Letter of Rec

I ingest an inordinate amount of content so you don’t have to! Here are the best things I spent time on this month:

1. All the books I mentioned this month ended up being very good. Instead of re-recommending them, here’s a link to a Bookshop page with all my Retrograder recs thus far.

2. Michael Imperioli Knows Art Can’t Save Us in The New Yorker. Imperioli (White Lotus, The Sopranos) is currently starring in a play with Jeremy Strong (Succession), which, obviously, I would simply die to see. He expresses a concern that weighs on me re: writing, which is that art both is and is not political action. I find it tempting to believe environmentally-focused art is a powerful form of climate action because it’s convenient for me to do so. Imperioli comes across as thoughtful and likable—this is a very good profile!

3. The Sony World Photography Awards. Just some good photos to peruse!

4. The Hard Fork podcast from the New York Times. I listen to Hard Fork religiously, and I wanted to recommend every episode this month. Give it a go for nuanced takes on the TikTok ban and the new story on cars reporting driver data to insurance companies. The most recent ep includes an interview with Jonathan Haidt, who argues that we need to limit children’s smartphone/social media access. I disagree with a lot of what Haidt has said in the past, but I’m pretty on board here. He points out that most teens would not give up social media alone but would love if it disappeared for everyone. I’m reminded of a thing that happened in college, the Stanford Marriage Pact, in which undergrads were given a series of questions (do you want kids, do you want to live in a city, is faith important to you) and matched with their most compatible peer. One of the questions was, “At what age would you give your child a smartphone?” I said high school (or as late as possible), which I thought was pretty banal, but it was actually my biggest outlier answer. I stand by it; enjoy your flip phones, kiddos.

5. The Australian word “daggy,” for which there is no American equivalent. I said this in front of my American friends and they had no idea what I meant. This Wikipedia entry is delightful in its entirety. We need more affectionate insults!

6. Ariana Grande’s we can’t be friends (wait for your love) music video. Exquisite! No notes! I cried.

7. Off Menu with Noel Fielding. British comedians James Acaster and Ed Gamble interview resident GBBO goth about his dream menu. I spent a lot of time this month going through the Off Menu back catalogue—favs are Lily Allen, Paul Mescal, Mel Giedroyc, Greg Davies, and Joe Lycett. If you’re American and you think you don’t know who James Acaster is, he’s this guy:

8. With all my Off Menu listening, I felt compelled to revisit old episodes of Taskmaster, which is very funny and very British and features all the same people who get interviewed for Off Menu. IMO the best season (“series”) is 4.

9. Writers on Writing with Nathan Hill. Wellness is probably my favorite book of the year so far, but it’s very long and delves into basically every theme imaginable, so I appreciated the extra opportunity to figure out what Hill had in mind. Listen to hear him describe the process of trying to write a novel that felt “kairological” rather than “chronological” (lol—but I love this).

10. A new game based on this meme:

Favs so far are: merry harrier, cantilevered bastion, frisbeed sunhound. Not all men are golden retrievers! Some are frisbeed sunhounds! Please send me your best fictional dog breeds.

Currently reading: News of the Universe by Robert Bly. This is a poetry collection that shows the evolving way poets wrote about the environment across centuries. I appreciate the organization in that Bly stops before every new movement to explain the prevailing written treatment of nature. I find it difficult to read hundreds of poems in a row with no scaffolding, so this has been fab. More reliant on Jung and Campbell than I’d like, but overall, this is a lovely anthology.

Non-urgent thought of the week: In what medium do you think? Words? Pictures? Is it possible to know for sure? Apparently, some people claim to have no internal monologue whatsoever, which baffles me to no end.

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