This week: I thrilled at The Odyssey bringing woke back, I loved my favorite historian begging for more Odysseus sex scenes, I bought a new shirt that’s getting me a lot of attention, I watched two kind of stupid movies, and I was triggered by a novel about a guy who hates his job (which happens to also be my job).

The Odyssey (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park

The primary audience for a Christopher Nolan film is dorks and virgins. The types of people who famously love to get extremely loud and mad online about two primary topics: Black people and/or women in movies, and “historical inaccuracy.” Which makes The Odyssey a great, big, glorious fuck you to his incel nerd fanbase, who spent the past year spiraling about Lupita’s casting as Helen of Troy, or Anne Hathaway’s botox (which looked fine, for the record! Her forehead moved!), or the fact that the men are wearing Roman leather skirts, rather than dressing like a gigantic dildo, which would have been historically accurate.

As an — ahem — former ancient history major, I would be remiss if I didn’t call out the incongruities in the film. For one, and probably most egregiously, the gods are almost completely absent from this version of The Odyssey. Rather than the playful, sexual, meddling gods of Ancient Greece, the only on-screen representation we get is a sad-eyed Zendaya playing Athena. Even weirder, nearly everyone speaks in a neutral American accent, even the Brits. And, yes, a lot of the dialogue is borderline embarrassing: every time Tom Holland’s Telemachus yells, “Dad!” a historian has an aneurysm. Even worse, the dialogue repeatedly hits us over the head with the film’s themes. If I have to hear the phrase “Zeus’s law” one more time I will personally kill the next person to visit my home, and my jaw dropped at the way we’re informed this film is set at the end of the Bronze Age: someone just literally says, “Our age of bronze is ending”………… k.

I can’t fight any of these complaints; they’re all valid. And yet — I don’t care! The Odyssey is such an enormous, thrilling spectacle that I simply didn’t care about any of the issues throughout. Not only that, I found myself rationalizing the issues. Their accents are American, and the dialogue is so obvious, because Christopher Nolan knows we are a nation of IDIOTS, so if he wanted his message to get across, he was going to have to hit us over the head with it. And he was right to do so! We Americans are dumb as shit; we have earned the contempt of the artists we worship. Everyone in The Odyssey is a half-second away from looking directly at the IMAX camera and saying, “This movie is about xenophobia, and how the erosion of norms leads to cultural collapse,” and if that’s the price we have to pay to make sure none of those groyper soyboys can willfully misinterpret the film’s success for their own evil purposes, then SO BE IT.

Dumbed down or not, it’s genuinely heartening to see an ancient piece of literature turned into what will likely be the biggest movie of the year. Disney’s weird live-action Moana remake already flopped, and even the Marvel bros seem exhausted by the same old bullshit in the new Avengers trailer that just came out. Which means: we’re entering the era of ancient blockbusters! Obviously, we’ll need an Iliad adaptation, and since this movie already introduced us to Agamemnon, why not adapt the Oresteia into a trilogy? And there’s no need to stop there — give us an adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy! Adapt some of Ovid’s weird-ass poems! I bet some Gen Z lesbian out there is dying to somehow adapt the poetry of Sappho for the big screen! I’ll take a Canterbury Tales HBOMax series, too! If Hollywood truly has any juice left in it to squeeze, there’s a bidding war on right now for the rights to that carbonized scroll from Pompeii they just managed to decipher.

After the excruciating hell of FLOPPENHEIMER, I was just so happy to have an exciting Christopher Nolan film again. It’s 3 hours long, and yet I truly could have gone for another hour at least! I was so engrossed, my body completely forgot it even had a bladder. This movie is a victory for so many of us: ancient history freaks, anti-Marvel radicals, Samantha Morton stans, IMAX corporate executives. This is the first real sign that woke is back. Christopher Nolan….. welcome to the resistance. The more money The Odyssey makes, the more confidence I have that JD Vance’s days in public office are numbered.

And finally, this has nothing to do with the actual film, but our theatrical experience was bookended by two extremely New York moments, which I would like to tell you about:

Before the movie we grabbed a drink outside, and our conversation was interrupted by a bald man driving a Corvette, which he absolutely screeched to a halt next to us, stopping all traffic behind him. He pointed his finger at us and aggressively yelled, “You ready? You ready?!” Before we had time to ask, “Ready for what?” or to grab a weapon, the man cranked the stereo on his car to blast the chorus of………. the 1961 classic “Runaround Sue”. He started singing along and all of us patrons were immediately swept up in it and sang along too. For the entirety of the song! Have you ever seen such a thing? A full bar patio having an impromptu singalong forced by a bald man in a Corvette? As the song faded away the man turned the radio down, yelled, “You see? You had a thousand things on your mind, but I bet none of them were Runaround Sue!” and sped off into the evening. A blessing!

And after the movie, in a more grotesque display of only-in-New-York: Justin and I were biking home, when without warning a gigantic rat darted out of a trash bag on the curb. With Justin biking a couple feet ahead of me, I had a front row seat to what happened next. The rat sprinted head-first directly into the rim of Justin’s wheel, narrowly missing being crushed to death by a matter of millimeters. Upon impact it did a full somersault, SQUEAKED, and then turned and sprinted back into the garbage bag, as if embarrassed. I have never seen anything like it, nor I will never forget the sight as long as I live. What a city! What a film! We are all so lucky to be alive!

“Mary Beard on The Odyssey” — in The Times

Words can’t describe how much I love Mary Beard, THE head bitch of all ancient historians, so post-Odyssey I am absolutely thrilled that she’s been on a mini media blitz talking about it (in addition to the article above, she also made a fun Guardian podcast appearance!). Even better, she seems to have liked the movie, but has one major complaint: WHY ISN’T IT SEXY? As she writes:

Overall, the erotic dimension of the poem, and its nuances, is consistently underplayed. We are not encouraged to follow Homer and to wonder quite how emotionally faithful to Penelope Odysseus really is. And while Nolan’s Circe (Samantha Morton, on great form) is a tremendous force of nature, the film has managed to obscure the sex in her relationship with Odysseus far more effectively than my teacher did. Homer’s Circe, as I realised years ago even as I struggled with the Greek, is a sexual rival to Penelope back in Ithaca, not the well-scrubbed near-parody of a 1970s feminist of this movie version. This is an Odyssey without the sex.

This is why I will travel across the sea and murder hundreds of men for Mary Beard, if she asked me to do so — she’s not whining about historical inaccuracies (in fact, she says she likes that Telemachus calls Odysseus “Dad!” though she admits she’s probably alone in that). She just wants Odysseus to fuck!

A T-shirt featuring Carmela Soprano — from the HBO shop

The hottest store in town, it turns out, is the HBO MERCH SHOP. I discovered it (I’m using “discovered” here in the Christopher Columbus sense, to mean “learned about its longtime existence and am now taking credit for it”) after my friend Zoe texted that she saw someone wearing a hat with the logo for SternTao, the disastrous hedge fund at the center of the latest season of Industry (is it a hedge fund??? I still don’t even know what a hedge fund is, actually, and I don’t want to know). When I googled the hat and stumbled onto the HBO Shop, I felt like Aladdin going into that bigass tiger mouth in the desert.

I mean, just look at all these hidden treasures!

I’m too Millennial to wear a bucket hat, but this is the first time I’ve considered it:

The “I’m a Charlotte!” mug is practically being given away for free at this point :(

Sorry, babe, the Real Time with Bill Maher shirt stays ON:

I won’t tell you I’m having a mental breakdown but there WILL be signs:

Okay, but I literally, actually DID buy this sweatshirt featuring the logo of Valerie Cherish’s AI-written sitcom on the last season of The Comeback, and I am very very excited for my first chance to wear it:

But my favorite purchase was THIS GORGEOUS CARMELA SOPRANO SHIRT:

Can you even imagine a better shirt? You can’t! It’s perfect. It features not one, not two, but three photos of Carmela, with two of them seemingly chosen at random. It wisely emphasizes “Carmela,” while de-emphasizing her husband’s last name Soprano, because it is a FEMINIST shirt. It hides the HBO logo inside the shirt, because it’s tasteful and anticapitalist. And it is the perfect conversation starter, because even if you don’t know who Carmela Soprano is, it helpfully gives you FOUR WHOLE PARAGRAPHS OF BACKSTORY, including updates on the spec house she’s building!!!!!!

I was so pleased with this shirt I wore it out the very day after it arrived, and I was even more pleased to discover that the people LOVE this shirt. I had two separate people on the subway remove their headphones and signal me to remove mine so that they could tell me they loved my shirt. Can you imagine??? This shirt has already earned me two new friends! This shirt is creating COMMUNITY. And there were at least a few other people who I noticed on the sidewalk who glanced down at it, and then glanced up at me and smiled. Smiled! Passing on the street! In New York City! I felt like fucking Zohran Mamdani!!!!

This is exactly what corporations should be doing, and why I have been an HBO girly since I was in the womb. Instead of giving us AI slop, they’re giving us thoughtful, hand-crafted merch (made in beautiful Nicaragua! Where I’m sure everyone is paid very well and treated ethically??? Best not to ask).

Anyway, I wrote all this while snuggled under the LARRY DAVID EXTREME CLOSE-UP BLANKET:

The Fall (2006) — on Mubi

I’ve been meaning to watch The Fall for a while now, because every shot I’ve seen from it is absolutely gorgeous, and also Lee Pace is in it, who is absolutely gorgeous. But I didn’t expect this movie to be annoying as shit!!!!! In the film, Lee Pace’s character is a stuntman in the 1920s recovering in the hospital, who tells a little girl who’s also in the hospital a fantastical story, which plays out across some truly stunning sequences of incredible colors and location scouting. Unfortunately, the little girl is one of the most obnoxious children ever put on screen, and her incessant questions and pestering of Lee Pace throughout the story began to send me into a blind rage. The Fall is an incredible visual achievement, and a movie that should be watched on mute.

The Long Walk (2025) — on HBOMax

Bleak, bleak, bleak! I missed this movie when it was in theaters, and I feel like it was the correct decision, because this was not a fun ride. I was surprised by how much of this movie revolved around… the logistics of shitting? I guess that would be a big problem, if you were forced to walk endlessly at a certain pace, but considering this is a fictional problem we’re creating, I don’t know if we needed to get this in the weeds of how and where these boys were shitting! It’s like… we didn’t sit and watch Katniss dig a fucking hole in the woods in the middle of the Hunger Games, you know? It’s fine! We can fill in the blanks. Anyway, I love the two main boys — the guy from Industry season 1 and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son, though I suspect they both have names of their own — and think they have bright careers ahead of them, hopefully in movies with fewer shots of literal shit falling out of literal assholes.

The Copywriter, by Daniel Poppick (2026) — library ebook

I’ve grown tired of metafiction, so I was wary of even picking this up, but it got good reviews, and is about a copywriter whose name is presumably Daniel (it’s stylized “D_____” but we can literally fill in the blanks), and I have, in my lifetime, been a copywriter named Daniel so… I simply had to. And it is a clever little book about The Way Some Of Us Live Now, but I think it’s safe to say that most metafiction is not for me. The main character — so presumably the author as well — is a poet, so of course I was put in mind of Ben Lerner, the king of poets who became metafiction authors, and then was equally satisfied and irritated when the main character in this book points out that he’s kind of copying Ben Lerner. It’s meta on meta on meta. Where does it end!!!

Similarly, the observations about modern life are sometimes brilliant, sometimes irritating. At one point a character asks another, “Is your cocaine gluten free?” and my eyes did a full 360. But then there’d be a little section like the excerpt below, in which he perfectly captures the absurdity of doing our stupid pointless little jobs in the midst of all this hell:

Scrolling through the news on my laptop at the office, I read that a woman has been killed in the street by a white nationalist in Virginia—she’d been there protesting a mass gathering of torch-bearing Klansmen and neo-Nazis heartened by the rise of our fascist president, who goes on to lament that an event attended by “many fine people on both sides” was spoiled by this unfortunate incident.

A shiver slides through me—a feeling not quite rage, but just parallel to rage. Then, from a different part of my screen, I receive an email notification requesting a product description for an LED light box emblazoned with the phrase NAMASTE IN BED.

It really WAS like that! But: do I need to relive it? I mean, I literally was a copywriter (named D_____!) when Charlottesville happened, and now I’m reading a book about it, which feels like the most pointless form of masturbation ever invented. So, I didn’t love this, but I also recognize that’s a me problem. Sorry to D____!

7/7/26 - 7/13/26

I know this is such a manic pixie dream girl thing to say, but: I think my apartment is being haunted. A couple weeks ago, a woman seems to have died in our building (long, upsetting story!), and ever since then our lights have been acting strangely. You see, because Justin is a technofreak, we have motion-activated lights in our living room that gently guide your way to the bathroom at night, so you don’t have to turn on any bright lights. But since this woman died, I have regularly been waking up between 1 and 4 am with a feeling of pure terror, only to look out into the living room to see the motion-activated lights activating on their own. I then lie in bed for up to 15 minutes, trying and failing to get up the courage to go see what’s going on. While lying there, I watch the lights gradually light their way towards me, from the living room into our bedroom, before they switch off and start the process again, my skin breaking out into full-body goosebumps. Finally, after mustering all my energy, I jump out of bed and slam our bedroom door shut, locking it (ghosts can’t figure out locks?). By the morning it’s all a vague blur, and somewhat silly and embarrassing to remember, but in these witching-hour moments I experience nothing but the raw, genuine terror you can only get while half-asleep. So, like, uhhhh what do I do? Should I get like… sage? Hire an Etsy witch? Call one of those ghost hunter shows? If any priests are reading this, please help!

This week: I marveled at Olivia Wilde’s comeback, I watched sheep solve a mystery for some reason, I ogled Marilyn Monroe, I saw and immediately forgot a dumb movie, and I enjoyed the absolute genius and chaotic mess that was James Baldwin’s life.

The Invite (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park

Finally, a movie for grown-ups! We’re only halfway through the year, but I find it hard to imagine another film will pop up over the next 6 months that I’ll enjoy as much as The Invite. It was just so fun! As far as I’m concerned, after making this, Olivia Wilde can fuck any pop star she wants. The woman has earned it!

Starring just four incredible stars — Olivia herself, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, and Penélope Cruz, all at the absolute top of their games — and one very art-directed apartment, The Invite simply follows two couples having a dinner party, where things quickly and hilariously devolve thanks to the messy business that can arise from marriage and sex and having extremely hot neighbors.

The acting is pitch-perfect (god it’s good to have Edward Norton back!), the directing is lively and smart, and the script is spectacular — and randomly written by Rashida Jones? (I just looked up whether Rashida Jones has had this illustrious screenwriting career I didn’t know about, and got immediate whiplash from this portion of her Wikipedia: “In November 2020, Jones started the Bill Gates and Rashida Jones Ask Big Questions podcast with co-host Bill Gates. In December 2020, the podcast ended after its fifth episode.” What the hell is this woman’s career?)

After the disaster that was Don’t Worry Darling — and by “disaster” I am only referring to the film itself; the disastrous press tour was actually a masterpiece — I genuinely did not think Olivia Wilde had a film like this in her. And I will accept my lashings for that! I am sorry, Olivia: The Invite is legitimately genius, an immediately iconic entry into the pantheon of dark relationship comedies. This is Olivia’s Adele post-divorce album. This is Olivia’s Kelly Clarkson post-divorce album! This is Olivia’s Princess Di revenge dress.

Actually, no: this is Olivia’s adaptation of Bravo’s The Valley. Real Valleyheads know that show is the darkest program ever put on TV, a bleak look at the miserable post-marriage, post-baby lives of heterosexual couples who hate each other, and The Invite is plumbing those same depths, just with much funnier, hotter people (and with less shitty apartments). Sure, one is reality TV and one is a feature film, but they’re both in the same post-marriage, pre-divorce genre. The appeal of The Valley and the appeal of The Invite are the same: if you’re single you can feel so much better about not being tied to some obnoxious idiot, and if you’re in a relationship you can think, “Well at least we’re not that bad.” And with things so terrible in the real world, isn’t it nice to luxuriate in someone else’s hilarious nightmare for a while? The Invite is a scathingly brilliant boots-on-the-ground report from the front lines of hetero hell.

The Sheep Detectives (2026) — on Amazon Prime

For some reason I decided to follow The Invite, a movie made for adults, with The Sheep Detectives, a movie where talking CGI sheep help solve a murder. And, look, this movie did get a couple laughs out of me — there are some truly bad jokes in here, which are unfortunately so bad they’re kind of good — but it could best be described as “sweet” more than anything else, which is an adjective that always turns me off from any piece of media (that’s the only way people have described Ted Lasso to me, which is why I will never, ever watch a second of that god-forsaken show). So: this was fine! Better than it should be, really. It’s genuinely better than either of the Knives Out sequels, but of course that’s a very low bar to clear. (Though, the funniest part of the entire film for me actually happened a few days after I watched it, when Justin referred to it as “that goat movie.” Kind of!)

Niagara (1953) — on Criterion

Due to some poor alcohol-mixing decisions on Friday night, I spent Saturday with a devastating hangover in which the only thing I could tolerate watching was, for some reason, this Marilyn Monroe noir. And I had a great time! The plot is as twisty as some of the best Hitchcocks, the Technicolor is stunning, and the acting is completely insane (Max Showalter seems to have been dropped into this murder noir straight from the Borscht Belt, and I kept praying for his death). Marilyn is the femme fatale, a woman who convinces the man she’s having an affair with to kill her husband by throwing him into Niagara Falls. It’s such a fun role for her, as she gets to slink around and scandalize everyone’s 1950s snowflake sensibilities. A woman with curves? Avert your eyes!

At one point in the film, Marilyn steps out of the shower in a full face of makeup, lips absolutely slathered in drag-queen-red lipstick despite the water all over her face. She then slinks into a hot pink dress, steps outside her motel room, and puts a sexy little record on to entice the other hotel guests to dance with her — which, of course, sends her husband into a violent, public rage. It’s all very dramatic and very silly and I was living for every second of it. Look, Marilyn was not the best actress, and especially not at this nascent stage of her short career, but she’s undeniably a fucking movie star here. There are endless shots of her sauntering away from yet another man who’s pining after her, which almost turned me — a fully gay idiot — into a cartoon wolf howling at the screen. She’s got the acting skills of Gal Gadot, but Marilyn proves in Niagara that you don’t need to act to be a movie star. I think this gal is going to be big!

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Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come (2026) — on Disney+

A very stupid but fine sequel to the very stupid but fine original. A lot of the fun of this one comes down to casting, namely in letting Sarah Michelle Gellar be a psycho, and in getting Elijah Wood to be… Satan’s lawyer? I have no idea what was going on throughout most of this, but I just turned my brain off and let it ride. There are worse movie franchise ideas than a bunch of Devil-worshipping families competing via a deadly game of hide and seek, so… whatever! I can already feel every single moment from this film fading from my memory, though. If you ask me next week if I’ve ever seen this movie, I will confidently tell you I never have. Oh well!

Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs (2025) — library ebook

James Baldwin was such a messy bitch!!! This new, lengthy biography of James Baldwin tells of his life, writing, and activism through the lens of his most important relationships. It’s a brilliant lens to view him through, as we see time and time again how directly his writing comes from whatever the hell is going on in his life at the moment of writing. And boy did James Baldwin always have some sort of nonsense going on in his love life!

We learn he wrote his first novel — which he had been struggling with for years — while living in a tiny Swiss village with Lucien, a Swiss painter who becomes one of the great loves of Baldwin’s life. The thing is, though they clearly had a sexual relationship at times, Lucien also appears to be barely bisexual, and clearly did not want a serious relationship with Baldwin, or at least in the way Baldwin wanted from him. (Though, it must be said Lucien is just as messy as Baldwin: he has a baby with a woman, marries her, and then names the baby Luc-James. Not long after the baby’s birth, Baldwin invites Lucien to come live in New York with him, and Lucien agrees, temporarily abandoning his wife and child. These two were insane!)

James Baldwin is truly, deeply chaotic throughout his entire life, but also he’s obviously an actual genius — he’s the kind of person who casually tells a friend, “I’ll probably get a Guggenheim,” and is right; but also the kind of person who crashes on his friend’s couch and then gives them all bedbugs. He borrows money from Marlon Brando several times and never pays him back (while also hooking up with Brando — I’m jealous!!!). As a young writer he gets under the wing of Richard Wright, the most famous Black novelist at the time, before launching his career by publicly shredding Wright’s work in a series of published essays, absolutely torching his relationship with his first mentor for a little taste of fame. (He later asks Richard Wright for money, too — he was always asking everyone for money — and they reportedly got in a screaming match at a bar. Divas everywhere!) The more I kept reading and loving his charismatic combo of chaos and brilliance, the more I kept wondering: was James Baldwin… the Lena Dunham of the 1950s?

Of course, the deeper we get into the Civil Rights Era of the 60s and 70s, and the more Baldwin’s work shifts towards activism, the more he has to grow up. We follow him as he becomes a central part of the push for civil rights, even as he privately remains unsure about his place in the movement — he’s constantly torn between wanting to stay in Europe or return to the US and fight. He’s not only experiencing an internal push-pull with the movement, but an external one as well; there are some not surprising but still shocking moments of absurd homophobia from other Civil Rights leaders, who didn’t want someone queer to be so visible in the movement (Baldwin was supposed to talk at the March on Washington before MLK’s iconic speech, but was barred by the organizers).

The more serious things get in the US — and, reading through the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, both Kennedys, and MLK in back-to-back-to-back succession really makes it clear we are not living through a uniquely dangerous time in America; things have been bad for a long, long time — the more fiery Baldwin’s writing gets, and the book is full of incredible excerpts from not only his essays but also his private letters, which were just as if not more fiery than his public statements. And, in an era where the worst people alive love to trot out the most anodyne MLK quotes to quiet any dissension, it’s very refreshing to read Baldwin speaking clearly about violence in our country:

The America of my experience has worshipped and nourished violence for as long as I have been on earth. The violence has been perpetrated mainly against black men, though — the strangers; and so it didn’t count. But, if a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.

This book is genuinely stunning in the way it achieves such an intimate look at Baldwin’s inner life. You feel his pain, his desire, his self-hatred, his ego, his anger, and his absolutely messy dating life. He’s funny and raw and genius, but an accessible genius. It’s clear that Baldwin struggled to feel accepted or known anywhere or by anyone throughout his life, but in Baldwin: A Love Story I felt like I got an intimate look at one of the most important and messiest people of the past century.

6/30/26 - 7/6/26

Haters of last week’s lazy vacation email (“You didn’t even try,” my sister said, rudely and correctly) will regret asking for more from me, because this week you’re getting 3000 words about Taylor Swift, a little-known singer who had a small shindig over the weekend. I so wish I could have gone to her wedding, but I unfortunately had to decline, because I spent the weekend in Wisconsin with family, where no one could go into the lake due to a toxic green algae — climate change is the gift that keeps on giving! Speaking of gifts, the thing I most want to know about the wedding is if Taylor had a wedding registry. I feel like the obvious move is for her to do the whole “in lieu of gifts, donate to ____” thing, but I also could see her literally sending out to guests, like, a Nordstrom link. If so, I need to know what the Haims got her! I bet Danielle paid for a caviar tasting on their honeymoon, Alana found some off-registry limited-edition vintage records, and Este got them a ladle. Anyway, this is all to say sorry: it’s Taylor week here at DBC.

This week: I desperately tried but ultimately failed to understand the appeal of Taylor and her wedding that took place in the ninth circle of hell, I changed my mind about Apple TV’s Cape Fear, and I tore through three beach reads and enjoyed two of them!

“You can’t get tickets to this” by Fran Hoepfner — in Vulture

I was out of town for the 4th of July, which is the only reason why I didn’t stand around outside Madison Square Garden in 105-degree heat, desperately hoping for… a three-second glimpse of Lena Dunham getting out of an Uber, I guess? So instead I had to turn to Fran, in which she went boots on the ground for days, giving us some good, old-fashioned scene reporting outside the disgusting arena where our country’s most obnoxious wedding was happening.

I always love an article that’s just “I talked to everyone I saw on the street in NY,” and Fran’s report is full of some beautiful little gems. Some choice moments I especially enjoyed:

I stop what I think is a Swiftie in a flower crown but is actually just a woman in a flower crown. “Flowers have been my thing way longer than they’ve been hers,” she tells me.

A little after three in the afternoon, guests start arriving in tinted SUVs, Sprinter vans, and a few regular-looking Uber minivans. “I just know that’s Bradley Cooper’s car,” says a woman with an Irish accent talking to a friend on FaceTime. She holds her phone up. “Can you see it? Bradley Cooper’s car?”

To be honest, my thoughts about Taylor Swift and her Midtown wedding aren’t that deep. I, like I’m sure many of you reading this, find it tacky and embarrassing, but also: this woman was never going to get married in a normal way. She’s not a human, she’s a human-like entity being piloted by brand deals and corporate synergy, and I suppose we should all be grateful that her wedding was as relatively private as it was. If I had put money on it on Kalshi, I would have bet on her wedding airing live, forcibly broadcast to every single screen in the country — your phone would start streaming the wedding against your will, your Samsung Smart Fridge would suddenly start blasting her vows, and when every Tesla display suddenly started playing Taylor walking down the aisle (to her own song lollll), thousands would be dead in the streets. If the worst that happened is that Taylor shut down Midtown for a few hours during a miserable heat wave, I say we got off easily.

“What makes Taylor Swift cool?” by Clare Frances — at Famous and Beloved Newsletter

To be a true hater you must know thine enemy, so I turned to Clare’s pre-wedding post to hear the Swifties’ defense of their queen. And, look, Clare does make a compelling case! For one, her description of Taylor as a “chronic cheater who has huge boobs and drinks a lot” is the first time I’ve actually found Taylor almost cool. And I do think she’s exactly right that this wedding is, at the heart of it, “just something that’s fun for her this month” (though, once the documentary and brand deals and new album and whatever else comes out of this are finally released, I think we have to amend that statement to “something that’s fun and profitable for her”).

Alas, though, I still can’t get over my general distaste for this woman. I’m sorry, she’s just annoying! I know that’s not a cogent argument, or a deep thought, or even an original one, but it is the word I keep coming back to with her: annoying. I will admit I was once Taylor-curious (partly because I’m always susceptible to cultural peer pressure, but also partly because there was a brief period where I did think I could have found her music compelling) but I long ago stopped seeing her as an artist and instead see her as what she truly is: a black hole at the center of our cultural galaxy, swallowing up all the money and attention it can, and never releasing anything of value. There is, of course, no way to escape a black hole other than avoiding them completely, lest you get sucked beyond the event horizon — just look at how many words I’ve already written about someone I say I don’t find that interesting!! So, to vanquish any further thinking about her this week, I turn to one of our nation’s greatest haters:

“Only A Complete Asshole Would Get Married at Madison Square Garden” by Drew Magary — at Defector

Drew Magary gets right to the point here: it’s incredibly stupid to get married at MSG. The only reason to do it is for the publicity and attention, which makes it even more annoying that Taylor’s camp is claiming that they had to do it inside the windowless arena for privacy. Taylor’s wedding was, literally, Olivia Colman in The Favourite screaming, “Look at me! Look at me! HOW DARE YOU! Close your eyes!”

Unfortunately, we know there’s always more to come from this broad, and Drew ends his piece with a guess as to what she’s cooking up next:

When Swift and Kelce first started dating, I thought it was all just one big stunt. Well, this bullshit wedding proves that it really has been a stunt, only one far more extensive, and tiresome, than I’d ever imagined. Join us two years from now, when Swift delivers her first child at Talladega Speedway. Presale starts on August 1.

Cape Fear, episodes 4-6 — on Apple TV

I’ve changed my mind: Cape Fear sucks. At first I praised it, for its campy 90s tone and the pure joy of seeing Amy Adams do her strange Foghorn Leghorn accent again, and my only complaint was that the teenaged characters were a bit annoying. Well, the show clearly does not agree with that assessment, as week by week the kids have become more of the focal point of the show. For some reason, the daughter is just a total asshole, constantly screaming at her parents despite them repeatedly having incontrovertible proof that they’re actually trying to help her, and in recent episodes she’s randomly become a drunk, swigging cheap liquor from bottles while she stares at the internet. This fucking girl has spent several episodes yelling at her parents and skulking around the neighborhood, empty liquor bottles clanking inside her oversized overalls, and there’s no point to any of it. I hate her!

But even worse is the son (apparently played by Kate Winslet’s son? Okay!), whose whole thing is, I guess, acting creepy now? For some reason? While his sister has become Bottles McGee, swigging from paper bags like a railway hobo, this character has seemingly been possessed by a demon of some sort, doing voodoo magic in the attic and staring blankly into the fridge while smiling like a lunatic. None of it makes any sense, and, even worse, none of it is fun. Whenever we get scenes with just the adults I’m still having a pretty good time, but the more we focus on the children of Cape Fear, the more the show is turning into Cape Annoying.

Room on the Sea: Three Novellas, by André Aciman (2025) — library ebook

I feel tricked! I started this collection of three novellas on Fire Island because it was written by the guy who wrote Call Me By Your Name, so I was hoping for a sexy little trio of tales of gay longing, and instead they’re all about… straight people? Yuck! Even worse, the stories were mostly just fine — the first of the three was the most compelling to me, about a guy who claims he can see into past lives and that he’s cosmically connected to a random woman at a hotel with him, but the quality of stories quickly dropped from there. I’m not sure if this was the point, but every character in all of these stories is deeply annoying.

The stories mostly consist of two people going out and talking to each other, having the kinds of conversations I only ever had on first dates with guys who were absolutely desperate to prove they had depth. I’m telling you, these characters could not be more obnoxious. This is the type of shit one of the guys says on a date:

“Ironically, it is familiarity that estranges people. We repeat the same things till we run out of new ways to say them, then we grow tired of saying them and of hearing them said, and our guarded silence turns into a way of life until we find ourselves drifting like two rudderless steamboats with their engines off. All it is, is habit — and habit is a shorthand for silence.”

And then the woman this is said to, instead of saying, “Jesus Christ, you’re full of shit,” falls into bed with the guy! This book gave me a very good idea of what it would be like to date André Aciman, and I don’t think I’m up for that challenge, thank you.

The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis (2025) — library ebook

A fun, quick little beach read, though it would also be great in the fall, when you’re feeling witchy. It’s billed as The Crucible meets The Virgin Suicides, which pretty much nails it. The story is simple: in an English village in the 1700s, five sisters are rumored to be able to turn into dogs. The book jumps perspectives constantly, giving us a birds-eye view of the village’s feelings about the girls, and, spoiler alert, they don’t like them!!! “The villagers were more afraid of the girls themselves than they were of the dogs,” a character thinks at one point, which works very nicely as a one-sentence summary of the entire book!

The Colony, by Annika Norlin (2025) — library ebook

Apparently this book was a massive sensation in Norway, is already being developed into a TV show, and the author is, I just learned, a Norwegian pop star. (Must be nice to live in a country where your pop stars are writing prizewinning novels rather than throwing tacky parties for attention, but here I am getting sucked into the black hole again!) It follows a woman, Emilie, who stumbles upon a small cult living in the Norwegian woods, and sets up a rather tense outsider-vs-cult dynamic. This is a fun, pulpy little book that feels like it was absolutely written to be turned into a TV show.

Strangely, the book spends about 98% of its length setting up the conflict, before it all unravels in a matter of pages, which left me feeling like it had all kind of just fizzled out. She spends so much time giving us each character’s backstory and motivations, so by the time they’re all together in the woods, you know each of them intimately and you see how and why they’re attracted to the cult, but also where the points of tension might lie. The majority of the book is spent tying this knot of characters together as tightly as possible, and she does a fantastic job at it, before, without warning, pulling a single thread and letting it all unravel instantly. It’s a very strange, sudden shift, and feels almost as if she got 300 pages into the book and then realized she was writing a 600-page book, but knew something closer to 400 pages would sell, so she had to just cut and run. It’s a bit of a disappointing ending, but I did enjoy the rest of the ride, so I’ll give it a pass!

6/23/26 - 6/29/26

A warning: there is nothing of substance in this email. I have spent the last week on Fire Island cavorting with the gays, and therefore my brain is mush. I’m actively teaching myself how to write again as I type these words. But I hope you’ll forgive a short, worthless little email, because it’s a holiday week and honestly who even cares? Delete this without reading, I won’t be mad!

This week: I was subjected to an insane morning film choice, and I read an apt book about a psychotic group of gays.

Margaret (2011) — streamed from somewhere, who knows

Hungover one morning out here, our friend Erik threw on Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, which somehow ended up taking nearly 5 hours to finish. I’ve always wanted to watch this, but I was coming and going, so I only got bits and pieces. Did you know the core plot of this movie is, as follows: Anna Paquin (who plays Lisa, not Margaret, confusingly) wants to buy a cowboy hat, and sees Mark Ruffalo driving a bus while wearing a cowboy hat, so she waves to get his attention to ask where he got his hat, thereby distracting him so he hits and kills Allison Janney? Is this just like… a thing everyone knows about? Are people constantly walking around talking about how Mark Ruffalo kills Allison Janney because Anna Paquin wants to know where he got his hat in the movie Margaret? Anyway, the whole thing was worth it just to experience the moment when J. Smith-Cameron, who played Gerri on Succession, appeared on screen, immediately causing a room full of gays to all gasp in unison, “Gerri!”

The Silver Book, by Olivia Laing (2025) — library ebook

Unexpectedly a perfect little book to read on languid hot beach days, surrounded by nothing but gays. Set in Italy in 1975, it follows a young British man who’s escaping his traumatic London past and gets caught up in the gay dramatic world surrounding Fellini and his film crew. Partly based on a true story, but mostly fiction, it’s a quick little read, full of breezy, lovely sentences (cooking an elaborate meal is “a way of entering time through the back door”) that seem written specifically for lying on a beach, nursing a hangover while also working on the next day’s. Reading this sentence after 6 ragged days on Fire Island, in particular, felt extremely apt:

Everyone else might be unaffected, mysteriously immune, but the daily descent into hell is getting to Nicholas.

6/16/26 - 6/22/26

Between last weekend’s visit from my sister and her family, and this weekend’s visit from my cousin and his friend, I have walked the Brooklyn Bridge twice in 7 days. I have also, for the same reasons, completely fallen behind on Love Island, and we all know when you fall even 3 episodes behind on that show, it’s nearly impossible to catch back up. It’s become a show I’m watching entirely via out-of-context clips on social media now, which might be the preferred way to watch it. But please let me know if those two curious boys actually start doing full-blown gay stuff, because then I will pick it back up immediately.

This week: I binged the perfect new season of Outlast, I tragically wasn’t high enough to enjoy RuPaul’s stupid movie, I watched the insane new movie about meteorologists in WWII, Adam Scott infuriated me but it’s not his fault, I gave my sensitive data over to a mysterious new app, and I read a book about the fact that culture sucks now.

Outlast: The Jungle, season 1 (but also it’s Outlast’s 3rd season?… confusing) — on Netflix

The first two seasons of Outlast, Netflix’s Survivor/Alone ripoff have been a mixed bag. The first season was somewhat of a revelation, a no-holds-barred survivalist contest featuring literal criminals going feral in the woods. I hadn’t seen a reality show in which contestants tried to actually, literally kill each other since, like, Bret Michaels was forcing unstable women to compete for his attention on Rock of Love. Season 1 of Outlast saw cast members burning shelters down, stealing sleeping bags to give other players hypothermia, and even holding producers hostage in order to watch back footage of the other players. It was mayhem! I loved it. Season 2, on the other hand, was more of a straight-up survivalist game, and forgettable. (This is where I have to be a good journalist and report my conflict of interest: my good friend Greg is the casting director for Outlast. I will not let that make me biased, I promise!)

Season 3 (or, confusingly, season 1 of Outlast: The Jungle?) made a few changes. First, as the stupid subtitle suggests, they relocated from frigid, miserable Alaska to tropical, beautiful Panama. Secondly, they seem to have de-emphasized finding real survivalists, and instead cast a bunch of hot people. (Which is probably why they relocated to the jungle — let us ogle those body-ody-odies!) And third, they’ve added a few twists to the game that make it more of an actual game than an outright survivalist show. The new emphasis on a social-strategic game means the players’ personalities are the focus rather than their skills out in nature, which means heroes and villains can emerge. And, I have to warn you: you are not prepared for how much you are going to hate some of the people on this season.

Outlast: The Jungle features some of the most unbearable, misogynistic, arrogant incels ever filmed — the show slowly transforms into Outlast: The Manosphere. Halfway through the season, things got so bad, I was kind of hoping for actual violence to break out against a couple of these guys. It’s been at least a decade since I’ve seen reality TV characters this obnoxious, and I found myself unable to stop hitting “next episode,” desperately hoping to see one of them get their comeuppance, or worse. (In my darkest moments, I may have shouted, “STAB HIM” at one of the women, as she was being berated by one of the awful men.)

Sure, you may say there’s no need for yet another show that gives us bad men behaving badly, but I will argue that this is what Netflix does best: between all its dating shows and now Outlast, Netflix is, one by one, making a list of literally the worst straight men in all of America. They are doing a public service for women everywhere! If you meet a guy and he says he was on a Netflix reality show, you need to run.

Stop! That! Train! (2026) — at Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn

A warning: a 5mg edible is not enough THC for this movie. I suggest starting with at least 10 and going up from there, if you want any hope of genuinely enjoying this film. Stop! That! Train! clearly intends to be one of the stupidest movies you’ve ever seen, which it does succeed at, but unfortunately it rarely succeeds at being funny. I laughed possibly 4 times (there are a handful of good jokes, which begs the question: why not write good jokes the whole time???), which averages out to a laugh about every 25 minutes. That’s not a good ratio, Ru!

To be fair, we were in the minority, as the rest of our theater was having a great time (they probably took 20mg). The people were clapping like seals at even the most basic Drag Race references, and screaming with laughter at anything pretty much anyone said. There is a Lea Michele joke in this movie that is so tragically tame, and yet that didn’t stop the woman in front of me from screaming, “HOLY SHIT!” She simply could not believe that RuPaul would have the nerve to playfully and gently tease Lea Michele!!!! Over the past few years, Drag Race has turned more and more from an edgy, boundary-pushing show into, basically, Gay Cocomelon, and Stop! That! Train! shows there’s, unfortunately, no stopping that train.

Pressure (2026) — on Apple TV

As a guy who loves both history and weather, there was no way I wasn’t going to watch the movie about the weather on D-Day. And, even after watching the whole thing, I’m still a little bit like… wait, they made an entire movie about the weather on D-Day??? This was a deeply strange experience, and yet I kind of enjoyed it? I love my girl Kerry Condon (someday we’ll get you a role that lets you do more than just tell the male characters how inspiring they are, queen!), and there are several sequences in which people are frantically looking at charts and maps while shouting things like, “Get me those barometer readings from Ireland!” or whatever, and none of it seems like things actual weatherpeople would say, but who cares! This is a silly, stupid movie designed for you to be able to throw on whenever you’ve run out of things to talk to your dad about. Happy Father’s Day to ME.

Hokum (2026) — on Apple TV

Hokum is a pretty standard horror movie — a man (Adam Scott) goes to a haunted Irish hotel, where haunted things happen — that’s actually secretly a comedy, thanks to a thing I think of as the Barbarian effect, where the plot can only continue if the main character consistently makes some of the worst decisions you’ve ever seen. Oh, what’s that, a terrifying ancient clawed hand just closed that door over there? Let me go open it as slowly as possible and see who’s behind it! I spent half this movie screaming at Adam Scott to stop being such a fucking idiot, which is really all I want from a horror film. Just get in your damn Hertz and go to a non-haunted Marriott, you stupid bitch!!!

332 blocks — on the WalkNYC app

This stupid new app tracks your walks around NYC, and tallies up how many of the — apparently — 86,638 blocks in the city that you’ve walked. It’s extremely dumb, and I do not know why I downloaded it, or who I’m giving my data to, but it’s not like Palantir doesn’t already know where I am at every given second, you know? Yesterday I mentioned the Guggenheim within earshot of my phone, and today all I’m getting are Guggenheim ads! So, like, we’ve lost the data privacy wars already — fuck it, might as well see how I stack up against all the other walkers in the city. (As I started typing this, I was ranked #906 on the leaderboard, but I’ve already dropped to #913. There are walkers out there passing me right now! I need to go outside!)

This is an app I will probably completely forget about within 3 weeks, and yet I will also forget about rescinding its access to my location data, which means whichever nefarious government agency designed this honey-pot app will have the ability to precision drone-strike me anywhere I go, in perpetuity. Oh well!

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, by W. David Marx (2025) — library ebook

I think I’m probably too online for this book. I thought it would be more of an analysis of its central thesis — that cultural progress has stalled in the 21st century because financial success is more celebrated than artistic risk now — but it was, instead, 250 pages of a mostly straightforward listing of everything that happened culturally over the last 25 years. Wikipedia: the book. Maybe a lot of this would be news to people who spend less time online than me, but I unfortunately already knew almost everything covered — I really didn’t need to sit through a step-by-step recounting of Kanye’s journey from The College Dropout to full-blown Nazi, I already lived it! You don’t need to spend a paragraph describing the humiliations of Bianca Censori when I can close my eyes and picture it all as if it just happened yesterday, you know?

The only interesting parts of the book were the intro and conclusion, when he actually made his point and offered the analysis that was lacking in the rest of the book. But even that was fairly expected: late capitalism and consumerist culture have made artists seek profits over genuine creativity? You don’t say! But again, I’m probably not the audience for this — I mean, I’m literally writing about an anti-consumption book in a newsletter devoted to consumption. W. David Marx and I are actually on the same side of this argument, but me reading this book was a bit like trying to describe shit to a pig. I am already very familiar with the concept, thank you!

6/9/26 - 6/15/26

I don’t know what happened to me this week — maybe it was something about the oppressive heat, or the fact that my sister, brother-in-law, and their two kids visited and stayed in our little apartment with us — but, in the depths of Pride Month, I started to act like a heterosexual. I drank more beer than I’ve had all year, I watched more sports than I have in my entire life, and I enjoyed all of it. What’s happening to me? I’m scared!

This week: I contracted a fatal case of Knicks fever, I was confused but also delighted by Disclosure Day, I regretted dipping my toes back into Netflix true crime, and I read two books about sad people.

Cans of Modelo — on the street, Brooklyn

Up until last week, this had been my journey with the Knicks:

• Birth to 2026: Considered it a cute thing my mostly straight male/lesbian friends enjoyed. I was glad they were having fun!

• Game 1: Met my friends at a bar to watch, but I was a huge bitch about it. Left at halftime.

• Game 2: Didn’t watch.

• Game 3: Didn’t watch, hoped the president would stroke out on-air.

• Game 4: Didn’t pay much attention in the first half, but felt slightly sad about the Knicks’ 29-point deficit; not genuinely sad, but sad in the way you feel, like, when a coworker tells you their plant died, you know?

But by the end of game 4, everything had changed. I was on my feet, screaming. I was texting friends. I was annoyed with Taylor Swift’s bandwagoning for attention (even though I am, at this very moment, also bandwagoning the Knicks, but I think we can all agree I’m doing it in a much less irritating and more interesting way). I even started using “we/us” pronouns to refer to the team. Within a span of about 15 minutes, I had become a completely different person. Nothing would ever be the same.

So when game 5 hit on Saturday, there was no question I’d be watching. After we got out of Disclosure Day (more on that below… lol), we walked around South Park Slope and Windsor Terrace, trying to find the perfect place to watch the game. Which was surprisingly difficult! I’ve seen other people point this out, but this was the first time I can ever remember New York feeling like it does not have enough bars. If you weren’t in the doors of a place by 8pm, you weren’t getting in, so we walked around until we stumbled upon a projector someone had set up in the middle of the street, which could not have been more perfect. We bought some Modelos at a bodega and set up on the curb, and by halftime the street was completely packed, hundreds of New Yorkers gathered around this single, random projector.

Much has been written and posted about the energy on Saturday night after the Knicks won, but as a person who had been rooting for the team for exactly four days, I think I’m the correct authority to tell you that it was truly once-in-a-lifetime. It was the first time I’ve seen purely uncomplicated joy erupting on the streets of NY like this in my 15 years here, and made me realize that maybe, possibly, there’s a slight chance that… the sports people have been right all along? Is this what you guys have been feeling and experiencing all this time?! Does this mean I have other preconceived notions that could be wrong??? (Not possible.)

I can’t promise I’ll be an NBA fan next year, but I am suddenly more open to it than I ever have been in my entire life. Should I get a Jalen Brunson jersey? Should I become a guy who yells, “Let’s goooooo!” all the fucking time? Should I put my life savings into a Kalshi account?! Watch this space……

Disclosure Day (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park

In retrospect, it’s hilarious how many conspiracy theories there were in the lead-up to this film’s release. Steven Spielberg was being used by the government to soft-release actual disclosure! He had spliced into the film actual alien footage! Emily Blunt’s weird clicking voice was a real recording of real aliens speaking! And then, after all that, you see the film and it’s… a fun but very stupid, late-Spielberg summer blockbuster. Who would have guessed!

And, ironically, the conspiracies and paranoia that surrounded the release of the film completely destroy its central narrative. In the film, Steven presents “disclosure day” as a moment for the world to pull back from the brink and come together under a collective humanity. But in reality, we’d simply turn full alien disclosure into more raw fuel for memes, conspiracy theories, and deranged content, before quickly pivoting to the next topic of the day, like we do with everything else. What I’m saying is: if Disclosure Day were to actually happen, it would only take 10 minutes before some dude had created an AI video of himself fucking one of the aliens as promo for his OnlyFans.

But that is where my internet-ruined brain goes, while Steven Spielberg is much more innocent and hopeful than I could ever be. So instead of dwelling in our modern reality, Disclosure Day plays in a more Aaron Sorkin-esque place, one where things are kind of bad right now, but we can turn things around if someone just gives an inspiring speech on the evening news. It’s an extremely Boomer way of looking at the world, but Spielberg is 100 years old, so I’m not going to waste energy being mad at him.

Unfortunately, Disclosure Day’s script and story are mostly a complete mess. There are vague psychic powers, a magical alien device that can do literally anything the plot needs it to do, and nefarious corporate villains who feel pulled from the later seasons of The X-Files and (spoiler alert) just kind of give up? The less time you spend thinking about the plot, the more you’ll enjoy the movie, is what I’m saying. This is damning with faint praise, but it’s the best advice I have for you.

Because if you do manage to turn your brain off a little, there are so many fun, electric sequences where Steven Spielberg is making the camera move in that specific Spielbergian way. I watched half the movie just like: wheeeeeeeeeeee! So many films are shot in such a flat way, designed to be streamed on your phone while on the toilet, so to see a big film with actual visual artistry behind it is thrilling. The bar is low, yes, but that’s not Steven’s fault!

Maybe, when the real Disclosure Day finally comes, we will learn that there actually have been psychic meteorologists and magical glow sticks and aliens presenting as shitty CGI foxes all along, and I will have to eat my words. But until then, my best advice is to just ignore the confusing plot completely and enjoy the movie for the big, stupid spectacle it is. Steven Spielberg has made possibly his dumbest movie of all time, but I still enjoyed the ride.

Maternal Instinct (2026) — on Netflix

This one’s on me. I should know better than to watch a Netflix true crime documentary, and yet something compelled me to click play on this movie, to my great regret. It follows an absolutely horrifying tale of a deeply unwell woman whose lies and petty crimes start spiraling out of control, until things take a very, very, very dark turn. It’s a bleak and horrible ride, the worst form of true crime, almost reveling in the misfortune of others. Even worse, the movie seems to be pushing for the death penalty? In fact, it goes so far beyond pushing for the death penalty that it feels like it’s pushing for something worse than the death penalty. This whole thing had a deeply conservative feeling to it, like it was a Heritage Foundation-produced film. I regret every second I spent watching it. Spare yourself!

What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan (2025) — hardcover

Ian McEwan’s writing is always gorgeous, but this book took a while to get into. It follows a group of academics 100 years in the future, who are researching a poem that was written in 2020 but has been lost to time. The first half of the book follows the academics’ attempts to rediscover the poem, as well as to retrace the lives of the poet, his wife, and the friends who were in the room for the one and only reading of this poem. The second half travels back in time and reveals the truth of what happens.

The book is full of weighty themes — climate change, aging, memory loss, the power of art, to name just a few — but I kept getting bogged down in the strange details of the actual story. For one, Ian McEwan seems to believe that a poem — and not just a poem, but a poem that has never been published; the idea of a poem! — could go massively viral in 2020. Even worse, the book supposes that a poem could inspire a wave of people finally taking climate change seriously. …….. Maybe!!!! It’s all very quaint, and I found that aspect the hardest to suspend my disbelief for (coincidentally, this is very in line with Disclosure Day’s insistence that broadcast news still carries an enormous amount of weight; it’s Boomer Media Week here at DBC!).

But there are some good emotional truths in here, namely the way the people of the future look back at us, the absolute fucking morons watching the world burn and doing nothing about it: “They were big and brave, superb scholars and scientists, musicians, actors and athletes, and they were idiots who were throwing it all away,” the academics of the future lament, and unfortunately that feels like exactly what they’ll be saying about us in the next century.

About halfway through, the book finally gets out of its stuffy academic world, and we start getting into the drama, which is where things really took off for me. Everyone in this book is cheating on their partner! There are more than a few soap opera twists, which feel extra shocking coming after 100+ pages of fictional poetry analysis, but were a welcome shift in tone. Is this what academic life is? Are all you literary theorists having scandalous affairs?

Sadly, I think we’re past the point where any single piece of art could change the course of our planet’s miserable climate future, but I suppose it was nice to live for a little bit in a fantasy world where that could be possible. I hope for everyone’s sake that I’m wrong and Ian McEwan is right, though.

Palaver, by Bryan Washington (2025) — library ebook

Bryan Washington is the gay male Sally Rooney, a writer deeply obsessed with a specific type of character and a specific world. And yet there’s something compelling about the repetition, the way these authors remain fixated on exploring extremely similar stories and relationships, with only minute differences between their characters. It’s like they’re both scratching a scab they refuse to let heal, finding new pains and new places to bleed from.

So, yes, this is another Bryan Washington novel about a sad queer Black sadboy living sadly in Japan, but it was the most I’ve enjoyed one of his books in a long time. The story follows a man — simply referred to as “the son” — in Japan, whose mother (“the mother”) comes to stay with him. As to be expected with dear old Washington, not much happens plot-wise, but conversations are had, emotions are fraught, sex is awkward but nice, and past wrongdoings are unearthed and dealt with. You know what you’re getting when you open one of his novels, and yet I haven’t gotten sick of it yet. And clearly, neither has he!

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.