Well, here we are, in May. The White Sox just won two games in a row for the first time this year, which, according to my preferred source of White Sox arcana, is the longest they’ve ever taken to win two games in a row in a season, ever. These stirring victories came on the heels of losing 10 entire games in a row, which I think we can all agree was pretty demoralizing for both them and me. One hopes for better from one’s preferred avatars of athleticism.

Still, spring is early, in baseball terms, so they have plenty more time to disappoint me in the months to come. Or to improve drastically! That is also an option. Having been a fan of this baseball team since childhood, I must admit that the evidence tends to point towards them being disappointing, but with so much in this world to despair about, I feel it’s not the worst idea to allow yourself a little unearned optimism from time to time. So I invite you to join me in hoping the White Sox, a team with only two starting players batting over .300 and one of them is injured, will find their way to a winning record this year. I suppose I could have concluded here by encouraging you to engage in your own unlikely hopes, but what if just for fun we all tried the White Sox thing and then it worked???

What I’m Reading in Print

This week I read Tell Me an Ending, by Jo Harkin. It’s set in an alternate version of our reality, where it’s the present day but technology has been invented that allows people to erase memories. They can choose to remember that they’ve had this procedure done, or they can choose to have the memory of getting it done removed, and as the book begins, a lawsuit has ensured that the company in charge, Nepenthe, has to notify all the people who chose not to remember that they’ve deleted a memory. The book follows the perspectives of a series of people connected to Nepenthe, many of whom are unaware they’ve deleted memories. The book is fairly even-handed in its assessment of whether or not this process would be good or bad. For some people, bad memories are preventing them from living their lives fully, but also how do you grow and evolve as a person without knowing your own history? Humorously, the book acknowledges that this is essentially the plot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which makes for a weird meta moment where they are like wow that is similar to what’s going on here.

Personally I might elect to remove memories such as the time I accidentally put a leg of my chair down on the cat’s little tiny baby paw in 2020, a memory that remains crystal clear and from which I cannot claim to have learned any particular lesson. Why do I still feel bad about it!!!

What I’m Reading Online

As someone who follows a lot of pop culture outlets/writers/participants (I think these are called “artists”), I’ve been reading many a tweet about the Hollywood writers strike. There’s a big New Yorker piece about why the writers are striking that I cannot claim to have read yet although I’ve seen it shared around a fair amount as a good walk-through. But I thought this thread does a good job of explaining why “the times have changed” is kind of a bullshit concept that lets people avoid responsibility for those changing times. And one thing you’ll see a lot of is companies claiming all their scripts are already ready to start shooting and thus they won’t need writers for a while, but this thread does a good job of explaining how much rewrites affect the final product. Here’s David Simon, who created The Wire, expressing something similar. And if you just want to know what the writers are asking for, Adam Conover explains it here.

Also, for my TV nerd friends, I really enjoyed these two threads (one about scripted TV, and one about reality TV) from the critic Emily St. James walking through some of the accepted narratives about how the 2007 writers strike affected specific TV shows at the time.

Cat tweet!

Having now shared a series of very positive examples of how Twitter is useful to me, I now feel I must share this story about Elon Musk threatening to give away NPR’s Twitter handle if they didn’t start tweeting again, and then when the tech reporter he had made the threat to published a story about it, he wrote back “You suck.”

In other tech news, do not play the Pixies song “Where Is My Mind” near your Android phone if you have an alarm set. But do read that story, because it’s pretty funny.

What I’m Watching

Lately I have been giving Dead Ringers a try. It’s a remake of a David Cronenberg movie about identical twin gynecologists who are extremely weird. In his version, the twins are played by Jeremy Irons, but in the new Amazon series created by Alice Birch, they’re played by Rachel Weisz. I haven’t seen the movie but the TV show is disturbing and fun, and Weisz is great. The twins want to open a new clinic where they can offer people better treatment throughout the pregnancy and childbirth process, and the first episode had more graphic depictions of what happens during childbirth than I have ever seen before. The whole show really leans into its own gonzo instincts; there’s almost something gleeful about the whole enterprise even as the subject matter is pretty dark. You could say there is a good twin and a bad twin, but it’s more like there’s one hedonist Rachel Weisz and one more cautious Rachel Weisz who thinks about the consequences of what she’s doing.

In both cases, Dead Ringers is based on an actual pair of weird twin gynecologists who probably did secretly swap places at work sometimes, and who died mysteriously and together and then weren’t found for several days. There’s an old New York magazine piece about them that got republished when the show came out if you’re morbidly curious.

I have also returned to my true love, the Perry Mason reboot, and I tell ya, the second season is even better than the first. They’re solving crimes! They’re wearing fedoras! They’re standing up for the little guy in a corrupt, no-good town! They do not actually talk like that on the show but what if they did?

I feel I should also admit that I watched the entirety of the animated show Arcane on Netflix this weekend, which will perhaps appeal to roughly 0% of the readers of this newsletter. It’s an adaptation of a video game (have you stopped reading already), and it’s sort of a steampunk thing about the relationship between a wealthy city and the impoverished city next to it, but it’s also a story about two sisters growing up in a corrupt system, and as a person of two sisters lifestyle, I always enjoy that kind of thing. I don’t even like steampunk as a genre that much but I found this show pretty compelling? It’s not exactly the most subtle and nuanced program I’ve ever seen, but the animation style is cool and dynamic, the vocal performances are very good (one sister is played by Hailee Steinfeld and one sister is played by Ella Purnell, of Died Dramatically on Yellowjackets fame), and the storytelling and characterization kept me interested despite my instinct that I was going to be frustrated by not knowing the video game.

What I Considered Putting in This Newsletter but Forgot about

I write notes in a Google Doc over the course of the week to keep track of things I want to use in the newsletter but this week the sole thing I wrote was: Going to have to figure out a way to tweet. It didn’t actually have a period at the end so I don’t know if I was planning to say more than that! They’re not all winners.

Reader Feedback

Remember two weeks ago when I apologized for missing a week because I’d gotten sick? I forgot I wanted to tell everyone that one reader saw fit to respond thusly: Come on lady, stick to it! I mention it now solely because I told the person, who is my friend Garrett, that I would. Isn’t it funny how everyone I mention in this newsletter is anonymous except for Garrett!

On that note, please do feel free to reach out with any thoughts about the newsletter and I will probably quote you anonymously (unless you’re Garrett). And if you know someone in your life who might enjoy the newsletter, please share it with them! I welcome new readers who would enjoy a newsletter with reading recommendations and at least one reference per edition to the writer’s cat.