Our June bookclub selection is John of John by Douglas Stuart. We will be in conversation with Douglas on June 24th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. Registration is open.

For newcomers, there is a bookclub FAQ if you have questions about how it all works. And this is what we will be reading for the rest of the year. We’re partnering with the lovely people at Allstora for the Audacious Book Club. Now, you can sign up to have the monthly selections delivered to your doorstep each month! Otherwise, I’ve put together an Audacious Book Club storefront if you want to buy current or forthcoming book club titles.

Subscribe now

THE NEWSLETTER WEEK IN REVIEW

PERSONAL & PROFESSIONAL NEWS

For my Australian readers, I will be back in Sydney on June 12th, in conversation with Narelda Jacobs! Tickets here!

On June 18th, I am joining Hope for Haiti in a fundraiser for their capital campaign to build a new medical campus in Haiti. They are a wonderful organization and my dad is on their board and I am so impressed with the work they do AND that all of their clinics and operations in Haiti are run by Haitians. If you want to support this campaign, please consider a ticket or table (if you have the scratch), and enjoy an evening of conversation, Haitian food, and music!

On June 20th, The Rumpus is hosting a convening for Black writers at Rutgers University. Tickets are available but going fast.

On June 22nd, I will be in conversation with Emma Copley Eisenberg in Frenchtown, NJ!. Tickets and more info here.

And then, on June 25th, I will be at the Center For Fiction in BK, speaking with Nicole Dennis-Benn and Xochitl Gonzalez about what makes a book a classic.

Book and project links: Books I’ve Written, RGB Imprint Titles, Rebind: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; The Forgotten Occupation.

READING MATERIAL

The president had a temper tantrum during a Meet the Press interview. And nobody interesting wants to go to his birthday party cage fight.

The National Guard presence in D.C. is not reducing crime, which is entirely predictable.

In Newark, the New Jersey governor sent in state police to quell a protest at an ICE facility which… what? The whole thing is a clusterfuck.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Black man who was convicted by a mostly white jury. Broken clocks and all that.

Primaries happened in Los Angeles. Votes are still being counted which, of course, has conspiracy theorists frothing. Karen Bass will definitely be in the run off and maybe Nithya Raman? Xavier Becerra will probably face Steve Hilton for governor in November. Yes, it’s frustrating that it takes this long for votes to be counted but California is a huge state. Anyway, I voted for Bass and Becerra.

In New Mexico, Deb Haaland won the Democratic primary for governor.

Has there ever been a politician who people are willing to give a pass to more than Graham Platner?

In Portugal, there was a remigration summit and yes, this is exactly as racist and xenophobic as you think it is.

A church where sexual abuse is generational. Oh, the sentences that the tragedies of this world force us to write.

The architecture of the Obama presidential museum is a megalith. A curious choice.

Caitlin Clark is not covering herself in glory in the WNBA.

The Tonys happened and it was a pretty good show though it was frustrating that a lot of the great awards happened in a pre-broadcast broadcast on some rando streaming network. During that portion of the festivities, Qween Jean won for best costumes for Cats: The Jellicle Ball. Qween is Haitian and really lovely and the first openly trans person to win a Tony!

Is Broadway playing it too safe?

College is getting more and more expensive and some schools now cost more than $100,000. Per year.

There are people living underground maybe in NYC.

The Knicks are up 2-0 in the NBA Finals. Elmo pissed some Knicks fans off. Spike Lee is very excited. Two fans ran onto the court for selfies and now are banned for life.

A conversation with Scott Palley after he was ousted from 60 Minutes. (Bari Weiss stands by her decision, smh.) A conversation with Regina Hall.

I appreciated this nuanced essay by Marisa Kabas on Weiss, Palley, independent media, and the way forward.

The age old practice of trying to control the weather.

There are loneliness influencers?

Conservatives are mad (?!) that Alex Cooper is pregnant? They really cannot mind their own business!

Karamo Brown is talking about his experience on Queer Eye. Messy, messy, messy.

RIP Peabo Bryson. RIP Marjane Satrapi. RIP Limmie Pulliam.

A missing sherpa was rescued after six days!

Here’s a long story about a hot air balloon family.

Belgium is dealing with a lot of potatoes.

The Literary Arts Fund has distributed its first grants!

The Cocaine Smuggler’s Daughter.

A look at the work behind Singapore’s school canteens.

Applications are open for the FSG fellowship.

Zadie Smith offers reflections on why we make art even in difficult circumstances.

THE RUMPUS WEEK IN REVIEW

Comics:

Shoehorn by Cole Degenstein

Fiction:

Pop Tart Crumb by Isabel Torrence

Poetry:

Two Poems by Johanna Magin
Two Poems by Puneet Dutt
Invocation of the Black River by Asa Drake

Reviews:

On Natalie Shapiro’s “Stay Dead” by Letizia Mariani

Interviews:

A Conversation with Maya Salameh by Swati Sudarsan
A Conversation with Diana Whitney by Jennifer Berney
The First Book: J. Brooke by J. Brooke
A Conversation with Alicia Kennedy by Raechel Anne Jolie

Columns:

Books That Made Me Gay: “The Vampire Lestat” by Anne Rice by Tess McGeer

Criticism:

Now More Than Ever, We Need “The Happiest Band on Earth” by B.J. Hollars

In the opening of Douglas Stuart’s 2020 debut Shuggie Bain, it’s 1992, and Shuggie, the 15 -year-old protagonist (who is pretending to be 16) is working at a supermarket in Glasgow, living alone, and hoping one day to be a hairdresser. Before the novel moves back to reflect on Shuggie’s childhood and to illustrate why he’s found himself in this situation, Stuart chronicles Shuggie’s daily deli routine and also his attempts to fill in for a coworker at her rotisserie stand:

“He prayed for strength. Why did no one want a whole chicken anymore? He would lift the carcass using long prongs, careful not to touch the birds with his gloved hands, and then he would dissect the parts neatly (skin intact) using catering scissors. He felt like a fool standing there against the broiler lights. His scalp was sweating under the hairnet and his hands were not quite strong enough to artfully snap the back of the chicken with the dull blades. He hunched slightly, the better to throw his back muscles behind the pressure in his wrists, and all the time he kept smiling.”

Stuart is meticulous in proffering details about Shuggie’s discomforts, the minutiae required to manage the deli, and in his descriptions both of Shuggie’s mother Agnes’s struggle with alcoholism and Shuggie’s attempts to save her. Stuart is also meticulous in his revelation of Shuggie’s queerness and in chronicling Shuggie’s attempt to hide that fact both from himself and from others.

It is that meticulousness and secrecy that also echo in Stuart’s third book, John of John. The novel’s protagonist, John-Calum MacLeod is living in Edinburgh, going to art school to study textiles, when his father calls him and insists he return to his home on the insular Isle of Harris, part of the Hebrides, to care for his aging grandmother. What Cal finds on his return is the same home he left behind and seemingly the same father, a man who criticizes his clothing and hair as well as his decisions. But what Cal soon finds is that nothing is what it appears to be: his father, a weaver and farmer, is breaking one of the key rules of the trade on the island, and his family is struggling to keep its secrets.

In some ways, Stuart’s novel is a faithful retelling of the prodigal son; his language is steeped in both the religious fervor of the conservative Presbyterian church and stark yet bucolic descriptions of the island’s landscape. But nestled within that narrative is a very different story, the threads of which interweave the story of the son with the story of the father, a story filled with sharp and startling insights into the nature of queer longing and loneliness. John of John forces us to consider not the scandal of queerness in communities that pride themselves on adherence to tradition but more importantly the cost: what compromises must people must make in order to love in secret? What lies must they tell? What shape must love take if that love is forbidden?

John of John is a gorgeous and often heart wrenching novel, one that reminds us that we don’t always know our families as well as we think we do, and that sometimes coming home doesn’t ground us but unsettles us instead. I’m looking forward to discussing this wonderful book with you throughout the month of June. We will be in conversation with Douglas Stuart on June 24th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. Registration is open!

Have you started John of John? What are your early impressions? If you’ve read Stuart’s previous two novels, what do you see in how his work has evolved?

Our June bookclub selection is John of John by Douglas Stuart. We will be in conversation with Douglas on June 24th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. Registration is open. If you missed our conversation with Adriana Ramirez, you can watch it on YouTube.

For newcomers, there is a bookclub FAQ if you have questions about how it all works. And this is what we will be reading for the rest of the year. We’re partnering with the lovely people at Allstora for the Audacious Book Club. Now, you can sign up to have the monthly selections delivered to your doorstep each month! Otherwise, I’ve put together an Audacious Book Club storefront if you want to buy current or forthcoming book club titles.

Subscribe now

THE NEWSLETTER WEEK IN REVIEW

PERSONAL & PROFESSIONAL NEWS

For my Australian readers, I will be back in Sydney on June 12th, in conversation with Narelda Jacobs! Tickets here!

On June 18th, I am joining Hope for Haiti in a fundraiser for their capital campaign to build a new medical campus in Haiti. They are a wonderful organization and my dad is on their board and I am so impressed with the work they do AND that all of their clinics and operations in Haiti are run by Haitians. If you want to support this campaign, please consider a ticket or table (if you have the scratch), and enjoy an evening of conversation, Haitian food, and music!

On June 20th, The Rumpus is hosting a convening for Black writers at Rutgers University. Tickets are available but going fast.

On June 22nd, I will be in conversation with Emma Copley Eisenberg in Frenchtown, NJ!. Tickets and more info here.

And then, on June 25th, I will be at the Center For Fiction in BK, speaking with Nicole Dennis-Benn and Xochitl Gonzalez about what makes a book a classic.

Why yes, June is kind of unpleasantly busy!

Book and project links: Books I’ve Written, RGB Imprint Titles, Rebind: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; The Forgotten Occupation.

READING MATERIAL

A thoughtful essay on Palestine, witness, guns, how we should treat our enemies and much more.

The economy is doing poorly which means, in turn, that a lot more Americans are going hungry.

Blah blah blah Spencer Pratt. whenever his name comes up I hear the Peanuts adults wah wah wah talk.

The Trump regime, in their quest to be as odious as possible, is continuing to target E. Jean Carroll, this time via the Justice Department.

The survivalists are fighting again, LOL!

Did you know that a UFC cage is being built on the White House lawn. Like, for realsies? But some UFC players are not at all interested in the grotesque spectacle.

Also, most of the musicians pulled out of Trump’s weird birthday party so now he’s going to… headline his own party? Loser shit. When Milli Vanilli says NOPE, it’s probably time for some introspection but first you would have to be capable of introspection. Alas.

In other loser news, it looks like Trump won’t be able to use his illegal slush fund to pay off crony criminals. And in even more loser news, Trump has to take his name off the Kennedy Centre.

Brutal.

The media has discovered the connection between gender-based violence and extremism even though feminists have been discussing this for decades.

Long time congressman Al Green has lost his seat to a fellow Democrat. This is FINE! Term limits should exist.

Pope Leo made offered a papal apology for the Holy See’s role in legitimizing slavery.

A drag queen and a multibillion dollar corporation walk into a courtroom…

Some day men will learn to just shut up but today is not that day. Also, why are they so emotional?

See also: THIS.

Also, men are playing with their penises again and trying to make them bigger which… like, sure but you also have to know how to use it for that extra size to matter.

That scammy guru got a $100 million podcast deal.

Summer House reunion? GRIPPING television.

Guys… speaking of Summer House, I’m on Bitch Sesh this week with my favorite podcast hosts other than my wife.

Another perspective on Belle Burden and Strangers.

The World Cup is bringing Haitians together because it’s awesome that the national team is playing!

Matthew Perry’s assistant will do prison time for administering Ketamine to his boss (RIP). This feels…tricky. He should have not done that but it’s an impossible position for an employee to be in and that should have been taken into consideration.

Is there such a thing as good vegan cheese?

Is feminist art having another moment?

Writers who use AI are so… embarrassing.

Taylour Paige shares how to spend a great Sunday in Los Angeles.

RIP Sonny Rollins.

The GOAT is making a comeback? Also, Naomi Osaka’s court entrance outfits are so lovely and interesting. And Naomi Osaka and Taylor Townsend through one (1) dinner party for Black tennis players at the French Open, so of course people were running their mouths.

When Djokovic was stunned in an upset cuz he LOST, the French Open definitely got more interesting.

Euphoria has come to an end and I think I’m going to write about the final season which was… very bad. As in quality. But the actors did the best they could with shoddy material. Here is an interview with Sam Levinson, who hates women if his shows are any indication.

Once, there was a dream that was Esperanto.

If you want to be a showrunner, UCLA Extension is offering a free class.

Might I interest you in a Bubble House? I’d spend a few hours in there.

An opera sort of based on Set It Off, you say? Say less. I’m sat.

THE RUMPUS WEEK IN REVIEW

Essays:

Someone to Swim With by Anne Marina Pelliccioto

Comics:

The Nine Lives of Amanda Ewell by Caite McNeil

Fiction:

Ancestral Milk by Paige Kaptuch
Bad Artist by Francesca Carra

Poetry:

Three Poems by Francis Dylan Waguespack
Two Poems by Teresa K. Miller
Eight Poems by T. De Los Reyes

Criticism:

“Famesick”: On the Frackable Self by Yvonne Conza

Interviews:

A Conversation with Jimin Han by Anne Gimm
A Conversation with Erin L. McCoy by Stephanie Feldman
A Conversation with M Lin by Cherry Lou Sy

Subscribe now

I cannot claim to be a skilled translator, but I am a practiced one. Ever since childhood, whenever I read in Chinese, I would invariably attempt an English translation inside my head. Though I rarely wrote them down and they’re never particularly good, I can nonetheless attribute some of my earliest attempts at composition to this early habit, as well as a certain sensitivity to sound and language. And it is a special joy when I chance upon a precise translation that fits smooth like lock and key, especially when - to nab a phrase from Nabokov - that key usually resembles a lockpick.

For annoyances are common. Take 香. An exceptionally common adjective, liable to appear with frequency in any romantic scene. By itself it means sweet-smelling or fragrant. As a noun, it could also mean incense (and tangentially, it is incensing that scent and incense derive respectively from sentire, to perceive and incedere, to burn.). Food, of course, is 香. But you could also describe the manner of eating as 香: wolfing down, or, sexier: ravish. So, too, could sleep be 香, and here we have one of those lock-and-key moments with sleeping sweetly.

So far so good. But like all good things in life, 香 radiates metaphorically: to say someone is well read, you could say they are book-scented; 書香. The artful, well-aged scroll he carries might be 古香; age-scented. Then feminine beauty is also often described as 香, thus proverbially 國色天香; literally meaning “colour of the nation and Heaven-scented” (and note how I must lean on the Christian notion here when no such meaning should be implied) — meaning a beauty beyond compare, or 溫香軟玉; “warm-scented and soft jade,” usually used to describe a maiden’s body when the wuxia hero is forced by circumstance to take her into his manful arms. Perhaps she would then reward him with a 香吻 — a fragrant kiss — or perhaps his arm would be drenched with her fragrant sweat 香汗 — and even if she later perishes, setting up his motivation for Act Three, he could rest well know that her soul is no mere soul, but a sweet-smelling 香魂.

Perhaps now you are beginning to see the problem: there are few usable words in the English translator’s toolkit to articulate “pleasant smelling” except fragrant, which is an awful, clumsy word with an unpleasant shape, visually suggesting some connection to fragment or fragging. And you can’t very well have your hero eat the fragrant rice fragrantly while his fragrant wife plants a fragrant kiss on his cheeks. Rummage further and you’ll find perfumed, which feels artificial; aromatic, which feels unromantic; or the humble, ever-useful “-scented.” However, the trouble is that scented is too neutral, too polite: whereas 茉莉花香 connotes the pleasant scent of jasmine, “jasmine-scented” seems merely scientific: the pleasantness has to be manually injected. Then because you now have to plan around that compound adjective, you get something like “she entered the room, smelling pleasantly of jasmines,” and now the sentence begins to feel overwrought for what should have been quite a subtle scent. If you’re feeling particularly daring, you could reach for top-shelf words like ambrosial (a bit much for jasmine, don’t you think?) or redolent (which lets you use its prettier but etymologically unconnected step-cousin resplendent somewhere down the paragraph), but fancy words are bound to break the flow, and sooner later the impoverished state of olfactory affairs would you have crawling back to fragrant once more, desperate to write anything but the grade school construction of “smelling like.”

Intriguingly, the inverse problem also exists. The antonym to 香 is 臭, and, as with English, can connote a poor reputation or low character. But here the English language shines. Beyond the childish stinky or smelly, you can have a stench, or a funk, or be odious, or fetid, or pungent, or putrid, or noxious, or even, if you were in a particularly bad spot, have a miasma hang about you; all of which can basically only be rendered as 臭 in Chinese. I am not a practicing historian, but the imbalance seems to suggest something about the historical (social, cultural) environments in which these societies evolved, worthy of etymological investigation. (An aside: it is said that Heian courtiers would spend vast sums of money on bark and spices from Southeast Asia to craft personalized scents, such that they could tell who is approaching by their scent alone (and then, in the gossipy nature of Heian courtiers, judge them for their poor taste). Imagine: there, in the dark, the gentle patter of an evening rain freshing the scent of the earth; the shuffling of socks on corridor; a passing shadow, a beguiling aroma, a fragrance unknown, and you fall to your knees in despair, for all the vocabulary you have to describe this encounter have already been used. What an odious state of affairs).

There are more fundamental differences. Chinese characters are monosyllabic. Each character corresponds to one sound, albeit not always one meaning; a word can consist of one, two, three, or more characters. There are no tenses, no conjugation; time is therefore fluid, and there is pleasing ambiguity in not quite knowing whether something occurred/occurs/will occur yesterday or today or tomorrow (you begin to see the limitations of English). As with Japanese, the subject is often omitted: a sentence could happen to you or me or he or she or a universal we without being forced to take a stance. It is irksome when, say, a perfectly transient moment (or memory) of leaning against a windowsill and pining for a lost love is suddenly intruded, in translation, by an I, who has to act out the pining (worse: the desperate translator’s move to preserve the nonspecific with a genderless, identityless oneself — for there is nothing worse than showing up where one is not invited).

Then there is of course the visual element. A cultured scholar such as you will know that there is a pictographic element to Chinese characters: thus 火 is fire and 川 is river and 木 is tree and so on (and it will delight you to know that 林 means wood and 森 means, you guessed it, forest). There are of course abstractions. 雨, for example, is rain. You see the sky, droplets beneath looming clouds. But look how it also shows up in 雷, thunder, and 電, lightning (note the forked tail): visually symmetrical and, as in English, often paired. And then it occurs again in 雪, snow, in 雹, hail, and in one of my favourite characters, 霜, meaning frost. Even though rain does not feature in the meanings of the words, it is implied by the characters themselves a tidy etymological set. Thus Chinese poetry contains beauty in not only form and sound, but also in image, and thus, like all poetry of all languages, remain in my estimation fundamentally untranslatable.

We continue now to matters of the heart (or literally 心事 — another of those lock-and-keys). Love is, I believe, the single most overworked word in the English language. You love your dog and you love your job and you love your mother and you love cheese and I am led to believe that these are all the same type of love. Certainly you could care for things and be passionate about and feel deeply for and admire and sympathize and whatever you do with limerence, but none of them really quite have that four-letter, 24-carat, one-syllable punch. In this the Greek had the right idea, and so do, I venture, the Chinese. A few words fairly translatable as love include 戀, a pink-ish, perhaps slightly youthful kind of love, something between a crush and affection and desire (and do you see, in that character, those slight blushing cheeks?); 情, a deep bond, usable also for family or friendships, and describing something willful, perhaps stubborn, yet also somehow fated; and finally 愛, the closest direct translation to love, including not only joys but all the sorrows and responsibility also. Look closely, and you’ll find the heart 心 buried within. Thus you can have your 愛人, which translates to lover, but you can also have 戀人, bashful still from the excitement of it all, or a 情人, which implies a paramour, or even the partner in an affair. True to form, these terms co-mingle: thus 愛情 is different from 情愛 and different again from 戀情 or 戀愛. Yet for all this it is rare to hear the words 我愛你 — I love you — unless in the subtitle of a translated film, or during the age-honed tradition of flirting through language teaching. For a culture that values the unspoken, such directness is corny at best and vulgar at worse — hence the Natsume Soseki anecdote about the proper way to translate the phrase into Japanese: “The moon is beautiful tonight”. Voiced yet unvoiced; shared, but only momentarily, and all the more fragile, because. In this way, even fundamental feelings are ever-shifting, and thus the very lives of people such as I are an act of constant translation — a fact I understood long before I read a word of theory.

Having lambasted English I now feel the need to rally to its defense. After all, (shamefacedly, despite), it is the only language I can write in with passing grace. Visually and semantically, Chinese is a relatively stable language, perfected by literati over thousands of years, and its classical forms can be fairly understood even by unstudied reprobates such as I. However, this also means that creating new characters is almost impossible (though those who have tried range from ambitious noodle merchants to the only Empress of China, and You’ll Never Guess Who Was More Successful!), and translations of new words or concepts can often feel awkward, with visual consistency usually an afterthought to phonetic or semantic fidelity. English, unburdened with visual elements, suffers no such compunctions, and freely ransack words with such diverse backgrounds as jungle or tsunami or ketchup or pogrom or kowtow or schadenfreude, a fact probably more attributable to the power of the English navy than that of the English language. The result is a rich and diverse set of synonyms capable of evoking exact tones and timbres. An eddy is not a whirlpool, and an ebbing tide feels somehow more mysterious than one that merely recedes. Those stark, simple Anglo-Saxon words — needle, elm, yew, brand, hawthorn, blood, kin — practically imply an old magic all on its own. But then for your dark academia you’ll want instead the Latinates — symposium, dementia, daemon, pact, virtue, pandemonium. Your rustic farmhand carries a dirk, his assassin girlfriend a dagger, but their mentor, a weathered hunter, wields a carving knife, and only the fanciest contessa could get away with carrying a stiletto. The flexibility self-perpetuates: through the magic of grammar, you could pressgang any word into verb service, shamelessly adjectivize, or even conjoin two unrelated nouns into a viable clusterfuck.

But here we start to centre around a worrying thought. If we accept that all words carry the semiotic weight of its culture and history, then isn’t all translation essentially a reconfiguration? And, and, you (or he or she or they or I) begin to fret: if all of us have our individualized experiences for whom home or taste or love mean different things, then are we not each of us speaking a dialect of one; forced to never truly understand the myriad intents behind each of our carefully curated words?

But no. You know what a tsunami is, see, perhaps, the curve of its blue-white waves. And you understood beauty in its many forms long before you studied aesthetics. A new dish. A pleasing scent. The sound of snow on snow. Moments like these are transcendent. The words will come later, but there are dewdrops on the banisters, frost in the air. The moon is beautiful tonight.

Our May bookclub selection is The Violence: My Family’s Colombian War by Adriana E. Ramirez. We will be in conversation with Adriana on May 27th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. Registration is open.

For newcomers, there is a bookclub FAQ if you have questions about how it all works. And this is what we will be reading for the rest of the year. We’re partnering with the lovely people at Allstora for the Audacious Book Club. Now, you can sign up to have the monthly selections delivered to your doorstep each month! Otherwise, I’ve put together an Audacious Book Club storefront if you want to buy current or forthcoming book club titles.

Subscribe now

THE NEWSLETTER WEEK IN REVIEW

PERSONAL & PROFESSIONAL NEWS

For the New York Times, I wrote an essay about playing make-believe with politicians and how it enables us to avoid discernment.

On June 20th, The Rumpus is hosting a convening for Black writers at Rutgers University. Tickets are available but going fast.

The latest edition of Best Women’s Travel Writing is out on June 9th and it includes an essay from me, about the time Debbie and I went to Antarctica. (It was amazing.)

For my Australian readers, I will be back in Sydney on June 12th, in conversation with Narelda Jacobs! Tickets here!

On June 18th, I am joining Hope for Haiti in a fundraiser for their capital campaign to build a new medical campus in Haiti. They are a wonderful organization and my dad is on their board and I am so impressed with the work they do AND that all of their clinics and operations in Haiti are run by Haitians. If you want to support this campaign, please consider a ticket or table (if you have the scratch), and enjoy an evening of conversation, Haitian food, and music!

Book and project links: Books I’ve Written, RGB Imprint Titles, Rebind: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; The Forgotten Occupation.

READING MATERIAL

In San Diego, a mass shooting at a mosque, where five people were murdered.

Even the NYT editorial board thinks Trump is very very corrupt.

The Pope dropped some bars on A.I. and its dangers.

The Women’s History Museum has run into some legislative roadblocks.

The Colbert Show has come to an end. This is bad for many reasons, not the least of which is political interference in media offerings.

James Murdoch bought half of Vox Media.

World Cup ticket prices are still outrageous.

Is AI writing good short stories? No, absolutely not. Are bad, AI short stories winning contests? Yes.

It should come as no surprise that AI is pretty sycophantic.

RIP Michael Singer. RIP Kyle Busch. RIP Grizz Chapman. RIP Rob Base. RIP Juniper Blessing.

Some very wealthy people bought some art at an auction.

The documentary Ask E. Jean is out now, in select theatres. Getting the film made was… a challenge.

A profile of a Hollywood casting director.

It’s never too late! Billie Jean King graduated from Cal State Los Angeles!

The disastrous Swatch/Audemars Piguet collab launch could have definitely been avoided.

An excellent excerpt from Tracy Lynne Oliver’s Magician.

An interesting piece about Belle Burden’s enormous wealth, some of which she elides in Strangers.

This one time a guy decided to use a landline instead of a cell phone, like it was… the 80s and 90s and other such ye olde times.

It’s hot at the French Open.

Elizabeth Smart has taken up bodybuilding.

Some tech bros threw “enhanced games” where athletes could use performance enhancing drugs and equipment but it was a dud.

I always appreciate Kate Manne’s writing and thinking. This essay about the limits of sex positivity and the dangers of sexual strangulation, was excellent.

This was an interesting essay about mah-jong and the tensions between people for whom mah-jong is part of their culture and a new breed of players who don’t have those cultural ties to the game.

Alison Roman is opening a First Bloom in Brooklyn.

A conversation with Shirley Kurata, who created the visual language of I Love Boosters. These interviews with L.A. dishwashers were really interesting. A conversation with Boots Riley. A conversation with Vivian Gornick.

In Marfa, there’s a roadside attraction that is more than a roadside attraction.

Route 66 is a hundred years old.

Lego pinball machine coming soon.

THE RUMPUS WEEK IN REVIEW

Essays:

Imagining Irmgard by David Susman
Intimate Enemies by Juan Villoro

Fiction:

Men in Black Coats by Isabelle Yang

Poetry:

Two Poems by Caroline Laganas
there must be a field alive inside you that isn’t burning by B. Luke Wilson
Three Poems by Louie Leyson

Reviews:

O’Frankenstein: A Resurrection of Manman and Tifi in Catherine-Esther Cowie’s “Heirloom” by Jay Aja
The Taxonomy of Girlhood: A Review of Susan L. Leary’s “More Flowers” by Natalie Tombasco

Interviews:

A Conversation with Kelly Yang by Olivia Q. Pintair
A Conversation with Jeff Boyd by Andrew Boryga
A Conversation with Bsrat Mezghebe by Nimarta Narang
A Conversation with Sean Hill by Clemonce Herd
A Conversation with Beth Ann Fennelly by Jenny Bartoy

We will be in conversation with Adriana on May 27th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. What questions do you have for this month’s author, Adriana Ramirez?

We’re heading into a holiday weekend. What’s on your mind? What are your weekend plans? What should I write about in the coming weeks?

I’m still stewing, believe it or not, about the Survivor 50 finale and the season as a whole. I love reality TV but it has morphed into something that has very little reality to it. It’s all kind of manufactured and unpleasant and gravely lacking in charm or whimsy. I expected that this milestone season would be fun and have lots of intrigue and twists but so much of the production felt, well, like a production! You could see the ways the producers tried to manipulate the game to get their desired outcomes. And one thing that has persisted across seasons is that racism and misogyny travel to the Survivor island with the contestants. No bigotry left behind!

(Cirie was robbed. Even Tiff, who I am not crazy about, was robbed. And what was Stephenie even doing during the final tribal council? )

During COVID, or at the height of COVID, I should say, the show changed its format. Instead of different locales, they settled in Fji. They shortened the season from 39 days (much more compelling) to 29 days (whatever). There were other changes and none for the better. Shows do change and evolve to stay “fresh” but what should have just been a temporary change became a permanent one. This is all compounded by the way that anyone who goes on the show now is a superfan, very familiar with how the game is played, which strategies work most effectively and so on. They come on the show with grandiose ideas and immediately start to build their Survivor portfolio, an accounting of the strategic moves they make during the season that will, hopefully, get them to the finale. They also talk about jury management which is to say they have to be careful about who they betray and how, because many of those people will be the ones who determine the season’s winner. And, of course, they immediately start looking for immunity idols and everyone at camp knows they are looking for immunity idols so it becomes something of a clusterfuck group project so that no one is every alone if and when they find an advantage.

As a viewer, this is all kind of grating. We’re no longer seeing people thrown into an inhospitable climate, with a bunch of strangers, using their intellectual and physical prowess to win a million dollars. We’re seeing a bunch of people showing how well they’ve watched previous seasons of the show, and how well they can mimic what they’ve seen. It’s an imitation of life.

Anyway, Season 51 is around the corner. The machine rolls on.

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There is a long history of journalism chronicling the way women have ruined the pleasures and pursuits men have long enjoyed. In 1929, English theatre critic St. John Ervine wrote, “When the theater was vital and alive, there was no woman either on the stage or in the auditorium.” This, of course, has never been true, but that was not a deterrent for St. John. Over the past many decades, women have been accused of ruining marriage, and their own “charm and femininity” by smoking, wearing makeup, and even worse, pants. Women have been accused of ruining men themselves “making milksops of their men,” and they have ruined the US military and military academies, and even the whole country. They have ruined the sports of tennis and golf and even the morale of toll collectors for the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Most recently, they have ruined the modern workplace, what with their feminism and liberal ideas about equity and fairness.

What’s worse than this cultural preoccupation with the notion that women ruin things and would be best kept out of public life, is that throughout history, men have had an alarming predilection for treating women’s rights and whether or not women even deserve rights as legitimate topics of debate. They do not trouble themselves with examining why they feel entitled to this unearned authority and they are not terribly interested in how women want to advocate for themselves and assert their autonomy. It’s a horrible state of affairs.

***

Another popular journalistic refrain concerns the death of feminism, the collapse, the failure, the irrelevance. Mostly, these are sensationalistic discussions that position feminism as a problem rather than a solution, suggesting that efforts to address misogyny are futile and we would all better off if we embraced the status quo.

***

My neighborhood in Los Angeles is inundated by Waymos. Every day, I see those self-driving cars ferrying people or, more often, simply driving around, empty. They are easy to make fun of because while they are, theoretically, smart cars, they can also be quite dumb. If a passenger forgets to close a car door after exiting a Waymo, the car is pretty much rendered unusable until someone comes along to help it out of its predicament. During ICE protests in Los Angeles in June 2025, several Waymos were targeted in spectacular acts of defiance.

People often say they will never take a Waymo but I don’t mind them. As a woman, a driverless car has genuine appeal. I won’t have to engage in awkward conversations about my nonexistent husband or politics or whatever might be on a driver’s mind. I won’t be kidnapped, murdered or sexually assaulted. I won’t be stalked or harassed. I’m not paranoid. These are very real dangers women face when availing themselves of rideshares.

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Our May bookclub selection is The Violence: My Family’s Colombian War by Adriana E. Ramirez. We will be in conversation with Adriana on May 27th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. Registration is open.

For newcomers, there is a bookclub FAQ if you have questions about how it all works. And this is what we will be reading for the rest of the year. We’re partnering with the lovely people at Allstora for the Audacious Book Club. Now, you can sign up to have the monthly selections delivered to your doorstep each month! Otherwise, I’ve put together an Audacious Book Club storefront if you want to buy current or forthcoming book club titles.

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THE NEWSLETTER WEEK IN REVIEW

PERSONAL & PROFESSIONAL NEWS

I had a busy week! I offered some thoughts on reality stars in politics for PBS Newshour. And then I was a Jeopardy clue on the 14th which is just… a delight. Every time this happens (every time???) I clap and squeal like I am still seven and wearing my hair in ringlets. Love that for me.

For my Australian readers, I will be back in Sydney on June 12th, in conversation with Narelda Jacobs! Tickets here!

On June 18th, I am joining Hope for Haiti in a fundraiser for their capital campaign to build a new medical campus in Haiti. They are a wonderful organization and my dad is on their board and I am so impressed with the work they do AND that all of their clinics and operations in Haiti are run by Haitians. If you want to support this campaign, please consider a ticket or table (if you have the scratch), and enjoy an evening of conversation, Haitian food, and music!

Book and project links: Books I’ve Written, RGB Imprint Titles, Rebind: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; The Forgotten Occupation.

READING MATERIAL

The Democrats can be so spineless. I will never understand why Jared Polis pardoned Tina Peters. WHY?

Words that come to mind, with regard to this $1.7 billion slush fund for Trump’s criminal pals: outrageous, rancid, disgusting, disgraceful.

Mayor Mamdani restored the library funding, as he should have. Glad he course corrected on this.

In NYC, Jack Schlossberg is running on… clout?

Alex Murdaugh’s murder conviction was overturned by the South Carolina Supreme Court but he’s still in prison forever for fraud?

Spencer Pratt, still a prat.

Excellent news! Hotel housekeepers in NYC will earn more than $100,000 per year and that is deserved and also not nearly enough for the work they do.

This journalist REALLY seemed to like Ezra Klein in this profile.

Good news! Ben Shapiro’s “media empire” is collapsing. Love to see it.

There is trouble in paradise at Kevin Hart’s media company. Also… that roast? I refused to watch but man… get some dignity Kevin.

Ross Barkan has been accused of plagiarism. Looks like plagiarism!

Screenwriters who can’t find work in the industry are training AI to do their jobs? Dystopia, dystopia, dystopia.

Turks out Kars4Kids is a bit of a scam. Of course it is.

Sometimes a person goes viral and gets very famous very quickly but it’s not necessarily a fairy tale.

Like Puff Daddy became P. Diddy. Like Prince became SYMBOL. Like PCOS became PMOS.

Nami Mun offers a gorgeous, haunting essay about women, the way we are silenced and silence ourselves when it comes to our health, and ovarian cancer.

Swatch did a collab with Audemars Piguet and it was too too successful.

There are some exciting things happening with the San Francisco Ballet.

RIP Jason Collins. RIP Brian Lindstrom. RIP Mary Lovelace O’Neal.

A lot of families have secrets, and here is a story about siblings, one of whom left the South to pass as a white man in Chicago and the choices Black people are often forced to make to survive. If you want to read an excellent novel about something similar, check out Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half.

A conversation with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. A profile of a guerilla artist in Los Angeles. A conversation with Kennedy Ryan. A profile of comic Gabby Hoffman. A conversation with Aleshea Harris. A conversation with Taraji P. Henson. A conversation with Julieta Venegas.

The phrase “optimize your vagina” should not exist. Absolutely the fuck not.

Here are the 100 best restaurants in New York City according to The New York Times.

A Wordle television show?

Tracy Lynne Oliver, author of Magician, offers a reading list about bad mothers.

Justice for Cirie!

Another entry in the annals of evidence that men really just hate women.

The Bard fiction prize is accepting applications.

I will always, always tolerate Drake slander. See also: Chris Brown.

Have you seen Is God Is? I’m going this week and have been taking in the reviews.

After the flood for the Parsley family in Texas.

James Charles is one of those people I only learn about unwillingly but he is really annoying, inexplicably popular, and always doing inappropriate or terrible things.

So there I was, walking through Times Square, the most crowded I’ve ever seen it, to meet Debbie at The Palace Theatre to see The Lost Boys musical and turns out, Gucci was getting ready to have a fashion show, right there. Absolute chaos. The show was pretty good and Shoshona Bean was amazing. Never ever thought that movie would get the musical treatment, but here we are.

I love a good story about a rent-stabilized apartment.

As you know, it’s a difficult time for independent media (has it ever not been?) and Hammer and Hope, an excellent magazine to which I subscribe, could use your support. The Spring 2026 issue is particularly strong with its focus on the Minnesota uprising, including a raw, searing diary by a Somali mom during the ICE invasion; a video of dream hampton and Jason Moran discussing D'Angelo's musicality; and a reported piece by Natalie Moore on Black women federal workers who were purged under DOGE. You can become a member HERE. And if you’re interested in making a significant multi-year gifts you can e-mail hello@hammerandhope.org.

My former, very talented student Meghana Mysore has a forthcoming short story collection, Let All Our Ghosts Depart, out on September 1. You can pre-order now! Until then, you can read her story “Repair Shop” in the Yalousha Review.

THE RUMPUS WEEK IN REVIEW

Essays:

Pinayrish American by Kimberley Nelson

Fiction:

Tyler by June Glass

Poetry:

Two Poems by Jeff Stumpo
Four Poems by Caleb Curtiss
prognosis of sound by Sloan Asakura

Reviews:

Obliteration and Authorship: On Hamid Ismailov’s “We Computers” by Anu Khosla
Meaning in The Ice and “A Violence” by Paula Bohince by Christos Kalli
A Backyard of One’s Own: The Meticulous Ecology of Cecily Parks’ “The Seeds” by Melanie Robinson

Interviews:

A Conversation with Anna Lena Phillips Bell by Amanda Hawkins
A Conversation with Emily Nemens by Nimarta Narang
A Conversation with Jonathan Miles by Denise S. Robbins
A Conversation with Ashley M. Jones by Annelies Zijderveld
A Conversation with Scott Broker by Stephanie Feldman

Other:

The AWP Flash Fiction Contest Winners by Roxane Gay

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If you were attempting to write your own famil…

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Our May bookclub selection is The Violence: My Family’s Colombian War by Adriana E. Ramirez. We will be in conversation with Adriana on May 27th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. Registration is open. And if you missed our conversation with Jamilah Lemieux, it’s up now.

For newcomers, there is a bookclub FAQ if you have questions about h…

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Last year, I was still shell-shocked. Mother’s Day was less than three months after my mother’s passing. I was lucky enough to spend her final days with her alongside my father, my wife, my brother and his wife, my nieces and nephew. My aunt was at the house every day, and so was my sister-in-law and her parents. My mother was beloved and she was surrounded by love as she transitioned from this world to the next. That is supposed to be a comfort and it is, in as much as there is comfort to be found in a loss so shattering.

My mom thought Mother’s Day was overly commercialized and a racket. She hated how businesses charged triple for flowers and brunch was a noisy, crowded affair and television commercials in late April and May insisted on trying to sell the idea that we live in a world where mothers are truly valued. She preferred that we appreciated her consistently, not merely on the second Sunday in May, and we did, especially as we got older and better understood what appreciation should look like.

Before my mom died, I didn’t realize how many businesses sent Mother’s Day e-mails but now I do. It’s all kind of ludicrous. I’ve gotten Mother’s Day e-mails from Wally’s where we buy wine in L.A. (great great store), Pasquale Jones, a pizza restaurant I’ve never been to, the Cameo app, Vespertine, ArtSpace, Barnes and Noble, Symphony Space, Joan’s On Third, Mandarin Oriental, The Paris Review, Frette, Jelly Belly, and on and on the list goes. Some of these e-mails are really reaching. I don’t begrudge these businesses the need to make money but it all feels so forced and sad that the best ways we, as a culture, can think of to appreciate mothers is through buying them a gift on the one solitary day each year dedicated to their efforts.

Surely, I think, as I scan these e-mails, we can do better for mothers. Surely, we have more imagination than these targeted entreaties to spend money on things the intended mothers probably don’t really want. The best gift would probably be giving the mother in your life some quiet time, alone, or to assume your fair share of domestic responsibilities without weaponizing incompetence and if she’s a fan of it, you can never go wrong with oral (from romantic partners, obviously).

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We were at a fancy party, my wife Debbie and I. We got dressed up and took a car uptown. At the venue, we shuffled along the step and repeat, blinking into the flashing lights. I did a brief interview with People Magazine and then we got drinks and sidled our way through the dense crowd of people enthusiastically exchanging small talk. I don’t normally go to these types of events, but I thought it might be nice to have an evening out. We assumed it was a dinner because the invitation detailed a three-hour event, during typical dinner hours, at a restaurant. It turns out it was a cocktail party, with passed hors d’oeuvres and a very open bar. It was a nice time. I got to talk with Andy Cohen, always fun, and Broadway director Whitney White, who was kind enough to visit my cultural criticism class last semester after I took my students to see her play Liberation on Broadway. We people watched and smiled at strangers and around 8:30, decided to head home.

In front of the restaurant, an older woman with shoulder-length salt and pepper hair, sat cross-legged on a large planter, wearing gold lamé ballet flats, louche and disheveled, and smoking unabashedly. Debbie casually remarked that the cigarette smoke smelled amazing, which it did. We both inhaled deeply. At that, the older woman took it upon herself to strike up a conversation with us. She was French… very French and she shared that she used to smoke three packs a day but was now down to one pack a day. We commended her on her discipline. She offered us a drag on her cigarette, which we declined. We chatted for a few more minutes, and then as our car pulled up, we started walking away. I was a few steps ahead when the older woman said, in that thick French accent dripping with casual disdain, “You really should exercise more.”

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Early in Dead Boys: A Memoir, a series of linked essays, Adriana E. Ramírez talks about watching a pirated news feed from Mexico and seeing nine bodies hanging from a pedestrian bridge. Ramírez writes that she is familiar with the bridge; she has driven across it many times. As she listens to a news anchor list the names of the dead, Ramírez realizes th…

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Our May bookclub selection is The Violence: My Family’s Colombian War by Adriana E. Ramirez. We will be in conversation with Adriana on May 27th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. Registration is open. And if you missed our conversation with Jamilah Lemieux, it’s up now.

For newcomers, there is a bookclub FAQ if you have questions about h…

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One of the things that really stood out to me was the burden of having to shoulder most of the caregiving responsibilities, when in many cases, singl…

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Our April selection will be Black. Single. Mother. by Jamilah Lemieux. We will be in conversation with Jamilah on April 29th, at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. Registration is open.

For newcomers, there is a bookclub FAQ if you have questions about how it all works. And this is what we will be reading for the rest of the year. We’re par…

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