😶🌫️ Making the Private World Public
Jessa Crispin on what is wrong with men and why Michael Douglas films have all the answers...Geoff Dyer on his working class British childhood...Brad & Mira evaluate the pop culture landscape...etc.
Twenty-sixth newsletter of 2025.
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▶️ On the podcast: Jessa Crispin makes her podcast debut. We had a great conversation about her excellent new book, What Is Wrong With Men: Patriarchy, The Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything, available from Pantheon.
▶️ On the podcast: Geoff Dyer also makes his debut. A wide-ranging and fascinating talk about his new memoir Homework, available from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
🚨Coming up on Thursday: A new episode of Brad & Mira for the Culture, the podcast’s weekly pop culture assessment. Last week’s episode: ‘I Will Show You My Body.’
🎧 Listen/subscribe via Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1. Ted Gioia on abundance and the rebirth of the longform.
2. Emma Alpern on why Substack is where writers go to be weird.
3. Charlotte Klein on the media’s traffic apocalypse.
4. Elsie Lange on how audiobook narrators are grappling with the rise of robot narrators.
5. Hua Hsu on what happens after AI destroys college writing.
6. Katy Waldman on how Eva Victor reimagined the trauma plot.
7. M.H. Miller on a show about truly terrible people that became the defining American sitcom.
8. Kyle Chayka on the importance of online ‘authenticity’ in the modern era and how it’s changing the behaviors of political leaders.
9. J.D. Biersdorfer on how to organize your digital library.
10. RIP actor Michael Madsen, who died of cardiac arrest on July 3rd at age 67.
This month the book club is reading Wanting, the debut novel by Claire Jia. Available from Tin House.
“…mesmerizing exploration of ambition, self-delusion, and the complicated bonds of friendship.” —Alexandra Chang, author of Tomb Sweeping
A searing debut novel of envy, longing, and regret across three lives and two countries that asks how far we’ll go for a friendship, a romance, a dream.
Ye Lian is thriving in Beijing. She has a well-paid job, a nice boyfriend, and plans to marry and move into a luxury high-rise apartment. She’s wanting for nothing–until her childhood best friend, Luo Wenyu, comes whirling back into her life after a decade in California with seemingly everything–a successful career as an influencer, a millionaire American fiancé, and a bespoke mansion in the Beijing suburbs–throwing Lian’s own reliable choices into high relief.
As the two women rekindle their friendship, Wenyu reveals a shocking secret about a past love that pushes Lian to question her own relationship. A few neighborhoods away, aging architect Song Chen is forced to confront his own past and the dissolution of his marriage as he’s tasked with building Wenyu’s dream home. And when the dark side of Wenyu’s enviable life emerges and threatens everything Lian and Wenyu have built for themselves, they must make a choice between the stable known and the frightening unknown that may have devastating and unexpected consequences.
In girlhood memories and karaoke afternoons in Xidan Square, in aspirational YouTube channels and billboard ads, in private hotel rendezvous and secret WeChat messages, Claire Jia’s debut novel is a love letter to friendship; a powder keg of impossible, interwoven desires; a siren song that explores why, even as it destroys us, we always want more.
Bluesky of the Week:
Quote of the Week:
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-Brad
www.otherppl.com
www.bradlisti.com
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