Friday Reads: Beat the Press

I haven’t been able to finish many books this week. It’s the last week of school for my kids, which means final concerts, final parties, team try-outs, and last-ditch summer plans. All of this means I don’t spend nearly enough time staring at pages and my Kindle screen, and instead have to interact with the real world.

But I have been catching up on a bunch of articles and journalism. Sometimes I miss being a reporter, but frankly, it looks exhausting now. You have an ex-president facing another indictment,1 mass shootings every day, the East Coast blanketed in Apocalyptic clouds of smoke, idiots threatening to overthrow the government, cities flooding, a proxy war with Russia, the rise of Skynet, Congress in revolt against itself… I could go on.

I remember sitting with two of my friends at lunch when we all worked for the same paper, lamenting how there was just no news. I doubt reporters even get to sit down for lunch anymore. Every day is a story that would have been the story of the year now.

Newspapers and other media companies have cut salaries and staff. They’re working their people to burnout. The owners want to replace reporters with AI chatbots. People threaten reporters all the time, and sometimes, they even kill them.

And despite all that, there is still excellent journalism being done every day.

• From the London Review of Books, here’s a beautifully written piece on the history of the consensual hallucination we call Hollywood by John Lahr, who has lived through it. It serves as a great backdrop for the ongoing WGA strike and a reminder: the studios don’t create. They own.

• Speaking of Hollywood, this is a thorough, comprehensive history in the New Yorker about how the Marvel Universe conquered the world.

• The LRB also has a couple good posts on the NBA and AI this week. (I have to admit, I am delighted that my life now includes regular references to the London Review of Books. Subscribe today, you’ll see what I mean.)

• At Nautilus, a profile of a scientist who casts doubt on all the cheerleaders for immortality. I did a lot of research in this area for one of my books. There are scientists who claim that our kids are going to be the last generation that sees a lifespan that ends before a century. But we’re not there yet, and Charles Brenner says we may never get there.

• Lyz Lenz has a great piece on seeing your neighbors at a DeSantis rally, and how it feels when the people around you support everything you’re against. She also says DeSantis might not be done yet.

• Counterpoint: Hamilton Nolan tells us the GOP is going to pick Trump. Again.

• I don’t know why anyone thinks they’re going to come out of an interview with Isaac Chotiner looking good, but Ted Koppel gave it a shot as he attempted to defend his good friend Henry Kissinger. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t go well for Ted.

FRIENDS AND WELL-WISHERS

I have only the most tentative connection to the world of “The Venture Brothers” —my kid used to do karate with the kid of Dr. Venture— but I love this show so much it feels like a part of me. The cartoon started as a parody of Jonny Quest and other boy-adventurer stories, but quickly became an obscenely funny story of absent fathers, adult failure, and jetpacks. It was canceled after its seventh season in 2018, leaving a bunch of fanboys like me bereft at all the danging plot lines. But now there is a movie that promises to serve as a tombstone for the whole, messy Venture Family and all their friends, enemies, and acquaintances. You can purchase it at through video-on-demand at midnight on June 20, or order the DVD/Blu-Ray, which hits stores July 25. Yes, I have already done both. Will we finally learn the identity of the boys’ mother? Will Rusty become the scientist and hero his father was? Will the Monarch finally get revenge? The answer to all of those questions is: probably not. But I’m still going to get a big box of Froot Loops and sit too close to the TV and watch the Ventures fly off into the unknown for the last time.

That’s it for this week. As always, your recommendations and reviews are welcome in the comments.