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“Winter is coming”? I’ll believe it when I see it. Last week it was ninety degrees in New York. The subways are steam rooms, the sidewalks are hot to the touch, and yesterday a kid tried to throw a water balloon into my cab. Culturally, things are also a bit overheated. Like Doreen St. Félix, you might enjoy the “sublimely steamy” comedy “Girls Trip”. Like Alexandra Schwartz, you might devour “Arbitrary Stupid Goal,” a feverish cooking memoir by Tamara Shopsin of Shopsin’s, the legendary Greenwich Village restaurant; the book best captures the claustrophobic dynamism of New York.
If you need to retreat to a cool indoor space, Richard Brody launched the New Yorker Movie Club, a new Facebook group where you can chat about a movie of the week with him and others. New Yorker reviews. You can also follow Jia Tolentino to the Met, where she went to re-read the children’s art history classic “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs.” Basil E. Frankweiler ”. (He turns fifty this week.) Or, like Sarah Larson, you can sit by the air conditioner in your living room while enjoying the “visual glories and horrors” of the new season of “Game of Thrones”.
As for me, there is a certain type of reading and listening that I enjoy the most during the summer. Over the weekend, I read “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst,” by neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky; it explains how we make decisions on different time scales (a second, a minute, an hour, a day, a month, a lifetime). That evening I listened to Glenn Underground’s “Atmosfear,” a Chicago-powered conga-powered house classic that just re-released after twenty-one years and is streaming on Apple Music and Spotify. For some books and albums, you need long days and warm nights.
“Chester Bennington and the Cathartic Wrath of Linkin Park,” by Amanda Petrusich. The singer, whose body was found on Thursday, led what was by far the most popular and ubiquitous new rock band of their decade.
“’Voyage entre Girls’: A Dirty and Liberating Physical Comedy,” by Doreen St. Félix. Malcolm D. Lee’s sublimely steamy new comedy suggests that black “authenticity” doesn’t have to be expressed in seriousness or pain.
“Game of Thrones” Season 7 Episode 1 Recap: Dragonstone, Sweet Dragonstone, by Sarah Larson. Oh, it’s good to be back, slithering madly through those old-style maps and shining armillary spheres.
“From the mixed files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, fifty years later”, by Jia Tolentino. The classic from EL Königsburg is even better than you remember.
“Jay-Z, Dr. Dre and the Music of Success”, by Hua Hsu. Jay-Z once rapped, “I’m not a business man, I’m a business, man.” It was an ambitious boast. Now, this is simply true.
