À la carte (June 3, 2025)
A stay-up-too-late show, a Jamaican novel, American Bulk's thoughts on Costco, and a very quiet movie.
This week, without a paywall, some things to watch and some things to read! We spent the weekend mostly at home, anxiously waiting for the symptoms of hand, foot, and mouth disease to present in my daughter, since the vile childhood disease is going around her class. They finally appeared yesterday morning—fingers crossed her case stays mild. The upside of our antisocial weekend is that I did a lot of reading and tv-watching. (The below does not even include the seven episodes of the second season of Single’s Inferno that I’ve watched in the last week…)
A bingewatch
I am coming up for air after spending the last four days in the dank basement bathroom of Edinburgh’s police department. It feels like forever since I’ve been truly gripped by a detective thriller—gripped in a “maybe we should spend the baby’s entire nap watching tv” kind of way. In 2025, there are few cultural pleasures greater than, IMHO, immersing yourself in a gloomy foreign landscape and joining an obsessive detective in neglecting domestic duties while doggedly trying to crack a gruesome case. But truly great mysteries are few and far between. My Amazon Prime home screen is a carousel of abandoned first episodes of second-rate subtitled detective shows, none of which compare to the gold standard of British detective thriller television, Broadchurch.
So my curiosity was immediately piqued when I saw Netflix's promo for its new Scottish crime thriller Dept Q on Friday. A middle-aged Matthew Goode appeared to be playing an English version of every grumpy detective ever played by David Tennant. The premise seemed simple enough—after getting shot at a crime scene, Goode’s cantankerous DCI Morck is relegated by leadership to the basement of Edinburgh’s police station, where he is tasked with leading a new cold case unit.
The show’s first of many plot twists comes in the selection of the unit’s first cold case. It’s one of the creepiest crimes I’ve ever seen depicted on TV. Be warned. Sometimes it’s easier to disassociate when the victim is dead, and this is not one of those cases. But it makes for a rich and intricately woven mystery, one that actually caused me to gasp as things were revealed. The show splices together narrative from the past and the present, making generous use of flashbacks, hallucinations, and dream sequences.
The depravity of the underlying crime is balanced out by a refreshingly delightful supporting cast, populated by faces that will be familiar to anyone who watches a lot of British TV. Morck is surrounded by some charming and endearing colleagues, and is on a genuinely rich psychological journey as he works to heal from the shooting that opens the show. I feel a bit of a void now that the season has come to an end, but am also relieved to be getting my life back.
A novel
I’ve been trying to get my hands on a copy of
’s A House for Miss Pauline since my trip to Jamaica earlier this year. McCauley’s newest novel, published in 2025, promised to grapple with colonialism, the land, the omnipresent legacy of slavery, and Jamaican identity—all things I was chewing on while trying to relax by the pool on the grounds of a former sugar plantation in Jamaica while on a yoga retreat in January.When the novel’s 99-year-old protagonist, Miss Pauline, begins to hear her house’s walls whispering to her, I didn’t need to suspend disbelief. As the reader learns, Miss Pauline built her stone house using the stones from a long-abandoned neighboring plantation house. And the stones have something to tell her, about from where and from whom she came.
I too heard the spirits of Good Hope Plantation singing and whispering during my time in Jamaica—though I heard them mostly in the chattering of the birds and the frogs, and in the humming of their descendants. There’s very few places where the past feels so deeply and viscerally alive, haunted by legacy if not actual ghosts (Berlin is another such place).
A House for Miss Pauline is a rich and delightful novel. Its language, sprinkled with patois, sparkles, and is imbued with a deep and abiding love and reverence for Jamaica, even as it grapples with its bloody past. As Miss Pauline tries to clean up the loose ends of her own life, secrets of her own ancestry begin to emerge. I couldn’t put this book down!
The novel provides at least one answer to a question I couldn’t let go of while on my trip—is the “one love” mythology of Jamaica just a performance for tourists? In the words of one of McCauley’s characters, a housekeeping worker at a hotel, “Dis island here, this one love Jamaica, it one terrible, wicked place, Aunty. It dark.” But McCauley’s overall assessment of Jamaica is more nuanced—at least for those who call it home and who have not left to go “live in foreign.” Know your land, care for it, know where you came from, and keep their stories alive.
A memoir-in-essays
Since marrying into a Costco family, I’ve been fascinated by the enduring hold the warehouse chain has on the American psyche—the promise of quality at a discount, if only you are willing to buy in bulk. It’s a uniquely American concept. Where else in the world do people have the room to store 30 rolls of toilet paper or a six-pack of toothpaste? Now that I live in a big suburban home with excess storage space for the first time in my life, I’m finding myself drawn in, literally, to the Kirkland’s promise. Maybe we should buy a four-pack of Mrs. Meyer hand soaps and a six-pack of Barilla pasta. We’re going to use it…But I remain ambivalent. I’m disgusted by the carts inexplicably filled with dozens of bottles of waters, and by the very notion of buying croissants in a warehouse. But I love seeing what remains of the American dream—multi-generational immigrant families filling their carts with fresh produce, ethnic condiments, and house plants.
And so I was very excited to read Emily Mester’s new(ish) essay collection American Bulk: Essays on Excess—especially once I learned that Mister was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, the landscape of sprawling middle-class affluence in which I now find myself. Mester’s essay collection promised an unflinching look at American (over)consumerism, something it feels necessary to grapple with now that I am the owner of a home with a garage and a basement and a parent to a toddler for whom I am very tempted to buy a lot of STUFF.
Mester’s collection is more personal than I realized—it’s more memoir-in-essays than pure cultural criticism. She has a complicated relationship with her father, one that she is working out on the page in the background of every essay. (I’m still trying to decide whether the book is intended as a “fuck you” to her father, or as a very subtle expression of love.) But Mester is at her strongest when she sets the emotional baggage of her family aside and writes as a critic. I loved her essay on her family’s relationship to Costco, but thought her keenest observations came in her essays examining facets of American big box mall culture—working at Ulta, eating at Olive Garden. I also loved her essay on going to fat camp as a teenager—this is perhaps Mester at her most earnest. American Bulk is a quick read and goes down easily. If you’re looking for a nonfiction beach read, this is it.
A movie
The weekend before last, my husband and I enjoyed streaming the very beautiful and very quiet Italian festival-circuit film, Vermiglio. If you love foreign films where very little happens aside from pregnancy, this movie is for you! If you love The Fast and the Furious franchise, it’s probably not. (Though there are also some stolen glances, literal romps in the hay, and the consequences of a world war on a small village’s men.) This type of quiet festival film feels like a much-needed antidote for the effect much of our visual culture has on the brain. And much to my surprise, it left me longing for a baby.