Recently my cat has been having some health issues. Or, to put it another way, recently I’ve been experimenting with flooding my entire body with powerful stress hormones for days at a time. He’s doing better now, but it is hard to have an aging cat, and he’s turning 15 in May. Why do we make the choice to love something that will leave us? And the answer is, look at that little face, how could I not love him, he is earth’s perfect little gentleman.

Taking care of an animal involves, essentially, tricking him into improving his health. At present, we are at roughly 80% success at hiding meds in his food, and 0% success at encouraging him to increase hydration by drinking out of his new extra water bowl. He keeps walking over and sniffing it, I assume because he’s identified it as a food bowl and is waiting for food to arrive. We must admire the optimism, even as we frown upon the lack of water intake!

Here’s what I got up to this week, when I wasn’t staring obsessively at my cat.

What I’m Reading in Print

Over the weekend, I read Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You. It’s about a 40ish woman, Bodie, who goes back to her private high school in a moment of personal crisis to teach a two week course about podcasting. While she’s there, she finds herself encouraging a few of her students to reexamine the long-resolved case of a classmate of hers who was murdered. And back home, her ex-husband gets entangled in a messy #MeToo situation. Bodie is kind of queasy company for much of the book; this is not a good moment in her life, and she’s really spiraling. There are parts of this one that didn’t totally work for me—the sheer volume of things that get ripped from the headlines made the book a bit unwieldy at times, and I wish it had narrowed its focus a bit.

But without giving too much away, Bodie is eventually not in crisis anymore, and by the time I got to that section of the book, I was pretty hooked on finding out how everything would get resolved. Does the adult Bodie have a better understanding of the complicated relationship dynamics that swirled around the murdered girl, and can she parse through them to figure out what really happened? Or is she too blinded by her memories of her own messy teen years to arrive at the truth?

I should say, as someone who does not normally read a ton in the true crime genre, that I picked this up because I loved Makkai’s prior book The Great Believers so much. That one is set in two eras, one of which is the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the ’80s, and one of which picks up with some of the characters thirty years later. If you’re hesitating because of how heartbreaking you know the ’80s section will be, well, I can’t say it doesn’t break your heart, but it’s also really wonderful. I even read it in noted Terrible Year 2020, so I bet you can handle it now.

What I’m Watching

This weekend I gave Class of ‘07 a try. It’s on Amazon Prime, and it’s about a group of women who head off to their remote mountaintop high school for their ten year reunion…and while they’re attending, the rest of the world is swallowed in a flood. This is not a metaphor, or at least it’s not only a metaphor, as the women then have to learn how to survive together. Many of the women represent various archetypes (the stoner, the mean popular girl, the overachiever), and they all start reverting to their high school selves in their dynamics with each other. This is now the third “stranded women” show I’ve watched in the last couple of years, including Yellowjackets and The Wilds, which is a very strange trend. If you’re having trouble telling them apart, this one features adults instead of teenagers, and it’s set in Australia. Tonally, it skews funnier and more satirical than those other shows, but it does share with them an interest in building out season-long mysteries. I am somewhat mixed so far (it’s sort of near-funny more often than it’s ha-ha funny) but intrigued enough to keep going.

Plus, mentioning Class of ‘07 means I can say that Caitlin Stasey is in it, and if you have not yet watched her previous show Please Like Me, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It’s an all-time favorite, and one of the best shows I’ve ever seen about being young and figuring out life and romance and friendship.

What I’m Reading Online

Did you know a bunch of people clipped off locks of Beethoven’s hair after he died as mementos? I learned this today. And thankfully, some scientists recently collected a bunch of the hair locks from different sources and tested the DNA in the hair to uncover “medical and family secrets.” The New York Times has the details, including the tidbit that one of the alleged Beethoven locks of hair came from an Ashkenazi Jewish woman.

Torn between “this level of scrutiny would be humiliating for any of us” and “but this is still one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard.”

What would you name your climate activist group?

On a similar theme, one of the challenges I am discovering as I pull together what I want to put in each newsletter is resisting sending various intriguing links to my sister in advance. Such as this little oopsy that aired (aired out?) during a recent storm.

Technically I already made my entire family and multiple other people watch this video, but you should watch it even if you’ve seen it before. Is it real? Is it fake? Doesn’t matter, just let the experience happen.

It’s hard to think of what to name a pet, but some people are better at it than others. Shoutout to the cat who was at the vet as the same time as me earlier this week: Waffle. Good name.

Throwing in a belated recommendation for Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel, which was one of my favorite novels last year, about, in part, an author on a book tour as a pandemic sets in. Mandel is best known for Station Eleven, a pandemic novel which later became a really good HBO show during a pandemic. She’s doing this cool thing where her novels have linked aspects, and characters appear in multiple of them, in slightly different incarnations. I enjoyed this run-through of where she writes! Although I’m a little sad she’s more focused on TV writing than novel writing right now. I could not write in my bedroom because I’m very committed to sleep hygiene as a lifelong insomniac, but I too have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to stack up enough items to get my laptop at the right level.

I am excited about Season 2 of Yellowjackets, but this quote from a review sums up one of my issues with it: “There are several Yellowjackets wandering around that cabin whose names I couldn’t tell you even if I were backed into a corner by a demanding bear.”

This is an absolutely maddening story about the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone editing critical coverage of someone he knew personally.

I started at Boston magazine in 2015, a few years after the creation of the famous shoe cover the mag designed in the aftermath of the marathon bombings, but it was still a legend when I worked there. Having seen firsthand how much labor goes into making that magazine each month, I still can’t believe they pulled that cover together in three days. Here’s an oral history of how the whole thing happened.

I’m very excited to be writing weekly reviews of the new season of the Apple TV+ show Schmigadoon! for Myles McNutt’s Episodic Medium newsletter. If you’re not familiar, it stars Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key as two people who get sucked into a spoof of Brigadoon (in the first season) and are about to get trapped in a spoof of Chicago in the second season. Either that collection of words has you amped or has seriously put you off, but count me on Team Musical Theater Is Fun. Subscribe to Myles’ newsletter to read all about it!

What I’m Listening to

I will not be watching the Yellowjackets premiere this week due to my watching buddies being out of town (pray for my ability to avoid spoilers for a week) but to prepare I’ve been enjoying this cover of “Just a Girl” Florence + the Machine recorded for the show.

Happy first week of spring to you, wherever you are, and remember to tell your pets something deeply unhinged about how much you love them. It is only their due, as earth’s perfect gentlemen.