Literally: find a favorite (not dead) author’s website and use their contact form to send them a message with specifics about why you like them.
I’ve done this several times. The nice thing is they’re usually very accessible and responsive, maybe because they tend not to get the same kind of public praise as actors, musicians, and other more glamorous artists.
Of course this does depend on the author’s level of fame. My favorites tend to be nonfiction writers with an approachable-enough profile to still be accessible by civilians, so if your favorite author is a Cormac McCarthy type then you’re SOL.
You can do this over social media, but a mere “Love your work!” doesn’t have the same effect as a more detailed note, which both proves you’re actually a fan and gives them the fuel to keep going and making more stuff you enjoy.
The Arcadian Wild. Heard about this folk/bluegrass trio recently and got immediately obsessed with “Big Sky, MT”.
Scream. Somehow I’d never seen this, though I was familiar enough with it based on its cultural ubiquity. Kinda wish the conclusion was a little tighter so it could be a perfect 90 minutes, but campy fun overall.
White Savior. This 3-part docuseries on Max is a rich text for those of us who grew up in a conservative Christian milieu and went on international missions/service trips.
The Witch. I like this Robert Eggers lite-horror joint for the same reason I liked Darren Aronofsky’s Noah: it takes its Old Testament inspiration and sensibility seriously, fully committing to a weird and very metal religiosity that too often gets sanded down for popular palatability.
Oppenheimer. “Men talking in rooms” is a common theme in a lot of the history books I’ve read, but I didn’t expect it to also work as a big-screen epic from Christopher Nolan. I’ll take it!
The Wager by David Grann. This new book from the Killers of the Flower Moon author makes me very glad I’m not an 18th-century sailor.
Emergency NYC. Stumbled upon this fascinating Netflix docuseries that follows surgeons, ER staff, flight nurses, and other emergency responders as they treat patients and balance their work with their personal lives.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. A great coming of age story, family dramedy, exploration of religion, female-centric story, and year-in-the-life movie all in one.
You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah. Surprisingly funny and a nice pairing with Are You There, God?
One of the great things about running an online magazine like Cinema Sugar is that I can just decide that I want to try to interview someone, and then watch as that dream miraculously becomes reality.
That happened recently in conjunction with Westerns Month. I remembered that I’d read two excellent books about westerns by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Glenn Frankel: The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend and High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic. So I contacted him through his website, he got back to me, and we arranged a Zoom call.
Our resulting interview dug into his books, westerns in general, John Wayne vs. Gary Cooper, writing, and more. It was a unique thrill to chat with someone whose work I admire as a cinephile and history nerd, and I’m deeply grateful for his time and his thoughtful answers.
I absolutely love doing these interviews and thinking up questions I hope the subject will enjoy answering. Check out the archive of interviews with actors, directors, authors, and more, including:
Karolyn Grimes (Zuzu in It’s A Wonderful Life)
Actor Peter Stormare (Fargo, Armageddon, Minority Report)
80 for Brady director Kyle Brady
Writer/director Ron Shelton (White Men Can’t Jump, Bull Durham, Tin Cup)
My adopted home state of Illinois has got 99 problems but now book bans ain’t one:
Illinois has become the first state to legislate against the banning of books in public libraries, a practice that has been on the rise across the United States as conservatives look to suppress some books dealing with race, history and LGBTQ topics.
Under the new law, Illinois public libraries can only access state grants if they adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, which stipulates that “materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”
From Gov. Pritzker’s press conference:
Book bans are about censorship, marginalizing people, marginalizing ideas and facts. Regimes ban books, not democracies.
This is a big win for freedom. More states please!
Reality. Riveting recreation of the arrest of whistleblower Reality Winner, played by Sydney Sweeney. This was my first encounter of Sweeney and was thoroughly impressed. Just released on (HBO) Max.
Queer Eye season 7. A quality hang as usual.
Ted Lasso season 3. Hard to top season 1 but have enjoyed watching this story play out. Hannah Waddingham as Rebecca
Prey. I’ve never seen Predator so this was my first foray into the franchise. Found it to be a riveting, admirably lo-fi thriller, combining the violence of a western with the constant peril of Gravity.
The Art and Science of Arrival by Tanya Lapointe. Gorgeous coffee-table book about Denis Villeneuve’s masterpiece.
TheChurch of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham by Ron Shelton. Got to talk with Shelton about this book and his career.
Confess, Fletch. This was a damn fun time.
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. Really creative use of Fox’s memoirs, his TV and movie appearances, and reenactments to tell his life story. He’s also still funny as hell despite the effects of Parkinson’s.
Really enjoyed reading Ron Shelton’s The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham, which I followed up with a rewatch of Bull Durham. He has such a wry, matter-of-fact style and perspective on his careers, most notably minor-league baseball player and movie writer-director.
Some quotes…
On being an athlete with intellectual curiosities:
Around this time it was becoming clear that I was living in two different worlds—the intellectual (or at least academic) world and the sports world—but it made no sense to me that they were distinct. They were dependent, connected, they fed off each other. At least I thought so.
On sports movies:
I’d played enough sports by then that I felt sports films got it all wrong. Their attempts to be inspirational felt cloying and false. When you actually play the game, there is little that is inspirational going on. It’s a competition; it’s physical; it’s a chance to test yourself.
A fascinating anecdote about how a test screening of Bull Durham went great in the room but not in the test scores:
The more highly educated the crowd, the more severely critical will be its analysis. Even—maybe especially—when the movie-watching experience is good. It’s a mistake to hand a pen and paper to professionals with multiple degrees and ask them to critique their experience. There seems to be a built-in expectation that the brain should overrule the heart, that the left side of the brain must dictate what the right side of the brain just processed—even when it contradicts that experience. The note cards were legible, neatly written, and expressed their critique in absurd detail compared to those of more working-class crowds, which tend to be of the thumbs-up, thumbs-down variety. In the heartland of emerging Silicon Valley—high-tech, the venture-capital center of the nation, with Stanford and all its tentacles of research—the audience had to deny its experience. What I thought of was: All I want is your reaction, not your fucking self-conscious notes.
On his feelings about baseball:
My interest in baseball isn’t analytical, romantic, or even patriotic. I like the game—it’s nuanced and difficult and physical—but it has an appealing vulgarity, an earthiness, and I’ve never quite understood the excessive lyrical prose that grows out of it. I’ve never understood the sentimentality it seems to inspire.
On the legacy of Bull Durham:
Perhaps Bull Durham has resonated all these years because it is about loving something more than it loves you back. It’s about reckoning. It’s about loss. It’s about men at work, trying to survive in the remote outposts of their chosen profession. It’s also about the women they fall for, and who fall for them. It cannot be dismissed that it’s also about the joy of playing a game for a living. It’s about team and connections and risk and reward. It’s about hitting the mascot with a fastball just because you want to, it’s about running and jumping and sliding around in the mud, it’s about interminable bus rides with a bunch of guys who are as lost as you are, and feeling lucky you’re on that bus. It’s romantic, and it’s supposed to be funny, and despite what most fans of the movie say, it is also about baseball.
Alan Jacobs gets to the crux of the ongoing Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit, which pits publishers against libraries in the quest to determine who has the right to distribute digital books:
Whatever forces are arrayed against libraries are also arrayed against readers. But publishing conglomerates don’t care about readers; they only care about customers. If they had their way reading would be 100% digital, because they continue to own and have complete control over digital books, which cannot therefore be sold or given to others. They are the enemies of circulation in all its forms, and circulation is the lifeblood of reading.
Publishers might think they want to sue libraries out of existence because it will help their bottom line. But ultimately they’d end up like the Burgess Meredith character in The Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last”: surrounded by a decimated literary landscape with nowhere to go.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m against book bans of all kinds. They’re the literary version of the Streisand Effect, not to mention small-minded and fascistic.
And yet, I also can’t get enough of people petitioning to ban the Bible based on the same criteria used for other books, most recently in Utah for example. It’s both A+ trolling and a useful countermeasure for exposing the absurdity of these anti-democratic laws.
It’s a good rule of thumb: if your legislation or policy makes the best-selling and most influential book of all time eligible to be banned, you done messed up.
Yoto. He uses his mini Yoto audio player every day, which is an excellent screen-free source of “edutainment”. He’s always ready to spout facts he’s learned from the many nonfiction cards he enjoys. (Some terms he’s learned and repeated: hominid, pyroclastic flow, and bioluminescence among others.) Current favorite cards on repeat these days include Volcanos, Creepy Crawlies, Ancient Egypt, and many more.
Prehistoric Planet. This Apple TV+ documentary series is just Planet Earth with dinosaurs (David Attenborough narration included), therefore it rules.
Floor Is Lava. Since he was really getting into volcanoes, we gave this Netflix game show a spin and found it to be goofy fun. He started making his own courses at home and implementing the rules and tropes from the show, like the teams cheering for themselves.
Paw Patrol. Welp, it finally happened. We’d avoided exposing him to this until he listened to a Paw Patrol Yoto card, and now he’s all about it—even sometimes above Bluey.
The Book with No Pictures by B.J. Novak. This isn’t a new one for him but we checked it out from the library recently and he’s fallen in love again.
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood. Hilarious and insightful memoir/biography of Lockwood’s Catholic priest father and her experience living with her parents.
Blankets by Craig Thompson. A stunning graphic novel memoir about small-town life, religion, young love, winter, and so many more things.
The Climb. An excellent indie film told through episodic, slice-of-life sequences that add up to a deeply funny and humane portrait of male friendship.
Jurassic Park. Amazing just how leisurely this feels compared to modern action blockbusters, with its long shots and deliberate storytelling pace. Yet still thrilling and not a wasted minute. So refreshing!
Babylon. A great prequel to (and double feature with) The Fabelmans.
Arrival. Masterful work from Denis Villeneuve and Amy Adams, and an excellent metaphor for the creative life.
The Twilight World by Werner Herzog. Happened to stumble upon this bewitching creative-nonfiction novel on a Best Books of 2022 list. In my mind I read it in Herzog’s iconic voice, so that probably made it even better.
Yojimbo. Some incredible shots sprinkled throughout this 1961 Kurosawa classic. “Whether you kill one or one hundred, you only hang once.”
[CEO James Daunt] used the pandemic as an opportunity to “weed out the rubbish” in the stores. He asked employees in the outlets to take every book off the shelf, and re-evaluate whether it should stay. Every section of the store needed to be refreshed and made appealing.
As this example makes clear, Daunt started giving more power to the stores. But publishers complained bitterly. They now had to make more sales calls, and convince local bookbuyers—and that’s hard work. Even worse, when a new book doesn’t live up to expectations, the local workers see this immediately. Books are expected to appeal to readers—and just convincing a head buyer at headquarters was no longer enough.
Daunt also refused to dumb-down the store offerings. The key challenge, he claimed was to “create an environment that’s intellectually satisfying—and not in a snobbish way, but in the sense of feeding your mind.”
His crucial move was refusing to take promotional money from publishers in exchange for purchase commitments and prominent placement of only certain books:
[Daunt] refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions.
This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.
“Staff are now in control of their own shops,” he explained. “Hopefully they’re enjoying their work more. They’re creating something very different in each store.”
This cheered me to read, not only because of my interest in the success of bookstores but also because I worked at Barnes & Noble for about six months back in 2011.
Freshly stateside after months abroad, I was nearly broke and working at a grocery store when my friend Brian let me know he’d be leaving his job in the Music & Movies section at our local B&N store and would put in a good word for me if I applied. I did so immediately and got the job, which boosted my pay (from “enough to avoid destitution” to “meager”) along with my spirits.
It turned out to be one of the best jobs I’ve ever had, despite lasting only about six months before I got full-time work elsewhere.
Since whoever was working in the Music & Movies section couldn’t leave it unsupervised, I would be stationed there during my shifts no matter how busy it got elsewhere in the store. Some might have found that suffocating, but as a movie lover I relished being sequestered with thousands of Blu-rays, DVDs, and CDs to browse through and organize when I wasn’t helping customers.
Another big factor of my enjoyment of that job was the manager of the Music & Movies section, Joe. He was the most laidback of the store managers but also probably the most effective because, as my friend Brian said after I sent him the above article:
This strategy reminds me of how Joe would run the music section. He gave us a lot of power over the music that was on the shelves and it allowed us to sell CDs when the industry was in decline. Well done, Barnes.
I guess that’s the takeaway for Barnes and for all purveyors of the fine arts: Be like Joe.
Gotta be honest: 2022 wasn’t a great reading year for me. I read 22 books, which was much worse than 31 in 2021 and just barely better than the 18 in 2020.
A lot of my potential reading opportunities were either taken up by movie watching, Cinema Sugar, or other leisure activities. Not a bad thing, to be clear—just the result of the ongoing calculus I have to make with my limited free time.
But reading is about quality, not quantity. And because my quantity of titles released in 2022 doesn’t justify a top 10 list, I’m gonna try something different and just list the titles I did read this year according to the star rating I gave them out of 5.
There were no 5-star books for me this year (my main man Steven Johnson got the closest), but enough good reading to keep me turning pages. Enjoy!
4.5
Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer by Steven Johnson (2021)
Haven by Emma Donoghue (2022)
4
Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan (2022)
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (2009)
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith (2021)
The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman (2022)
Office BFFs: Tales of The Office from Two Best Friends Who Were There by Jenna Fischer & Angela Kinsey (2022)
Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women by Alissa Wilkinson (2022)
The Twilight World by Werner Herzog (2022)
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller (2020)
A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance by William Manchester (1992)
The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick (2021)
3.5
Book Lovers by Emily Henry (2022)
The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School by Neil Postman (1995)
3
The Bowery: The Strange History of New York’s Oldest Street by Stephen Paul Devillo (2017)
Everyday Sisu: Tapping into Finnish Fortitude for a Happier, More Resilient Life by Katja Pantzar (2022)
Hero on a Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life by Donald Miller (2022)
Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan (2021)
The Story of You: An Enneagram Journey to Becoming Your True Self by Ian Morgan Cron (2021)
We Had A Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff (2021)
The World’s Worst Assistant by Sona Movsessian (2022)
2.5
American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon by Steven Rinella (2008)
Athena. Come for the gangbusters opening 10 minutes—stay for the tense, heart-pounding drama of Children of Men-meets-The Battle of Algiers in a French apartment complex. (Streaming on Netflix.)
The End of Education by Neil Postman. My third Postman book after Amusing Ourselves to Deathand Technopoly. Would probably rank it below those two but still a barnburner.
The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick. The story of discovering the Rosetta Stone (thanks Napoleon!) and the decades it took to decipher it, thus unlocking the secrets of ancient Egypt to modernity.
The Hunt for Red October. Finally got around to see this. Enjoyed it but still have to give the ’90s submarine action thriller edge to Crimson Tide.
Kiki’s Delivery Service. Been going through the Miyazaki oeuvre with the 3 year old and some, like this one, are first watches for both of us. Love being able to show him animated movies with a completely different pace and style than what he’s used to with Bluey/Curious George/Disney, etc.
The World’s Worst Assistant by Sona Movsessian. Sona is a key part of the success of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast so I’m glad she’s able to cash in on it.
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Story of Life by Lulu Miller. A remarkable memoir/biography hybrid that reminded me of The Feather Thief with its nature/animals obsessives at the center and the ethical dilemmas they encounter (and create).
When you drill down deeply into a single subject, you nearly always realize: Holy crap, this is more complex than I’d have thought. This is true of just about any subject, right? And it’s exactly the opposite feeling you get from a “big” book, which strives to make you feel like you understand how Everything Is Explained By This One Specific Idea. When you gloss over a subject from 50,000 feet in the air, as those big books often do, you can feel a sense of dangerous knowingness. You’ve been insulated from the gnarly details; you think you know what’s going on, but you really don’t.
In contrast, when you dive obsessively into a single, narrow subject, it humbles you about about the state of your overall knowledge. If there’s this much to know about cod — or pencils, or champagne and salt and ice and gramophones? Then you become usefully aware not of your knowledge but of your overall ignorance. You’re reminded that, as ever, that the devil’s in the details.
To paraphrase Rick from Casablanca, when it comes to history books I’m a true (small-d) democrat. I’ll take ‘em long or short, expansive or narrow. But I totally share Thompson’s love of microhistories. I just finished one recently for a book club (American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon by Steven Rinella) and have enjoyed many more, including:
Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair by Witold Rybczynski
A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Steele Gordon
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers by Tom Standage
Live Text, available in iOS 15 and beyond, feels not far off from magical. The ability to copy text from photos or through the camera app has completely transformed my book notetaking process as a print-book partisan but digital notetaker. I can just point the camera at a desired passage, hit the Live Text button, copy the text, and plop it in Workflowy (where I keep my book notes). And to think I used to have to take pictures of quotes to later type out manually like an idiot…
2. Reader View
Using the Reader view in Safari on iPhones makes reading things on the internet insanely more pleasant. If you come upon an article clogged with ads, unnecessary photos, and/or unreadable text, Reader strips it down to a clean, simplified, text-only version. You can find this feature elsewhere too; I use it often in Firefox on desktop.
3. No-Signup Tools
So that this isn’t an exclusively Apple affair, I wanted to shoutout nosignup.tools because at this point in my life I appreciate any digital tool that doesn’t require an account or credit card to use. Just free tools that work quickly and easily.
Barbarian. Despite being a big baby about horror films, I went to see this opening weekend when I came into some unexpected free time. To say it’s surprising in many ways is a gross understatement.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Thus far it’s managing to strike the right balance of serving a global audience, LOTR trilogy fans, and Tolkien nerds. I quit on House of the Dragon after one episode because I’ve had my fill of Game of Thrones content, but I’m all in on this one.
Bluey season 3. Every season of this show (the best on TV) has a handful of episodes that are stone-cold masterpieces, and thus far “Rain” is holding the championship belt.
Nope.With this and Barbarian, it’s been a delightfully horrific summer at the movies.
When we make our art, we are also making our lives. And I’m sure that the reverse is equally true.
That line is from Look & See, the beautiful documentary about the life and work of Wendell Berry.
I think about it often, and I thought about it again recently as I feasted on two pieces of art simultaneously: the limited documentary series The Last Movie Stars on HBO Max and Alissa Wilkinson’s new book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women.
In sync
Whenever I notice disparate works of art speaking to each other, I call it synchronicity. It’s one of my favorite things to write about because discovering new connections feels both satisfying and alluring.
The Last Movie Stars, which chronicles the lives, careers, and decades-long romance of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, offered a way into this synchronicity not through the series’ content but through its form. As director Ethan Hawke tells the stories of the two subjects, through clever editing he intercuts scenes from Newman’s or Woodward’s movies that speak directly or obliquely to whatever they were going through at the time in their lives.
Examples include contrasting Woodward’s real-life misgivings about being a mother with her performance in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds as an abusive, resentful mother (acting with her real-life daughter!). Or reckoning with Newman’s own struggle with alcoholism using boozy scenes from The Verdict—a performance inspired by director Sidney Lumet imploring Newman to reveal more of himself in it.
Newman touches on this paradigm explicitly during one archival interview used in the series:
Our characters rub off onto the actor. Probably one of the areas of great discontent is that they probably feel, as human beings, they are merely a series of, a collection of old characters that they played. I sometimes get that feeling about myself, that I have become a series of connectives between the parts of the characters that I really like. And I’ve strung them together into kind of a human being.
A salty symbiosis
That idea of one’s work and life feeding each other while building a kind of accretive self echoed in my mind as I read Salty, Wilkinson’s collection of biographical essays spotlighting nine notable 20th century women who comprise her ideal (if hypothetical) dinner party.
Whether they were writers (Hannah Arendt, Octavia Butler, Maya Angelou), artists (Agnes Varda), activists (Ella Baker), or cooks (Enda Lewis, Elizabeth David, Laurie Colwin), all of them used what they learned in their work and lives to inform—and, ideally, improve—the other:
Chef Edna Lewis bringing black Southern cooking to 1960s New York and then beyond with The Taste of Country Cooking
Filmmaker Agnes Varda translating her fascination with the ordinary into cinematic curiosities
Civil-rights activist Ella Baker practicing communal hospitality as a catalyst for social change and empowerment
These women weren’t movie stars like Newman and Woodward, but their lives were still reflected in their work. They too—to toss a metaphorical salad—were pulling from the strung-together assemblage of old characters they played throughout their lives, making meals with the ingredients available to them.
And that’s all we can do, really. Per Wendell Berry, we make our lives and art concurrently, whether we know it or not.
My compliments to Alissa Wilkinson and Ethan Hawke for the meals they’ve created in these works of art, which are infused with moments and lessons from their own lives that made them all the richer.
Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan. An excellent oral history of one of the greatest films ever made. One of the many tidbits: George Miller’s first choice to play Max was Heath Ledger, which I now can’t stop thinking about.
The Northman. A brutal, heavy-metal fever dream from Robert Eggers.
A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance by William Manchester. Published thirty years ago, its scholarship is out of date and perspective rather flippant, but the writing remains spicy and illuminating.
We Own This City. A sequel of sorts to The Wire that was just as compelling with a much shorter runtime. Gotta hand it to HBO Max, which has accounted for pretty much all of my TV viewing over the last year or so between this, Winning Time, Minx, and Station Eleven.
Top Gun: Maverick. The first Top Gun is kinda bad. This one is not.
The Office BFFs: Tales of The Office from Two Best Friends Who Were There by Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey. I’ve listened to the Office Ladies podcast since the beginning—where much of the book’s content has been covered previously—but still found this enjoyable and informative.
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith. This fits into a nonfiction genre I really enjoy, where the author visits various places/people that connect to the book’s central theme and explores their histories. Smith covers some stuff I was already familiar with but much I wasn’t—including that the Statue of Liberty has shackled feet.
