The Pop Culture Pyramid: Vol. 23

HOUSEKEEPING!

Big thanks for your patience while I’ve been away. I’m dutifully reporting on my travels below.

BOTTOM OF THE PYRAMID

Swamps!

Fouls!

Felt a little iffy to me. They can grab and hold onto this guy the entire match, but when he does a slight push to get separation, and the guy flops, a goal that didn’t involve either of them is disallowed?

The English aren’t beating the soft allegations after this fortuitous ruling.

MIDDLE OF THE PYRAMID

Taylor Sheridan!

After a super cringey appearance on the Bill Simmons podcast, Sheridan is back in my good graces with news and project development like this.

Sheridan has simply relocated his template to a wetter climate, and I could not be more supportive.

Voicemails for Isabelle!

This movie is an entire mess, distracted by two truncated central relationships: Zoey Deutch and her sister, who dies early in the movie (not a spoiler), and Zoey Deutch and Wes, her love interest. The chemistry between ZD and her sister is fantastic and the galvanizing heart of the movie. Unfortunately, after her sister’s death, ZD is forced to go all over San Francisco and Austin to find someone to fill that void, and Wes ain’t it.

Partly, this is because he’s a too-thinly sketched idea of a love interest. Mostly, it’s because he’s a too-thinly sketched idea of a person. He’s a realtor who lives in an apartment that Elon Musk would struggle to afford, and the closest thing we get to evidence of professional talent is that he has a tech-savvy underling hack into people’s texts to get intel on their real estate plans.

The movie is genuinely sneaky about inverting that: his new work number used to belong to ZD’s sister, and it still receives ZD’s drunk voicemails to her sister’s ghost. It’s yet another instance of ill-gotten information that he uses to his advantage (getting closer to ZD), which eventually blows up in his face. It’s a sneaky great pivot point to build a story on, but the movie blows by it because it’s not really interested in Wes at all.

Instead, the movie wanders off to Nick Offerman’s abusive celebrity chef and a wannabe-Hitch character who is a podcasting influencer teaching women to be more lovable by reciting banal platitudes in a British accent. And while it all builds out the world, it also leaves the central relationship completely unexamined, so that by the end I still couldn’t tell you why these two people should be together.

It doesn’t help that Wes is played by Nick Robinson, a minimalist in both style and appearance. That works in A Teacher, the miniseries I loved him in. Here, in contrast to ZD’s realism and bubblicious energy, it’s a hindrance. He plays like a rough draft of a leading man, undefined both literally and emotionally.

All that said, I still really enjoyed it. Just not as much as I could have.

TOP OF THE PYRAMID

This had been on my GOALS FOR 2026 list since January, written down without much faith it would ever happen, given the scheduling demands of being a person in the world with a spouse, children, and a job. Then our summer travel plans changed, and it stopped being a goal and became a ticket.

I had two aims for the trip: writing and wonder.

On the first, there is nothing on earth like being stuck on a train for thirty consecutive hours to force you into writing. The process of writing is, for me, deeply enjoyable. The problem is that nearly everything that composes modern life is engineered to distract you from it and to reward you for not doing it. Even the writing we do now bends toward immediacy: a caption, a post, or the very thing and place you are reading right now: a newsletter on Substack.

A train, while transporting you, doesn’t actually offer you anywhere else to go. That’s the entire trick to writing.

I have written SO MUCH that will never see the light of day, and to be clear, should never see the light of day. Did you know I’m currently on the 8th draft of what began as (I now realize) a fan-fiction screenplay for the Mummy franchise, prompted by a conversation on episode #453 of The Popcast? This defies reason. I cannot point to a professional or financial purpose for an eighth pass at something that may never be anything. The best I can do is call it a hobby: unmonetizable, and a source of great joy.

I’m happy to report that I was able to crank out 50,000 words going 40 MPH from Denver to San Francisco. To what end? We honestly may never know.

As for the second aim: wonder has become more important to me as I get older, which is not how I understood the arrangement. You’d think youth is the season for awe, and adulthood is when you develop a benign cynicism about everything from politics to lawn care to athlete salaries to natural landscapes. But somehow I’ve run the timeline backward.

With more transparency than I usually muster: I find it increasingly difficult to locate awe in the places built to house it. Crowds at tourist traps unmoor me, and Church has become complicated by the residue of political partisanship. I’m neither precious nor puritanical about what to expect from either, but when the sacred skews profane, it’s hard to look at it the way you did before.

Yet still, the compulsion persists; I want to be overwhelmed.

I used to find that in church, where I was handed profound and transportationally supernatural things on a weekly basis. But I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and I watched Evangelicalism pivot from morals and integrity to identity politics above all else, and it left me reeling. I’ve made the reconciliation of these differences harder to resolve than it should be, I know, but I’ll never in my life get over the Trumpian bargain that has been made over these formative years of my adulthood and my kids’ lives.

So for now, it’s wonder that keeps me. Not the idea of it; the fact of the matter of terrain and sky. That a mountain range was doing this long before I arrived and will keep doing it long after I’m gone, enormous and indifferent and entirely unbothered by my opinions or existence. I love stained glass and a well-timed organ or hymn that catches your mind flat and your heart sideways as much as the next person. But right now, nothing puts me on my ass like the mountains.

Pictures don’t do any of it justice, but I picked my favorite two to show you.