PicoBlog

YOU is without a doubt one of Netflix’s most successful shows till date—four seasons, each one better than the last (in my humble opinion, at least), with the most recent set of episodes dropping today. And the biggest reason for YOU’s success is the show’s main character, Joe Goldberg. Joe is, frankly, neither truly likeable nor relatable to most of us (or so I hope). He’s a murderer, and believes he can “save” women that don’t actually need saving.

A veteran critic and entertainment journalist, Alonso Duralde has contributed to publications far and wide, including MSNBC, The Wrap, The Advocate (where he served as arts and entertainment editor), and, most recently,The Film Verdict. Duralde’s also a familiar face, thanks to appearances on TCM and elsewhere, and a familiar voice thanks to podcastsLinoleum Knife,Maximum Film!, andBreakfast All Day. He’s also written one book about Christmas movies, Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas, and co-authored a second, I’ll Be Home for Christmas Movies.

The first time I went to Win Son bakery and café in Brooklyn, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It’s billed as a Taiwanese-American bakery, and I’m not too familiar with Taiwanese baked goods. I ordered a few things off the menu that sounded good, and after I brought them to the table, I started tasting my way around the tray, and everything I ate blew me away. Everything was delicious.

Hey y’all, Today I want to share a conversation I had with two of my favorite critics. Stephanie Zacharek is the film critic at Time. She is the recipient of a Newswomen's Club of New York award, and she’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Dwight Garner is a book critic for The New York Times, writing about fiction, nonfiction, poetry and the book world. His most recent book is The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating and Eating While Reading.

Welcome to this SPECIAL EDITION of The Square Inch Newsletter. Subscribers may expect regular programming to resume shortly. The following is a lengthy review of a popular book. Stephen Wolfe’s The Case For Christian Nationalism (Moscow: Canon Press, 2022) is a manifesto that has garnered a great deal of online publicity. Scoring as the #1 bestseller in Amazon’s “Nationalism” category, the book has enjoyed a large boomlet of popularity across a wide and diverse conservative Christian audience.

One of the reasons I for years rejected the theory of a conspiracy to kill JFK was that it’s too hard to keep small secrets, let alone an enormous one. “Somebody would have talked by now,” I once told a relative who had read a lot of books on the JFK assassination. “A deathbed confession. Something.” What I didn’t realize at the time was that there had been confessions and near confession from people inside the US government.

A book with the title A City on Mars sounds like it should be a classic Golden Age of Science Fiction-style paean to space settlement, and the authors (the polymathic power couple Kelly and Zach Weinersmith) acknowledge that that’s exactly what they originally hoped to write. However, after copious research, they ended a book that firmly convinced me that there will not, in fact, be a city on Mars in this writer’s lifetime (barring serious life extension technology, which I’m still hoping for).

Today we’ve got another episode of Rom Coms Revisited: exploring the good/bad/ugly of early 2000s rom coms. This time, one of my personal faves. Loading... The basics: Debra Messing’s Kat Ellis hires Dermot Mulroney’s Nick Mercer to pose as her boyfriend and attend her sister’s wedding, paying him $6,000 in cash. I love Kat’s practicality here. She needs this to go well, so she hired a professional. And he’s definitely a professional.

Turkey tail mushrooms (Trametes versicolor) are pretty common as mushrooms go.  They can be found throughout the world and are easily identifiable, but aren’t exactly edible--at least in the classic sense.    These aren’t the mushrooms you take home to cook up for your pasta.  So they don’t often make the foragers’ favorites list.  Nevertheless, these mushrooms have some pretty powerful benefits. And recent studies have proven what traditional healers have known all along--that turkey tail mushrooms are highly medicinal.