Briefly catching up

books and music and candles and, yes, movies

Hello! I am in the middle of a full weekend of book revisions (I have a few weeks before my deadline). Expect it this time next year, and expect to hear plenty more about that. But as a breather (for me), you get a little post, the first one in 2024, a little treat.

I’ve just passed the three-month mark at the Times, and it’s been, honestly, a real pleasure. I’ve gotten used to the strangeness of seeing my byline in the paper delivered to my door, and of seeing my words in that typeface all the time. But that’s not really what I’m enjoying about it. Not only am I working with a lot of smart, thoughtful folks, but I’ve received a lot of encouragement both from colleagues and from readers. As I’ve been telling people, in my line of work you get quite a few unhinged/bizarre reader emails, but I’ve never gotten so many thoughtfully written notes from people who sat down just to say that they liked what I wrote. It’s nice! I recommend it!

(Also there’s a goldfish cracker dispenser in the kitchen near my desk in the newsroom, and though I don’t go in all the time, when I do, I get to eat goldfish.)

First, some recommendations

A few books I’ve read since the beginning of the year. (All by friends or acquaintances, but that shouldn’t dissuade you.)

• Here in the Dark, by Alexis Soloski: Absolutely delightful page-turner that is somewhere between one of those delicious novels of a life going down the tubes and a hard-boiled detective novel. The protagonist is a theatre critic at an alt-weekly desperately hoping to get the vacant lead critic seat, but also accidentally gets tangled up in a disappearance that may or may not be a murder. Very funny, brilliantly written, sexy, messy, and twisty. I had a blast.

• Great Expectations, by Vinson Cunningham: I mean, of course Vinson’s novel is terrific and exquisitely written, and I’ve been dying to read it for literal years — but it’s somehow better than I even expected. It’s at least somewhat based on his own life, a book about a young staffer on the Obama campaign and a moment in American history that I remember well and yet seems like some other planet. (Out March 12!)

• Splinters, by Leslie Jamison: I’ve been reading Leslie for a long time, and she just keeps getting better. This is a memoir of divorce and early motherhood, but of a lot, lot more. Leslie’s eye for the telling detail — a basic building block of personal writing that I struggle with! — has never been better. There have been so many memoirs about these two subjects that I rarely feel like I am engrossed in the story or hearing something new, and she catapulted all my barriers. (Out Tuesday!)

Some other things I have been liking

• I have lived a sleepless life in adulthood, and been working for a year on curing this. A big part of it was my moderate apnea, which has been more or less solved by this goofy retainer thing (a CPAP was never going to work for me, so this is a godsend). But other things have helped, too, and lately I’ve been experimenting with magnesium before bed, both in drink and bath form. It helps! It’s not perfect, but it definitely helps!

• With shifting career situations comes shifting financial situations, and so I have been into thrifting via ThredUp, which is convenient and useful and also will send you a bag to send them your old stuff, and then you get shopping credit when it sells. In this manner I managed to snag a black leather Theory jacket for like 90% off retail, which is something I’ve wanted forever.

• I was lucky enough to see Heather Christian’s “Terce” last month, and it was genuinely the most transcendent experience I’ve had (in a church, no less) in as long as I can possibly remember. You can get a taste of it here and here.

• I splurged on a bunch of this candle during an end of year sale and burn it continually. The last couple of months have brought a lot of challenges, but it helps.

And now a list of clips

Subdivided, so you don’t get overwhelmed. I haven’t sent one of these yet in 2024, so this is quite literally six weeks’ worth.

Essays and critics’ notebooks:

• This piece has been a stealth ratings rocket, so: the point of Saltburn isn’t what we’ve been talking about, or How I Learned To Stop Needling And Enjoy Saltburn.

• Following reports of the death of Russian dissident Aleksei Navalny in a federal prison somewhere in the Arctic Circle, I wrote about the Oscar-winning documentary about him (streaming on Max) and why it feels far stranger to watch after his death.

• With chief movie critic Manohla Dargis: who we’d nominate for Oscars if we were the Academy. Our visual team did an amazing job setting this up and it’s so fun to play with!

• On the new Mean Girls, which reminded me of the essential core of the Mean Girls movie in the first place: being homeschooled.

• What made the late actor Tom Wilkinson (no relation) so great: it was never clear if he was a warm hug or a ticking time bomb.

• For our Oscar issue: A close read of the first scene in The Taste of Things. (The movie is in theaters now — review below — but we got video of the sequence so you can see that in the article.)

• With chief TV critic James Poniewozik and critic at large Jason Zinoman: some ruminations on the bananas finale of The Curse.

• One of my annual pleas to make the Oscar nominations make sense — in this case, the categorization of screenplays like Maestro and Barbie. (I know that sounds boring, but I think this is pretty fun.)

• I watched about 20 documentaries that were at this year’s Sundance and wrote about their strange obsession with talking to the dead, whether through mediums or AI.

Reviews

• The Teacher’s Lounge (Oscar-nominated, terrific)

• Good Grief (Dan Levy’s Netflix movie, surprisingly strong)

• Night Swim (forgettable enough that I’ve basically forgotten it)

• Apolonia, Apolonia (luminous, intriguing, wonderful)

• The Book of Clarence (one of the weirder Jesus movies I’ve ever seen)

• Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (remarkable debut about spiritual wandering)

• The End We Start From (torpid, unfortunately)

• Sometimes I Think About Dying (strange little misfit drama I quite like)

• Skin Deep (high concept, spare execution, extremely thought-provoking)

• Argylle (by far the worst movie I’ve seen so far this year, kinda ripped into it because it’s such a waste of money and time)

• Perfect Days (Oscar-nominated, jewel-like lyricism with a dark side)

• The Taste of Things (glorious, a must-see, food and love and longing)

• Lisa Frankenstein (such a disappointment)

• Players (pleasant enough, lots of rom-com ruminations herein)

• The Arc of Oblivion (fascinating, a little kooky, a doc about building an ark but also about all of the world’s memories)

Documentary columns
This is just a little experiment we’re trying, 500 or so words a week, but they’re fun to write! I focus on documentaries you can stream right now — sometimes new, sometimes from the archives.

• The most groundbreaking Oscar race is the documentary features

• 3 celebrity docs worth your time

• True-crime documentaries that tell us more about ourselves than their subjects

• 8 documentaries about love

I’ve got some travel coming up, and the Oscars, and these revisions, and a few side projects to tackle, but I’ll try to be better about updating this more often!