Obsessions Th(ese) Week(s): August 3–16, 2026

I did not skip writing you last week for any fun or interesting reason—I’ve had neither the time off nor resources to travel this summer, so fitting small staycations into my weekends has been the primary respite this season. Thankfully, Chicago in the summertime is a destination in and of itself, and I’ve had a blast introducing my transplanted partner to the glories of the Third Coast. That, and we’ve watched a lot of movies.

My sister is at the Edinburgh Fringe, which is making me seethe with envy thrilling me from afar. She had friends in six shows or something crazy impressive, and is traveling with friends in hostels in a way that makes me ache for my younger days abroad.

I am seeing this with friends at The Music Box on Tuesday and I literally cannot wait.

Theeeee definition of a gaze I want to watch.

Shoutout to my friend Carly for introducing me to this beautiful song about LGBTQ+ people getting married in San Francisco back when that right was contested. Made me grateful for the progress of my lifetime, limited as it’s been.

When I started this Substack three years ago, my goal was to avoid focusing on things I don’t like. It’s fun to be a hater, and I am not by nature a positive person, but I try to keep this newsletter relatively upbeat. It’s fun to like things, too; I usually need that reminder. If you’ve noticed certain elisions of, say, Marvel movies or Bravo reality shows, that’s why. The older I get, the more I try to avoid media I find aggravating. Life is too short.

On Friday, I saw The Samurai and the The Prisoner at The Davis and was bored to tears. It’s an aesthetic bath—made me want to replace my area rugs with straw mats and purge my space of everything except maybe one single tea urn—but the plot did not move me (perhaps because I find men at war terminally boring, no matter the context). I will say, the three people I went with had a good time, and the film is very beautiful. So make of that what you will! Not everything is for everybody.

1. The Air and Water Show (and military recruitment, generally)

2. The drunk baseball fans of any city but especially mine

3. Reality shows about rich people that don’t show them getting guillotined at the end

4. Fetishizing being busy, overworked, or overbooked

5. When a cafe cares more about Instagram than their employees or food

The third book in the “Shadows of Leviathan” series dropped August 4, and I am happily listening to the audiobook whenever I can. I love these books and the way their biopunk scifi setting serves as both escape from and illumination of the political realities of our world.

Last weekend, I showed my partner both Pleasantville and The Notebook, two movies I consider must-sees. He called the former “poetic” and the latter “effective.” This weekend, we plan to fit in Crossing Delancey, which reminds me1 of this Roches song my sister loves:

A short list of things I LOVE but don’t write about because they’re just so quotidian they don’t really merit focus here: glittery or gloriously vampy manicures, complex pastries, cross-country train rides, men crying tenderly, good theater when you’re expecting bad, those $12 settlement checks you get randomly for corporate malfeasance, kids badly describing movies they love, blue silk, pithy eulogies, birdcage wedding veils, nights that go on longer than you planned, the way rain smells different in different places, quiet indoor swimming pools.