Friday Fixations

What I'm into right now

Happy Friday, my fellow suffering beings. Each week, I share two things I’m digging right now (books, TV shows, movies, music, and the like) plus one online video of nearly zero cultural merit.

• Playground, by Richard Powers. A little backstory: In 2020, my friend Sebene Selassie sent me a book called The Overstory, also by Richard Powers. By all rights, the book shouldn’t work. It’s about trees. Or, more specifically, about humankind’s relationship to trees. And yet, it’s a page-turner. It won a Pulitzer. It also radically altered my reading habits. For the decade prior, all I read were dharma books. Now, I’m back to novels. (It’s not that I don’t love the dharma, but novels are way more fun. They’ve also deeply informed my own writing style.) Fast forward to a few months ago when Powers put out his latest novel. This one is about the oceans. It may not be quite as sublime as Overstory, but it's still extraordinary. The writing and the characters are riveting. And like its predecessor, it sensitized me to our fraught relationship with the natural world.

• The Brutalist. You’ve probably heard the hype about this movie. It’s a beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, 3.5-hour-long epic that is a serious contender for Best Picture. I really enjoyed it. To my mind, it wasn’t as great as some of the other nominees such as Anora (a batshit “Pretty Woman”) and Conclave (a sturdy thriller set in the Vatican), but I deeply respect the ambition and skill on display here.

• I really do love trash talk.

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