Word of Mouth: Deep Summer Edition

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Surf dogs at Imperial Beach. Mike’s Birds from Riverside, CA, US. 2019. Wikimedia Commons.

ESCAPE

Non-Fiction: A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II — Sonia Purnell

Fiction: The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six — Jonathon Keats

Fiction: Mercy — Joan Silber

Music: Tailspin — Eleni Mandell

TV: Colin From Accounts — Patrick Brammall, Harriet Dyer

ENGAGE:

Podcast: Bad History Will Kill America — Amicus. Dahlia Lithwick, Mark Joseph Stern, Sam Bagenstos and Jed Shugerman discuss the final cases of the Supreme Court term, involving birthright citizenship and independent federal agencies.

Podcast: F@#$ the AI Overlords: Cory Doctorow’s Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI — On the Media.

Essay: The Science That Turned Lizard Venom into GLP-1s Is Under Attack — Jeff Coller on the Trump Administration’s all-out assault on science funding.

Podcast: Donald Trump Can’t Quit the 2020 Election — The New Yorker Roundtable.

Opinion: The Incoherence of Blaming Mamdani for Anti-Jewish Violence — Peter Beinart.

Essay: When Following the Rules Leads to Disaster — Graeme Wood on the migrant disaster in Ceuta.

Word of Mouth: High Spring

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TV: “What were you wearing?” — Tracey Ullman’s Show

Fiction: Young Jane Young — Gabrielle Zevin

Fiction: The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter — Peter Orner

Non-fiction: Stronghold: One Man’s Quest to Save the World’s Wild Salmon — Tucker Malarkey

Non-fiction: The Queen’s Path: A Revolutionary Guide to Women’s Empowerment and Sovereignty — Stacey Simmons, Ph.D.

Word of Mouth, Proto Spring

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ESCAPE:

Fiction: This Is Not About Us — Allegra Goodman

Fiction: Grown Women — Sarai Johnson

Fiction: Shred Sisters — Betsy Lerner

Memoir: Feh — Shalom Auslander

TV: The Dr. Blake Mysteries — George Adams, Tony Wright

Non-Fiction: The Haves and the Have Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich— Evan Osnos

ENGAGE:

IDEA: “A person who claims to be religious, but finds a way to justify the abduction of a 5-year-old child, is a heretic, a danger to America, and an embarrassment to his faith.” from the sermon “We are under-reacting,” by Rabbi Sharon Brous, of IKAR

Opinion: “What Happened in Chicago When Science Became the Enemy” — Jeneen Interlandi

Podcast: “Trump’s Head on a Pike Foreign Policy,” Ben Rhodes on the Ezra Klein Show

Word of Mouth: Heavy Summer Edition

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Engage or escape? Here are some recommendations for bizarre times.

Novel: Liquid Snakes — Stephen Kearse

Novel: The Best We Could Hope For — Nicola Kraus

Novel: Welcome to Murder Week — Karen Dukess

Memoir: Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop— Paula Whyman

Encouragement: Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change — Maggie Smith

Non-Fiction: The Premonition: A Pandemic Story — Michael Lewis

Movie: Materialists — Celine Song

Podcast: The Call Is Coming From Inside the Court — Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick

Essay: America Has Never Seen Corruption Like This — Casey Michel

Essay: The Worst-Kept Secret of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict — Yair Rosenberg

TV: The Flight Attendant — Steve Yockey

TV: Her Majesty — Borja Cobeaga, Diego San José

WORD OF MOUTH: WTF Edition

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If you have the stomach to think about what is happening, read on. If you’d rather skip the news, and immerse yourself in something else, skip ahead to the ESCAPE section.

ENGAGE

Non-Fiction: What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures — Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

The Atlantic: The Attack on Birthright Citizenship is a Big Test for the Constitution — Adam Serwer

Podcast: Amicus, with Dahlia Lithwick: The Federal Funding Freeze, with Steve Vladek

Podcast: Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara: The Kiss the Ring Presidency, with Ian Bremmer

Podcast: Brian Lehrer Show: What to Know About Deportation, with members of the Immigrant Defense Project.

Non-Fiction: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, a Reckoning— Peter Beinart

ESCAPE

Good news, for a change: Reasons To Be Cheerful — David Byrne

Mystery: Death at La Fenice — Donna Leon

Podcast: Ezra Klein: Burned Out? Start Here, with Oliver Burkeman

Podcast: Radiolab: The Wubi Effect: how Chinese programmers solved the problem of getting 70,000 plus characters of Chinese onto a computer keyboard.

Podcast: On the Media: Wars are Won By Stories — Brooke Gladstone interviews Elyse Graham, author of Book and Dagger – How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War Two

Documentary: Inside the Mind of a Dog — Andy Mitchell

TV: Daisy Jones and the Six — Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Webber

Word of Mouth: Really, Truly, Almost Spring

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Musical: A Sign of the Times Lindsay Hope Pearlman, Richard J. Robin, Gabriel Barre, JoAnne M. Hunter, Joseph Church.

Extrauterine Children: The IVF Ruling Is About Who Gets to Raise Your Children — Dahlia Lithwick in SLATE.

Novel: Lady in the Lake — Laura Lippman

Podcast: The Wars in Ukraine and Gaza Have Changed. America’s Policy Hasn’t — Richard Haass on the Ezra Klein Show.

Podcast: Trump and the Age of Disinformation — Barb McQuade on Stay Tuned with Preet.

Double Standards: Israel, Gaza and Double Standards, Including Our Own — Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times.

TV: Avatar: the Last Air Bender — Albert Kim.

Movie: Shortcomings — Randall Park.

Idea: Dobbs was never self-limiting to abortion—it was a save-the-date card for the religious right’s plan to come for the rest of our reproductive freedoms. …

This is the two-step wherein the state forces women to have babies they cannot raise, does nothing to help support them, then swoops in to seize the babies when their parents are seen as endangering them—a phenomenon that of course predominantly hurts poor women and women of color. The state also ensures that adoptions flow in the direction of more “worthy” parents, which means heterosexual and Christian parents, a regime also built into the legal framework. The list of people who cannot assert autonomy and control over their potential children has, in the course of a few weeks, now expanded from LGBTQ+ parents, single parents, poor parents, and parents of color to anyone who has started the process of IVF in Alabama.” —The IVF Ruling Is About Who Gets to Raise Your Children — Dahlia Lithwick in SLATE.