Obsessions This Week: July 13–19, 2026

Another absolutely banger of a rec from my boyfriend. He’s got the Ethiopian composer-pianist-nun’s albums on vinyl, and it has classed up my living situation by orders of magnitude over here.

As the wildfires raged through Canada this week and the related DEEPLY HAZARDOUS air pollution in my city broke records, I noticed that my skin and the skin of loved ones around me is breaking out something fierce. This is by no means the most upsetting part of the present moment, but it did remind me of acne’s intersection between perceived personal and social responsibility: as a woman especially, I am supposed to be at war with my skin until it is beaten into submission, and signifiers/treatments like star patches and light masks serve as both hypothetical fixes and demonstrations of my efforts to have beautiful skin like I’m “supposed” to1 (and, going further, like I am told I owe society). But that neat capital-serving narrative, in which I alone hold the responsibility for clear skin and consequently must spend untold dollars on beauty products and dermatologist appointments, gets complicated when the air is poison and my skin is rightfully in rebellion against toxic particulate matter coating my world and seeping into the water supply. Just girly things!

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I’ve written about songwriter-comedian Kyle Gordon before.2 I find him and this song hilarious, not least because I was at a Paul Simon concert last night in which Mr. Simon played the very Graceland-era music that inspired Gordon’s character in the music video above.

While Gordon’s sensibility around music and comedy is obviously influenced by forerunners like Bo Burham and The Lonely Island, he has a particularly zillennial perspective that (very simply and not exclusively) boils down to older-looking tech interventions (e.g. “the nineties” aesthetics of this music video) making the scripted comedy hit even harder. He shares this with other age peers like comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg and singer Olivia Rodrigo. It’s tempting to view this aesthetic nostalgia as the twentysomethings of today organically romanticizing the decade before they were born, but it’s hard for me not to see it as yet another recursive capitalistic gesture in the vein of what Carlee Gomes wrote in 2023:

[T]he market asserts that what we’ve loved before we’ll love again, and that not only will this recursive posture lead to certain profit, but the halo of nostalgia that comes along with it will generate an extra boost in capital to boot. ​

I’ve gotten very into Mason Jar Lifestyle’s accessories that turn the kitchen staple jar into all kinds of other tools. I’m especially obsessed with our stainless steel cold brew-maker, which has kept my partner and I from spending all our money on iced coffee out this summer.

Some of the attachments advertised are just plastic junk that does little, like this piggy bank one I thought was cute but is sadly a waste of money. Other faves that serve our household well are the spice shaker tops (a great way to dispense spices bought in bulk) and drinkware lids.3

So succinct. BTW, theeee Erin Brockovich is now sounding the alarm on the environmental catastrophe that AI data centers pose. This piece in The Guardian alone should make you reconsider even casual AI use.

Canadian trans cartoonist and author Sophie Labelle is making unforgettable cartoons all the time, like the one above that illustrates an Anne Frank quote with images of ICE.

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There’s Matt & Ben in Interview circa 1997:

And John Waters revealing his close personal friendship with the late great poet Mary Oliver and her girlfriend in LitHub back in 2019:

She was very different than people think about her. She was no sweet little earth mother. She was fun and really lovely, but she did not suffer fools in any way. She had little patience for people that weren’t very smart. I used to kid with her about crawling around the woods talking to animals, that I was going to call the police if I saw her. I loved her very much.

I’m guessing the Waters reveal is gaining attention as the PBS documentary about Oliver gains attention ahead of its August release.

I’ve lately become aware of Wilson’s Revenge, a new poetry collection by an elderly Oklahoman taking Instagram by storm. The World Poetry Publishing site where you can buy a copy advertises it this way:

Every line, on its own page.

You saw the line somewhere and came looking. Here it is, printed the way he said it. When you are ready, the book is one click away.

Effective! Have you seen these poems around as much as I have?