Heat Domes and Striking Actors [#121]

Back in LA after five weeks of touring and a couple of glamping adventures. A lot of great reads have piled up.

Hey from LA! I hope this finds you with an overwhelming surplus of diggity.

And I hope you are staying cool, healthy and hydrated this scorchingly hot summer. After the five-week book tour, we took the girls on two back-to-back glamping trips and hosted house guests in between. First we hit Lake Arrowhead’s UCLA Camp Bruinwoods resort, which was really more like staying at a country club abutting a lake. Then we roughed it more(ish) by staying at a private lodge inside Yosemite National Park, where the waterfalls were absolutely majestic because of the ice melt from this year’s record snowfall.

Status Update: This is me, the blob on the right…

It takes a lot to make Mark Zuckerberg seem like a decent billionaire, and Elon has somehow done it. It happened sometime between putting a cap on reading tweets(?) and challenging the Zuck to an actual dick measuring contest. (I am just reporting the facts here). Practically speaking, this means I am now on Threads, a Meta product. Sigh. At least lots of you are there so it doesn’t feel like the dead mall that is Twitter? I dunno. What a dispiriting time online. The creatives are still doing all sorts of great writing and world building, however. Let’s get to some links!

Read

This piece does a great job outlining the stakes of the historic writers+actors strike happening now. In 2021, David Zaslav, the current CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, made $675,000 a DAY. A third of Americans (mostly millennials) are getting sleep divorces, moving their partners to other beds. How Americans are finding new spiritual communities amid ‘the great dechurching.’ Could Houston’s handling of homelessness offer lessons for other cities? The lip readers of TikTok. Every Harrison Ford movie, ranked. Pat Sajak only works 48 days a year for his $15 million salary, and still acted like he wanted to be anywhere else.

Book: True Biz! Read True Biz! Even though I am more into audiobooks lately, this is a book I recommend enjoying by reading the old fashioned way. Dialogue changes from spoken to sign language pretty quickly and you can see it in front of you, and the book is full of fascinating inserts with drawings that teach you various signs.

Werk Werk Werk

My favorite books, and the ones I pretended to read in high school. Hosted KCRW’s Left Right and Center after SCOTUS effectively ended affirmative action. For Jezebel, how lookism in South Korea is enforced with open discrimination. And I’ve done a lot of talking about Flawless in the press so if you want to catch up, the links are rounded up on the book page.

Watch and/or Listen

Joy Ride, see it in the theater, and it’s enjoyed best slightly drunk. The set pieces are fantastic. We were hootin’ and hollering from our seats.

White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch. This film brought back some memories and gave me some insights that I’m sorry my tween self couldn’t have possibly understood in the context Abercrombie came up.

The Town podcast, from Puck and The Ringer. If you’re interested in the machinations of the entertainment industry and the labor actions we’re witnessing (and soon, affected by), Matt Belloni of Puck does a great job breaking down what he’s hearing, and this guy is super connected in the industry.

And if you have not caught up on S2 of The Bear, what are you still doing here reading Substack? Go watch The Bear for crying out loud! The Taylor Swift needledrop in Richie’s episode … chef’s kiss. I’m smiling just thinking about it.

More next time, between now and then … what should I be reading, listening to and watching? Or send me good memes to share with the group! And you can share this newsletter with your friends since with Twitter gone, it seems like Substack is going to be where a lot of us hang out more online.

Go get your overwhelming surplus of diggity,

E