Update June 10, 2026: I added a Selena Gomez song that is probably in my top 20 pop songs of all time. (Vibe: Electropop)
I wanted to see the movie and my father-in-law had the book to lend. Andy Weir has a gimmick about making his scientist protagonists relatable to the point of not being a person with recognizable interiority. His protagonists in this book and in The Martian think in their private mind the way I believe other people pretend to be in social functions. But I don’t think any human actually thinks this way.
That said, I very much enjoyed this and would take this over the Dungeon Crawl Carl craze happening at the moment. Weir has an excellent sense of tension and stakes in the progression of the plot. He could write some of the greatest sci fi of our era if those moments didn’t come with a “well, that happened” punctuator.
Obsession | Curry Barker
I’m seeing something interesting about how people discuss this movie, which is a lot of “Ahem. Well, as you know, I am extremely media literate and let me tell you that this real villain of this movie is Baron, the feckless abuser.” Then a lot of people go on to make the case that Baron is monstrous from beginning to end and top to bottom and that this is the true skeleton key of the film.
But I think what you’re describing there is a worse a movie. Obsession is really good because Baron (I just…refuse to call him “Bear,” it makes me nauseous) could be your best friend. Or he could be you. The anxiety of the film is designed to play on your own fears of relationships.
Yes, there are key moments in the movie where he is forced to confront what he’s done and chooses the most self-serving path. But for most of the movie, what he’s doing is choosing the path of least resistance. He has cognitive dissonance about the situation and he does some mental flips to reconcile everything in his own mind.
That’s not a secret movie monster. That’s everyone. And while Baron is the villain of Nikki’s story, he’s not just the protagonist of this story. He *is* the hero, upon whom it’s incumbent to either find a solution or for whom failure would mean ultimate tragedy.
And he succeeds! He undoes his mistake, even as Barker and crew give him one more moment of cowardice when he almost pukes up the pills.
Baron does many shitty things in this movie that lead up to a point where he does make choices that are arguably irredeemable. A big part of the horror of Obsession is that all sorts of people in their early twenties are vulnerable to this kind of moral failure. Luckily, for most of us, it usually doesn’t lead to actual lifelong trauma for our crushes, the death of our closest friends, and life’s ultimate cancellation.
But it probably dose make your skin crawl when you watch a guy dig himself into a cycle of codependency. That’s almost as scary as the weird makeup on Inde Navarrette in the middle of the night, what the hell was up with that??
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Sales from the more than 1,416 publishers who report revenue to the Association of American Publishers’ StatShot program rose 0.9% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to a year ago.
Sales of religion books, which have been solid for several years, fell 1.4% in the quarter, while sales in the industry’s biggest segment, adult books, slipped 0.5%. The decline in adult books was due entirely to a weak performance by nonfiction, where sales fell 7.8% in the period offsetting a 5.5% increase in fiction.
Within adult nonfiction, sales fell in all major formats with the exception of digital audio, where sales rose 9.2%. Hardcover sales took the biggest decline, falling 15.6%, while sales in the other major format, trade paperback, dropped 4.7%. E-book sales fell 13.6% in the quarter and were half the size of digital audiobook sales.
Sales of digital audio had the biggest increase in adult fiction, jumping 23.3%, while e-book sales, which were still higher than digital audio, dipped 3.4%. The two formats combined to account for 39% of fiction adult sales in the quarter, up from 38.2% a year ago. Among the print formats, trade paperback had a good quarter with sales up 12.1% while hardcover sales increased 1.5%.
The 2.6% increase in the children’s/YA segment was due entirely to a 16.8% jump in sales in the relatively small nonfiction category. The two most important formats, paperback and hardcover, had sales of 23.2% and 9.1%, respectively. Children’s/YA fiction sales slipped 0.7% in the quarter. Sales of paperbacks, the largest format, fell 2.1%, while hardcover sales dropped 6.5%. Sales gains in the special bindings format and in the two digital areas helped to mitigate the declines in hardcover and paperback.
The 1.4% drop in sales of religious books was due to a 4.3% decline in sales of hardcover, which is by far the segment’s largest format, accounting for 59% of revenue in the quarter.
Source: Publishers Weekly
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) by Douglas Adams
I’m a big Hitchhiker’s Guide fan, having enjoyed my first exposure to proper satire during my lonely middle school days and then discovering over time that almost everyone I liked to interact with had a similar experience.
I’d known about Dirk Gently in theory, but it wasn’t until our book club selected it that I had a chance to read any non-Hitchhiker’s books from Douglas Adams.
The core wit is there and refreshing in how deftly it’s weaved in with a denser plot. Our club had the consensus that the density of jokes is far fewer than the most well-known parts of the Hitchhiker’s series and while I’m a little neutral on how the central mysteries involving the Electric Monk and Gordon Way are handled, one of Adams’ messages resonated with me.
He warned us to not get super reliant on technology and use tremendous amounts of resources to do basic tasks of living.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detecitve Agency is an anti-artificial intelligence book written 40 years before the explosion of generative AI and LLMs.
How timely. I’ll read it again.
Escape! (2026) by Stephen Fishbach
Coinciding with a return to a Survivor era of my life, I received this book a couple months into 2025 after pre-ordering it last year. I rarely pre-order books, but Stephen Fishbach promised me more “Blood in the Clocktower” YouTube videos if I did that, but as the show that popularized him taught me: trust nobody.
I can praise Escape! as being a page-turner. Fischbach commits to escalation of plot and introduces a varied enough cast of characters with potential arcs you’ll want to see close out, much like Survivor does. He has flashes of damn good writing, particularly in the final act when his characters are really pushed into moments of existential reflection.
But it’s important to see this as something of an absurdist plot and I wonder how it will play to people who haven’t been following pop culture discussion of “the edit” or even to fans of reality TV that don’t follow survival shows. At times it feels like Fishbach gave in to a thought exercise and the conclusion feels like something unearthed rather than purposefully crafted. Still, a good airplane read, as I made significant progress on my five-hour flight from California to North Carolina.
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bronte
feel like I was told this would not be the stodgy 19th century romance that I expected, but I was still surprised at how much Bronte was committed to writing bad people who do bad things.
I do think my experience was helped by still finding ounces of sympathy for Heathcliff, Catherine the elder, and all of them. Even Joseph. Bronte excelled at setting up the internal motivations and the traumatic experiences that built these people up act as they do.
I was a little harangued by the narration model and I didn’t care to see the world through Lockwood’s eyes at the beginning. Thankfully, the narrator MVP is Nelly Dean, who I think should have started and ended the whole thing.
Therapist was six minutes late. Could’ve been worse, he’s ghosted before.
I did a lot of talking. So I guess this is the kind of therapy it is, where I’m revealing things to myself and he’s kind of like a sounding board.
We were talking about the tension between the career I have for money, which itself exists to support the liberal capitalist lifestyle I have set up for myself and my family and the activism work I do for very little money.
And he did say one thing that helped me. “They say you should talk about your goals.”
I reflected on the fact that I don’t love talking about my day, because even when it comes to simply putting a post out there on the Internet on behalf of a good organization, that’s not exciting. I bore myself at the thought of talking about that extensively.
But something I could talk about would be the observation I’ve had – of the past activist organizations I’ve worked with, they’ve been heavily reliant on the corporate web as part of their social media strategies: LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram – all these platforms actively working against the missions of the activist organizations.
We’ve been monitoring this attempt to break away from the centralized, corporate internet and introduce the world to the decentralized, human internet. Wouldn’t it make sense to work toward platforms that specifically are for activists and people who want to use the Internet without providing DAU metrics for evil tech giants?
This….this I’m interested in talking about.
The lump itself is that layer of fat squishing through the hernia hole. I’ve literally got everything plugged up. When I eat poorly enough to trigger something like acid reflux, it gets inflamed and pretty painful.
I could get it operated on now, but the doctor’s like “with your BMI, there’s a higher chance of recursion.” So I guess the hole could open back up again. And could you guess what the doctor at the “Duke Metabolic and Weight Loss Center” thinks I should do?
The Doctor recommends a GLP-1 like Ozempic or Zepbound.
And he’s happy to show me his work. He types in my current weight and target weight and he shows me this custom text file that tells me the percentage success rate with GLP-1’s.
I’m seeing what’s happening and I’m thinking of asking him. I’m thinking of asking him The Question. But I don’t have to, because he tells me. “Yeah, this is just something I whipped up with ChatGPT.”
Now my basic stance on GLP-1’s is…okay, that’s interesting. It really seems like they’ve been prescribed with a lot of more frequency in the past five years. But, I’m 38. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could take the resources that would pay for a lifelong medication and direct them toward lifestyle?
Like, let’s at least try, right? Maybe I can talk to nutritionists. Dieticians. Workout coaches. But my insurance won’t pay for any of that. And the funny part is, given the weirdness with insurance companies and GLP-1’s, there’s no guarantee they’ll pay for this for the rest of my life.
And also, like, I probably don’t need to get to BMI 30. I have a sense the odds of my surgery would go up if I lost something like 15-20 pounds. But this guy framed it as if I needed to lose 40 and fast. Is that because ChatGPT tells him to or did he have a cool conversation with a pharma rep?
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Because of a joke I made to a Discord server, I am now compelled to listen to Soundgarden’s “Spoonman,” as well.
I woke up and I really did feel the need to listen to some Jesus Chris Superstar songs, which is eerie, given the timing. When I first started dating Erin, the theater company she worked for was putting on a staging of JCS around Easter time and that’s how I became familiar with the music.
Anyway, Roofman, the movie, was kind of flat to me. Just like….a straightforward look at how this real-life criminal played by Channing Tatum lived kind of a boring existence while creating felonies against the corporation of Toys ‘R Us. And, hey, I’m sure the shareholders of Toys ‘R Us are not sympathetic victims, but the movie in 2026 doesn’t provide the same righteous defense of noble criminality as if he were ripping off Jeff Bezos. Clearly not what the movie cared about, but it’s how my mind works.
Said mind wandered and I started looking at Letterboxd before the movie ended, which “spoiled” the fact that “Roofman” is based on a true story.
They cut out the entire part where the Roofman had to leave the Toys ‘R Us Store and live in an abandoned Circuit City, which I think would have been more of an interesting commentary on our life and times.
