Does anyone else get oddly mournful as spring is starting? Even though the weather improves and the Fun Season is imminent, I find that the first time the temperature starts to tip up into temperate, I feel a little glum. Partly it’s that no matter how much it’s changed, I still think of the fall/winter as the serious time of year when all the good movies and TV come out, so when the summer starts up, it means we’re not being serious anymore. But also I love nothing more than burying myself in many blankets for maximum coziness, and you just can’t do that when it’s 85 degrees out. And as a devoted boots and a nice coat person, I intrinsically dislike a season where you simply can’t wear a jacket.

Also I hate being sweaty. I want to walk quickly from place to place and you can’t do that when it’s hot out without arriving looking like you Zumbaed over.

Still, I recognize that this is an unpopular opinion, and everyone else is happy they get to wear (shudder) shorts. I will begrudgingly admit that I am capable of enjoying warm weather sometimes. It’s a good time for eating fried seafood, for instance. And I’m ready to recant everything I said previously about the heat if anyone reading this email has a boat they want to take me out on.

What I’m Reading in Print

This week I read Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, by Bushra Rehman. It’s the story of Razia, a young woman growing up in a Pakistani immigrant community in the ’80s in Queens who’s both very tied to the people and culture around her and very aware from a young age that there are ways she doesn’t fit in with them. As she ages, it becomes clear that this sense of difference is connected to her queerness, but that’s only one of a variety of ways that she begins to clash with her loving but traditional parents. It’s one of those books that has an incredible sense of place and time, like a window into that era and that world, where you can practically hear the George Michael music and cringe every time Razia argues with her mom. And Rehman does an amazing job of sketching out the other people in Razia’s world, and the shifting social dynamics between her friends and nemeses and the varying degrees of religious observance and how that affects people’s welcome in the group.

What I’m Reading Online

A journalist writing a new book about Martin Luther King Jr. discovered that a famous quote of his harshly criticizing Malcolm X was largely fabricated, which is going to make people rethink their relationship. Here’s a really interesting piece in the Washington Post about the ramifications for researchers who study both of them, and for how we collectively think about them in relation to each other.

Shoutout to my mom, who shared this video on Facebook the other day. It’s a cantor singing a Jewish prayer to the tune of the banana boat song in honor of Harry Belafonte passing away. I’ve had the banana boat song stuck in my head for like three days straight, between this video and talking to my sister about what she thought of the Beetlejuice musical.

A couple years ago I read a lovely novella called This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It’s a sci-fi, time-traveling, spy vs. spy epistolary romance. You know, that famous genre. It’s funny and dramatically romantic, and it got a decent amount of buzzy press when it came out in 2019. And then the other day a Twitter user named Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood tweeted a compelling demand that people read it, the tweet went viral, and the book rose to the #3 bestseller on Amazon. El-Mohtar wrote about it in her newsletter. It’s nice to see a good book getting attention, but obviously a real highlight here is that everyone has to thank someone named Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood. Here is a little comic they drew about how much they enjoyed the book. And here is an interview El-Mohtar did about the whole phenomenon in Slate. I also would recommend this book, although I don’t think I can argue in its favor as compellingly as Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood did.

Look, is it embarrassing that George Santos is in Congress? Yes. But am I also going to miss hearing new weird things he lied about? Maybe a little. I read a piece the other night that summed a lot of them up and it was a truly astonishing number of lies, but the journalist had also quoted someone accusing Santos of stealing his scarf, and somehow that was the funniest part of all, because I’m just not sure that particular crime rises to the same level as the campaign finance violations and whatnot.

Lindsay Lohan had such a heinous experience in the public eye when she was young that I would not be surprised if she never appeared in public again, so it’s nice to see her dipping a toe back in on her own terms in this interview with her Freaky Friday co-star, Jamie Lee Curtis. I had no idea the two of them had stayed in touch over the years.

This piece, about why many Asian immigrant families in the ’70s-’90s named their daughters (or their daughters named themselves) after Connie Chung, made me want to cry. The Connies got to meet Connie! Connie is overwhelmed to learn this about herself! I’m welling up just thinking about it again. Read it read it. But try to do it on desktop, because the Times made it a cool scrolling experience that probably doesn’t work as well on mobile.

If you, like me, are from the ’90s, you may have felt some kind of way about the announcement that MTV News was shutting down. Here’s Kurt Loder reflecting on his time as the face of the program, including this extremely Gen X description of getting the job: “I’d been recruited to help start an MTV news department—despite the fact that I knew nothing about television and quickly demonstrated this fact with a decidedly non-sizzling camera test. But whatever, apparently.”

This Paste article is a great piece of sharp, enraged writing about the current state of the movie business, which depends entirely on existing intellectual property instead of original ideas thanks to a venture capital instinct to maximize profit. The writer calls the ongoing rapacious thirst for rebooting old properties “cover band filmmaking,” which is the best description of it I’ve seen.

Hey Wait, Doesn’t This Newsletter Usually Come Out on Thursdays?

Yeah?? What’s it to you?? (I was babysitting on Wednesday night).

What I’m Listening to

Cayetana broke up in like 2019 but all my various streaming algorithms have not gotten the memo and keep offering them. I’m listening to this album while assembling the newsletter, but they also did a really great cover of the New Order song “Age of Consent.”

Anything Else Bother You about the Heat?

As a matter of fact, yes! The cat does not like to snuggle when it’s too warm out and instead sits several feet away, like some kind of stranger.

Did You Add That Solely to Maintain Your Streak of Mentioning the Cat?

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