Show & Tell: Choke Jobs, That AI Booklist, and My Enemy Is Back!
Unstacked Digest for the week of May 19 -25
This is Show & Tell where I tell you some things I loved from the week and the one thing I hated, plus round up everything else going on around these parts. The first half of Show & Tell is free to all. The adoration and hateration are for paid subscribers only.
The 2025 Nonfiction Reading Guide is out in the world! I am proud of this one. I love the categories. I loved getting some smart readers to contribute. And of course, I love the book. If you missed it, don’t do that.
The 2025 Nonfiction Reading Guide
Here we are, the end of May aka Summer Reading Guide SZN™. And I’m back, just like everyone else, with my own foray into the guidescape. We call it the Nonfiction Reading Guide aka NRG.
Also, reminder, later today, there is a virtual meet up to discuss the guide, and all the details are in the above post. I look forward to seeing you and talking all things nonfiction.
For those of you who are new, welcome to Grown-Up Show & Tell. Basically I recap the week, my reads, any announcements or appearances, and then I talk about things I love from the week, and one thing I hate. The majority of GUS&T is free, but when I start getting fired up and saying stupid shit, I putit behind the paywall. I’m not that brave. If you want all of it, now is a great time to upgrade to a paid subscription1.
This Week in The Stacks
A real hodge podge last week around here: Knicks fans, Nuuly, and ice cream.
I had the pleasure of talking with
about his YA novel This Thing of Ours. We talked classics, sad boys, and writing for young people.
Have I mentioned I made a reading guide? No? Well here it is.
My pal
, the queen of the summer reading guide, dropped her Paperback Summer Reading Guide on Friday, so we tried a Substack Live to talk about our guides; how we make them, what is the most rewarding part, and what we plan to read now that we’re done. While my guide is all nonfiction, Sara’s guide is all fiction, mostly backlist, and has 45 book recommendations, many of which you’ve likely never heard of. I can’t endorse it highly enough.
Books I Read This Week
Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story by Rich Cohen
In May 2019, wealthy housewife Jennifer Dulos dropped her kids off at school and was never seen again. She was in the middle of nasty divorce, and her husband was the number one suspect. This book took me by surprise (I knew nothing of the case going in), yes it is true crime, and pretty standardly so. However, the complexities of this case added gave Cohen the ability to add depth and texture to this story. The exploration of Jennifer’s wealthy self-made immigrant Jewish family thriving in NYC and the pressures that added combined with the tension of Jennifer wanting to be both a socialite and a struggling artist playwright, are so interesting to parse. As the book comes together, the tragedy of it all is slowly brought into focus. Cohen does make some odd choices, inserting himself and his opinion into the story, which felt out of sync from the rest of the book, and completely unnecessary. After reading the introduction I didn’t think the book had much to offer, but by the end of part one I was making up chores that needed to be done so I could keep listening2.
Fave of the week!
They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Steven Scott, Justin Eisinger, and illustrated by Harmony Becker
A graphic, young adult memoir from celebrated actor and activist, George Takei, about his childhood growing up in an American concentration camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. The heartbeat of this book is strong, seeing internment through the eyes of a child but filtered through Takei’s memories as an adult worked well. The book falters a bit in glossing over some of the history, Korematsu v. U.S. is almost a footnote despite its importance in the legality of internment. I found this book to be impactful and it made me want to read more and dig deeper into the history and experiences of Japanese Americans at this time.
They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals by Mariah Blake
An investigation into the chemical industry and their history of hiding the dangers of forever chemicals as told through the story of one town and the people who were poisoned by corporate secrets. These companies do not give a fuck about people, not for one second. This book is enraging and depressing, and frankly, terrifying. Even if you don’t have a large chemical company dumping waste into your town’s water supply, these forever chemicals are all around us. Blake drives this point home over and over. In fact, this book gets a lot repetitive. It is short, but it could have been even shorter. There is a little too much added personal/human interest, but I didn’t feel like it was earned. The book is good, the information in it is revelatory, but the push to put a human face to all of this can bog the story down in parts.
Housekeeping
This month on Here and Now I talked about family drama in both fact and fiction. Check out the chat and the list of books I recommended here.
Things I Love…
Books
I feel like the biggest book news this week was that the Chicago Sun Times shared a summer reading list3 that included a majority of books that did not actually exist. Why didn’t they exist? The piece was written by AI. Cool.
This shouldn’t be in the love section, this should be a hate, so I guess you’re getting two hates this week. You’re welcome.
What is most terrifying to me is how little it would have taken for anyone to fact check this thing. No one cared to do the bare minimum. Not the writer, not the editor, not anyone. This is the future of news media as budgets are cut and journalists fired. It is funny bad when it comes to a book list, but it is awful bad when you start to think about what this means for actual news stories that could have cultural or political impact.
Remember “fake news”?
It is here where I will tell you a book I plan to read real soon, it is called The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want and it is about how people hype up AI as this cure all for societies ills, but really it can’t even credibly pull off a book list. Which is not, of course, me shitting on book lists. I know what it takes to make a good one. But I also know how easy it is to phone in a list and AI can’t even do that.
Politics
Look, I used to have stupid and funny things to say about politics. This is no longer true. Things are so bad right now for so many people that I have no jokes. The framework of this weekly roundup piece (loves and a hate) means that I often have to skip the politics section because things are so very bad.
I am not, however ignoring the the thousands of children who are being starved to death by Israel and its allies. I am not ignoring that Trump’s new little bitch boy bill is going to irreparably harm trans people, and the environment, and so many other things I care deeply about. I am not ignoring that yesterday marked the five year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd and it appears that the police killings are only getting worse. I am not ignoring any of it. I hate it here4.