Letter of Rec

The art of suspense + a bunny doing crimes

Author

Laura Brooke Robson
May 28, 2024

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. New York Times Popcast: The Best New Taylor Swift Songs. Popcast is always fun, but this month had some especially worthwhile episodes (good coverage of the Kendrick vs. Drake feud, too). In this episode, the hosts talk about what does and does not work in the new Taylor album and suggest pared-down versions of the album (which IMO are much more digestible).

  2. ”How Daniel Radcliffe Outran Harry Potter” by Chris Heath. I am perpetually and immensely charmed by Daniel Radcliffe (aren’t we all?). This article charts his whole career, but it gives specific space to the question of what you do when you build some part of your identity around a cultural object whose legacy shifts over time—in this case, Rowling’s bizarre and increasingly emphatic anti-trans rhetoric altering what it means to enjoy, or have enjoyed, the Harry Potter franchise. Radcliffe comes off as so warm and reflective—cannot recommend this enough!

  3. Pitchfork. Just, like, the whole website. I seem to have forgotten it existed until it was snatched from the jaws of death, but hey, I forgot I really like Pitchfork! I have very little intuition for whether a certain album might be critically successful, especially because the Grammys, unlike the Oscars and Emmys, favor commercial popularity. Love hearing people who know way more than me (basically anyone) talk about music! A fun list: The Best Music of 2024 So Far.

  4. Haley Nahman: On Ultimatums. This comes from a paywalled advice column, but the advice in question is the first in the list and you can read it for free. Basically, someone writes in saying they tend to think in grand, all-or-nothing terms. The response is so good:

I loved to analyze a single experience—in a relationship, friendship, job, city—and conclude whether it was proof things were destined to succeed or fail. I always wanted conclusions…

This is an exhausting way to live. You become so focused on staying in the driver’s seat, hands at 10 and 2, that you forget the point is to enjoy the ride. I’m not talking about being passive—I’m talking about relinquishing control.

Haley Nahman

  1. The Secrets of Suspense by Kathryn Schulz. This is writing advice, but it’s also life advice. Just very good! And now that I’m looking at it again, it feels not unrelated to the Haley Nahman link above.

Either way, suspense still reigns supreme. As long as the future remains opaque, it will also remain frightening and exhilarating, the repository of our greatest fears and wildest dreams. This is perhaps the most important way that real-life suspense differs from the fictional kind: in books and movies, we do not necessarily care if the outcome for which we have been waiting is good or bad—our primary concern is that it resolves the feeling of suspense in a satisfying way. But in life we care about those outcomes desperately. We want our fears to prove unfounded and our dreams to come true; we want to be spared life’s many possible devastations and gratified by its revelations and resolutions. This is, perhaps, the tenderest and most hopeful definition of suspense: it is the passionate wish, in the face of omnipresent doubts and dangers, that all will be well in the future.

Kathryn Schulz

  1. My Instagram algorithm is getting better:

  1. How to Build a Small Town in Texas. This is not new but was new to me. While I have no strong desire to lead a cult at present, I do think, if the opportunity arose, I could design a cult with great infrastructure. But don’t we all?

  2. Inside Reese Witherspoon’s Literary Empire by Elisabeth Egan. I just want nothing but the best for Reese Witherspoon! (Though I will admit to loving at least one 700-page novel about a tree.)

  3. A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight by Elisa Gabbert. This is neither new nor new to me but remains one of my favorite things on the internet. It’s a close read of the Auden poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which is based on the Bruegel painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The NYT piece is very, very well constructed—both in terms of content (it reads like a warm conversation with the best poetry professor you ever had) and form (it’s good interactive design work). I feel like all you need to know is that I went to the Royal Museums of Fine Art in Brussels specifically because of this piece!

  4. Something to aspire to:

Currently reading: Biography of X by Catherine Lacy. SO WEIRD. Loving it.

Non-urgent thought of the week: Do people (me) who like TV shows full of unlikable characters put up with these characters because we have good empathy skills or because we relate to unlikeable people? Troubling :)

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