TV & Movies

🍿 Twisters: Well worth going to the cinema to see, this type of real-life scary is my definition of a fun summer movie - and a welcome change from all the superhero/alien/special effects blockbusters of recent years. Daisy Edgar-Jones is adorable as a traumatized, well-meaning scientist, and Glenn Powell is perfect as her hot tornado-cowboy love interest/antagonist.

📺 Unstable: it is never easy to find a show that pleases the teenagers and adults in our home, and this week, I was very surprised that this workplace/family comedy starring Rob Lowe and his real-life son, John Owen Lowe, delivered. 17-year-old Sadie, a tough critic, laughed out loud several times at the ridiculous antics of Ellis Dragon, an eccentric biotech billionaire who regularly compares himself to a god. The show centers on the relationship between Ellis and his 20-something son, Jackson, and the tension between parental criticism and support. Is it the greatest TV show I’ve ever watched? No! But when my teenaged daughter asked to watch another episode because she was “intrigued,” I swiftly pressed play.

📺 Presumed Innocent: Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a Chicago prosecutor accused of murdering his colleague in this remake of a Scott Turow novel that inspired a 1990 movie starring Harrison Ford. I loved the original movie and its shocking final twist and so was skeptical that a TV series could surpass it – but found myself enthralled by the show’s tense, slightly claustrophobic vibe. Like the movie, the show explores infidelity, culpability, and revenge, and provides an ending that’s fitting for its dark subject matter.

📺 America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: a fascinating look behind the scenes at America’s most famous professional cheerleaders, the “DCC,” the show illuminates what it takes to join and remain on the squad (cheerleaders must re-audition every year); and how the organization’s demanding routines, rules, and culture impact women’s bodies and lives. While it’s easy to judge this enterprise as outdated and sexist, there’s a LOT to think and talk about in terms of traditional gender roles, feminism, Christianity and its influence on American culture, what passion jobs are worth, and more.

Books

📖 Margo’s Got Money Troubles: an inventive, rollicking, and often laugh-out-loud tale about Margo, a college student whose life is upended by an unexpected pregnancy and the urgent need to support herself and her baby. What makes this novel so charming are the indelible characters that people it: complicated, confused, creative, and well-meaning Margo; her intense, all-black clad, former pro-wrestler father, who goes by Jinx; Margo’s mother, Shyanne, an appearance-obsessed former Hooters waitress turned Bloomingdale’s salesperson; Mark, the infuriatingly emotionally immature married father of her child; and the weird and wonderful friends, colleagues, and clients Margo encounters as she experiments with internet fame and notoriety. I did not want this book to end and am thrilled that it’s already been optioned as a TV series starring Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning.

📖 Long Island Compromise: the latest novel from Taffy Brodesser-Akner, celebrity interviewer and author of Fleishman is in Trouble, is a privileged family saga with a twist. The Fletcher family is living the American dream until, one day in the 1980s, Carl Fletcher is kidnapped and held for ransom. Forty years later, as Carl, his wife, mother, and grown-up children, continue to wrestle with the emotional aftermath of this ordeal, another challenge presents itself: the family money has run out. Brodesser-Akner’s detailed psychological profiles of each of the Fletchers and their neuroses, are both highly entertaining and horrifying, and the book is a can’t-put-it-down meditation on relationships, love, generational wealth, and emotional stability.

📖 Love Letters to a Serial Killer: I found myself completely immersed in this novel about Hannah, an unhappy 30-something who becomes obsessed with a perfect-on-paper young man accused of serial murders. After becoming fascinated with the sordid details of the case, Hannah writes William, the accused, a letter. Soon, she’s in an intense epistolary relationship with him and is charmed and attracted to his intelligence and candor. As her devotion deepens, Hannah discards her job, friends, and home to attend William’s trial and insinuate herself into his life and family. Is Hannah’s obsession driven by her desire to know the truth about William or an impulse to self-destruct?

Newsletters

📨 The Performance Plan: is a free newsletter by Nicole Garelick, who describes herself as an “anxious mid-30s mom of two with a day job in tech who likes to make people laugh in my spare time.” Nicole skewers regular life with wit and pathos, and I recognized myself in her hilarious recent issue, What I Wore On My Summer Vacation, where, despite packing carefully for a family trip, she wore the same shorts and sweatshirt Every. Single. Day. 😂

📨 What To Read If: this free weekly email is my favorite source for excellent book recommendations. The clever thing about this newsletter is that author, Elizabeth Held, ties her recs to current events, like her latest, inspired by a viral moment at the Olympic Opening Ceremony. Unlike book reviews in newspapers and magazines,What To Read If features a wide variety of books in every genre, from new releases to classics, nonfiction to cozy mystery novels…