I think it's a Tuesday email now

Thanksgiving eats, TV, publishings and preorders

Hello, friends. It’s hard for me to keep up on Friday newsletters, because by the time I get to Friday the last thing I want to do is write more things.

Tuesdays, though — this makes sense. It’s a good way to grease the gears. Let’s say it’s Tuesday emails now.

First, a reminder

We’re deep in the weeds of book tour planning for March, when the book is released, and I’ll have more to tell you on that soon.

But in the meantime, please do pre-order if you’re planning on getting it anyhow. (At that link you can see the shiny new reviews and endorsements too! I am inordinately proud of them.)

In fact, please pre-order from your local bookstore if you can. Why? Well, here is a fun fact that you might not know, as summarized by someone I don’t know on BlueSky:

On to the funner stuff.

Culture Diet

• Over the weekend we watched an early screener of the upcoming Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, which is coming to Netflix on January 3. Mark your calendar.

• On TV, I recently worked my way through Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, which came out earlier this year. It is lumpy, but I am helpless in the face of anything about mid-20th century writers and socialites. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Capote reigns supreme, but I liked Tom Hollander’s, too.

• We also watched my screeners of the full third (and last) season of Somebody Somewhere, which is currently airing. I love this show so much. It means a lot to me that someone made it, and treated its characters so tenderly. It sticks the landing.

• I am surrounded by piles of books as I prepare my syllabus for next semester’s class. I have always enjoyed syllabus design, but I haven’t done it in a while and it’s a little overwhelming. A few from the pile: “Ways of Seeing” (John Berger), “Disordered Attention” (Claire Bishop), “Attention: A Personal History of Trying to Focus (or Trying To)” (Casey Schwartz), “Camera Lucida” (Roland Barthes), “Known and Strange Things” (Teju Cole), “How to Do Nothing” (Jenny Odell), the list goes on …

Speaking of “Somebody Somewhere,” it’s Thanksgiving.

Actual Diet

• Obviously all food energy is directed toward Thursday’s big meal, a goodly portion of which I am preparing for nine people. My personal plans include the following:

  • Spatchcocked turkey and a supplementary roast pork loin with rosemary and garlic

  • The “You-Only-Need-One” stuffing from Katherine Lewin’s “Big Night” cookbook

  • Sheet pan brussels sprouts and bacon

  • The best mashed potatoes

• On Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s marvelous podcast “Wiser Than Me,” the great Alice Waters recommended pu-erh tea for lowering chloresterol, which is something I have recently had to do (and succeeded at). So I’ve been drinking this one and it is very good. (Also that episode is an absolute delight.)

Publishings

• An entry in the Culture desk’s new advice column, on whether you have to sit through all those end credits.

• An audio roundtable with two of my colleagues, TV critic Margaret Lyons and critic at large Amanda Hess, on the most urgent pop culture of our time: Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” show, which is very bad, even for its genre.

• Reviews of “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” “Blitz,” “Bird,” “Small Things Like These,” “Dream Team,” “A Photographic Memory,” and “The Piano Lesson.”

• Documentary Lens columns on that “Martha” Stewart documentary, the final installment in Wang Bing’s “Youth” trilogy, “The World According to Allee Willis,” and “Night Is Not Eternal,” an absolute banger of a documentary that really twists back on itself halfway through and could not feel more urgent (and is streaming on Max).

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends, and I hope you eat fantastic stuffing.