still eat it up, because these men are charming and handsome and grade-A movie stars, and it’s always fun to watch movie stars do things handsomely and charmingly.

For many years, Ryan Gosling wasn’t one of these guys. He was a genuine actor who put in some serious work: he played a Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer, he was believably old-timey in The Notebook, he was convincingly in love with a sex doll in Lars and the Real Girl, etc.. He had — and still has — the talent! But around 10 years ago, he stopped disappearing into roles and started just being Ryan Gosling. Sure, there are different shades to the characters he’s chosen over the last decade — Blade Runner 2049 is sad Ryan Gosling, Barbie is dumb Ryan Gosling — but it’s all still, essentially, Ryan Gosling. (Sometimes he has an accent.) And with Project Hail Mary, he’s thrown in the towel and gone full Clooney: it’s Ryan Gosling, in space!

As a film, Project Hail Mary is fine. It’s fine! It’s beautifully shot — one of the most impressively crafted space films we’ve had in a long, long time, in fact! But the tone of it… oh boy. The movie’s attempts at humor (and it’s attempting to be more of a comedy than any other genre, unfortunately) were cloying and rather desperate, full of Marvel-esque quips that practically required Ryan Gosling to smirk at the camera after each line (in fact, he pretty much does smirk at the camera a few times).

I know that this sort of stuff is what passes for most comedy these days, and that most big-budget movies are essentially live-action Pixar films now, but I found watching this movie in a theater a baffling experience. I genuinely did not even smile at a single joke! To give you a sample: one joke is that the alien in the film (sorry if this is a spoiler, but the alien was 95% of the trailer) misinterprets the phrase “fist bump” as “fist my bump”……..which is then deemed so funny that we have to call back to it every 20 minutes, for the rest of the film…………………..are you laughing yet? When you start seeing “fist my bump” merch sported by all the Disney adults in your life, this is where it came from.

There could have been a good movie buried in here, but unfortunately it’s a 2.5-hour mess. Wild tonal swings, lame humor, a completely unnecessary third-act twist that’s discarded the instant it’s revealed… what the hell was going on?! And yet, I know I’m in the minority: the movie is getting rave reviews, it’s about to make a zillion dollars, and my Monday night showing was packed. But watching this corny film surrounded by an enormous audience absolutely howling with laughter, I walked out wondering… am I the alien?

Two Lovers (2008) — on Criterion

The alien in Project Hail Mary has nothing on Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix, two deeply strange creatures pretending to be everyday people falling in love in Two Lovers, possibly one of the last truly great Gwyneth films we’ve ever gotten. These are two of our weirdest, least-normal actors, and that gives this already tonally-strange film an interesting layer: are these characters meant to be this odd, or is that just Gwyneth and Joaquin? This film has such a uniquely bleak-but-still-charming perspective on everything from modern dating to living with your parents. It’s also an immediate all-time New York City film for me: a 34-year-old Joaquin Phoenix yelling, “We’re out of seltzer!” to the parents he lives with in Brighton Beach is simply one of the most Jewish moments ever captured on film.

The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture, by Tricia Romano (2024) — paperback

This massive oral history of the Village Voice felt like eavesdropping on a bunch of retired drunks reminiscing about the good old days (this is a compliment). It’s extremely insidery — people frequently talk about “Ellen” or “Karen” or “Bob” as if the editors from an indie newspaper in the 1970s are Cher or Madonna — but once I gave up trying to keep track of the cast of characters (there’s a 6-page list of everyone in the beginning of the book, if you really need to follow), I had a great time getting all the delicious, decades-old gossip!

From its birth in the 50s to its death in the 2010s (it came back in 2020 but it’s really not the same), the Village Voice was literally there for everything, so while the book is ostensibly the history of a newspaper, it’s pretty much a history of our own country. Decades before Pride and #MeToo and BLM, the paper was actively fighting with itself (in public!) about gays and women and Black people in the workplace and in culture, and it’s both refreshing and depressing to see that none of the fights we’re having now are new. Between all the history, you get strange little tidbits that you could only get from a paper that was at the center of culture during the periods when American culture changed so quickly (one weird example: James Earl Jones was a janitor there???). But, as always, all this history leads us quite depressingly to modern times, when the internet sweeps in and destroys pretty much every industry, and then Donald Trump shows up to finish our country off. But until we get to the hell we’re all trapped in now, it was a fun, wild ride!

“Miscellanea: The War in Iran” by Bret Devereaux — at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

I don’t know why I keep reading and listening to stuff about Trump’s Iran War, because there are no answers to be found, no deeper reasonings or learnings or game plans to uncover. This is the dumbest fucking thing a president has done in a long, long time, and now literally everyone on the planet will have to suffer for it in some way. But if you were looking for a long read that coherently explains exactly why this war is so fucking dumb, this blog does a decent job at it.

The result is a fairly classic escalation trap: once the conflict starts, it is extremely costly for either side to ever back down, which ensures that the conflict continues long past it being in the interests of either party. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down. So both sides ‘escalate to de-escalate’ (this phrase is generally as foolish as it sounds), intensifying the conflict in an effort to hit hard enough to force the other guy to blink first. But since neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so.

(One petty complaint is that whoever writes this blog needs to chill on the bolds and italics. The formatting throughout this entire post is insane! I love writing with emphasis as much as any other aging Millennial, but why is this blog yelling at me while I read???)

It’s too staggering, really, to sit with the concept that thousands, if not millions, of people could die (and, in many cases, are already dying) simply because some of the dumbest and most soulless people alive managed to gain control of the US, Israel, and Iran, but we do have to face it. Even if this isn’t exactly World War III yet, it kind of is, and it’s all a lot more evil and stupid than anyone could have imagined.

3/17/26 - 3/23/26

I’m writing this from San Diego, where I’m spending the week with my family in the unseasonably hot weather that suggests we’re all going to die very very soon but is, for the moment, absolutely lovely. Might as well enjoy the warmth before we ChatGPT ourselves to extinction! As a result, this will be a shorter email, and honestly this week it’s mostly an excuse for me to brag about a good thing that happened to me.

This week: I got some bling, I watched two rather strange movies about how being a political prisoner can make you insane, and I jumped headfirst into a Danish literary sensation.

An engagement ring — on my finger

Some breaking news: two weeks ago I proposed to Justin! And unfortunately he said no, so now I am brokenhearted and single. :( No, no, I am only joking. He said yes, so I am now a fiancee, just like the women on Love Is Blind!!!!

I proposed on a beautiful 72-degree day at sunset on the Christopher Street Pier, an iconic gay cruising spot, while nearby a group of queers sexually harassed shirtless runners — so it was a very New York, very gay proposal. Later, we had dinner across from Jennifer Tilly, which was really just a perfect gay punctuation mark on this whole gay affair. “I’m so happy good things can still happen in the world!” my cousin said when I told him the news, and I agree! The Strait of Hormuz may be closed, but my heart is wide open……………

You might be asking why, after 9 years of dating, I finally proposed, and frankly I am asking myself that question, too, now that I had to purchase a ring at peak gold prices. I should have done this shit 6 years ago!!!! If nothing else, at least I have a fancy new object to pawn for cash when they reboot the Great Depression this summer.

Apologies for hiding this news from you the past couple weeks, my dear beloved subscriber, but I couldn’t say anything until we had surprised my family with it this week. I promise I won’t hide anything from you ever again. We are sisters, you and I, and we must hold no secrets from each other. Promise?

The thing I’ve learned, now that I am out of the engagement closet, is that you are immediately thrust into the terrifying world of post-engagement, pre-wedding questions. So, to get it all out of the way: no, I don’t know when or where the wedding will be happening. No, I don’t know how big it will be. Yes, our DJ will take requests, but there will be a list of banned songs (“Blurred Lines,” and anything by Justin Timberlake or Meghan Trainor). It’s a brave new world out here for me! Should I be subscribing to Brides magazine???

Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025) — on Delta

An absolutely delirious movie to watch at 30,000 feet. You’ve got Diego Luna and some actor named Tonatiuh playing political prisoners during the Argentinian dictatorship, who pass the time by telling the plot of a movie called Kiss of the Spider Woman, a fake movie musical starring Jennifer Lopez. So we cut back and forth from the two prisoners being tortured, basically, and then the bright, campy song-and-dance sequences of J.Lo’s fake musical. It’s… very strange! It’s also very obviously based on a stage play, one of those movies where the dialogue is overwritten and overacted, everything still played for the back rows even though the camera is tight on the actors. As a result, it all feels hammy and broad, which doesn’t work at all for the more serious prison scenes, but does work for J.Lo’s campy dance numbers.

As much as I resisted this often-stilted movie, the combo of altitude and J.Lo worked together to activate my homosexuality, and I found myself, against all odds, having a somewhat good time with this. Make fun of her all you want, but no one commits to anything more than Jennifer Lopez commits to everything, and she is genuinely a star in this (probably because she’s not asked to do much other than dance and show off her legs and smile, but still: a star is a star!). There is absolutely no way I’d make it through all two hours of this on the ground, but up in the air — with a little bit of help from airplane wine — I was soaring.

It Was Just An Accident (2025) — on Delta

I feel like I need to throat-clear a little, before I give my real feelings on this movie: this is obviously an important film, the biggest hit out of Iran in years, at a time when our country is committing untold war crimes over there. And the fact that it was made at all, let alone seen outside the country, is impressive, so all the accolades are worth it. But, as a film, I thought this was just… okay? I loved the simplicity of the story, and the way Panahi uses the framework to explore the different ways regular people have been brutalized by the Iranian regime, and I found many scenes and images particularly beautiful. And I also loved how surprisingly funny it was, and how well it balanced humor with drama. But the longer it went on, the more I felt like it had run out of things to say — the characters all have strong feelings, but no one ever really budges from their feelings, so there are many scenes of characters rehashing similar arguments with each other. And once the drama kicks into high gear, it switches from comedy into melodrama, in a way that doesn’t feel earned to me. I started the movie in the palm of its hand, and ended it feeling a little cold and distant. I’m sorry!

On The Calculation of Volume, books 1 and 2, by Solvej Balle (2024) — paperback

In a matter of days, I absolutely devoured the first two books in this seven(!) book series, which follows a woman, Tara, who gets trapped in the 18th of November, in a Northern European version of Groundhog Day. The books are short and efficient, each less than 200 pages while covering a year or two of Tara’s time loop, as she lives out November 18th over and over and over again.

I found Tara’s situation simultaneously soothing and panic-inducing. It’s repetitive, but never in a way that drags — often, when a book is described as “meditative,” I view it as a warning, but this is the rare “meditative” book that actually keeps me awake instead of putting me to sleep. The first book focuses more on Tara’s immediate situation, specifically how to deal with the fact that her husband wakes up and lives the same day out over and over with no memory of the day before, while she is still aging and moving forward. She’s forced to choose between explaining her situation again every morning to her husband, or forgoing that and instead living separate from him and everyone else she knows, completely alone.

In the second book, Tara has a little more fun living “outside of time”— she spends a year traveling around Europe, “chasing seasons,” finding snow in Sweden during the “January” of her internal calendar, and sun in Spain during her own summer. She spends another year doing exactly what I would do in this situation, doing almost nothing but deep-diving into Roman history, becoming an expert on Ancient Rome just because she has nothing but endless time. But often she finds it unbearably lonely, of course, and the series excels at bringing to life the many different ways loneliness can appear in the mundanities of life — feeling alone even though you’re at home with your husband, being surrounded by a crowd but feeling apart from everyone, or simply walking around and wondering if anyone can even notice you.

This is much more than another retread of a “time loop” story, and I’m only upset I’ve started it now, because the final 4 books have yet to be translated into English. I finished the second book and immediately went to a book store to pick up the next. So now I have the third on hand, but once I finish it I’ll be trapped in a time loop of my own, waiting for the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh to be translated and published. But unlike Tara, I’m actually very happy to be trapped in November 18th for a while.

3/10/26 - 3/16/26

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and I hope my Irish ancestors won’t curse me for saying bad things about Jessie Buckley in this email. I should probably get off her back soon, though — between last week’s The Bride! takedown and this week, I’m accidentally becoming the internet’s #1 Jessie Buckley hater. And I’m not even a hater! I think she’s fine! I just don’t like a lot of the stuff she does! But to get the heat off of me, I’m going to take some time off from working in the Jessie-criticism mines for a bit, but rest assured that I’m keeping a very close eye on her………..

This week: I watched the Oscars and barely felt anything, I bravely came out as someone with eyelash mites, I watched Gwyneth pretend to be British and other British women be insane, I watched another embarrassing Jessie Buckley performance, and I am finally free from carrying Gravity’s Rainbow with me everywhere.

The 98th Academy Awards — on ABC

For such a decent year of movies, the Oscars felt excruciatingly strange and mostly boring. Conan was stiff, and came the closest to bombing I’ve probably ever seen him get, but I’m not blaming him. Something was off in that room! The monologue fell flat, but even worse were the endless and meandering presenters’ jokes — most notably the unbearably long “banter” between Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans that was supposed to be Marvel promo but instead convinced me to continue avoiding those movies at all costs. So many movie stars on that stage, and so little charisma to be found. Hollywood, girl, you are in trouble, we do not need you putting on a boring show like this right now. Get it together!

The whole production felt cursed, in fact. Why couldn’t the cameras find anyone? Why was the audio so echoey? Even Maya Rudolph getting so much screen time wasn’t enough to save the thing from being a mostly unpleasant bore. When they brutally cut off the K-Pop acceptance speech mid-sentence and the entire room, (including Conan!) rebelled, it was almost a relief that something so cruel was happening: finally, some excitement!

It was, I suppose, an accurate look at culture these days: the monoculture is dead, and no one knows what to do about that, least of all a big old show like the Oscars. So it’s no surprise the show felt like a bunch of flailing attempts to grab someone’s, anyone’s attention. The awards were fairly spread out between the big movies, so it felt like there were no real winners or losers, other than, you know, Timmy (who looked awwwwful) and Rose Byrne (we will avenge you). So what we were left with was a panicky mishmash of attempts to keep your eyes on the screen. Your kids love K-Pop, so here are those beloved Demon Hunters, doing whatever they do! Oh, you liked the big musical number from Sinners? What if we put that on stage, but a poorly choreographed, sloppy version of it? Would that interest you? No? How about a Bridesmaids reunion? I’m genuinely shocked they didn’t trot those exhausted Heated Rivalry boys out, even though they’re not even in movies, just to try to force gay people to screenshot something from the ceremony and put it on their social media. It already feels like the Oscars came and went as if they never even happened. What does a multizillion-dollar corporation gotta do around here to get the homosexuals interested in their awards shows again???

At least Leo was looking more attractive than he’s looked in, like, 20 years. He should permanently stick with whatever de-swelling routine Scorsese got him on for their new movie! And, no Club Chalamet, but everyone celebrating Timothée’s loss should take a moment of reflection to understand that this means we now have to live through yet another Oscars campaign from him. So congratulations to Michael B. Jordan, but condolences to Timmy’s team, who are probably already reaching out to every podcast on the planet in anticipation of next year’s inevitable continuation of the endless Timmy Wants An Oscar And He Wants It Now! tour. This kid will still be tap-dancing for votes long after the nukes have been launched.

While we’re on the subject of little Timothée, I am so happy the forced outrage about his ballet and opera comment can be finished now. It was annoying and somewhat arrogant, yes (and his comments have also been completely misinterpreted, but I really can’t dwell on this nightmare any longer), but so was everyone else who took to the stage and scolded him all night. You’re all being annoying! Show me all the ballet tickets you purchased last year! And, if you’ll allow me to be woke for a hot second: it is very telling that everyone had more energy all night for attacking Timmy on behalf of ballet than speaking up on behalf of Palestine or immigrants or against war with Iran or Venezuela or Cuba or… etc. etc. etc. (Not you, though, Javier; you’re perfect as always.) This was a deeply annoying night of television, one I regret spending 4+ hours in front of, and I know I’ll do it all again next year, for some reason.

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XDEMVY eye drops — in my eyes

I have a confession to make: my infamous stye, which I have been battling for over two months, did not come out of nowhere. It was caused by an ailment known as Demodex blepharitis, which is a fancy way of saying I have an overwhelming amount of tiny mites in my eyelashes. Mites! But don’t you dare sit there so smug, thinking that I’m a nasty little freak with my eye mites: you — yes, you — also have Demodex mites on your face right this very second. It’s just that mine went out of control for whatever reason, resulting in my horrific stye, and this lingering feeling of mite shame. But you’re disgusting, too, and don’t you dare forget it.

The cure for Demodex blepharitis for decades, if not centuries, has been to wash your eyelids with tea tree oil. This is a solution that may or may not work, but it’s at least guaranteed to make you wonder why you’re paying an eye doctor hundreds of dollars to tell you this, rather than consulting with a local forest witch.

However, that’s no longer true — a hot new bombshell has entered the pharma market! The second eye doctor I saw for this humiliating endless stye cued me in on the magic ingredient known as XDEMVY eye drops. (The first doctor I saw for the stye — who operated out of an office that was connected to a Crumbl Cookies, so her office reeked of 1,000-calorie cookies baking in the oven — didn’t even mention the Demodex blepharitis! Which makes me wonder if she’s in the pocket of Big Mite, or perhaps has her own case of D-bleph that’s gotten so out of control it’s spread to her brain and she’s trapped in some sort of Pluribus situation with the mites.)

This miracle cure known as XDEMVY is a simple, teeny-tiny bottle of eye drops that kills the mites lickety-split and costs — I am not joking — $2,000. Two thousand fucking American fucking dollars!!!! For an eye drop bottle smaller than the size of my thumb! And I have small thumbs! Miraculously, I appear to be one of the rare (according to my doctor) people whose insurance covers this liquid gold, so my bottle somehow cost $0. I have never, ever said a bad word about United Healthcare!!!!!!!!! I love my insurance company and all the things they do for me, and I think Luigi Mangione did a really mean thing to them and also isn’t that hot if you really think about it.

It is of course deeply, psychotically criminal that a company can create the only functional cure to a very un-serious disease that doesn’t seem to really do anything other than cause occasional styes (you can’t even see the mite overgrowth without a microscope, so I really need you to stop thinking I’m disgusting over here), and then charge $2,000 for a bottle that has something like 100 drops in it, max. But the good news is my Demodex levels are under control again (bragging about my normal level of eye mites), which means I’m willing to sell my remaining drops of this shit for $20 a pop. If you think you’ve got too many mites in your eyelashes, just hit me up on Venmo and I’ll send you a droplet in the mail. And if you’re a subscriber, I’ll sell you a drop for $15 to thank you for your support! Don’t say I never did anything for you.

Sliding Doors (1998) — on Criterion

It’s so random that Gwyneth was British for most of 1998. It’s also so funny that Shakespeare In Love, for all the awards and controversy it caused back then, has had absolutely zero lasting cultural footprint (unless you count paving the way for Hamnet, ugh), while Sliding Doors has lived on as a cultural reference to this day. And while I get why they wanted the most famous actress of the moment in their movie, I have no idea why the fine folks at Sliding Doors Inc. felt like Gwyneth absolutely had to be British in the film. She could have been American without any of the story changing — her character has no family, as far as the movie is concerned, and only one friend, which is kind of sad. Maybe the character originally was American, but Gwyneth wanted to get her money’s worth out of all those expensive Shakespeare In Love British accent lessons by showing off some more? (This actually seems extremely likely.)

Whatever the reason for her Britishness, this means you get to hear Gwyneth saying some of the most British slang ever forced into a movie’s script. Gwyneth says “wanker” and “bollocks” practically every five minutes; at one point, she refers to a man as a “pissing shagging wanker.” Everyone else speaks normally, but Gwyneth’s character speaks like she’s in a Guy Ritchie film. Characters will be having a nice little dinner party, speaking to each other as normal humans do, and Gwyneth will burst into the room, chugging a pint and screaming, “Oy! Wut’s all this, luv? Fancy a shag, mate? Bloody hell, I’m knackered! You fuckin’ wanker. Blimey!” It’s INSANE. I loved every second.

Ladies of London, season 4 episode 1 — on Peacock

The last thing I needed was another Bravo franchise of rich women acting like lunatics to get screen time and brand deals, but when I heard the Ladies of London reboot was being compared to early RHOSLC, that was all I needed to give it a chance. And oh boy did they find a collection of psychos.

The star of the premiere was a woman — sorry, a Lady — who has a chaotic riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags story, and currently lives in a literally crumbling apartment with an exotic bird who will pluck your eyes out if you look at it (visitors have to wear safety goggles in her home). But we’ve also got the Marchioness of Bath, who lives in “the largest house in England,” which she has turned into a literal zoo, and who is trying to claim the “first Black woman to join the Royal Family” crown from Meghan Markle, or at least to start some on-air beef with Meghan. There are 1-3 Swedish women (I can’t tell them apart to count them), who all confusingly have brown hair, and two women with a toxic relationship (one thinks they’re best friends, while the other can’t stand her). Everyone feels extremely Epstein-adjacent, so much so that I won’t be surprised when Trump pardons Ghislaine and she joins the cast next season.

How To Shoot A Ghost (2025) — on Criterion

This 27-minute short film by Charlie Kaufman and starring Jessie Buckley was some of the most pretentious nonsense I’ve seen in a while. Jessie Buckley and some other guy play two dead people who wander around Athens, whispering clunky poetry about death, life, violence, humanity, and everything in between. Jessie’s in Eternal Sunshine Clementine drag the whole film, taking Polaroids for no reason other than the forced poignancy of showing faded Polaroids on screen every twelve seconds. I spent every part of its 27 minutes begging for it to end. Between this and The Bride!, I’m going to need Jessie’s agents to stop sending her scripts for a while. This woman makes terrible choices!

Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (1973) — paperback

My Pynchonian ordeal is complete! I found the last bit of Gravity’s Rainbow even more exhausting and twisted than the beginning, the way it loops and fractures and becomes almost a parody of itself. (But I did love how Pynchon’s language collapsed in on itself by the end, with sentences like, “The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple.” This hilarious, obnoxious, pretentious dick!) What kind of a deranged madman introduces brand new characters 700 pages into a novel? This was frustrating, exhausting, sometimes gorgeous, often disgusting, and I am happy I read it, but I am probably not doing that to myself again.

3/3/26 - 3/9/26

It’s a beautiful 70+ degree day in NYC, here at the beginning of the end of the world, so you’ll have to forgive me for skipping right to the main drama of this week’s email because I desperately need to go outside before we’re plunged back into winter. And I have a lot to say in this email, because a movie really made me mad this week!!!!

This week: I suffered through Maggie Gyllenhaal’s big flop, and I watched three movies about people having affairs, which is a strange coincidence, I swear I’m not admitting to anything here with those choices, Justin. I also, coincidentally, started reading Pynchon during the beginning of World War III, which was a bad choice.

The Bride! (2026) — in IMAX at AMC Kip’s Bay

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is a two-hour movie that’s two hours too long, an infuriating, exhausting, excruciating film that, like Frankenstein’s monster, should have never been created. The Bride! has the aesthetics of a teenager throwing a tantrum in a Hot Topic, and the emotional intelligence and political depth of Hakeem Jeffries. This movie is so bad it actually made me switch sides in the eternal Maggie Gyllenhaal vs. Park Slope Co-op war; maybe if she had worked her required shifts at the co-op, she wouldn’t have had the time to make this monstrosity. They were trying to save us all along!

The nicest thing I can say about The Bride! is that in comparison to Guillermo del Toro’s boring (and bafflingly Oscar-nominated) Frankenstein, at least I felt something while watching it. The problem is that “something” I felt was a combination of exhaustion, annoyance, and resentment. The longer this movie went on, the more upset I got that I was still watching. Is it a good sign for a film if you get excited every time the main characters have guns pointed at them, because maybe they’ll die this time and you can finally go home?

One of the many, many problems with this movie is its incoherent plot. Let me try to summarize: the year is 1936, and Oscar winner Christian Bale is Frankenstein’s monster, who has been wandering the planet for over 100 years in search of pussy. Yes: this entire movie is kicked into motion because Frankenstein is horny. So Frankenstein (or “Frank”) enlists Annette Benning, a lady mad scientist (there are several moments in this movie in which ham-fisted male characters are like, “But women can’t be [occupation]! Whaaaaa??!!” and it’s always very funny) to dig up a dead woman and make him a bride so he can finally lose his virginity. The body they get belongs to future Oscar winner Jessie Buckley, who plays a New York-accented flapper who dies after becoming briefly possessed by the ghost of Mary Shelley, author of the original Frankenstein novel. I’m sorry to say I am not making any of this up. There’s also a whole separate thing going on with the mafia, and Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz playing a pointless pair of detectives, but none of that really matters so why get into it?

The Mary Shelley of it all is the most baffling choice in a movie full of baffling choices — the only reason we’re given as to why Mary Shelley possesses Jessie Buckley (Mary is also played by Jessie, in a series of excruciating scenes in which she basically tells knock knock jokes straight to camera while dressed like Cole Escola in Oh, Mary!) is because she wants to get revenge on men on behalf of women, I guess? We’ll get into the movie’s take on feminism a bit later, but the politics of this movie are the equivalent of those “if Hillary had won we’d all be at brunch” signs. (It’s actually so embarrassing I coincidentally saw this movie on International Women’s Day, now that I think about it. I am a MALE ALLY.)

Anyway, this is all to say: when Jessie Buckley is reincarnated as “The Bride of Frankenstein,” Mary Shelley’s possessed spirit is, I guess, reincarnated inside of her, too? As a result, Jessie Buckley spends the entire movie alternating between speaking in a New York/transatlantic accent, and a thick English accent that manifests when the ghost of Mary Shelley takes over. The ghost of Mary Shelley, however, is the most obnoxious character in a movie full of obnoxious characters, because the only thing this dead woman seems to want to do is to force Jessie Buckley to start spitting rhymes. This is where I really wish I were making things up. Imagine becoming the first person in history to defeat the finality of death, and the only thing you use your immortal powers for is to make a woman speak like she’s a mix of Allen Ginsberg and Nicki Minaj.

This is how it goes, every time Mary Shelley possesses the Bride: Jessie Buckley is saying a normal sentence, in her weird transatlantic accent, but she is suddenly seized by a series of spasms, yanking her head back and switching into a thick British accent, in which she spouts out rhymes or synonyms of the word she just said. So, for example: [Transatlantic accent:] “I would like a kiss.” [British spasm accent:] “Kiss! Bliss! Swish! Piss!” [Transatlantic accent:] “Shall we?” As far as I can tell, the only purpose of this whole contrivance is to show that… Mary Shelley was a writer? And loves words??? (The only time it’s ever acknowledged by anyone that she keeps doing this is when Frankenstein says, after one of her episodes, “Wow… you have a great vocabulary.” LOLLL even her virgin husband is like “…..k.”)

75% of Jessie Buckley’s dialogue in this movie is delivered in this sort of James Joyce-ian slam poetry, and the only positive thing I can say about it is it does capture the excruciating feeling of hanging out with someone who’s obnoxiously proud of their uselessly large vocabulary. If the ghost of Mary Shelley is real, Maggie Gyllenhaal better watch her back, because she is not going to like being portrayed as such an obnoxious little freak.

And obnoxious is the key word here: I have never met two more annoying characters to spend time with than Christian Bale’s Frank and Jessie Buckley’s The Bride. These two spend practically half the movie running around, tongues hanging out, smashing glasses while screaming, “BAHHH!!!” It’s like spending two hours watching a couple of 8-year-olds rebelling against their babysitter at bedtime. If you like riding the subway at 3pm on weekdays when all the tweens get out of school, you’ll love The Bride!

You’ll see a lot of defending this film because it’s a “feminist Frankenstein,” but the only feminist thing about this movie is that it proves that women can suck at making films just as much as men. The feminism here is hackneyed and trite — the Bride is angry about the way men have treated women, yes, but that’s as deep as the movie is willing to go. Every once in a while Jessie Buckley picks up a gun, points it at a man, gives an incoherent speech about how badly men treat women, before sprinting out into the night screaming, “Ahahahaaha!!!! Yes!!!!”

Somehow, this half-assed call to action serves to inspire women around the country, resulting in an excruciatingly stupid montage of women painting their faces to look like the Bride, shooting guns in the air, and screaming “Brain attack!” in the streets, while we see a series of newspaper headlines that are just embarrassingly empty Riot Grrrl references. (For a brief moment in this montage we also see — and I swear I am not joking — a shot of a 1936 woman twerking on the hood of a car.) This baffling eruption of proto-feminist violence goes nowhere and is never touched on again. The feminism in this movie feels like the cinematic equivalent of Rose McGowan taking a photo of herself raising her fist in the air and then going home, satisfied with another day’s work of activism. What are we fighting for? Who cares! Brain attack!

Female rage is obviously a rich and somehow still tragically under-explored territory in mainstream film, but the Bride is all rage, no substance. And sure, female rage at the expense of complicated interiority can be highly effective when a film commits to it (like, to name one off the top of my head, the spectacular Revenge, the first feature film from Coralie Fargeat, director of The Substance), but The Bride! wants to have it both ways, suggesting a rich inner life and larger questions for its protagonist without, you know, actually showing any of that.

The Bride is still, at the end of it all, just a woman with very little agency of her own: she’s been forced into violent actions largely via Mary Shelley mind-control (I guess?), and the only question the non-possessed half of her personality seems to have is, “What is my name?” Which — spoiler alert — comes to an extremely unsatisfying end, when she decides at the end to change her name, from “the Bride of Frankenstein” to simply “the Bride.” As if removing the husband’s name changes the fact that calling someone “the bride” is still a way to refer to her as only existing in relation to a man! After all that anger, all that rebellion, all that sticking-it-to-the-man, she is at the end of the day still just somebody’s wife. Sad! It’s a confusing message, like the kind of feminism you see on Love is Blind or tradwife TikToks, where it’s seen as empowering to be subservient to a man as long as you have a punk rock attitude about it. Go on girl, give yourself nothing!

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Mistress Dispeller (2025) — on Criterion

This is an absolutely wild documentary, and I have no idea how they filmed any of it. It follows a woman called a “mistress dispeller,” which I guess is a thing in China, who is hired by wives to help chase their husbands’ mistresses away. So we follow the titular mistress dispeller as she gets herself involved in the husband’s life, and then the mistress’ life, while lying and manipulating them into realizing that what they’re doing is wrong. It’s wild, and the most insane thing is that everyone knew they were being filmed and signed releases?! I have no idea what the husband and mistress were told before filming (an opening disclaimer says that all participants signed onto the film before and after filming, once they understood the true purpose of the doc), but the raw, emotional footage captured would put some Real Housewives franchises to shame. And now that I know about this world and this mistress dispeller, I’m going to need more. I need a documentary about the making of this documentary, I need a full series following her work with different couples every episode, and I need the mistress dispeller to get on Survivor. She’d have Boston Rob crying within, like, an hour.

The Housemaid (2025) — on Apple TV

Unlike The Bride!, which is just bad bad, this is a perfect example of good bad. Sydney Sweeney is, of course, the worst actress in the entire world, and though I haven’t seen her in much, it’s shocking to me how little effort she seems to have put into a starring role opposite Amanda Seyfried. Sydney really is at peak marble mouth here, mumbling her way through the entire film. (At one point, she sips a glass of champagne and mutters, “It’s really bubbly…” which felt like the world’s worst ad lib that somehow made it into the final cut.) But Amanda Seyfried makes up for Sydney’s lack of energy with a performance that rivals The Testament of Ann Lee for Most Psychotic Amanda Seyfried Character of 2025. In fact, this could make for a strangely good double-feature with Ann Lee, if you want to spend 5 straight hours watching Amanda Seyfried terrorize people for having sex. And why wouldn’t you!

A Perfect Murder (1998) — on Criterion

This is such a campy, twisty, perfect 90s thriller, a Hitchcock remake with three icons in their prime — Gwyneth, Michael Douglas, and Viggo Mortensen — who all happen to have basically the same haircut for some reason. There’s murder, sex, bribes, twists, turns, Gwyneth speaking Spanish with a Catalan lisp, Gwyneth speaking Arabic. Basically: everything you could ever want in a 90s film. A Perfect Murder on a rainy night, with a little joint? Bliss!

Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (1973), pages 1-519 — paperback

For the past two weeks I have been working my way through Gravity’s Rainbow and boy am I exhausted. It’s my first Pynchon, and I suppose I am enjoying it, although “enjoying” isn’t really a word I’d use to describe the experience. It will be worth it in the end, I can tell, but I can’t remember the last time I worked this hard at a book. If you’re looking for the cure to phone-addicted brain rot, Pynchon might be it, simply because there is no way to read him without using 100% of your brain’s focus. If I find my mind wandering for even half a sentence, I’m suddenly lost and need to go back 2-3 pages to start over. This is an intense, wild, sometimes annoying, occasionally beautiful experience. (I will say, if you’re going to take it upon yourself, the website gravitysrainbowguide.com is very helpful, especially when you’re picking it up the next day and need to remember wtf happened in the last section you read.)

One major theme of the book seems to be the separation between reality and fantasy: do fantasies come from reality? Or can fantasies create reality? Before reading this, I would have said the former, but now that I’m reading this book, which was written 50 years ago and is all about the rise of fascism, increased militarism, and an all-encompassing paranoia reinforced by extreme surveillance and shady corporate practices, I’m like……….. maybe fantasy and reality have collapsed? It’s all very — for lack of a better word, but actually now that I think of it this is literally the perfect word in this instance — Pynchonesque.

There genuinely is no one who writes better about paranoia. Just look at this section in which, after spending 400+ pages building up paranoia as an awful burden to bear, he flips it on its head and shows how the opposite might actually be worse:

If there is something comforting-religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky. Either They have put him here for a reason, or he’s just here. He isn’t sure that he wouldn’t, actually, rather have that reason....

And, really, is there anything more Pynchonesque than starting the most deranged and mind-altering novel about bombs raining down from the sky during World War II, right before the bombs start raining down at the start of World War III? This may not have been the most comfortable time to start reading Gravity’s Rainbow, but it is also tragically the perfect book for this moment. Fuck it, let’s have a paranoid summer.

2/24/26 - 3/2/26

I know there’s a lot going on — did you know there’s a lot going on? — but I’m still annoyed about last week’s pre-war media cycle, which was wall-to-wall about the NYPD whining and crying and literally arresting people for throwing a couple snowballs at them (during a massive snowball fight they walked into???). There have been so, so, so many worse things that have happened over the past year (the past year? try the past 36 hours), but for some reason this whole snowball fight circus was my final straw. How the media was able to take these claims that these cops’ lives were endangered by snowballs seriously, to breathlessly report on every deranged statement from everyone involved, has to have been the final nail in the already-buried media coffin. Anyway, I’m glad it’s finally going to go above 60 degrees this weekend, so hopefully all the terrifying, dangerous snow melts (it must be so scary to be a cop and to walk by a pile of snow these days… you might as well be walking past a loaded gun). Anyway, let’s get to the consumption, I just got myself mad about this all over again.

This week: I went long on the Survivor 50 premiere because I am unfortunately addicted to that show, I watched the two remaining Best-Picture-nominated films I had yet to see, and I watched another new movie that traumatized my gay ass.

Survivor 50, episode 1 — on Paramount+

The premiere of Survivor’s 50th season came with a lot of trepidation. I’ve been watching, studying, and obsessing over this show since I was 13 years old. I have never missed a single episode — even when I studied abroad in Cairo, Egypt, in 2007, I would regularly take my janky old laptop to a nearby cafe and drink tea for hours while using the extremely slow Egyptian cafe wifi to illegally download that week’s episode of Survivor: China (don’t sue me, CBS). So, having been on the Survivor journey for 26 years — literally 2/3 of my entire life, yikes — I was equal parts excited and anxious as the show’s 50th season began last week.

Thankfully, and somewhat to my surprise, it delivered! The fact is, Survivor has discovered some of the most iconic and charismatic reality TV stars of all time, so having true megastars like Cirie, Coach, Colby, and Mike White back on the show goes a long way to making the 50th season feel as big as it needs to. The whole cast isn’t up to that caliber, of course, but that news was released months ago, so I’ve had time to whine and cry and gnash my teeth, and I’m practicing a Buddhist (or Coach-esque) acceptance now with the show. I’ll take whatever slop they’ll give me, basically, but at least right now the slop has true Survivor icons like Coach and Colby on it!

It’s hard to overstate just how truly famous Colby Donaldson was 25 years ago, but he’s aged very well, if you’re wondering, and has returned to remind us what true reality TV star power looks like. Within minutes, he dismissed Rizo — a 6-year-old boy stuck in a 12-year-old boy’s body but who is somehow 25 years old — as “annoying as hell.” If you, like me, had suffered through Rizo (who calls himself “RizGod”) for all of Survivor 49, Colby calling him annoying on television felt like that first bite of cheeseburger must feel after you get off the island. Finally, some real food!

In the old days of Survivor, calling someone annoying would barely rate as an insult (we’ve literally seen a woman mock another woman for crying over her father’s death… this show used to be dark dark), but in the post-covid reboot of the show (what Jeff refers to as Survivor’s “New Era”), the casts have been overwhelmingly positive and friendly. It’s rare we get a spirited disagreement on the show these days, let alone a full-fledged insult, so hearing someone call someone else annoying was as shocking as, like, the Oscars slap (which happened 50 years ago next week, can you believe it?).

And while I will forever complain about fully half the cast of season 50 consisting of players from seasons 41-49 (a move that feels a bit like Jeff Probst stubbornly doubling down on criticism from fans that the show has lost its way in the last 5 years — which is a response I unfortunately very much relate to as a stubborn brat myself), even some of the more random “new era” choices are given a lift toward stardom merely by interacting with true legends. In fact, Colby quickly reverses course on finding Rizo annoying and decides to take him under his wing (they briefly bond over Rizo telling Colby, who is 50, that his dad is 47[?], before bursting into tears[???] — I burst into tears as well, because what do you mean you’re an adult on Survivor and your dad is only 47???), which serves to let Colby show he’s a more flexible player than he was in his younger days, and lets Rizo show that he’s a more socially savvy player than I possibly give him credit for. (Still doesn’t mean I have to root for Rizo, though. Go away! Get off my lawn!).

As you can tell, I’ve suddenly found myself deep in the Survivor strategy weeds, now, while merely trying to write about the show, and that’s still the biggest flaw with the way it’s evolved: it’s simply too complicated! I have no idea how new viewers can follow along with the slew of advantages, twists, “beware advantages,” and, in season 50, prior relationships you have to track. And with the premiere running a full three hours, if you opened a bottle of wine at the start of the episode, you were probably cross-eyed by the end of it. You can’t expect me to keep up with whatever a Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol is when I’m drunk!

Because, yes, they did introduce something called a “Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol” into the game, which was revealed by a hidden note “written by Billie Eilish,” which began: “Hey, it’s Billie Eilish,” before “she” went on to describe how this complicated advantage works. I guess this is the show’s way of trying to bring in new viewers, but… are people watching a 3-hour episode of TV just to see a note that some PA wrote and passed off as something actually written by Billie Eilish? Furthermore, where the hell was Billie during all this? I saw no promo from her, no acknowledgement she had anything to do with it — if this woman is supposedly designing complicated Survivor game mechanics, can she not whip out her phone and quickly record a front-facing video to promote the damn thing? I’m genuinely asking: does Billie know this happened?

This whole thing was so baffling, and yet, because my gay brain is broken (or maybe because of the aforementioned bottle of wine), I found it kind of…. campy? I do not think the Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol did anything to help the show’s ratings, but I’ve already gone through the five stages of grief with my feelings about this show and settled on acceptance. So, fuck it, it’s Survivor season 50 and for some reason that means we’re going to have to watch Mike White being forced to learn who Mr. Beast is. Jeff already knows I’ll keep watching the show no matter what he does, apparently, so why should he care what I think? He knows he had me hooked long ago!

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The Secret Agent (2025) — on Hulu

This was wayyyyy weirder than I anticipated (the leg scene?????), and better for it. I was expecting a sober, action-packed look at the horrors of 1970s Brazil, and instead I got a goofy, beautiful, slightly messy film, one where I literally never knew what was going to happen next. Like pretty much every film, it’s too long for no reason, but I don’t care; despite the horrors of the Brazilian military dictatorship, I could have stayed in this world forever, with its gorgeous colors and Wagner Moura’s adorable, sad eyes. It’s so crazy the Oscars nominated this and Sinners for Best Picture, but also nominated… F1???

F1 (2025) — on Apple TV

This is the longest movie ever made. If you told me I watched this for 6 hours straight, I’d believe you. There are exciting moments, sure — the racing scenes are actually fun, and thank god for that because otherwise what are we even doing here — but this is such a cookie-cutter old-school Hollywood plot that I found myself gobsmacked at how normal it all is. Unfortunately for me, I will follow my girl Kerry Condon anywhere she goes, and sometimes that means sitting through 3 hours of her simply batting her eyelashes at Brad Pitt (who, it must be said, turns in possibly his clunkiest and stiffest performance of all time in this movie). If there’s an F2, I will NOT be watching.

The Plague (2025) — streamed somewhere, I forget

This is billed as a horror movie, which is kind of annoying because it’s not, though I guess it captures the horrors of being a young boy surrounded by other young boys. Call it: emotional horror. Gay trauma horror. Sissy horror. Set at a water polo camp (do those exist??? hundreds of kids getting shipped away to become water polo players? is this some WASP shit I don’t know about?), it follows a boy who tries his best to fit in with the popular crowd by joining in on their bullying of an outcast boy who’s been deemed to have “the plague” — some sort of vague disease that requires you to be ostracized by the group.

It’s a simple movie shot absolutely gorgeously (all those underwater shots!), with several sequences I’ll be thinking about for a while, and builds perfectly. I really liked this one! It will possibly be re-traumatizing for anyone who was once a little boy (well, maybe not if you were the popular kid, but if you were, you’re probably not reading a gay substack), but it’s all fine now! You’re an adult! No one can bully you! And water polo isn’t real! There’s really nothing to be afraid of.

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2/17/26 - 2/23/26

First things first: this email may have arrived in a different part of your inbox, because I have relocated to Substack for reasons that are too boring to get into here (my old indie platform seemed to be falling apart, so I’ve sold out yayyyyyy). The good news is I finally have a working url — deathbyconsumption.com — so we are a real, official, grown-up website. All this means nothing for you; the emails should keep flowing as usual, so just drag this into your primary inbox or whatever, and gmail should resume treating these weekly emails as the priority they are. And now that all that boring stuff is out of the way: snow, huh?! What a concept! The Great Blizzard of ‘26 was beautiful for a day, but now all this snow is just in the way, and I simply refuse to find myself midway through March and still trapped behind slow walkers on snow-narrowed sidewalks. MELT, BITCH.

This week: I saw the new Sam Raimi film and once again was horrified at how people act in movie theaters, I marveled at how much Willem Dafoe looked like a lesbian in the 80s, I was chilled to the bone by the men of Love is Blind, I loved the new HBO show that exposes how broken Americans are, and I read the debut novel from a two-time Survivor contestant that’s totally not based on Survivor, wink wink to any CBS lawyers.

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Send Help (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park

This is a perfect January/February movie: campy, over-the-top, genuinely shocking at times, and just perfectly stupid. Which is all to say, this sure is a Sam Raimi movie, all right!

Dylan O’Brien and Rachel McAdams are both fantastic in this, and while I always expect her to be great, I realized I’ve become weirdly proud of him, as if he were my very own son. You’re doing great, Dylan! They do a She’s All That kind of thing with Rachel McAdams here, where they throw her in a bulky cardigan and an ugly skirt and you’re expected to believe Rachel McAdams is physically repulsive to men, which is more than a little insane. But she’s such a good actress she actually kind of pulls off the transformation from mousy office worker to empowered, feral island woman. What can’t she do!

There aren’t “twists,” per se, but the back-and-forth between Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien does keep you guessing who will get the upper hand. The smartest thing the movie does is to avoid moralizing — these are both bad people, in different ways, and if you’re rooting for either of them you’re missing the point. We do get some perspective on why they’re so fucked up, but it’s handled well, used more to flesh out the characters rather than forgive them. Like the best fights on the Real Housewives, both characters are completely in the wrong, and the best way to enjoy it is to free yourself from having to choose a side at all. This is a knowingly stupid movie, yes, but it’s also a bleakly funny glimpse at the coldhearted rot at the center of America, where the job market is slowly collapsing and many of us (especially women, of course), are forced into toxic workplaces. When you’re given the chance to flip the power against your abusive boss, how far would you take things?

The only downside to the movie — and this is something I’ve complained about before, but I don’t care, I’m doing it again — is the fact that people have completely lost the ability to watch a movie in public. We were surrounded by the worst-behaved theater audience I’ve been subjected to in a while, a collection of people who were all convinced that we all paid $20 specifically to see the film with the addition of their own audio commentary. The more the people around us threw out unfunny one-liners, the more I fantasized about doing to them what Rachel McAdams was doing on screen to Dylan O’Brien.

Two Gen Z girlies behind us couldn’t make it through a scene without adding a “joke,” like in a scene in which Rachel McAdams makes a sauce to go with the fish she’s caught on the island, causing the girl behind me to screech, “SAUCE?! A WOMAN AFTER MY OWN HEART!” Wow, what a hilarious thing to yell! I’m sure it must have been hard for you, to watch a movie that somehow didn’t revolve around you, so I’m thrilled you managed to find a way to make us all aware of your uniquely sparkling personality! Sam Raimi should be paying you to see his film! In fact, we should all turn our seats around and watch you instead of this movie, since you’re clearly the most interesting person in the room!

Look, if you’re going to speak during a movie, you really need to assess whether you’re actually a funny person or not. Most people simply don’t have the personality to pull off a genuinely entertaining mid-movie outburst, I’m sorry to tell you! The majority of the time, adding your own “joke” to the movie we’re all watching just makes you sound like everyone’s lamest coworker, awkwardly reheating week-old memes in a sad attempt to pass as humorous. We can’t all be the genuinely hilarious woman who was in the theater with me when I saw the horror movie Barbarian a couple years ago — when that film’s main character passed up her 4th or 5th easy opportunity to escape, this theatergoer groaned out loud, mostly to herself, “I’m so sick of this bitch,” which made the entire theater burst into laughter. If you’re going to yell something in a movie, you better make it worth our while, and none of the people in my showing of Send Help had the charisma to pull it off. Normally I’d be enraged at the girl next to us, who spent the whole movie scrolling Instagram, but compared to what else was going on in that theater, I was just relieved she was quiet.

All I’m saying is: movie theaters are dying and while it’s easy to blame the corporations for their own collapse, I can reserve some of the blame for these people who can’t ever shut the fuck up.

To Live and Die in LA (1985) — on Criterion

From the neon-stylized opening credits to the Wang Chung-composed soundtrack to the quaint concerns with counterfeiting $20 bills, this is a gloriously 80s film, and has to be one of William Friedkin’s best. He’s the master of Bleak Cinema, giving you a miserable look at the institutional rot beneath our society, and unfortunately since we never seem to learn our lesson as a nation, his films are still relevant over 40 years later. He’s also smart enough to lean into the fact that Willem Dafoe looked exactly like a glamorous lesbian in the 80s, so why not work that concept into the movie?

Love is Blind, season 10, episodes 1-9 — on Netflix

Every season of Love is Blind is a horror show about women who have been cursed to heterosexual hell, but nothing prepared me for the nightmares that the Ohio-based season had in store for us. These are some of the scariest people ever put on television. Most of these people literally voted for JD Vance to be a Senator, and then voted for him again to be Vice fucking President of our entire country, okay? So you know these people don’t give a shit about anything. The men on this season have the intelligence level and personality of those macaques that keep beating up Punch the monkey.

Chris is the obvious villain, but his body-shaming of Jessica felt so obvious and almost forced — like a performance from a tiny man who’s desperate to turn his 15 minutes of fame into a career as a right wing podcaster (and it’ll probably work!). Alex is the most genuinely terrifying one, with his shifty lizard eyes and inability to say even a single thing with conviction. That man is hiding some dark and terrifying secrets, and with his “nomad lifestyle” I will not be surprised when some true crime TikTok girly gets her corkboard and red yarn out to reveal an uptick in disappearing women in every city Alex visits.

The show got lucky with its first and only successful couple, and it felt like the producers wasted years trying and failing to chase that initial high, serving us rose-colored edits of some clearly fucked-up couples. But now, with the nightmare that is the entire state of Ohio, it feels like they might finally be retooling the show and making it into what it always should have been: a PSA to women about specific men to be avoided at all costs.

If we can keep this show running for the next decade-plus, we will have compiled an FBI’s Most Wanted list of all the single men women should most avoid in the entire country. This show is performing a valuable public service to all women, and I think it should be taxpayer funded.

Neighbors, season 1, episodes 1-2 — on HBOMax

Neighbors is, unfortunately, the show America needs right now. This new HBO show, produced by A24 and the malevolent spirit that lives inside Josh Safdie, tells various stories from around the country of neighbors at war with each other. Each episode is less than 30 minutes and covers two different stories, so the episodes are quick and dirty, told at whiplash speed, with TikTok-inspired edits and absurdist interludes that, somehow, captures the vibe of living in the United States right now: we are a nation of idiots at war with each other over the stupidest things imaginable.

The show is often cruel and unforgiving, using distorted lenses and unflattering angles to show the worst of the participants, with most arguments edited to make both sides look absolutely deranged. No one comes out of this looking good, least of all our country. The portrait of America that emerges after only the first two episodes is a nation of petty, miserable people squabbling over the tiniest plots of land, willing to draw a gun on neighbors if they’re perceived to lower our property values by even a dollar. Each episode strives for a happy ending, but the participants’ happy endings always come across as more coping mechanism than actual happiness.

I’m making the show sound more bleak than it is, and, depending on your tolerance for laughing at people, you may find it bleak. But I’m not ashamed to admit I screamed with laughter throughout most of the two episodes I saw; despite the cruel nature of the show, I found the participants almost always extremely charming, if not relatable at times. (My absolute favorites are, of course, the elderly Indiana gays who I refuse to believe aren’t plucked from a Christopher Guest film — the first time we see them, they’re sitting in a hot tub that appears to be in their living room.)

Who hasn’t felt absolutely overwhelming frustration at the tiny, ridiculous slights from an obnoxious neighbor? We’re a nation on the verge, at each other’s throats over extremely important and vital issues, so maybe what we need most is a show that exposes the pettiest, least-important arguments in our country, and gives us all a chance to laugh at it. This is a cruel show, holding up a mirror to a cruel nation, and if you weren’t laughing, you could cry.

Escape!, by Stephen Fishbach (2026) — hardcover

This debut novel by two-time Survivor player Stephen Fishbach feels like a book he’s been working on since his first time on the show, 18 years ago. Focused on a Survivor-esque reality show called “Escape!,” it tells the story of the types of people drawn to reality TV — on both the contestant and production sides. Kent, a grizzled hero who has already won a similar reality show, is cast on season one of “Escape!” and marooned on an island alongside a collection of other reality TV has-beens and newcomers, all various mishmashes of recognizable types (and, for a Survivor fan, Stephen drops endless Easter eggs dropped throughout the narrative — I truly lost count of references). Also out there is Miriam, cast to be the “nerd,” a reality TV newbie who may or may not be in over her head. And on the production side we follow Beck, a disgraced producer eager to prove herself once again. Miriam and Kent are playing the literal game on the show, but Stephen never lets you forget that there’s always more to the story than what you see on screen: “There are always two games. The one you’re playing against the other contestants, and the one the producers are playing against you.”

What starts as a silly, tongue-in-cheek look at the behind-the-scenes process of reality TV turns deadly serious, with twists and melodramatic turns worthy of their own Sam Raimi adaptation. While the characters sometimes feel a bit blurred at the edges, not quite fully real (but perhaps that’s just a meta-commentary on the act of thinking you can know a character based on their TV edit?), it’s a true page-turner, with more than enough clever insights on the types of personalities (and personality defects) that have kept the reality TV engine humming for decades. But reality TV, of course, turns a mirror on society, and what it shows us is we’re a nation of paranoid lunatics, overeager to turn on someone else before they can get one over on us.

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YIKES, bleak week! I blame the snow. As always, you can reply to this email, or forward it to someone who might love it — or better yet, someone who might hate it and want to fight about it with me. I love fighting over email! You can also, I think, comment on it on Substack?? I don’t know, we’re figuring this brave new email world out together.

2/10/26 - 2/16/26

Okay, it’s time for the snow to melt. We’ve all had our fun, but I am absolutely sick of being stuck behind slow pedestrians on a sidewalk that’s been narrowed to a single lane of traffic between gray-brown walls of snow and ice. Just like any self-respecting gay New Yorker, I’m used to zipping down the street at lightning speed, elbowing tourists and old ladies in the ribs in order to get ahead. So every time I come to a screeching halt behind a slowly shuffling family of four, tiptoeing their way across the slush, I feel it as a personal attack. Why are you doing this specifically to me, I scream at the back of their heads, kicking out the knees from the youngest child in the group so I can leapfrog over him and get to the bar or movie theater 2 minutes faster than Google Maps told me it would take a straight person. Even worse is the horrific amount of dog shit left on the sidewalks — what is it about Americans that we think dog shit somehow melts with snow, so it doesn’t need to be picked up in the winter? Every step I’ve taken outside over the last month has been fraught with danger, a half-inch away from ruining my day with every step. I love dogs more than most people do, but these days, as far as I’m concerned, every dog owner is a fascist, willing to destroy innocent people’s lives rather than face even a single second of inconvenience themselves. The post-Trump truth and justice tribunals better make some room on the docket for city dog owners, is all I’m saying.

This week: I endured Emerald Fennell’s latest cinematic assault, I healed myself with Scorsese’s gayest film, I followed Elle Fanning into the depths of Disney hell, I relived the years Tyra Banks spent torturing and mangling young women for our entertainment, I marveled at modern anti-stye technology, and I read three newish books, wow!

“Wuthering Heights” (2026) — at Cobble Hill Cinema

I am an Emerald Fennell apologist, but even I can’t defend “Wuthering Heights,” her bloated, boring, gutless take on a classic. Somehow, Emerald Fennell — a woman whose previous work has given us grave-fucking, a naked dance number, and inspired the Tina Fey-coined phrase “sexually violent third act twist” — made a movie less shocking than the 150-year-old book it is based on. Emerald, girl: you’ve been out-scandalized by Emily Brontë, are you not ashamed of yourself?!

This movie needed to be 30 minutes shorter and 200% crazier. In retrospect, the obnoxious quotation marks around the film’s title should have been the giveaway that Emerald wasn’t confident enough to commit to anything, that the entire movie would run away from its own convictions. At times, it wants to be a sexually violent story that pays tribute to the emotional and physical horrors of the novel; but every time things start to get even a little bit weird, Emerald retreats to the braindead comforts of a weepy, rain-soaked, period piece romantic film, something you’ve seen a thousand times before. For every bit of genuine freakiness (Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff licking the wall mid-makeout), there are ten times as many moments of melodramatic crying and longing in the rain. I’m bored!

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, unfortunately, have nearly zero chemistry — Jacob literally has more chemistry with the aforementioned wall he licks. It’s hard to forget, due to the sheer size of him as he looms over a tiny trembling woman, that he is our reigning (Oscar-nominated??) Frankenstein’s monster. And yet I wish he had brought even more Frankenstein into the role; at least then we’d have had a Heathcliff worthy of the reputation! The Heathcliff of “Wuthering Heights” is mostly a doe-eyed sadboi who likes to tell you he’s dangerous and scary more than he ever acts on it. The dangerous liaisons between Cathy and Heathcliff are told, not shown, and if the characters weren’t spending every scene reminding you that Heathcliff is violent and cruel, you wouldn’t be blamed if you forgot it. In the novel, we see Heathcliff abuse children, servants, his wife — oh and he literally hangs a dog. But Jacob Elordi and Emerald Fennell’s Heathcliff has been so declawed, he’s closer to Heathcliff the cartoon cat than anything recognizable from Brontë’s work.

The whole time, you could feel Emerald Fennell unsure if she wanted to make the most fucked-up BDSM nightmare of her career, or an 1800s The Notebook, before deciding to split the difference, slapping some quotation marks around the title at the last minute to give herself a perfect out for any criticism. And it’s those quotation marks I keep coming back to. Those quotation marks, I know, will piss me off for years, if not decades. It’s an astonishingly embarrassing and cowardly decision, and also a pointless and stupid one: the quotes are meant to signify that this isn’t literally Wuthering Heights, merely one woman’s take on it, but like....... that’s how all movie adaptations work??? Does Emerald Fennell think if she hadn’t put the quotes there, we would have all, what, wondered if Emily Brontë collaborated with her on the script? Does she think other adaptations of other novels aren’t taking creative liberties? Does she not understand that every single time a director has taken 200-400 pages of a novel and compressed it into a 2-hour movie, they have been forced to make creative choices about how to adapt it in their own unique way? Does Emerald Fennell not know what the word “adaptation” means???

The title’s quotation marks are everything wrong with the film: they’re useless, poorly thought-through, a garishly obvious “joke” that thinks it’s a subtly clever wink. Someday, it would be nice to see an Emerald Fennell film that reveals what she actually thinks about the world, but I’m starting to worry there isn’t any thinking happening at all.

The Age of Innocence (1993) — on Criterion

I appreciate Criterion throwing Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence onto streaming as a not-so-subtle “fuck you” to “Wuthering Heights.” You see, Emerald, this is how you adapt a 100-year-old novel about longing and forbidden love, no titular quotation marks required! This was, hilariously, sexier and more scandalous than all of “Wuthering Heights,” and it’s all pulled off while you never see any skin below anyone’s neck!

Daniel Day Lewis — young and more beautiful than you remember he ever was — is engaged to a comically wide-eyed Winona Ryder, while secretly falling in love with her cousin, a disgraced Countess played by Michelle Pfeiffer. The story is narrated, thrillingly, by Joanne Woodward, who helps you through all the interconnected family drama in 1870 New York City. It’s actually shocking to see a Scorsese film with this tone, like you’ve pulled up a sofa in a seating room and are being told the most delicious high society gossip. This is, to my knowledge, the gayest film Scorsese ever made, and made me realize that the Wuthering Heights adaptation we actually need is his.

Predator: Badlands (2025) — on Disney+

The male loneliness crisis affects Predators, too, apparently! People have dubbed this “the gay Predator movie” (which I get, but is wrong — the original 1987 film is gayer), since the story follows a Predator who’s rejected by his father for being weak. Eager to prove himself to his burly dad, he flies to “the death planet” to hunt the deadliest creature as a trophy to bring back to his tribe. But that’s all a simple setup to the real message of the film: the power of friendship. Yes, this is a Predator film that amounts to a “we’re stronger together!” message, and as a result it’s the most Disneyfied of the bunch. It has its decent moments, but the tone of the movie felt like one of the 5,000 films that lay downstream from the Marvel universe, where an exciting action sequence must be immediately undercut by a character being like, “Well, that just happened.” The only takeaway from this film was that I will, apparently, watch literally anything Elle Fanning is in.

Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model — on Netflix

I found this three-part documentary on the Tyra Banks Prison Experiment known as America’s Next Top Model equally captivating and confusing. It’s unclear to me how much involvement Tyra had in the making of the documentary — at times it feels like she’s genuinely being put to the screws to answer for the crimes against humanity she perpetuated on her reality show, while at other times the documentary feels like a whitewashing of her reputation, if not promo for a return of ANTM. Either way, I watched all three hours in one sitting.

Those who know America’s Next Top Model already know its most psychotic moments — judges calling skinny girls “elephants” to their faces (and worse behind their backs), the blackface challenge (not joking), the forced surgeries (yes) — so the weakest parts of this documentary are the 20 or so montages that simply highlight the insanity of ANTM without commentary. But when they dial in on specific moments, there are genuine revelations here, most newsworthy the fact that the iconic “cheating scandal” of Cycle 2, in which model Shandi “cheated” on her boyfriend in Milan on camera (seriously: they not only aired her boyfriend SCREAMING at her on the phone, calling her a slut as she sobbed and hyperventilated, but they also aired her calling the Italian man she had sex with to ask him if he used protection or had any STIs — you truly had to be there), was actually a sexual assault.

This is the most harrowing section of the documentary, in which Shandi recounts the whole excruciating escapade: she wasn’t eating, because no one ate on that show, and the producers got her drunk with a bunch of Italian men they had hired to drive the girls around, and next thing she knew she was blacking out while he was on top of her, and the cameras kept rolling through it all. I remembered the Shandi spectacle from when it first aired, of course (anyone who’s been reading these emails for more than 2 weeks knows my brain is 90% reality TV mush), but I had never heard the truth of the matter, and it’s horrifying to see Shandi recount it and the ways it continues to ruin her life. Even worse is when Tyra and the other executive producer are asked about it in their interviews, and they brush it all aside with barely an acknowledgment that anything bad happened.

The most frustrating and fascinating aspect of this documentary is the decision from Tyra to be interviewed, alongside co-executive producer Ken Mok, plus former judges Miss J, Jay Manuel, and Nigel Barker. The three former judges make it clear they’re here to settle scores, after Tyra publicly fired and burned them, ending her friendship with them practically overnight, but the result of their vendettas against her is to frustratingly avoid any self-criticism. Any of the show’s evil behaviors they participated in were Tyra’s fault; they were, in so many words, simply following orders.

Tyra also refuses to accept blame for pretty much everything (the only time she admits she went “too far” is during the viral “we were all rooting for you!” meltdown, but even that she blames on some “Black girl shit that’s deep inside”), hand-waving any concerns off with vague admonishments that young critics just don’t understand “that’s just how things were back then.” Sure, we’ve come a long-ish way in 20 years (although, considering the state of things, it’s a little bit 2 steps forward, 3 steps back......) but it’s maddening to watch Tyra refuse to accept any criticism while acting like America’s Next Top Model aired in 1942 rather than the 2000s.

There’s a much more interesting, much more explosive documentary here, if they cared to look for it, about the abuses and extremes that were often required to make the iconic reality TV we all look back on so fondly. It’s a question that’s still grappled with today: can you make good reality TV ethically? And, to be honest, I don’t know the answer! Most of my favorite reality moments happened in the early 2000s, which can be partly attributed to the fact that, without social media or YouTube or even reruns of reality TV, people felt free to act like lunatics in front of the cameras without thinking about how it would follow them for the rest of their life. But these iconic moments are also, in many cases, attributed to the actions of producers with shaky ethics and boundaries — even a show like Survivor, which really does seem to have been one of the most ethical shows at that time, went through multiple rounds of horrific on-camera scandals (multiple sexual assaults that weren’t taken seriously, and a trans man being outed against his will, to name a few) before it started to focus more seriously on the long-term wellbeing of its cast members (and, probably as a result, has become a nicer and less dramatic show).

So, yes, America’s Next Top Model was all of it: iconic television, a product of its time, and seemingly a factory for abuse. And yet, as Tyra says to us viewers in the documentary while panicking to throw blame on anyone but herself, “You wanted this.” She’s not wrong! Because, at the end of the documentary, my first thought was: “Holy shit, that was fucked up.” But then my second thought was: “I should rewatch America’s Next Top Model.”

eye-press self-heating reusable compresses + lid wipes — purchased at CVS

As I bravely came out with last week, I’m currently battling the stye of my life, which may force me into eyelid surgery (???) next month if it doesn’t go away on its own. The only real weapon any of us have against styes are hot compresses, so, tired of heating up a damp washcloth 5x a day, I decided to try out these supposedly self-heating and reusable hot compresses I happened to see on a CVS shelf. And let me tell you: these are the most astonishing invention of the 21st century.

The compresses have a soft pad on one side (which is apparently soaked in baby shampoo to help clean your eyelids! So thoughtful!), while other side is clear plastic with a tiny little handle so you can comfortably hold it against your eye. Inside is a mysterious blue goop, the color of the ocean in James Cameron’s The Abyss, in which floats a small oval sliver of metal, like a button from the 1700s. To activate the self-heating mechanism, you simply flex the button back and forth, popping it like the top of a Snapple bottle’s lid, which immediately causes the blue goop to transform in a flash, from blue to icy-blue, from liquid to solid, in about 2 seconds. I can’t properly describe the experience, but I can tell you that — alongside bluetooth and smartphones — I’m 100% certain this technology has been reverse-engineered from a crashed UFO.

The heat lasts for about 10-15 minutes, the exact amount of time you should be compressing for, before turning into a cold plastic lump. But here’s where things get even more magical: to re-activate it, all you do is drop it in a pot of boiling water for 5 minutes, and it somehow resets to brand new. It comes out of the boiling water pliable and soft, the liquid once again ocean blue, ready to be re-activated via its metallic disc. I purchased a pack of 10, but I only use 4 of them now, in a constant cycle of boiling and resetting. Sure, boiling bits of plastic repeatedly and putting them against my eyelid is probably exposing me to all sorts of nefarious microplastics going directly to my brain, but what modern activity doesn’t come with a side of microplastics? And if it gets rid of the stye without requiring eye surgery, I’d say that’s a worthwhile exchange.

I have no idea what toxic chemicals are inside this little package, I have no idea what sort of evil conglomerate is behind this invention, and I’d rather not know. What I do know is that this is the kind of technology we should be funneling billions of dollars into, rather than AI or crypto. This is truly transformative. This is revelatory. This is the future we were promised.

The Passenger Seat, by Vijay Khurana (2025) — library ebook

This slim, tense book explores the idea that — well, I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but, young men are kind of fucked up these days. In The Passenger Seat, two teenage boys run away from home and embark on an aimless drive “up north,” causing a hell of a lot of trouble on the way. Right off the bat, we know bad things are going to happen, and they do, but the violence is anything but predictable: I spent most of the book anxiously turning the pages, waiting for something awful to happen to these boys, or for them to do something awful, or, usually, both. It’s a quick, short little read, which is great because I really did not want to stay in their minds very long, and ultimately a sad one that offers no catharsis or platitudes, which I think makes it stronger. Boys are fucked up, and they crave intimacy, but often don’t know how to find non-toxic ways of being together. It’s sad and true, and Khurana never lets the boys off the hook for the awful things they do, while also finding moments of tenderness that speak to the deeper need within them, that force you to, at times, see the humanity behind the monsters in the headlines:

Teddy remembers the first time Adam took him to jump into the river. ... Adam vaulted onto the railing like it was nothing. When Teddy got up there they stood side by side, looking down. They both had to touch a hand to each other’s shoulder to keep their balance. He remembers Adam looking at him then, those small eyes, pupils tiny in the sun. Teddy was uncomfortable and chose to look down at the water, at the rocky banks closing in on the patch where Adam was assuring him it was safe to jump. Adam adjusted his trip on the stanchion and with his other hand nudged Teddy off balance. Instinctively Teddy stepped forward, only a fraction, to catch his weight, but there was nowhere to step. He can still picture the sight of Adam’s face in his peripheral. On the way down he decided he hated Adam, planned to put a knee right through his stomach. Or better yet, to walk up to Adam’s truck and take the handbrake off, let it roll right into the river. But once he struck the water, he saw that Adam was not up on the bridge, looking down at Teddy and laughing. Adam was right there beside him; he had followed Teddy down without Teddy realizing it. And this made Teddy wonder if he really had been pushed, or if they’d both just stumbled over the edge. Adam made a shrill, joyful noise, and Teddy decided then and there that he had enjoyed the fall.

The Mind Reels, by Fredrik deBoer (2025) — library ebook

This is another slim, tense book, but one I enjoyed a lot less than The Passenger Seat. It follows a young woman, Alice (of course), who loses her mind to severe bipolar disorder while at college. We follow the unraveling and paranoia, her frequent and frustratingly brief encounters with what amounts for mental healthcare in this country, and we exhaustively chronicle the medicines she takes. It’s bleak, and though it feels very realistic to the experience of having bipolar disorder, it feels like one of those books that’s important that it exists, but not the most enjoyable to read.

The Unveiling, by Quan Berry (2025) — hardcover

I enjoyed Quan Berry’s previous novel We Ride Upon Sticks, about a 1980s high school girl’s field hockey team that turns to Satanism and witchcraft to win matches, so was looking forward to The Unveiling, which sounded like a mix of LOST and Lovecraft. In The Unveiling, a group of tourists to Antarctica get stranded on an island, where strange things keep happening and the past comes back to haunt them. It has its fun and genuinely spooky moments, with some great, tense horror sequences, but I kept bumping up against the characters, who all felt obnoxiously one-note. This is by design — the narrator rarely uses their real names, instead referring to them by the character names she’s coined, like “The Baron,” for an obnoxiously arrogant older wealthy white guy — but that doesn’t mean I can’t be annoyed it. Rather than figuring out how to survive, the characters spend more time bickering about social and political issues, arguing about affirmative action and pronouns while literally starving to death. There’s a point to all of it, but not a very elegant one, and I never enjoy a book in which I’m hoping for literally every single character to die, and quickly. The genre of “horror as a way to unpack trauma” is well-worn territory, and while it can still find ways to surprise me, I didn’t find any surprises here.

2/3/26 - 2/9/26

I need to speak my truth about something: I have the worst stye I’ve ever had in my life, one that I have been informed may require surgery if it doesn’t go down over the next month(!), and it’s made practically everything I enjoy — reading, writing, looking at things, blinking, being alive — extremely annoying. There are worse ailments a person can get, of course, but also I’m pretty sure I’ve suffered more than anyone else on the planet this week. Let’s hope it goes away ASAP, because I have my tickets to see Wuthering Heights and I know I’m going to need both eyes operating at 100% in order to take in whatever madness awaits.

This week: I scoffed at most of Hamnet, I was horrified by Sirat, and I read a new novel about a production of Hamlet in Palestine — it’s unintentionally Hamlet week!

Hamnet (2025) — on Apple TV

I dragged my feet on seeing Hamnet, because I’m kind of never in the mood to watch a movie about a child’s death, you know? But I knew the day would have to come eventually, so once it hit streaming I decided to pull the trigger. And, sure, I found it emotionally devastating and extremely well-directed and well-acted, and Jessie Buckley is more than deserving of her Oscar nom. But… I didn’t really like it! Sorry!

Mostly, I was unpleasantly surprised at how obvious and overwrought it was. This feels like an Oscar winner from the late 90s, and while those kinds of movies were (and clearly still are!) effective at pulling tears — if not full-body sobs — from audiences, they’re also not, like, actually good movies. For every genuinely emotional scene, I often found myself immediately pulled back out of the movie by a scene making some of the most scoff-inducing choices I’ve seen a film make in a while.

When Agnes (I know Shakespeare’s wife was alternately called Agnes and Anne throughout history and possibly even her life, but it’s so funny to me that she has to be called Agnes in the movie simply because having a character literally named “Anne Hathaway” would be extremely confusing) gives birth, it’s a largely bloodless affair, and babies are plucked from beneath her skirt looking clean and fresh, without even a pesky umbilical cord to deal with. The movie is full of weird, discordant, or just plain corny choices like that; in another moment, when William and Agnes are first falling in love, we cut from their love-making in the forest to William at home, furiously writing Romeo & Juliet. I’m almost shocked there wasn’t a scene in which someone says, “Ahhh... a lovely Midsummer night, what a dream!” before we cut to William furiously scribbling the title A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Even worse, after their son Hamnet has died, and he and Agnes are both overcome with grief, we watch William step up to the edge of the Thames and consider suicide, only to recite Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech in full — apparently he is writing the most iconic monologue of all time during a flash of inspiration in the midst of suicidal ideation. Look, I don’t need realism in a movie like this, and I’m not asking to watch Paul Mescal scribbling and struggling with a quill over his verses for hours, but can we not have at least a little taste here? For a highly lauded and soon-to-be-Oscar-winning film, I was mortified to see the most egregious and embarrassing use of “to be or not to be” since Adam Driver randomly recited it in Megalopolis.

What’s even weirder about those first un-subtle 90 minutes is how delicate and beautiful the final 30 minutes are. You’d think there’d be nothing left to mine from yet another creative interpretation of a fictional performance of Hamlet (and this wasn’t even the only fictional interpretation of Shakespeare’s work I consumed this week!), and yet Chloé Zhao managed to breathe new life into this dusty old play.

That final act of the movie delivers some of the best face acting I’ve seen in forever, as we watch Jessie Buckley’s character react first with horror at her son’s name being used in a play, then realize that her husband had been grieving in his own way the whole time, and, finally, realize that not only is she not alone in her grief, but that the entire world will be grieving her son forever. That’s a hefty serving of complex emotions to get across while using nothing but the dialogue from Hamlet and Jessie Buckley’s face, and yet they pulled it off. Which makes the rest of the movie so baffling and frustrating to me — if they could make a movie like that this whole time, why didn’t they?

Sirat (2025) — streamed at home

“I think this is like a fun adventure thriller?” I said to Justin before we saw Sirat. An hour later, we were stuck with our hands covering our mouths, watching in shock and horror at the things we were witnessing. Sirat is outrageously stressful and bleak, one of those movies that I never want to watch again. It’s difficult to discuss without spoiling it, so I’ll keep it brief, but the plot is simple: a father and his young son are searching for the man’s missing daughter, and travel from one Moroccan desert rave to another in an attempt to track her down. So it is an adventure, of sorts, but not a fun one. This movie fucked me up for hours after, so don’t plan on seeing it before, say, a child’s birthday party!

Too Soon, by Betty Shamieh (2025) — library ebook

Too Soon could be called the Palestinian Pachinko, a big novel telling the story of a family through a few generations, and while Pachinko remains the stronger book, I thought Too Soon was a lovely and surprising book that tells a different kind of story about Palestine than you’re probably used to. It follows three generations of women — the grandmother who is forced to leave Palestine during the Nakba, her daughter who grows up in the United States, and then the granddaughter, a thoroughly American woman, who returns to Palestine to direct a performance of (what else?) Hamlet.

The opening sections with Arabella, the American granddaughter, are some of the weakest in the book, and quite honestly almost made me give up on the book entirely. Something about her deeply Millennial-coded narration was triggering, and I wasn’t sure if I could endure it for hundreds of pages (instead of “motherfucker” she says “motherlover,” which I took as the author feeling that particular slur would be inappropriate in a book about mothers and daughters, but I found it unbearably cringe).

I mean, this is how Arabella speaks:

I had seen a production of Equus there when I was in high school that made my panties wet and not just because a dude was naked in it and I saw my first adult wee-wee (although that helped).

It’s all just a little too Millennial “meep” for me, but, to be fair, the “present” of the book is set in 2012, and that is how certain people my age spoke and wrote back then. And it feels like a deliberate choice to make Arabella speak so unseriously and, frankly, obnoxiously, to reflect that this is a deliberately not serious book about Palestinians. It deals with trivial matters by design, because that is exactly the point: Palestinians deserve the right to trivialities just as much as we do.

Reading it, I realized that we hardly ever get to see or hear about normal life in Palestine. Setting the book in 2012 is clearly a deliberate choice to show us what “normalcy” in Palestine was like before Israel started their genocide, and it’s a risky choice — I have to assume the title Too Soon is partly Shamieh asking whether it’s too soon to put out a book like this. But I think it’s even more necessary now, to show that Palestinians have always just been regular people trying to survive, no different than you or I, and to show a Western audience Palestine outside of the victim/aggressor binary narrative people love to ascribe to them. As she writes about the city of Ramallah: “It is a city under siege in a country that the world didn’t fully recognize, but it felt like a country just the same, with its hospitals and universities and girls who needed to experience more than the din around them.”

This book revels in the trivialities of life in Palestine, because, after all, life is trivialities. There’s always the horrific background of the occupation — Arabella’s love interest is a doctor, so he’s frequently reporting on the everyday war crimes like two boys whose feet were shot by Israelis so that they couldn’t play soccer anymore — but the real focus of the book is on Arabella’s work life and love life. It makes the story all the more effective, and broadens Palestinian literature in a way that it often isn’t allowed to be: after all, Palestinians have work drama and romantic drama just like the rest of us, so why shouldn’t those stories be told?

As Arabella frets about whether it’s inappropriate or pointless to care about a production of Hamlet in a virtual war zone, you can feel Shamieh working out her own feelings about writing a silly little love triangle set in Palestine. But, the book is directly arguing, why can’t Palestine have its own Bridget Jones? Do Palestinian stories always have to carry the weight of their history, or can they have a little fun like the rest of us? In a world desperate to dehumanize Palestinians, and a media environment that wants you to never think about the people who live there, I don’t think it’s too soon to tell a story like this; I think it’s been long overdue.

1/27/26 - 2/2/26

I’m regretfully back from the Bahamas, and I, like the rest of New York, am now furious at Zohran for not getting rid of all this snow yet. Bitch, you’ve been mayor for a month, why is it not WARM outside yet?? I voted for change! Anyway, whatever, we’re suddenly in February and I’m back in the consumption mines, but this will be another slightly shorter one, because I’m going to spare you the envious details of my week of sitting in glorious sunshine and drinking rum and not being on my computer. Someday, when AI is doing all of our jobs, that will be the life us humans get to live every single day, and it’s going to be so great!!!!!! Hurry up, Sam Altman!

This week: I saw the Kate Hudson Oscar-nominated (??) movie about Neil Diamond impersonators (???) and was charmed by it (??????); I was forced to visualize Bernie Sanders having a cosmos-shattering orgasm; and I was tortured by the freaks of Wuthering Heights.

Song Sung Blue (2025) — on Apple TV

When I first saw the trailer for Song Sung Blue, all I felt was confusion. Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson were in a movie about... Neil Diamond? I mistakenly believed it was a Neil Diamond biopic, which raised even more questions. Has Neil had an exciting life I didn’t know about? Is there a huge story involving Neil Diamond I’ve somehow missed? And what the hell is Kate Hudson even doing here? It all felt like the kind of fake movie they’d cut to on 30 Rock for a quick joke, so I promptly forced myself to forget about it. Whatever Song Sung Blue was, it was not my problem. And then the Oscar nominations came out, and Kate Hudson was nominated for Best Actress, and I had a sinking feeing: oh no... I’m going to have to watch Song Sung Blue.

Thankfully, the movie is not about Neil Diamond, but rather about Lightning & Thunder, a married duo of Neil Diamond impersonators (or, as they call themselves, “Neil Diamond interpreters”), who were a real sensation in Milwaukee in the 80s and 90s. That’s exactly when I was growing up in Wisconsin, so I was surprised to have never heard of these two, but I did feel like there was a shocking amount of Neil Diamond music in the air around me as I was growing up — and, without even knowing it, I realized I had kind of always thought of Neil as a Wisconsin-specific sensation, for some reason. So now I wonder: was Neil’s music more prevalent in Wisconsin in my childhood because of these two? Had I been affected by Lightning & Thunder without even knowing it?

The first hour of the film I found surprisingly charming, while thinking, I can’t believe I’m being charmed by this shit right now. Kate is very good in this, sporting a surprisingly decent Wisconsin accent that just borders on parody, and it’s genuinely lovely to see her on screen again, a warm and strong presence opposite the larger-than-life mania of Hugh Jackman. And you wouldn’t think this about a gigantic, superhero-jacked Australian, but it turns out Hugh was actually born to play a Wisconsin alcoholic obsessed with Neil Diamond — he’s somehow electric and perfectly fits this silly, strange role. The man was simply destined to put on a sparkly shirt and sing, what can I say!

This isn’t a great movie, by any stretch, and it remains insane that it is now an Oscar-nominated film, but it is a reliably old-school Hollywood movie. It hits extremely traditional story beats, despite following the real twists and turns of the character’s lives, so I see why it appealed to a certain sector of the Oscar electorate (old people). When the tone shifts halfway through, it’s predictable and a little schlocky, but it is still effective, if only because it’s somewhat comforting to see a movie that still follows the traditional story arcs we all grew up on. In lesser hands, this would be a Lifetime Original, but it is well-directed, well-choreographed, and well-acted, so as a whole it rises above kitsch. I don’t know what to say: I’ve been charmed by Song Sung Blue! Give Kate Hudson the Oscar, why not, it’s not like anything really matters anymore! Fuck it, give Hugh one, too!

“EXCLUSIVE: How Bernie Sanders built a device to give himself ‘cosmos-shattering orgasms’” — in the Daily Mail

Look, if I had to read this headline, so do you. (Full article without a paywall can be found archived here, because no one should be paying the Daily Mail to read about Bernie’s orgasms.)

This appears to be pulled from some sort of book about Bernie, in which we all have to learn the unfortunate fact that, in his 20s (so: in the 1800s?), Bernie built a device called an “Orgone Accumulator,” which sounds like it was basically an electrified box you sat in that, somehow, channeled energy into your body that would result in stronger orgasms???

Look, the grossness of picturing Bernie’s “cosmos-shattering orgasms” aside (imagine the yells! Sorry!), this is classic Daily Mail behavior. Of course — on a weekend in which millions more Epstein documents were dropped, revealing some absolutely horrific things done to children by seemingly every single rich person and politician alive — these reporters spend their energy digging through a random book for the details on Bernie’s college gooning phase.

Like, sure! This is kind of weird and gross and silly! But, uh....... have you seen what the President and his friends have been up to??? SEEMS WORSE! Honestly, not to go full Bernie Bro on you, but I don’t even see what’s bad about this! You’re telling me Bernie wanted to have stronger orgasms in his 20s, and instead of trying to achieve that by, say, pinning a woman to the bed and covering her mouth as she screamed, or raping a woman in Bergdorfs, or transporting underage girls across state lines in order to have sex with them — he just strapped some electrodes to himself and meditated? Sounds pretty normal, by comparison! They probably have these devices at Equinox these days! All I’m saying is: maybe some of Bernie’s colleagues should try sitting in an Orgone Accumulator instead of all the awful shit they’ve been doing to women and men and literal children! Maybe Bernie should build Orgone Accumulators for everyone in the Administration and they’d leave future victims alone! Probably not, but anything is worth a shot at this point, right?

I, as much as anyone, love and crave salacious details about politicians’ freaky little sex lives (my inbox is always open for tips on whatever gets Hakeem Jeffries going — I know deep down that guy is into some crazy BDSM), but this is the funniest example of it we’ve had in a while. Especially because the Daily Mail also takes this opportunity to try to soft cancel... Albert Einstein???

This lazy, hilarious journalism is made worse by the fact that we get no updates on the story. We’re left on a cliffhanger, stuck at the very beginning: 60+ years ago Bernie sought stronger orgasms, but what about now? Has he continued the search? Or has he been victorious, and finally achieved the stronger orgasms of his dreams? Are his earth-shattering cries of pleasure rattling the walls of power up in Burlington? Is he still tinkering away in his garage, trying out new and stronger voltages on his Little Bernie Bro in an elusive search for the perfect O? Or has he sadly given up his lifelong quest, forced to accept a life of orgasms that barely even dent the cosmos? Enlighten us, Bernie!

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë (1847) — paperback

“Are you buying this because of the movie?” the older woman scanning my purchases at McNally Jackson asked, before continuing without waiting for an answer: “It’s such a good book, but that Emerald Fennell lunatic is going to ruin it. They’re going to be engaging in homosexual affairs on the moors for no reason.”

Not to quibble with this bookseller, my new favorite NYC icon, but, after reading Wuthering Heights (for the first time!): I don’t think homosexual affairs would stand out much in this story. They pretty much already do everything else!

Wuthering Heights is, I was surprised to learn, a deeply insane book. Not knowing much about it before I started, I had been imagining the book was simply a lot of sad, quiet pining for lost love, with lots of ruffled dresses and misty moors. I did not expect it to, in actuality, be a twisted book about horrible people trying to kill each other pretty much constantly.

In Wuthering Heights, everyone hates everyone else. Any time you enter a room, 5 people immediately are disgusted with you, and each starts imagining how they could murder you most painfully. Children are there to be slapped and thrown into walls, women are likely to scratch and bite men, husbands are one bad day away from strangling their wives, and servants find any excuse to tell their masters how ugly and stupid they are.

One servant, describing her teenaged master, Cathy, says, “I own I did not like her, after her infancy was past. ... I’ve had many a laugh at her perplexities and untold troubles, which she vainly strove to hide from my mockery.” This old woman hates this little bitch, and rightfully so — a few pages later, Cathy pinches and slaps her for no reason.

Even the “love” in this love story is twisted: to love someone means to keep yourself away from them, for whatever reason, and then to slowly let yourself starve to death out of misery. All these people are sickly, coughing and withering away, while pining after their one true love, only to finally confess their feelings after the object of their desire has passed away (most iconically, Heathcliff demands that when he dies, they are to remove one wall of Catherine’s coffin and connect his to hers, to make it a double-wide — I can see why this book has been a favorite of goth girls for centuries). In Wuthering Heights, love is a death sentence, even when it doesn’t have to be. These people are simply obsessed with torturing themselves and others!

As a reading experience, it is quite a slog, with a lot of repeating drama and outrageously dense anachronistic prose, so I spent most of the book being annoyed with it. Why was I working so hard to get through a book full of characters I hated? And then, at the end, I unfortunately realized I had enjoyed it. It felt like an accomplishment, but also like I had been let in on a disgusting, twisted little world of freaks — reading the book is like having the most fucked-up gossip session with someone who died 150 years ago.

And, now that I’ve endured it, I don’t think I see all the fuss about Emerald Fennell adapting it. If not her, who? This is a monstrous little book, full of sexual deviants and emotional basket cases, with a story that’s absolutely primed to – in the iconic words of Tina Fey summarizing Emerald Fennell’s work – take a “sexually violent turn, and you have to pretend to be surprised by that turn.” In fact, now that I’ve read it, I think she might be the only person who can give us a faithful adaptation of Wuthering Heights! If Heathcliff and Linton start engaging in “homosexual acts on the moors,” it may not be faithful to the literal plot from the 1800s (though, reading between the lines, there were definitely homosexual acts happening on those moors), but it will probably feel emotionally true to the spirit of the novel. Either way, it’s probably going to mirror my experience with the book: an exhausting experience, full of people I hated, and one I’ll be thinking about for a long time.

1/20/26 - 1/26/26

Okay, there’s no good way to say this, when half the country is buried under a foot of snow, but: I am in the Bahamas right now. I’m sorry! So, you’ll have to forgive me for a shorter than usual email, because the beach is calling my name. Sorry sorry sorry, I understand the feelings of hatred you are having. But first, I’m here to talk about something more important: I finally revealed the existence of this newsletter to my therapist. He looked shocked that I had never mentioned it to him over the past year, and he had a surprising amount of follow up questions (in fact, he had more questions about this than he has when I tell him about actual emotional experiences in my life!). Questions like, “Do people pay?” and, “You can find it online?” Questions that made me worry he was immediately going to google it after I left, which is of course exactly what I would do if I were a therapist. So, Dan, are you reading this??? I can’t wait until our next session is all about analyzing my feelings about The Testament of Ann Lee or whatever.

This week: it’s a weird one, since what I’ve mostly been consuming is rum punches and sunlight, but I found time to get mad about an article in The Guardian about The Traitors UK; I decided the Vanderpump Rules reboot might actually be good; I desperately tried to find some hope in the ICE occupation of Minneapolis; and I enjoyed a prizewinning book that I know at least a few of you hated, and I am ready to fight about it.

“It’s open warfare in the castle! How The Traitors lost its soul” by Alexi Duggins — in The Guardian

I’ve written before about how The Traitors UK is top-tier reality TV, so of course the curmudgeons at The Guardian have decided it’s bad for society. Grow up! This article about the show was an instant-click ragebait the second I saw the subhead, which reads: “It used to be a breath of fresh air – TV’s most relatable reality show. Now it features shouting matches and bad-tempered confrontations, and the biggest loser is the viewer.” Oh no! Shouting matches and confrontations? On reality TV?? Who could have let this happen????

I don’t know who this Alexi Duggins writer is, but let’s just take a look at the kind of person who needed to write a whole pearl-clutching article about a reality TV show that dared to show people arguing:

Okayyyyyyy well, it all makes sense now. One look at Alexi Duggins and I knew his whole deal. This guy is the awful new boyfriend of your friend, who you desperately try to not sit next to at a dinner party. This guy shames you for liking pop music, and only reads books reviewed in The Economist. This guy pronounces “Timothée Chalamet” with a French accent. When everyone else is passing a joint at the party, this guy takes out his tobacco pipe and hopes you’ll comment on it. This guy probably swims in an Oxford button-down.

But, you know what? It’s actually a little cute watching Britain freak out over how “mean” this season of The Traitors was. (People betraying each other? On a reality TV show? One that’s literally called The Traitors? The horror! The Queen, God rest her soul, must be rolling over!) Seeing this article was a little like falling into a time warp, because here in the godless and cursed United States, we stopped having this argument in, like, 2003. Truly, the average British person would not have survived the Stanford Prison Experiment that was America’s Next Top Model, or the lawless fight to the death that was Rock of Love with Bret Michaels. Americans have been in the reality TV trenches for decades now, and pretty much the only thing that could genuinely horrify jaded US audiences anymore would be airing live executions — and even that would depend on who was getting executed. (I can think of a few I’d tune in for!)

So what I’m saying is, England: you need to cling to your naivety as long as you can. You make some incredible reality TV over there, and that’s largely due to how committed people still are to the bit. The cast of The Traitors UK seemed to genuinely believe people were getting literally murdered in the castle, which led to incredible drama as people sobbed and screamed as people were eliminated. Over here in America, reality TV has become simply the easiest pathway to getting enough followers so that you can pull a crypto scam — I’ve said it before, but the only American Dream left anymore is to follow Hawk Tuah girl’s career path (go viral, start a podcast, steal millions from your followers, enter Witness Protection). And the more we’ve become a nation of wannabe grifters, the worse our reality TV has gotten. It no longer matters whether you’re a Real Housewife throwing a glass of wine, a contestant starving on Survivor, or a mail-order bride on 90 Day Fiancee — the real game on all these shows is always ultimately the same. It’s scams and grift all the way down.

So I can mock dear old Alexi Duggins for his embarrassingly bad take, but he is, in a convoluted way, doing England a public service. For reality TV to survive, we need people who are still horrified at the idea of backstabbing on a game show all about backstabbing. Dorks like Alexi are the whimpering cogs that have kept the outrage machine of reality TV going strong for over 30 years now — and honestly, if The Traitors producers are smart, they’ve already reached out to Alexi to cast him on the next season.

Vanderpump Rules, season 12 episode 6 — on Peacock

After the spectacular, world-shaking implosion of “Scandoval” destroyed any sense of reality on Vanderpump Rules, producers made the risky and controversial choice to fire everyone and recast with an entirely new, younger cast for season 12. I really did not want to watch the reboot, and I certainly didn’t want to like it, but, 6 episodes in I think it’s time to admit they might be cooking with something here.

The magic of Vanderpump Rules’ success was the fact that the original cast was intimately entwined, had genuinely worked together for years at Lisa Vanderpump’s steampunk-meets-carnival-themed Hollywood nightmare restaurants, and, most importantly, were absolutely desperate for fame. The true star of Vanderpump Rules, in fact, was always that desperation, the hunger that drove these people to repeatedly destroy their own lives in a quest for more and more followers. To continue my thoughts from earlier, VPR is the endgame of all American reality TV — a television show about people who need to be on TV at all costs. As a viewer, we understand that the show is a performance and that the cast members aren’t acting authentically, but their performances are built on an authentic layer of desperation and emptiness, so, somehow, the performances become a form of actual reality. Vanderpump Rules is postmodernism, reality TV commenting on reality TV itself. What I’m saying is: Lisa Vanderpump is our Rene Magritte. Ceci n‘est pas reality TV. (Clearly, these people have warped me, too.)

Thankfully, this new cast appears to be just as desperate as the old cast, with the perfect amount of self-awareness (none). The women are shameless and boy-crazy, and happily invite producers and camera crews along as they warble into a microphone in a rented recording studio as they attempt to launch their hopeless singing careers. But so far, the real stars are the men, which is how Vanderpump should be — VPR is a franchise built on the backs of piggish, immature men who do nothing but torment women, and the new guys seem to be expert manipulators, primed to psychologically torture these girls for, ideally, seasons to come.

There’s Shayne, an extremely attractive former addict, whose parents introduced him to hard drugs as a child, and who has been shot four times (honestly, the show had already won me over at the idea of a Vanderpump cast member with bullet holes in him). There’s Marcus, a manchild who, when scolded for behaving badly at work by Lisa Vanderpump, burst into tears and revealed his father had died, before quickly taking advantage of Lisa’s pity to ask her to let him DJ at the restaurant.

But the true stars in my eyes are Chris and Jason, two hunky idiots with painted-on eyebrows, who are unfortunately already known to fans as the Incest Twins. Yes, the new Vanderpump Rules cast has had incest drama in its first 6 episodes, and this is how I know it will be successful. Chris and Jason are cousins who live together and, horrifyingly, make OnlyFans content together. I don’t know if they, like, do it do it (I‘m too scared to look, but hopefully someone can conduct an independent investigation and fill me in), but even the idea of filming porn with your cousin…………. well, these are the kinds of horrific, humiliating situations that made Vanderpump Rules big enough for even Obama to make fun of them, once upon a time. The jury’s still out on whether the new cast will be successful, but they‘ve clearly got the raw ingredients, the perfect mixture of delusion and desperation, so here’s hoping they can continue their descent into Hell, for our entertainment.

“There is no such thing as other people’s children” by Erik Hane — at Welcome To Hell World

What’s happening in Minneapolis is intolerable and horrifying, of course, and it’s hard to find anything hopeful in it, when children are being snatched off the street and used as bait, and mothers and nurses are getting murdered by government thugs. So this essay, in the newsletter Welcome To Hell World, was at least somewhat heartening, with its focus on how the community has come together in Minneapolis, in a way that shows all of us what’s to be done when the thugs come for our neighbors:

Here is something simple and beautiful: the vast majority of the residents of this city agree. In the days since ICE murdered Renee Good, something new has happened. Everyone is activated. Ordinary people—as in, people who don’t normally think that much about politics or where they fit on an ideological spectrum—have looked up and said, “No, what ICE is doing in my city is unacceptable, and I am going to be part of the opposition.” Networks for supplies, groceries, shelter, rides, medical care, and neighborhood patrols have burst forth on the sheer strength of everyone participating. This is part of all of our daily routines now, just as much as our jobs and our personal lives. Groups that started with whole neighborhoods in mind soon became so full that they’ve splintered into ten-block chunks, then five-block chunks, then specific locations within those areas. There is nowhere ICE can go in this city where they won’t soon be met by a dozen locals ready to record and impede their actions, and the whistles we’re all wearing mean that many other people will soon be at that location too.

Fuck ICE, obviously, but also fuck every politician who puts even a single dollar in these thugs’ pockets, or who acts like “better training” will fix it, or who settles for anything less than the total dismantling of ICE — which is, of course, an organization that’s younger than the concept reality TV. We were fine before ICE existed, and we will be much better off after ICE is gone. These soulless men and women are masked, but they’ve exposed the rot at the heart of our country, and none of us should settle until ICE no longer exists, and the many, many people who enabled these horrors have been punished for their crimes against humanity. We have to believe that they will lose this fight, because they will.

Flesh, by David Szalay (2025) — hardcover

Flesh has to be one of the most controversial books of last year — it won the Booker Prize, but everyone in my life I know who has read it hated it (including a handful of you reading this right now, I know for a fact!). So I’m here to say that I liked it, and I’m ready to fight you about it.

The book tells the story of one Hungarian man’s life, told through radically spare prose, with a limited view into the interiority of our protagonist. István, at first glance, appears to be a passive participant in his own life — he mostly says, “Okay,” and lights cigarettes. “It’s like he’s waiting for something else to find him. Or not even that. He isn’t really thinking about the future at all,” Szalay writes, and that’s exactly the point. Somehow, by the end of the novel, I genuinely felt like I had gotten to know István, this mostly silent, lonely man. He’s incredibly frustrating, but this is what straight men are like. Have you ever tried to talk to a straight man, or to access his inner feelings? I don’t recommend it!

I think a lot of the frustration people have with the book is that they’re frustrated with István, which tells me he was a successfully drawn character. You’re annoyed with István, you want to shake him to speak up, to tell you what he’s feeling, which means you’re reacting to him as if he’s a real person. He’s not just a character in a book, he’s a real guy you just want to stop being so fucking thick. By the end of the book, I felt like I had, somehow, gotten close to István, despite the sheer amount of blank space on the pages, the one-word sentences and the endless okays. It felt like a magic trick, the creation of interiority via the seeming absence of it. So I understand why so many of you hated this book, but, I’m sorry, I’m on István’s side.