À la carte (June 17, 2025)

What to read, watch, and listen to this summer

Since finishing Dept. Q, we’ve been stopping and starting shows. I’ve also been slowly making my way through a single book for the last week, falling asleep reading the same few pages night after night. I think ~what’s happening~ has fried my attention span. Nothing I read or watched in the last week could wholly distract me from the footage of parents and children getting “arrested” in their schools, places of work, and neighborhoods. I’m both haunted by these images and drawn to them, checking Instagram as I get into bed and the moment I wake up. Writing about anything else feels very besides the point. And promoting my writing on social media feels more than a little cringe.

Until I figure out how to write about it/what I can do about it (and whether these are the same things), I’m going to try something a little different this week. Rather than recommend things I’ve already consumed, I’m going to share what I want to read or watch or listen to in the coming weeks. This list isn’t particularly curated for summer but does reflect some of my current preoccupations—including AI, hair loss, and mother stories.

(For those of you who are new here, every two weeks I send out four(ish) cultural recommendations. One monthly “À la carte” edition is free, while the other is for paid subscribers only—who help defray the costs of childcare so I can spend my days reading and writing. This week, paid subscribers will get to see the television, film, podcast, and music on my list, below the paywall.)

If you’d like to become a paid subscriber (paid subscribers also receive longer monthly personal essays about motherhood, literature, and culture, as well as access to the full archives), I’m offering a SUMMER READING SPECIAL! You’ll get 15% off Turtleneck Season for one year if you sign up before June 24.

I am not Old Navy! This is my first ever sale! Take advantage of it!

Read

Reading outside is often better in theory than in practice during the summer (bugs, sweat, sun-induced drowsiness), but it has also been years since I’ve gotten to indulge in the lazy idyll of a beach day—read, swim, sleep, repeat. Now that I live in a beach town, I’ve been dashing to the beach for 45 minutes during the day whenever I can, book in tow. My amazement with the fact that I live in said beach town and that I can see my toes in the crystalline cerulean water of Lake Michigan has precluded me from doing much reading so far, but here’s what I have queued up to bring to the beach.

• Flashlight by Susan Choi. I loved Trust Exercise for which Choi won the National Book Award in 2019, and Flashlight has been generating a lot of buzz!

• I’ll Come To You by Rebecca Kauffman. Described by reviewers as a warm, family novel with overlapping narratives, this sounds like my literary catnip!

• Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara. Described as an astute and personal exploration of what the digital technologies like the Internet and ChatGPT are doing to us.

• Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Caladone. In translation, a woman tries to reconstruct what led her parents to abandon her as an infant in the Villa Borghese. I don’t know much more about this book, which hasn’t even been published in the U.S., but I’m intrigued by its depiction of the lives of marginalized women in southern Italy.

• The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex by Melissa Febos. Febos is just one of the best writers out there. I was lucky enough to take a memoir class with her and can’t wait to read her latest.

• My writing classmate

  Allison Hiltz
  ’s essay on hair loss and structural sexism.

Here’s where you can find me from 4-4:45 every day this summer.