When it comes to my taste in music, novelty is important. I can’t listen to the same 500 classic rock songs every single day. I like to hear new sounds, track new trends, find new artists.
Every month, I start a new playlist. Then, every time I hear a new song that I like, I add it to the playlist. They usually wind up being a couple of albums long. I thought I would start sharing those playlists here with you.
But first, a couple of caveats: These songs are dumped into the playlist in strict chronological order in terms of when I discover them. That is to say, I have not arranged them into a mix and the transitions are not maximized for pleasant listening. In fact, the song-to-song shifts are often a little jarring. And I only add songs that are new to me, which means they’re not all brand-new music.
I don’t claim to be a musical expert. I like short, catchy, poppy songs and I’ve learned that I’m more likely to love a song if it features swearing, so don’t play the playlist with the kids in the car, okay?
I prefer Apple Music, so that’s what I’ve got to share. If you use another streaming service and you use Apple devices, I can’t recommend the app Playlisty enough. For a one-time fee, you can easily transport playlists from one streaming service to another. I use it all the time.
Anyway, this June’s music wasn’t as summer-y as I’d hoped it would be. The playlist starts pretty soft and contemplative (deBasement aside) before things get a little more lively and poppy. I’d say my favorite barbecue bangers are “This Feeling” by The Allergies, the delightful “Pop Pop” by Channel Tres, and especially “Yip Yip Yow” by Caroline Rose. There’s a nice little danceable stretch in the middle, too, if you’re into that kind of thing.
It doesn’t seem like WordPress plays nicely with Apple Music, so here’s a link to the playlist, instead. Let me know what you think!
I was at a bar with booksellers a couple of months ago when someone used me as an experiment: “Have you read The Correspondent?,” she asked me. I said I hadn’t. She asked the bookseller next to me the same question and she quickly and enthusiastically replied that she had.
Our interrogator turned to her friend as though she had just settled a bet. “You see?,” she huffed. “Every woman in this room has read The Correspondent, and every man in the room hasn’t even heard of it.”
Reader, I took that personally. That night, I fired up my Libby app and queued up the audiobook version of The Correspondent. A couple months later, it finally arrived in my inbox and then I spent two days squeezing in as much listening time as is humanly possible.
Virginia Evans’s runaway bestseller of an epistolary novel is literary fiction in the style of Richard Russo and Ann Patchett, big-hearted and broad and accessible. It tells the story of Sybil Van Antwerp, a fiercely independent elderly woman who maintains correspondence with a number of people while also writing too-friendly letters to authors of books she admires. It’s got a lot to say about aging and forgiveness and regrets.
If you prefer your literary fiction to be ambiguous and subtle, this isn’t for you. This is a book of BIG SWINGS, the kind of on-the-nose sweeping storytelling that used to reliably win the Pulitzer Prize in the early 2000s. I’m a sucker for that kind of storytelling, especially in the summer, and so it spoke right to me—despite its somewhat fat-fingered handling of race and gender and class. (If your main character is a rich old straight white lady and you spend most of the book inside her perspective, you’re not gonna get the most enlightened observations about the world.)
And I definitely want to recommend the audiobook, if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s read by a full cast, and the collage of those voices working together to fill out Sybil’s life lend a nice resonance to the epistolary format. I can’t recommend this enough if you’re the sort of person who likes to bring a populist literary novel with you on vacation—especially if you’re one of the millions of men who, according to at least one Seattle bookseller, has never heard of the damn book.
I’ll admit it: I was suckered into reading Simon Pare-Poupart’s memoir about life as a garbage man, Trash!, because Dwight Garner compared the book to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. I love well-written books about workers who provide services that most people don’t ever think about.
But Trash! is bad. It’s a macho, cliched, annoying (but mercifully short) book written by an incurious know-it-all. I don’t know what Dwight Garner was thinking when he reviewed this book, but I can tell you that if you do want to read a great tell-all about life on a garbage truck, you should skip Trash! and read Derf Backderf’s excellent graphic memoir Trashed, instead.
Seattle is lucky enough to be home to the best film critic on the topic of action movies in the business. His name is Vern and his blog is a must-visit for me every time I watch a movie. So let me tell you that if you only read one review of the martial-arts action film The Furious, it should absolutely be Vern’s.
I basically want to high-five Vern for his review, because he put so much into words about The Furious that left me speechless. I love that the five main characters of the film each have their own individual fighting styles—one is a dancer, one throws his body around like a pissed-off bull, the lead is small but indomitable. I love that through sheer kinetic filmmaking, The Furious made me believe that a tiny man in flip flops can realistically chase down a giant truck roaring at full speed through the streets of a generic southeast Asian city.
The Furious isn’t the best martial-arts movie of all time. I think the movie kinda flags around the penultimate fight before coming back in a big way for the grand finale. And I hate the current action-movie trend of making the bad guys human traffickers—the reality of human trafficking is so disgusting that it adds a queasy-making jolt of reality into a story that’s ultimately meant to entertain.
But if you like big dumb fights between unbelievably graceful men that have been choreographed down to the most minute detail, this could be the best example of the form you’ll see all year—hell, maybe in five years. Watch it in the theaters, read Vern’s review,and spend the next two weeks wondering how the hell they managed to do all that stuff without accidentally killing someone on set. It’s movie magic, baby!
The thing that drew me to M. Arusha Wehm’s novel The Department of What It (Really) Means to be Human was the promise on the dust jacket that the book was “a thoughtful, optimistic sci-fi novel set in a near-future Aotearoa New Zealand where an investigator navigates a newly post-capitalist world in their search for a missing artist.”
It’s really that simple: All you have to do to get me to read your sci-fi novel is set it in a future that doesn’t suck. And I loved living in the world of this novel—Wehm has clearly thought about what a climate-friendly, post-capitalist society might look like, and they establish a very lived-in world for the characters to move around in. Even better, none of the ideas in the book are presented as outrageous or groundbreaking. The future just is the way it is. The casual, no-big-deal air around the setting is luxurious, like slipping into a warm bath.
Unfortunately, the central mystery of the book didn’t really pull me through the story. Every time something happened to advance the plot, I found myself wanting to squint at something Wehm gestured toward in the background, instead. I’m glad I read it, but it’s very much a journey-not-the-destination kind of reading experience—and oh, what a journey! I wish I could live inside this novel.
Last weekend I finally watched Obsession. The movie was enough of a cultural phenomenon that virtually every news site and film critic and podcaster has chimed in at least once, but probably multiple times, about What It Means For the Culture, so I don’t know if I have any original thoughts about it.
If you’ve been tuned out on pop culture, just know that it’s a basic Monkey’s Paw setup in which a hapless loser wishes that his crush would love him more than anyone else in the whole world. It’s a well-directed movie, and it was made for very little money so the special effects are more stagecraft than CGI, which is fun to watch. But be warned that the movie is relentlessly dark in spirit. I don’t know if I would have the stomach to watch it again anytime soon.
Everyone is correct to point out that the central character of Nikki is played to the absolute hilt by Inde Navarette. She gives a performance that is as unselfconscious and expressive as Nicolas Cage—which, if you know me, is about as big a compliment as I can give an actor. I hope she makes the most of the big opportunities that I’m sure are about to come her way.
There’s a cultural conversation around the movie that’s been pretty disconcerting. It feels as though some critics are reviewing the movie they think they saw, but not the movie that writer-director Curry Barker actually made. For instance, on the Cannonball podcast, New York magazine pop culture critic Angelica Jade Bastién said Obsession was a movie “about the crazy girlfriend who’s going to destroy your life and how the cost of loving a woman is to have your life completely cratered.”
Which is just categorically not true. That is not in any way what the movie is about! You could make plenty of feminist arguments against Obsession, but I don’t think anyone involved in the making of the film would say either of those messages were the messages they they were trying to send, and as a viewer it’s just not a good-faith description of the movie.
Anyway, people have been chasing each other in circles over this movie for weeks, and nobody cares if another racer joins the demolition derby. But I do feel compelled to say that while other movies this year have made more of a mark on me—shout out to The Drama and I Love Boosters—I’m still excited to see a tiny movie make such a giant splash in the general cultural conversation.
I was born in 1976, so I obviously don’t recall America’s big bicentennial birthday bash. But the celebration of America’s 200th birthday was a big enough cultural event that artifacts from the bicentennial celebration were kicking around throughout my youth. I’d occasionally encounter the special 200th birthday quarters, which featured a minuteman playing a drum on the back, for instance. Jack Kirby wrote and drew a giant Captain America comic for the bicentennial that was one of my favorite comics growing up. And so on and so forth.
When I was a kid, I did the math and determined that I’d be 50 years old when America celebrated its 250th birthday. Even though I couldn’t fathom being 50 years old at the time, I recall that I did wonder what America’s quarter-millennium celebrations might be like. I was envisioning a future full of robots and American flags on Mars and all the other sci-fi trappings we were promised back then.
And now that I’m 50 and America’s 250th birthday is here, I imagine trying to explain to my four-year-old self that the celebration is shaping up to be a dud. The president, you see, is the worst person in the country, and he’s ancient and clearly losing his mind and he’s been making everything in the world about him for the last decade or so. The economy is so bad and America has been embarrassed so solidly on the global stage that even Republicans don’t seem to be in a mood to go full star-spangled bananas right now.
All that is to say that the one and only thing I’ve done to acknowledge America’s big 2-5-0 is read Meg Elison’s brand-new sci-fi novel, Foundling Fathers. It’s a story about teenaged clones of America’s Founding Fathers figuring out that they’re not in the 18th century anymore.
The book has a stellar first line:
“It took Benjamin Franklin twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds to discover there was pornography on the internet.”
That pretty much sets the tone: The clones of Adams and Washington and all the rest maintain their essential character traits, and they slowly begin to realize that the world around them isn’t as it seems. I don’t want to spoil anything, so that’s all the plot you’ll get out of me.
Foundling Fathers is a short and funny book, and it doesn’t exhaustively explore its concept. Instead, it makes a point and then ends well before it wears out its welcome. It’s thoughtful enough and well-researched enough that it inspired me to consider the men who started the American experiment and what they might think of where we are now.
I enjoyed it a great deal, and now I’m officially done thinking about America’s 250th birthday—except to hope that things might be better for kids born this year when, or if, the 300th birthday rolls around.
As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I’m in the process of transforming this blog from a newsletter archive into more of an old-school blog—mostly book and movie reviews, but I reserve the right to write about whatever I want. So if you’ve subscribed to this blog as a newsletter through WordPress, you might want to unsubscribe here and subscribe to my Buttondown newsletter instead, which will continue to run at a twice-a-month cadence. I’m not going to promise new posts every day here, but I do think I’ll be posting multiple times a week.
I currently have a backlog of movies and books to write about, and I’ll be posting those starting tomorrow. Not all of the posts are going to be long. Some might be a few sentences. But if you’re one of the few dozens of people who get these posts in your inbox, you might be annoyed by all the extra me in your life. You’ve been warned.
As I was taking my seat at the Tasveer Film Center for Disclosure Day last week, I recall thinking how lucky I was to have lived the entirety of my life in a time when I had the opportunity to catch a new Steven Spielberg movie on opening weekend in theaters.
One day in the not-so-distant future, on whatever terrible website eventually replaces Reddit as the place where people go to wallow in their own worldview with like-minded wallowers, young film buffs will have serious conversations about how thrilling it must have been to be in the audience for Jurassic Park or Minority Report or E.T. before most people in the world had seen them, and before opinions about the movie became calcified into conventional wisdom. The experience must have been blissful, the future movie nerds will enthuse.
So, yes: let me acknowledge that it is, in fact, pretty neat to live in a time when one can pop into a movie theater--an independent, nonprofit neighborhood movie house, if you're lucky!--and watch a Steven Spielberg flick in cool air conditioning on a hot summer day.
But that's about the beginning and the end of pleasant statements I have to make about Disclosure Day.
Actually, wait. Here's another pleasant thing I can say about the movie, and it's a statement I've never made before in my life: Emily Blunt is fantastic in this picture. She blows away her previous best film performance, in The Devil Wears Prada, in her role as a weatherperson for a middleweight TV news show who suddenly starts speaking fluent alienese.
Blunt has never given a bad performance that I've seen, but she's never been a magnetic, charismatic performer. What she does in Disclosure Day is actually Oscar-worthy, a performance of depth, skill, and high-wire intensity.
Too bad the rest of the movie isn't anywhere close to playing in the same league. All the other characters are shoddily constructed ciphers, the plot is laughable, and the climax is an embarrassment, an old man's idea of a technocratic fairy tale.
I mean, for real: How do you make Colman Domingo boring? How in the name of God is that even possible?
Everybody is doing their job here, which means viewers will have artistry to admire. The camera work is deft. The cinematography is doing very interesting things with reflections on glass. John Williams's score is not his catchiest work, but it improves every scene. There are a couple of cool set pieces that would be absolute trash in the hands of virtually every other director.
But in the end, Disclosure Day is bad. And it's the worst kind of bad, which is to say it's uninteresting. I'd put it near the bottom of Spielberg's efforts. And I have to wonder what would have happened had Tony Kushner, the screenwriting collaborator on four of Spielberg's best recent films, put his estimable talents toward the story that Spielberg wanted to tell instead of David Koepp, a screenwriter who has never once in his long career managed to make bad material good or good material bad.
But to return to my initial thought: it really is a wonderful thing to be alive at the same time Spielberg is making movies. And that blessing applies equally to his bad movies, because frustration is a key component of the Spielberg movie-watching experiment. Any number of his best movies, including Catch Me If You Can, Lincoln, and even Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, are near-perfect theater experiences that come to a crashing halt, typically near the end, while Spielberg stops to again unnecessarily reemphasize the importance of the nuclear family, or sentimentality, or nostalgia, or parental love.
There is no universal truth that Spielberg hasn't reinforced, celebrated, and then underlined in red ink with aching sincerity. Even when he's making the best movies in the history of cinema, he has to stop and frustrate the viewer lest anyone in the back of the theater come close to missing the point.
Maybe that frustration is somehow an essential part of Spielberg's magic?
Every great director has their central flaw that keeps popping up in their work. Most of Hitchcock's best films feature a queasy lingering of the lens on his leading ladies, suggesting something subtly disgusting is happening on the other end of the camera. I've never watched a Kubrick movie without wondering at some point if the director would go five steps out of his way to save a child from being smashed to red paste by a runaway mail truck. Can we really begrudge Spielberg his pathological need to pause all the glittering spectacle for a minute or two in order to lecture us about how we should be nicer to each other? So far as directorial kinks go, it's a pretty tame one.
Here’s a factoid that hit me like a cricket bat: Forbes recently reported that “for the first time in the internet’s history, machines now generate more web traffic than people.” In fact, internet traffic analysis shows that bots now average “57.5% of all HTTP requests to HTML content, humans at 42.5%.”
Those numbers are guaranteed to get worse. Over the last few weeks, Google switched from its traditional blue-link results page to an AI chat-formatted response that makes it hard to actually find a webpage—or even a sentence that was written by a human and not AI.
The five or so giant corporations that run the internet are trying to railroad us into Web 3.0, an internet that takes place almost entirely in a chat field, with robot-generated text and images serving us whatever the algorithms think we want.
Say what you will about the algorithm-heavy social media of Web 2.0, but at least the possibility of discovery was there. People could occasionally bump into life-changing posts or websites. But 3.0 is not an algorithm pointing out at the world. It’s an offer to step inside the algorithm, to be entombed inside an AI capsule that promises to bring you only what it thinks you need and desire.
I’m not convinced that Google and Meta will win this round, honestly. I think anti-AI sentiment is calcifying within the general public at a rate that none of the Silicon Valley set anticipated.
Maybe there’s something wrong with me, because when I read that human traffic on the internet is declining, it just makes me want to post more writing on the internet. I’m thinking about retooling this website at paulconstant.com and turning it more into an old-school weblog, a journal of all the books and movies and art that I encounter, published in real time. At the moment, it’s just serving as an archive of newsletters, which is fine but feels like kind of a waste.
Anyway, I’m only vaguely just starting to think about this. But I can tell you that nothing will change with my newsletter. I will routinely link to my writing from there and you can choose to read it or not, like always. But if you’re following me here at paulconstant.com via its newsletter function or the RSS feed, at some point soon it might become something more like an old-fashioned LiveJournal, with multiple posts published at different times.
In the meantime, if you recently found something on the internet that you treasure because it’s a labor of love made by one or two humans, I hope you’ll share it with me. I’m looking for blogs and podcasts and art written by humans for humans. For a while, at least, that kind of stuff is going to get harder to find online.
I’ve Been Writing
For the Seattle Times, I wrote about Grit City Books, an “unapologetically queer-owned and queer-positive” general-interest bookstore in Tacoma that I learned about because Seattle booksellers can’t stop raving about it. If you shop for books regularly in Seattle, there’s a good chance that Grit City is your favorite booksellers’ current favorite bookstore. It’s easy to see why: The shop is beautiful and very thoughtfully designed.
I also wrote about June’s excellent array of new paperbacks, including the latest R.F. Kuang novel.
I’ve Been Reading
I’ve been reading cartoonist Julia Wertz’s books for the better part of two decades. She’s a little younger than me, but her autobiographical comics have sort of grown up with me. I was coming out of my 20s party years when Wertz was reveling in hers, and we’ve both matured at roughly the same pace, eventually moving away from cosmopolitan socialization and into a more sedate home life. Bury Me Already is Wertz’s latest cartoon autobiography, and it documents her rocky path into parenthood and her struggles with learning how to be a mom. I got to interview Wertz three years ago for the Comics Journal, and in many ways that interview was a preview for this book—it’s about how a detached, ironic young artist learns to live with the aching sincerity of parenthood. Like all of Wertz’s books, I laughed out loud at several points, which is not common for me as a reader. I like that her books don’t feature epiphanies for the sake of epiphanies, or any false narrative structures slapped onto the events of her life. For Wertz, life happens and you adjust to it, even if you really have no idea what the hell you’re doing. So far as artistic statements go, I can for sure vibe with that.
Somehow, I had gone 50 years without reading a J.M. Coetzee novel. Thanks to a Little Free Library on Beacon Hill, I found myself in possession of a copy of Waiting for the Barbarians at the exact same time that Steven Metcalf of the (sadly soon-to-be-ending) Slate Culture Gabfest started raving about his late-in-life discovery of Coetzee, so I decided to give it a try. Friends, this book is so of-the-moment that I’m having a hard time believing it was written in 1980. It’s set in a tiny frontier town that is slowly going mad over the just-past-the-next horizon threat of foreign barbarians who are presumably going to lay waste to everything they encounter. If an American tried to publish this novel for the first time in 2026, I would have called it too on-the-nose because it so closely resonates with the headlines.
I read Nicholas Enrich’s memoir of his time working at USAID while Elon Musk’s DOGE ripped the agency to shreds, Into the Wood Chipper, at the same time that Scott Pelley was protesting the hackification of management at his job at 60 Minutes. Like with Pelley’s post-firing interview, this book left me a little mortified that smart people who were very good at their jobs just completely failed to recognize what was happening when the fascists came for them. Pelley seems genuinely astonished that new CBS owner David Ellison might have gone back on his word to maintain 60 Minutes’s independence, and Enrich couldn’t begin to fathom that Elon Musk would want to murder hundreds of thousands of (mostly non-white) children on the other side of the globe. The expectation of civility left both of these men woefully unprepared for the fight that was coming to them. When will we stop being surprised by the powerful oligarchs doing exactly what they threatened to do?
Somewhere on social media, someone praised sci-fi author Clifford D. Simak’s City, a novel-in-stories set in the far future, about the end of humanity and the rise of dogs as the world’s dominant, intelligent species. It’s an entertaining book that is very clearly stitched together from a handful of short stories that were obviously never intended to work together as a piece. I deeply disagree with Simak’s initial premise for the dystopia. The basic idea is that cheap, fast, and affordable transportation led to the wholesale rejection of cities as humankind retreated to solitary rural life and society fell apart. But just because an old sci-fi writer’s prediction didn’t come exactly true doesn’t mean the book is worthless. On the contrary, I enjoyed the thought experiment, even if it wasn’t the most satisfying novel.
And finally, I read a couple of short books that I picked up on a recent trip to Peter Miller Books.
First, even if I hate the author and think their advice is absolute shit, I find myself magnetically attracted to how-to-write books. I am unfamiliar with the author Verlyn Klinkenborg so I can’t tell you how I feel about his work. But Klinkenborg’s writing book, Several Short Sentences About Writing, might be my favorite how-to-write book of all time, replacing Stephen King’s On Writing after two decades as the reigning champ. What’s most appealing about this book is that the advice is almost entirely at odds with every other writing book.
Klinkenborg urges the writer to write in very short sentences. No, You should write even shorter sentences than that. No, you should make them even shorter. Like this, then? Maybe, yes. And while most writing books urge quantity over quality, Klinkenborg also urges the writer to focus on making every sentence perfect before moving on to the next one.
Most writing books make me want to read more, with an eye for the choices that the author made while writing. I’ll say this for Several Short Sentence About Writing: It really made me want to write fiction. That’s rare.
And Bruno Munari’s Drawing a Tree is exactly that: A short, profusely illustrated book showing how to draw trees. The styles range from hyperrealistic to cartoony, with tutorials for different types of trees throughout. The book is just as inspiring in its own way as Klinkenborg’s writing guide. There’s a real pleasure in being able to do something really well—even if that something is just knowing how to draw a tree in a pinch.
And Here’s a Bald Eagle I Saw at Seward Park the Other Day
That’s it for now. I’ll see you again at the end of the month! Paul
