just great stuff to read

Happy Weekend! I thought I would share some essays/hodge-podge that I’ve really enjoyed reading lately. These completely unrelated drawings of Joan Didion and Vendela Vida talking are by Wendy Macnaughton.

The Vital Importance of the Top 10 Korean Pop Songs, by David Cho. a funny writer who’s Korean explains the almost hysterical importance of pop music in Korea. You get to hear more about Girls Generation, that group of nine Korean girls that is apparently enormously, and economically influentially, popular.

Walking Dead recap, by Starlee Kine. I’m linking to a month old recap because I don’t actually watch the shows, I just read the recaps. Grotesque violence is so much fun to read related in a candid, distant tone. Here’s an amazing moment I experienced this week that reminded me of this recap: I’m sitting in a Bible study with free childcare (a big reason why I was there) and an older, very nice and soft-spoken woman, starts explaining connections between the passage and The Walking Dead episodes. Clearly not another woman in the place had ever watched a show, but this woman was a huge fan, and wanted to relate how much the scenes reminded her of the verses we were studying. I tried to nod along empathetically, but I was in the back row and I’m sure I was drowned out by the agape mouths that surrounded me.

A Rough Guide to Disney, by John Jeremiah Sullivan. (or, as I pitched it to Joe, “Dads finding nooks in which to smoke pot while at Disney.”) I saved the best for last! I’m reading a collection of essays by JJS right now, and I’ll just casually share that NPR suggested he might be the best magazine essayist alive right now. This essay is not in the book, but it is free to read online, and it so good and about so many different things at the same time, and illustrative of why you might want to add his book to your Christmas list.