Quiet Days in Vientiane

For reasons largely beyond my control, I had to fly to Vientiane – not really for work, not really for travel, although kinda sorta for both of those things. I figured it would be good to get out of the city for a bit. My stay would be open-ended, but I booked a cheapish hotel and figured that even if it sucked, I’d be back in Bangkok on the weekend, just in time to see friends, have a nice night out. And I didn’t think it would suck – I’d been to Vientiane a few times before, and remembered it as a sleepy riverside town, someplace that might not be the most exciting, but had the advantage of good local beer, some nice crusty old French restaurants run by sweating Depardieu clones, a few nice little used bookstores – one of the mellower stops on the backpacker trail through Southeast Asia. It didn’t have the spiritual sublimity of Luang Prabang, with its ancient temples and streams of monks with their alms bowls in the morning, nor the party vibe of Vang Viang – the attractions of which, back in my day, were tubing down the river and doing shots of cobra-infused rice wine in the day, and magic mushrooms and DVDs of Friends at night – but it was a nice little small city. 

And if you don’t understand the appeal of a hammer-and-sickle flag flying outside a crumbling French colonial villa as the tropical foliage grows ever thicker, you and I will never truly understand one another.

So I arrived in the evening rain looking forward to the getaway.

 

I spent the first few days getting to re-know the place. I’d seen the sights – the temples, the Haw Phra Kaew where there’s a sign pointing out where the jade buddha statue known as the Phra Kaew used to be before the Siamese looted it and brought it to Bangkok, where it remains a popular tourist attraction. I had gone to the National History Museum, to see the Lahu fabrics embroidered with images of bombs and helicopters, Buddha statuettes forged from the aluminum of downed American planes, pictures of fenceposts made from casings, the maps of the unspeakable UXO problem, my country’s attempt to annihilate the Ho Chi Minh Trail by ensuring that generations of children in Xiangkhouang Province would risk blowing their legs off on their way to school, the poorly reproduced photographs of jeunes communistes holding up signs saying “Là-bas Monsieur McNamara!” I figured I could just wander and see what was good.

I walked around, I went out. I went to a coffee tasting, as Lao coffees from the Bolaven Plateau are often quite fine. I befriended locals and expats alike, I ate with them and drank grotesque quantities of Beerlao and, if we were feeling fancy, a bit of the delightful Laodi rum, and had some damn good conversations.

The food of Laos remains a bit of a question mark. A walk down the downtown streets of Vientiane reveals far more Thai and Indian and Chinese and Italian and Korean and Vietnamese places and generic burger joints than Lao restaurants. Unfortunate, since the same people, speaking the same language, across the river in the Isan region of Thailand, make some of the best fucking food on earth. At the street stalls, most dishes, indeed, seem to be identical to their Thai versions, pad see iw and rat na and ubiquitous laap seem indistinguishable from what’s available in Thailand. The tam mak hung, their version of papaya salad, seems to be awfully similar to any som tam in Thailand. The jaew are indistinguishable from Thai nam phrik, the only major difference being that they’re still by necessity made by hand rather than industrially. And the backpacker’s favorite, the khao jee pa te, is really just a banh mi. The noodles are called pho and seem indistinguishable from the perfectly OK noodle soups found on streets throughout Southeast Asia.

So what is uniquely Lao? One oft-cited example is or lam, the rich herbal stew flavored with the slightly numbing sakhan vine and thickened with buffalo skin. Unfortunately, it’s a gloopy, under-spiced swamp of a dish. Goy pa, the famed freshwater ceviche, has an unfortunate tendency to be lousy with liver flukes. I took my chances anyway (worth it, yum). I ate mok pa, the fatty fish and fragrant herbs wrapped in banana leaf, and salt-grilled pa yon, an impossibly buttery river fish that I still can’t find an English name for (Thai speakers, it’s ปลายอน in Thai, and I can’t find an English name – Thai Wikipedia refers me to pangasius, and it’s definitely not that). I ate grilled pork udders (chewy) and stewed beef lungs (intensely gamey and metallic), lake weeds and water bugs. The herbs – dill and cilantro and Thai basil and phak phaew and phak khayaeng and even the vile khao thong, or “fish mint” – are beautifully fresh.

And there’s a certain Lao-French restaurant that I was politely told not to tell the world about, where I ate buffalo tartare and crayfish dumplings and drank pastis as the monsoon rain pounded down on the roof. The French clientele gently mocked my silly accent and occasional misgendering of a noun. No air conditioning, Simone Weil books on the shelves, Can and Stereolab and Taeko Ohnuki on the soundsystem – this, too, is a thing of consummate beauty.

But the days went on, and on. Four days turned into a week. And then a week and a half.

I moved from hotel to hotel, each perfectly comfortable and reasonably priced, each feeling immensely temporary. I didn’t even bother to unpack.

As with the food, nothing seems original. The music is either Thai city pop or the standard Asian mix of contemporary K-pop and 2014-era Western pop music, The Chainsmokers and 1989-era Taylor Swift. The products in the stores are all Thai. Even half the shit at the duty free at the airport is Thai. With an adjacent culture with that much purchase and relative wealth, and with a mutually intelligible language, the media is all Thai television and Thai music videos. At the nicer cocktail bars, which varied from awful to perfectly OK, I could understand the highly Thaified Lao of the clientele with perfect clarity. I go to the mall, and the chain restaurants and coffee shops are all Thai. I try to buy clothes, and all the brands seem to be the sort of Chinese and Vietnamese brands you see on Shein that seem English-adjacent but are not English. Wow, a genuine Besor. And is that a real Mouve?

Because it was, after all, an accident of the great game of European colonialism that this country even exists in its present form. The Lao-speaking territories to the south remained vassal states of the Kingdom of Siam, ready to be exploited by Bangkok, while the French chomped away at what they could, resulting in an even more exploited colony that never made a profit, a forgotten landlocked kingdom away in the hills.

And now it feels like time has forgotten the place.

Even the backpackers who passed through seemed to live on a different planet than my peers and I had, and spent their time smoking weed or Beerlao in clannish little small groups or couples rather than effusively making friends with other young and interested and interesting people. Maybe I’m just old.

But the bookstores are gone, of course. As are the crusty old French restaurants… L’Alsace where the elderly owner sneered at me as he poured my Gewurztraminer and plated my choucroute with Alsatian sausages, La Côte d’Azur, where the adorable little Lao girl giggled as she took my order in French… “il veut le ROSÉ!” Barely even the signs remain.

I walked past the site of the old White Rose club, the most notorious nightclub of old Vientiane, when it was a wild town crawling with both American and Soviet spies, French madams still managing the bordelles, past the old Lane Xang Hotel where Hunter S. Thompson frantically typed up his notes for Rolling Stone on the Fall of Saigon, When I first passed this way, the building had still been there, next to the Hotel Douangdeuane… a name which, if we’re being a bit creative, can translate to Astral Weeks…

To lay me down / In silence easy / To be born again / From the far side of the ocean.

In happier days.

Circa 2014.

And as I walk past, a nowadays hooker, a tattoo on her shoulder in this conservative country the only outwardly obvious sign of her profession. She’s wearing a gaudy dress of tiered pink tulle, Vientiane copying Seoul copying Harajuku copying some European princess fantasy. She calls out “hello hansum.” She can’t be having a good time if that’s her agenda at 1 PM on a Sunday.

This really does feel like the end of the world.

I remember when the Mekong came almost all the way up to the Quai Fa Ngoum – it was, after all called the quay. Now, where the Mekong once flowed, wild grasses grow. The dams in China have taken their toll, and let us say kaddish for the pla beuk, the giant catfish threatened by an increasingly low river. I remember when fishwives fanned away the flies from the hunks of yellowing flesh for sale at what were, for Laos, sky-high prices. There’s not much left.

I sit by the river and watch the sunset. The Lamborghini passes, Chinese dark money behind the wheel.

And as I trudge back towards town, I pass the dodgy bar on the ground floor of the abandoned building. The owner tries to summon me in, presumably thinking I looked like I’d be willing to buy some H from them. The evil skulking shirtless tweaker hippies sneer at me. I quickly move on.

And in my darker moments, I think about what Paul Theroux said about the place:

“Laos, a river bank, had been overrun and ransacked; it was one of America’s expensive practical jokes, a motiveless place where nothing was made, everything imported… What was surprising was that it existed at all, and the more I thought of it, the more it seemed like a lower form of life, like the cross-eyed planarian or squishy amoeba, the sort of creature that can’t die even when it is cut to ribbons.”

Deeply unfair, I know, “a lower form of life”… but it resonates on some level, because this is what happens when a country is so thoroughly spit-roasted by the cruel 20th Century, and now here it is. Yet people try to move forward. Chinese mining companies buy billboards informing the public how many schools they’re building and how their open-pit mines are totally not death traps for some of the poorest and most exploitable people in Asia. A new rooftop bar opens, and I’ll be drinking a Negroni there. Protests among the young and conscientious elite of Bangkok mean that new dam probably won’t be built. They start selling the grilled blood sausage with cold beer at the night market. The traffickers of Chongqing park their money in a new hotel project on the edge of town. The music plays in the evening twilight. A child is born, and his life will be 20 times better than his parents, because places like this are the last places where there is hope, real hope.

And I get the email saying my new visa is approved, two weeks later. I book my flight back. Finally.

And yet the river flows on.

Bear Market

Do you remember when The Sopranos dropped? I mean, I don’t really, I was pretty freakin’ young, and I’m not even sure if my family had HBO at that point. But the general consensus at the time was that American television would never be the same. Liberated from the strictures of FCC content rules – can’t have the smol beans seeing the dangly bits, now can we? – Matthew Weiner’s often wickedly funny Greek tragedy set in hideous and tasteless Jersey suburbia reset what television was. There was Before Tony Soprano and After Tony Soprano.

This was what was called “prestige” television, i.e. something theoretically better than laugh-tracked man-children whom we the audience are supposed to both identify with and pity, the machinations of cruel heiresses dripping in Swarovski, or the avatars of a masculine ideal we failed to meet, whether embodied as cowboys back then or cops now. This was something that was supposed to use its lengthened timeline to reach the novelistic depth that movies couldn’t, that eschewed the clean Aristotelian endings of procedural TV in favor of uncertainty, complexity, and depth. And I was all in, at least for a time.

A few weeks ago, The Bear launched the long-form episode “Gary,” as an interim between its seasons. And it was godawful.

I’m not the first to comment on the decline of The Bear, and a lot of ink has been spilled over the past couple of years on the show’s wasted potential. “Aimless” seems to be a term that gets thrown around a lot, but I’m OK with aimless, at least certain kinds of aimless. “Self-indulgent” is another, but I think good art is almost definitionally self-indulgent to a certain degree, because it takes itself and its vision seriously, rather than trying to pander to a preexisting set of sensibilities. However, my qualms with the more recent seasons of the show are really just reflections of my qualms with the overall decline of prestige TV in general.

When The Bear dropped in 2022, it was a breath of fresh air in a prestige landscape that had gone stale. The shows that had defined it – The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Six Feet Under, Deadwood – were all distant memories, and most of the shows that had emerged in the interim had nowhere near the kind of cultural impact. There were a few, sure (Succession, The White Lotus, and The Boys stood out in terms of their contribution to the discourse), but on the whole, each new show seemed to have less and less staying power.

To a certain degree this was inevitable. The idea of high-quality television was no longer a peculiarity, and as glossier, more highbrow programming proved itself to be a bankable asset, more and more media outlets were willing to put forth the effort. Furthermore, audiovisual content was quickly moving online, and countless streaming services and platforms emerged, each with their own suite of shows. Apple, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Disney, HBO, and Paramount all attempted to woo their subscribers with flagship series featuring A-list actors. However, this necessarily curtailed the potential viewership, and if a show was on a platform you didn’t subscribe to, you probably didn’t watch it. Game of Thrones, it seems, was the last series that you could reasonably assume the guy at the water cooler to have at least a passing familiarity with.

Furthermore, as part of this boom, many of these shows seemed to carry the form of prestige TV – the production values, the top-tier talent, the sense of profundity – but ultimately rang hollow. A show like Westworld, for instance, was basically mediocre pulp sci-fi. But it had Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris and beautiful art direction, so it was deemed prestigious. And so for every groundbreaking Breaking Bad, there were 10 woodenheaded Ozarks.

So when The Bear dropped in 2022, it felt like a breath of fresh air. Like so many of the best shows about working life, it balanced humor and pathos in a way that really, really worked. OK, not early-seasons Simpsons level, little reaches those heights, but pretty damn good! The setting was pleasantly intimate and small-scale, Carmy had demons to slay, and had to get his ragtag band of outsiders on his side and lead them to success, with the daily dramas of kitchen life – health inspections, rush orders, emergency repairs, and the like – providing the drama and tension and challenge. And, in the post-Bourdain world in which the kitchen is deemed a “cool” setting, audiences were hooked along with the critics.

And yet, as so often happens in serial media, Flanderization was inevitable. And when a media landscape is utterly ruled by metrics and engagement, this becomes a feature rather than a bug. You like the family dramas and inability to process trauma? Yeah, have some more of that. You need those heartwarming moments in which said trauma is finally resolved through the power of listening? Sure, have some more of that, you fuckers. We’ve focus-grouped the shit out of this show, so have some of that slop you like, you fucking piggies.

 

The real turning point, the shark-fin soup jump, is at the end of season 2, with Carmy having finally opened his dream restaurant to suitable fanfare, and then loudly declaring his uncertainties and inability to have a relationship to no one in particular while locked in the walk-in. It’s not only an utterly lame and pointless monologue about how sad and insecure he feels that no one would actually say out loud when locked in a room by themselves, so even that premise is ridiculous… but of course his new gf is on the other side of the walk-in door, and she hears everything, and decides to just leave the fucker. If this was on a 1980s midday soap, you’d call it camp, but here it is on the prestige teevee.

“She loves him and he loves her, but to quote RuPaul, ‘If you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?’ Let’s please get Carmy a therapist for season three because he very much needs one.” – Marah Eakin, Vulture, who managed to close a review in a manner almost tailor-made to piss me off

And the rest of the show has seemed an extension of that moment. By season 4, it was bordering on parody. Nonstop maudlin emotion punctuated by quietly simmering resentment, all revolving around their shitty narcissistic mom (Jamie Lee Curtis, who really does play her part awfully well), and the lingering effects of the suicide of Carmy’s substance-abusing brother Mikey, as played by Jon Bernthal in flashback after flashback. And yet despite the high-pitched melodrama, no difficulty was insurmountable. Bros came in from around the world to pitch in, and the former janitor can become a wine expert in a matter of a few weeks with just a lil’ heart! Maybe this is what some viewers were looking for from the beginning. But what I was looking for was honesty, and there is nothing more dishonest than this level of sentimental pap.

And “Gary” continued in this vein. What we see is a flashback of an assignment to pick up unknown product in Gary, Indiana, by Jon Bernthal’s Mikey and Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie. And eventually they get bored and sidetracked by the allure of substances and loose women (at a working-class bar in 80 percent black Gary that is somehow 100 percent white). Over the course of the hour of David Mamet-aping dialogue and phony confessionalism, the contempt for the audience is palpable, especially as the snarling dialogue paves the way for the required emotional breakdown monologue. Oh, and there’s a twist ending where they get in a car crash or some shit. I stopped caring.

But what sucks is that this didn’t need to be the case. There are echoes of things better. The Mametian Chicago tough guy talk could have actually been captivating, as anyone who has seen Glengarry Glen Ross or American Buffalo can testify. The liberal use of “Heart of the Sunrise” by Yes seems a direct reference to Vincent Gallo’s nightmarish journey in the famed Buffalo 66 trailer. And the cinematography is, as is the case in even many shitty prestige shows, truly beautiful. And for this prodigal Midwesterner, the strip mall lights and the flash of hopper cars through the naked winter trees are transcendence itself.

And we can extrapolate that deficiency to the series itself. It could have been the next great show. It wasn’t.

The Pilgrimage Road

In a general sense, things weren’t going well. Components were falling off the mainframe more rapidly than before. Shit seemed to be going down, in both personal and global terms, and so I did what I normally do. Before the oil prices got truly atrocious, I booked a round-trip ticket to someplace unfamiliar, and decided to spend two weeks amid smoking craters and fragrant citrus orchards, and tried to find some equanimitous sense of things. 

Of Japan’s five most prominent islands, Shikoku is the forgotten one. Neither connected by Shinkansen to the Japanese heartland like Hokkaido and Kyushu, nor a verdant tropical paradise like Okinawa, it exists off to the left side, without major cities. And despite numerous trips, I’d never gotten there, and so clearly it was time.

What did I know? Well, Kafka on the Shore was set there, and I know that young Kafuka Tamura makes sure to eat the udon for which Shikoku is famous, and I know that I don’t much care for udon. And I knew it as being ringed by a pilgrimage road, a sort of Japanese Santiago de Compostela in which 88 temples of historic note around the island were connected. But that was it. I’d barely even heard of the island’s largest cities (Matsuyama, Takamatsu, Tokushima, Kochi). I knew no national parks, no particular loci of the tourist industry. But I had time, and the weather was getting feverish around the Thai New Year, when I used to joke that I always summered abroad.

After a brief stopover in Kyoto mon amour – cherry blossoms over the canals, a few visits to old haunts, a few hisses towards the more uncouth tourists – and it was time to take the Shinkansen west to Okayama, sunny land of peaches and grapes, and then take a local express southwards, crossing the long causeway over the turquoise waters of the Seto Inland Sea.

 There is a pattern that sets in when one travels in Japan. It’s part of a larger pattern – the novel becoming the staid. Upon arrival in the city of Takamatsu, it’s not that different from anywhere else. Japanese provincial cities are hard to distinguish from one another. Little houses, shopping arcades, blaringly loud pachinko parlors, the inevitable foundations of a long-since destroyed castle, and even the local quirks seem standardized. The localized manhole covers simply seem to all be a variation on the same theme.

Maybe I’d made a mistake. Maybe the innate cynicism of the weary traveler – the place changes, but it seems the same – was setting in. And in the case… what the fuck was I doing here?

I liked the rhythm of things, I really did. I find my preferred hangouts, those little institutions of the sort only found in Japan – little café-bars run by solitary men (and the occasional woman), where they can express their curatorial taste in food, drink, music, cinema, and books. I met elegant lady sommeliers, I met grumpy old men who only looked happy when they were perfecting the grind on their Yirgacheffe coffee beans. There are cozy corners. There is tea.

There are the many varieties of citrus that grow on this coast, familiar and unfamiliar. Sure, this is the land of the tangerine and the blood orange and the yuzu, but I came to also know the kanpei and the iyokan, the amakusa and the hyuganatsu.

And every day, I made my way to temple or shrine, temple or shrine, whatever that might be. I climbed up mountain after mountain. Lacking in context, failing to identify the difference between Mahavairocana and Bhaisajyaguru, I simply gawked. I was unable to read the script, and while Google Lens is very good at getting across the meanings of menus at yakitori joints, it is less good at conveying the subtleties of Medieval Shingon Buddhist religious poetry. Again, what the fuck was I doing here?

Natsume Soseki, the father of realist fiction in Japan, lived here for a time as a teacher. He was abjectly miserable, and the only means of coping he found was to relax at Dogo Onsen, a hot spring resort since at least the 6th Century AD. I went there, and it was pretty nice. I had a good soak. I guess he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing there either.

The sign says “Kokoro,” the same as his famous novel. Turns out it’s a hair salon.

I take the ferry to little Naoshima, the best known of the Inland Sea’s “art islands,” the whole turned into a major art installation, save the belching smokestacks of the Mitsubishi smelter at the north end of the island, thoughtfully tucked away lest the crowd of late middle-aged French aesthetes in stylish round glasses actually have to confront the livelihoods of working people. And yet I can’t hate. Because the installations are some of the smartest, most effective pieces of contemporary art I’ve ever seen, absolute masterworks by Lee Ufan, Tadao Ando, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. They pierced the void. Sure there were plenty of works by masturbators like Yves Klein, Jenny Holzer, and David Hockney, but what do I care? I am being given a little contemporary wagashi and a glass of sencha as I look out over the ships beyond Sugimoto’s pristine landscape architecture. Rocks and trees, sea and ships. Here at least, I am happy. Even if the veil is quickly pierced.

 

 

Throughout, I ran into a dismal number of loudmouthed American tech bros, i.e. the people I literally moved to Asia to get away from. Many of them were fascinated by my culinary journalism gig, but it quickly became apparent that they viewed visiting top-tier restaurants a bit like unlocking video game achievements. Hungry ghosts in the antique sense, beings of pure consumption that can never be satisfied. To be fair, I encountered a greater number of the lovelier of my countrymen, some of whom may be reading this right now, but a single bad vibe could take me out of my element.  I’m sitting here with an antique cocktail and trying to enjoy the cherry blossoms, and this mustache-and-Carhartt Brooklynite hiding his bald spot under a fitted Knicks cap is coked to the gills and telling me about sick business opportunities.

“This was not the Paris that good Americans went to when they died.” – W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

I often describe my nature as “peregrine.” But this isn’t quite accurate. Because the term peregrine refers to a pilgrim, and I’m not a pilgrim, carefully making my way down the ordained path in search of transcendence. I’m a wanderer.

And yet I followed the pilgrimage road, diligently, even if I was sad and sick and fucked up and my life was thrown into upheaval. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I looked all the same.

At the Ishite-ji, Temple 51 on the pilgrim’s path, in the outskirts of Matsuyama, I arrived despondent. Horrible dreams woke me up early, haunted by ghosts of the present. Again, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing there, but it found me.

After wandering the grounds, I see a sign. “Pure Cave.”

The sign warns you. No light. No photos.

The corridor is barely big enough for one person. I barely fit, and someone actually fat, it would have been impossible.

It twists and turns in the dark. Steps you have to feel for, walls to guide you, low overhangs that threaten to hit you in the head. You have no choice. You can only feel around in the dark.

And you almost immediately lose any sense of time, of the larger world. You are here in this dark space, and you are trying to negotiate it. It does not yield to you. The only sounds come from you. You are reduced to what you are, mind harnessed to body, alone, confronting an impassive reality.

Until you see the strobing light at the end, and the little statue of Kannon, boddhisatva of mercy.

Her light is fleeting. You crawl back through the dark into the daylight. I have never been so happy to see sunlight.

And I knew I needed to climb the mountain.

I found my way up through the abandoned cemetery, all that citrus rotting on the ground the whole way up, the perfume of the petitgrain blending with the reek of rotting oranges.

At the top, the little donation box amid the little statues is rusted. Whether the corners are curled up in accordance with the dictums of classical Japanese temple architecture or whether that’s just the metal rusting and curling, I cannot say. But I don’t think it matters, does it?

I throw myself onto the gravel and stare up at the tips of the cedars and cypresses, where the forest ends and the sky begins.

I have been here many times. The mountain itself is almost irrelevant. The point is getting here, to this apogee, because I can.

This is what the fuck I’m doing here.

And Then It Fell Down

 Sometimes, in writing, there’s this horrible sense that one is birthing demon children.

The most bitter of ironies – less than 24 hours after reposting my paean to Falling Down, my entire department (a horrifically jargonistic name, which I won’t provide here lest I get noticed), too, got the axe. At 9:00 a.m., we had jobs. At 11:00 a.m., we did not. Not unpredictable (half of my team getting fired two years ago, and the panicked colleague who told me “trust no one” a few weeks prior) and entirely unsurprising, given economic and technological trends, as well as my bosses’ and all bosses’ general disregard for knowledge workers, but still… this year, this job market.

’26 really is a motherfucker, isn’t it?

To a certain degree, we were waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it finally dropped. No more trying to curry favor or suck dick. The truth is revealed. My fellow editor – after having had two gin and tonics, most of the bottle of Vinho Verde we ordered with lunch, and a couple Port Charlottes courtesy of my home decanter – stretched on my couch and loudly exhaled how glad he was our Graeberian bullshit job was finally fucking over. That he finally didn’t need to give a fuck about his KPIs anymore.

He would go home and tells his wife and two daughters that their family would be on one income for a time. For me? It’s easier. I have a strong savings base, and no mouths to feed, other than the occasional cat.

But still, am I bitter? How could I not be? In a complete lack of ceremony, 10 years’ efforts are up in smoke. I threw the last bit of their coffee from my travel mug out into the bougainvilleas.

The reason given for our termination was not AI explicitly, although it would be foolish to say that that didn’t play a role, even if only implicitly. My bosses have, over the past couple years, demonstrated their radical misunderstanding of the technology and its capabilities, and while I would like to think they will face their comeuppance, I am confident that that will not be the case. They will, in all likelihood, continue to fail upward, and my only hope is that their failsons will do their best to humiliate their fathers and squander any familial wealth.

It’s a strange sort of life I’ve cultivated. I’ve somehow managed through a mix of increasingly irrelevant writing skillset and bohemian finagling to wind up standing in front of the money hose to write and edit things that I don’t care about very much so as to fund the writing and editing of those things I actually care about – something of a necessity in which the world of art and letters is increasingly the province of those with inherited money. Sure, it was bullshit, but I know precious few office workers in 2026 whose jobs aren’t bullshit in some meaningful way. If you’re an EMT, cool, your work contributes to the wellbeing of those around you and society writ large, es verdad. However, if you’re, say, an insurance underwriter, you’ve just found the sort of not-quite-parasitism that biologists call commensalism – remoras, enjoy your ride down the Gulf Stream.

But all remoras – self included – must fall off eventually, and try to find new cetaceans to guide us to happier waters.

And I woke up in the morning, a bit worse for wear after the sheer amount of wine and negronis in the awful afterglow. I look down at every little bit I’ve acquired over those 10 years. Burmese lacquerware cigarette box. Gin bottles filled with dried flowers. Coffee table books published by the government of the Georgian SSR to celebrate 50 years of Sovetskaya Gruzhiya. These are things I care about. There are also the things I don’t care about. Tonight, I’m finally using up the last of the paper towels I stole from the office.

And it’s not all bad – I’ve been given four full months’ paid leave, to be followed by a severance package that would make most of my fellow Yanks blush. So fuck ‘em, let’s move on.

There are things to do. Job hunting and networking, sure, but also the many freelance assignments I have to complete – enough to cover my rent, I’m happy to report – as well as the infinite little tasks and vaguely autistic fixations that constitute living. Is dinner made? Is the floor swept? And while we’re at it, when was the last time you really took a long hard look at your reading list?

But then, for every step forward, a step back, I look at my daily Business Insider email. In happier times, I enjoyed their catty, gossipy approach to the world of business and finance, but reading the reports in this context – spiraling costs, spiraling unemployment, professionals taking on jobs for a fraction of their former sinecure, it feels a bit like looking at WebMD, and then back at the mole that has emerged on your calf.

Yesterday there was what looked rather like a run on a gold shop in my neighborhood, with record one-week losses on gold in decades prompting panic among the Chinese aunties fanning themselves outside in the summer heat.

Meanwhile, one blocked strait is sending the entire world’s energy economy into a tailspin, because a bunch of fat chomos in Washington and Jerusalem had a very involved temper tantrum.

Investors are expected to put approximately USD 700 million in AI this year, despite the actual economic returns being thus far negligible. The job market is wrecked, the air and water are fouled, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

It’s not a t-shirt – it’s a way of life. It’s not a t-shirt – it’s a cry for help. It’s not a t-shirt – it’s a manifesto. Too meta?

I look out on the spot by my house, where Charles Sobhraj lured backpackers into his tropical death cult. A song plays from my living room speakers. Just like Topanga, it’s hot today, and it might as well be Manson in the air. All my friends are gone. I want to leave, but I’ll probably stay another year. It really is hard to leave when absolutely nothing’s clear.

And then I wake up in the sweltering hot season morning, and see the spot on my desk where my work laptop used to be, and I realize that the empty day stretches out before me. And the sun is only getting higher.

I’ve left the cards on the table. They make as much sense as anything else at this juncture.

The nine of pentacles, reversed.

The eight of pentacles, obverse.

Judgment. Three people in the lifeboat, beseeching the archangel.

And thusly I stare heavenward. Are we all gonna make it?

The School Shooter I Wasn't (But Wasn't That Far from Being)

 Last week’s school shooting in British Columbia would have probably been minimally remarked upon if it had occurred south of the 49th Parallel. The main reason is simple – we have a lot more school shootings. I’ll leave the politics of gun control aside here, except to mention one thing, which is to say that America has had lax gun laws for a very long time, but frequent school shootings have only been a standard feature of American life for 30 years or so, which suggests to me that while gun availability might be a catalyst for the spike in school shootings, it is not a cause. Causes, it seem, run far deeper than these sorts of technocratic issues. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve been so morbidly fascinated with the events in the remote Peace River Country of Northern BC, both in terms of the events themselves and the ways in which the media responded.

Firstly, this is the largest school shooting in Canada since the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, perpetrated by célibataire involontaire avant la lettre Marc Lépine, who, product of a very 1960s pairing of a former Catholic nun and a largely absent Algerian businessman, who then failed out of multiple technical fields and blaming feminism for his failures and seeking salvation through a Ruger Mini-14, really was decades ahead of his time. That alone makes it distinctive, but even more interestingly, this shooting was carried out by a woman. Not that it’s completely unique – Alina Afanaskina, age 14, shot up her school in Bryansk – but it’s certainly an oddity. But I would say neither of those things would make this stand out in my mind.

What first fascinated me was the media treatment – they were awfully cagey about the specifics, which, to a certain degree, should be expected from an ongoing investigation. The shooter was reported to be a “female in a dress,” which immediately led to speculation among the hardworking bottomfeeders of the internet that the shooter was trans. This turned out to be true, which had the unfortunate effect of confirming the preconceptions of said bottomfeeders – both in their preconception of trans people as socially maladjusted freaks, but also in their presumption that all trans women are actually men, because, y’know, it’s not like feeeeeeemales can shoot up a school this efficiently. To belabor the point, they posted pictures of the presumed shooter, which emphatically were not photos of the shooter themselves – rather, they just found pics of a sufficiently fat and unpassable Canadian trans woman who could reaffirm their disgust.

To which the response from the more gender-accommodating left was that the shooter was a “literal Nazi,” precluding them from any membership in their own community. As far as I know, there’s no evidence for this claim either. What’s the worst thing one can be? A Nazi. Therefore, the shooter must be a Nazi, because they had bad vibes and stuff.

For their part, our friends at the Anti-Defamation League claimed that the shooter was antisemitic and anti-Zionist, ensuring that their own political agenda was confirmed. This, of course, was also bullshit.

In other words, everyone projected their neuroses onto this person at a time of terrible tragedy, because we needed an explanation, we needed some order in this disordered world. We needed to know that whatever the bad guys were, this bad guy was a member of Team Bad Guy, and could function as an avatar for all the Bads. We wanted to ignore the entropy that was building until the final heat death of the universe.

And when more was found out about actual shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar, she seemed almost too perfect an avatar for the horror of life in the present moment.

This is her, at some point in her transition – a transition that will be called into question, but I’ll take her at her word for now – amid what is presumably the gorgeous lichen-spattered granite of the far north.

What photos of me were taken, wearing a hoodie, somewhere in the outdoor spaces in which I found refuge? The reindeer lichen, Cladonia rangiferina, grows in only a handful of places below the boreal forests, one of which is Ledges State Park in Boone County, Iowa, where I’ve been photographed countless times between the rocks.

If I look for anything about Tumbler Ridge, BC, before the shooting, I’m confronted with this sort of duality. On the one hand, it’s treated like a sort of golly-gee Twin Peaks PNW community, right down to news articles about beavers chewing through data cables, and on the other, it’s a company town built around coal extraction, subject to the vicissitudes of mineral-based economies.

I didn’t grow up in a faltering coal town in the taiga. I grew up in a larger small town that remains relatively prosperous compared to the nearby towns, which is to say that it’s still something of a dump, but less of a dump. I still found it alienating. The railroad sidings of Dakota quartzite gravel, the big box stores, the cul-de-sacs… they all seemed so haunted.  A slug of gin and Sprite brings back instant memories of empty lots and 2 a.m. gas stations and low winter sunsets traced with smokestack plumes. Strange that, more than 20 years after I left for good, it still chills me.

She had an affinity for violent fantasies, creating a mall shooting game on Roblox (a concept I only vaguely understand) and having signed up for a gore website. She fetishized guns. You get the idea. Other than the technology involved, is there any qualitative difference between these reports and those on school shooters past?

I came of age in an era when something was awful and ebaum had a world. In our Target cargo shorts, murder and rape were abstract concepts, and therefore quite likely to be hilarious. The printouts of, say, someone with half their head lopped off by industrial equipment, or for that matter John Bobbitt’s severed penis, were distributed among the playground boys as early as elementary school. And when I finally first fired a measly .22 as a youth, and when the hot shell casing burned my exposed forearm, I could only think… I could get used to this. This story is hardly even remotely unique.

This all, honestly, feels kinda standard, but then I realize for a lot of people it doesn't. I thought about going on into detail, but at a certain point it stops being forensic and starts being lurid. 

All of this is to say that there were a few critical switches that were set better for me, no propensity for outward violence certainly being one of them. I can’t say how many of those critical junctures were contingent upon my own decisions.

I don’t want to rely on the many-worlds hypothesis here – I hate it as a plot device, and don’t know enough to know if I even ascribe validity to it – and instead I’ll rely on the idea of ghosts that we’re among. I mentioned avatars earlier – that’s more a symbol of a set of conditions, but I think of ghosts as more a product of a set of conditions.

And it’s discomforting to see those ghosts, whatever their form, all around.

My Old Neighborhood

 I almost hate to contribute to the ICE discourse, because it doesn’t seem like there needs to be discourse. ICE is blatantly evil. That should be enough. 

First, there’s the gravity of the moment. I’d like to write cool, dreamy analysis about art and landscape. That makes me happier than writing twitchy current-events prose. But fuck, the moment is pulling me in. Load a John Dos Passos newsreel, let’s go baybee.

Renee Good was murdered on the south side of Minneapolis, on the corner of 34th and Portland, just a few blocks over from 38th and Chicago, where George Floyd was murdered. Contrary to what you may see on the right-wing news, this part of Minneapolis isn’t a violent inner-city slum in which the only law is the law of the jungle while liberal politicians helplessly flail, and contrary to what you may see on lefty social media, it isn’t a quilombo of BIPOC resistance either. It’s a neighborhood like many others, remarkably diverse, with significant white, black, and Latino populations, largely working class, but with a fair number of comfortably middle-class homeowners as well. Sure, it’s a little worse for wear, but the area has a fine and well-preserved stock of Victorian and Edwardian homes, lovely little parks and lakes, and an abundance of independent merchants serving the local community, hippie cafes and hopelessly unprofitable record shops next to Ecuadorian butchers and Ethiopian salons.

And, once upon a time, it was the neighborhood I called home.

 

So fuck it, I don’t want to spend too much time in this shitty, shitty moment. Let’s get cool and dreamy about art and landscape. The landscape that has, much to my shock, set much of the political tenor of the past decade.

It was one of those living arrangements that one can only have when young and free. My roommate was several years older, a graduate from the same college spinning his wheels between political campaign work, hosting tables at the Bennigan’s out by the airport, and supposedly writing a book about Deep Space Nine. We had three cats. Our neighbors an agoraphobic lesbian across the hall, and a rotund middle-aged woman who drove an Escalade with a leopard-print steering wheel cover below. Wealthier neighborhoods were just on the other side of Blaisdell Avenue. On one side of the street was a minimalist Stella Artois billboard. On the other side was a Modelo billboard in Spanish with fake-titty Mexican telenovela blondes in crop tops. The local branch of the sureños kept tagging the building, only to be painted over by the landlord. Their little arms race. I looked up our local gang. They had a Myspace.

I barely worked, because I really didn’t need to pay for much more than my rent, and had a bit of cash saved up that I could burn through. What little I owned could fit in a ’95 Camry. I scrounged a mattress from an alley – don’t judge me – and who needs a bedframe when you’re 20? We didn’t have internet, although we could sometimes get onto our neighbors’ wi-fi networks. We skinny dipped in Lake Nokomis. We drank Pabst and Evan Williams bourbon and smoked rose-flavored hookah and listened to Justice and Glass Candy on our second-floor porch – a Minneapolis specialty, ideal for cool Northern summer evenings. We got yelled at by the tweakers in the building next door who threatened to call the cops on us, and we yelled back that they wouldn’t call the cops because they were tweaker trash. Apologies were made in the morning, and we’d put on Joni Mitchell’s Blue and spark a joint and sweep the floors and empty the ashtrays from the night before.

And then, my roommate left, packed up his things, leaving me with an apartment empty, save for a mattress, a sofa, and a floor lamp. With no work, nothing to do, I spent my days reading library books, as well as the countless used books I’d brought, stacked up on the floor, next to my mattress. The sunlight came in over the wooden floors in the afternoon as hookers smoked in the parking lot. I got an awful sunburn tubing on the Apple River, and I ripped a postcard-sized bit of dead skin from my back, and I couldn’t believe how beautifully it caught the light. I would walk everywhere. Maybe down Minnehaha, past the old grain elevators painted with the verdant fields of the hinterlands, a little bit WPA, a little bit Stalin. Or maybe just over to the bodega above the basement mosque. Maybe I’d buy something, maybe not. I lost a good 30 pounds that summer, and when I returned to college for my senior year, I was, for the first time, considered “hot” by some.

And other than a few visits, that was it for me and Minneapolis.

And yet Minneapolis followed me.

The din of Cedar Avenue after late-night punk rock shows and quiz nights with cheap pints of Summit Extra Pale ended in the Somalian delis, eating spicy as hell falafels, long before anyone started talking about daycare fraud.

Stopping for gas in Brooklyn Park, before that suburb’s representative, Melissa Hortman, at that time minority leader in the Minnesota Statehouse, and later speaker, a competent, well-meaning technocrat if ever there was one with a strong sense of a social mission in her good Catholic heart, was murdered by a Christian nationalist with Mittyish operator fantasies as delineated in his wildly exaggerated CV, an estranged family, and a laundry list of grievances against imagined enemies.

And that bodega with the basement masjid I mentioned earlier? A feckless George Floyd tried to pass counterfeit bills there only to be shot down by Derek Chauvin. The city burned, on the precise streets where I’d once read Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s “Empire.” And in the aftermath, any serious calls for racial justice quickly devolved into hollow rhetoric, faux-radical stances being adopted by the professional classes with a complete lack of skin in the game, consultants being called in to convince consumers that Unilever actually cared about anyone, mewling performing arts collectives trying to “decolonize” their abstruse set pieces, Black Lives Matter transformed into a floating signifier, actual black Americans as poor and fucked over as ever, police budgets still proudly high, complete with a new stock of Halo Warthogs to prepare for the Fallujahfication of American cities.

Until that fateful day last week where a mother of three got merc’d by a fat fuck in tactical gear as she tried to make a three-point turn in the middle of Portland Avenue while ICE goons went about their usual business of harassing random people of color.

 

But even when I lived there, there were signs. That August, the I-35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River at the peak of rush hour, the first sign that America’s proud mid-century Keynesian infrastructure was reaching the end of its natural life, with no one willing to foot the bill to replace it.

And the past nearly two decades play back, quickly, in reverse, until I’m in the Minneapolis summer, riding my bike through the summer night to the house party in Como, and the horizon still seems endless, the midsummer sun dipping behind the lake.

Not the Best Books of 2025

 My annual reading list. It’s pretty much my sole annual tradition, other than a few vague concepts – I do, for instance, like to watch Mr. Show’s “Monster Parties: Fact or Fiction?” at Halloween, but that’s hardly a necessity.

I’m not a literary critic. I’m not out here trying to say what I think the best books of 2025 were, and frankly I’m suspicious of anyone who can do so. Given the number of books released in each year, how can anyone take a serious glance at the literary scene as it stands in 2025, read the new releases closely enough to really understand them, and confidently come up with a list of favorites? Even if you deny yourself the pleasure of reading older books – a pleasure I can’t live without – you’re still not going to be able to read more than, say, 150 or so new volumes maximum and give them serious consideration. It’s not like movies (two hours at a time) or music (less than an hour while you’re doing something else). Books command attention and care and time. And for that reason I am happy to ignore literally all critics’ year-end lists. Fuck you guys. 

No, my favorite-book lists almost entirely consist of older work. These are just the books I read this year that I loved, for various reasons. If I pushed myself, I might be able to make year-end favorite lists for music and movies, but I just lack the passion there (although Ethel Cain’s Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You got me through a lot of dark moments in a year full of them, and frankly she’s a good enough songwriter she belongs on the list below). Books are different. I can listen to a crappy song or watch a crappy movie and it’s a non-issue. But a shitty book will put me in a genuinely bad mood. I don’t care to see barbarians storming my cathedral.

So here you go, you bastards, divided into three sections, with my own commentary as to why you should read each of these. 

Fiction and poetry and pretty things

Charles Baudelaire – Paris Spleen 

            Been reading excerpts of this for years, Paris as capital of modernity. Vintage Baudelaire.

Agustina Bazterrica – Tender Is the Flesh 

Cannibalism is as overdone now as zombies were in 2010. Bazterrica proves that it doesn’t need to be deployed as lamely as it is in most contexts.

Mircea Cartarescu – Solenoid 

Hey, it’s a 700-page Romanian novel with extended discussion of the Voynich Manuscript. Cut me a fat rail of this shit.

Jordan Castro – The Novelist 

It’s very strange to me that Kurt Vile got as close as he ever got to a hit with “Pretty Pimpin” given that the lyrics are pretty much a man going “duuuuuude.” This is a lot of duuuuuude. But very good all the same.

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle – The Fire Within 

Junkie books are normally boring, especially when they’re about hot junkies having hot sex with jutting ribcages and track marks. But somehow Drieu La Rochelle makes it work.

Nawal El Saadawi – Woman at Point Zero 

A straightforward novel about what it is to be a woman with a mind of her own in a society that does everything it can to punish that. A social realist novel in the old mode, something that’s not really done anymore.

John Fante – 1933 Was a Bad Year 

A story of born-loser working class life among Italian immigrants in the Great Depression. Straightforward and heartfelt and pure feels.

Damon Galgut – The Promise 

I was a bit miffed by some of the telegraphed punches here, but I think Galgut gets a place on this list all the same because of the ways in which this is an almost perfect encapsulation of life under an apartheid society, because even after apartheid ends, it’s not like everything turns out OK.

Jacqueline Harpman – I Who Have Never Known Men

Sounds like a shitty A24 movie, plays out like a top-tier A24 movie. Women in a prison deep underground, explanation minimal, vibes oppressive as hell.

Wolfgang Hilbig – The Females 

More explicitly violent and fucked up than a lot of Hilbig’s other work, which tends to allude to recent horror more, for which…

            – The Sleep of the Righteous 

Absolute top-tier eerie Central European bleakness. Not long after I read this, I came upon an unearthly DDR television mast emerging from the icy fogs over Saxony-Anhalt. Apropos.

Gert Jonke – Geometric Regional Novel 

Another member of the Vienna avant-garde as represented by Jelinek, Bernhard, etc., taking on the subject of a completely mathematically ordered town. Does anyone even write like this anymore?

Alfred Kubin – The Other Side 

Eldritch horrors, the German version, as narrated by a dorky German narrator who seems more concerned with minutiae than with the unbelievable weirdness of everything around him.

Benjamin Labatut – The Maniac 

            Essential reading for the AI age. I’ll leave it there.

Mary McCarthy – The Group 

No one reads Mary McCarthy anymore, which is a shame. She has a remarkable talent for channeling the voices of the most annoying people you meet, and actually making you feel bad for them.

Reza Negarestani – Cyclonopedia

Imagine if Deleuzean ideas weren’t used for fake philosophy, but as a tool for literary exploration, with Islamist terrorism and oil extraction regimes functioning as a rhizomatic object. That’d be cool, and Negarestani agrees.

Paul Nizan – Aden, Arabie 

            I will never get over my fetish for travel in a more romantic era.

Wilfrido Nolledo – But for the Lovers 

Totally forgotten Filipino writer, and his only novel. Manila is a Latin American city adrift in Asia, and this is some Garcia Marquez level insanity.

Fernando del Paso – Palinuro de Mexico

             If you were to do bibliomancy on a Spanish medical textbook.

Joseph Roth – The Radetzky March

A semi-forgotten novel of familial decadence and decline in the late 19th Century, standing firmly alongside Buddenbrooks and the rest. A chronicle of all that rot and chaos that came to a head with a gunshot at a parade in Sarajevo in 1914.

Masahiko Shimada – Death by Choice 

What would you do for the remaining few days if you planned to kill yourself? Shimada has a few ideas, and it goes much different than I had anticipated. Some real curveballs here, and they don’t seem like a deliberate attempt to subvert expectations so much as avenues I simply hadn’t thought of.

Adalbert Stifter – Motley Stones 

I’d read Rock Crystal before, but all of these geologically themed novellas are remarkably evocative of Alpine life in the olden days. Strange and haunting.

William Styron – The Confessions of Nat Turner 

            Problematic favesies.

John Waters – Carsick 

            It took me until he was hitchhiking with Patty Hearst to make me realize he was pulling my leg.

Read this to understand the world, because you’re an academized sicko

Zygmunt Bauman – Liquid Modernity

Of all the metaphors for modernity after modernity, this might be one of the creepiest and most effective.

Robert Caro – The Passage of Power

The story of how LBJ became LBJ – let’s pray Caro lives long enough to finish volume 5 of this absolute magnum opus, the greatest of all biographies.

Annie Ernaux – A Woman’s Story 

            How well do you know your parents?

Byung-Chul Han – The Burnout Society 

OK, this is absolutely THEEEEEORY, and I’m not sure how necessary it is as a text, but it’s fucking resonant. When we are told we can do anything, we realize we necessarily have to do less than everything, and we feel like nothing.

Ivan Illich – Tools for Conviviality 

            A book that explains why your iPhone makes you feel worse about yourself.

Karl Marx – The 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte 

The worst people are back, time to read about Napoleon III building big beautiful walls all over Paris.

Hans-Georg Moeller – You and Your Profile 

A remarkably incisive, compulsively readable story about the nature of authenticity, the nature of the social media profile, and the epistemological consequences.

Pasuk Phongpaichit & Chris Baker – Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand 

Sometimes people ask me to explain Thai politics, and then I have to patiently inform them that I’d have to explain a lot about the incongruity of the left-right spectrum before I even get into the policy-based meat and bones you want me to talk about. Pasuk and Baker do a better job than I ever could.

Corey Robin – The Enigma of Clarence Thomas 

Clarence Thomas, former black nationalist, current active participant in the destruction of civil rights. A kind of difficult to verify but fascinating idea of how these two things aren’t as incommensurate as you might think.

Quinn Slobodian – Crack-Up Capitalism 

Hey, Anglo-American liberals want to privatize your cities and turn you all into serfs, just like the conservatives.

Richard Wolin – The Seduction of Unreason 

What happens when you abandon universal concerns? Radical pluralism means that brute force, whether physically brute or capitalistically brute, charges in.

Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism 

            The most depressing, most prescient book I’ve read all year.

Nonfiction, but read more for the style and the feels and the memoiristic reverie than to get capital-I Information 

Shalom Auslander – Feh

A long and bitter kvetching by a highly uneven writer, but performing at top level here. There's also a story about an Indian bachelorette party and Shalom Auslander that was far too cringe for me to insert here.

Bill Buford – Among the Thugs

You think you’re a journalist, but you didn’t get beat up by Italian carabinieri as part of your in-depth reporting on lower middle-class criminal Brits, I’m guessing.

Owen Hatherley – Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances

            We’re doing a drunken Irish wake for modernism over here. 

Alfred Kazin – Starting Out in the Thirties

Mostly forgotten writer, totally forgotten book. But my god it’s a beautiful intellectual odyssey of New York back when Trotskyists and Stalinists debated in the CCNY lunchrooms.

Jarett Kobek – Do Every Thing Wrong! 

            It’s a book about XXXTentacion. And it’s amazing.

Michel Leiris – Manhood 

            Love letter to your dysfunctional penis.

Pankaj Mishra – The World After Gaza 

OK, it seems a bit too easy to write a Gaza book right now, but this is worth it. It’s a story about how the concept of Israel was corrupted over time, from an outsider’s perspective, and how, almost certainly, this genocide is just gonna keep going.

Jonas Mekas – I Had Nowhere to Go 

A couple years ago, I met Mekas’ son at a garden party in Brooklyn, and he was quiet, intense, curious, and humble. All things I see in his father’s memoir.

Douglas Murphy – The Architecture of Failure 

A really gorgeous series of architectural essays. I don’t mean to talk ill about Frank Gehry so shortly after he died, but Murphy sums up all the bad vibes I’ve always gotten off the guy’s work.

Harvey Pekar – Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me 

Not sure if this counts as nonfiction –  it is a comic book after all. But Pekar is as always a brilliant storyteller, and this is a great story about one Jewish man’s sundering with the Israel that his Holocaust survivor parents dreamed of.

Adolph Reed – The South 

A memoir that, for my money, conveyed the experience of living black in the Jim Crow South more powerfully than anything I’d read before.

*** 

Dear god, I did a listicle. Fuck the (twenty) five-o.