Required Reading (and listening and watching and loving, etc): May Edition
On jazz men, burnt ends, and the stubborn art of staying open.
Hello lovies,
This weekend I brought my family with me to Kansas City, Missouri, so I could preach at Church of the Resurrection (you can watch my sermon here!), which is a jewel in the crown of Methodism and makes me feel very hopeful about the future of the church. It’s enormous—like, genuinely enormous with 25,000 or so people—but also deeply rooted in its community because their staff and leadership is obsessed with theological hospitality. Their pastor, Adam Hamilton, told me he’s become convinced we need a “revival of kindness,” which sounds both eminently reasonable and wildly ambitious in the year of our Lord 2026. He even decided to run for Senate this year with the basic premise that he would not spend his time humiliating people. Imagine. A campaign platform built around compassion and service.
I found myself thinking about openness all weekend. About staying porous to delight, surprise, contradiction, other people. About how easy it is to become sealed shut.
Because, to be fair, closing off can feel efficient. Protective. You can decide you already know how everything works and then move through the world like a TSA agent of your own emotional life: nothing unfamiliar allowed through security.
But Kansas City was full of surprises breaking through.
One night we attended a jazz performance where every member of the band was definitely, without a doubt, over eighty years old and fully alive. One man played the bass clarinet with the kind of swagger usually reserved for people without a clicky hip (and I say that as a woman with a very clicky hip.) The piano player absolutely annihilated it and then slowly shuffled off to sit and laugh with his friends. What a delight! There was no sense that joy belonged to the young or optimized or uninjured. No one seemed concerned with branding or relevance or whether they had “reinvented themselves lately.” They just kept making music. And the room kept applauding.
I think sometimes we imagine openness as naïveté, when really it can look more like stamina. A willingness to keep responding to the world instead of retreating from it.
(Also, I need you to know that I tried a form of Kansas City BBQ called “burnt ends” for the first time – have you ever tried it? It’s insane. I don’t know how to explain how pork can do that, but I can testify that it’s not technically food so much as a highly specific form of leaving your body.)
But I’m hoping that maybe sometime this week that you felt porous too. Not a person who only lets in what is useful, productive, efficient, or confirms what we already believe. But remaining open to music. To absurdity. To kindness. To men with bass clarinets. To barbecue-induced religious experiences. To people trying, imperfectly, to make public life gentler. To the possibility that delight still has somewhere to land in us.
Anyway, before I accidentally turn this into another sermon, I want to show you some things I’ve been loving lately. Books, conversations, music, articles, and a few small delights that managed to crack open my very serious little brain this month.
Come along, my dears. Let’s all stay open to what’s still possible.
As I’m working on the book club idea and dreaming up a new podcast season, do you mind helping me figure out how many people here are also listening to the podcast? I won’t feel bad, I swear! You don’t have to like podcasts! Just tell me:
Okay! Thank you for telling me. Now here are a few things that might delight you or at least make you laugh before you have another beautiful, terrible day.
THINGS I’M WATCHING
Beef (Netflix)
I’m starting to think we are…as mystery. Are we doomed to repeat the same stories, the same mistakes, the same hungers? Season 2 of Beef feels like a fever dream about late-stage capitalism and the strange ache underneath modern life—gorgeous, brutal, funny, devastating. And I can’t stop thinking about the final line: “Even all the money in the world cannot buy us time… Seasons, ever changing… this great, even beautiful cycle of life, which leaves us no choice but to accept it gladly.”
Remarkably Bright Creatures (Netflix)
THIS STORY IS SO JOYFUL ANYWAY CODED. Remarkably Bright Creatures follows an older widow (Tova, played by the indomitable Sally Field) whose life begins to open again in the most unexpected way: through her late-night job cleaning an aquarium and her unlikely friendship with a giant octopus. It’s tender and strange and funny. The whole thing is a reminder that there is still so much life left to love.
(Also: the book is also wonderful, if you’re the kind of person who likes to read the story first and then judge every casting decision with tremendous confidence.)
THINGS I’M READING
June Baby
A Jenna Bush Hager’s Book Club pick that is perfect for summer. June Baby is full of grief, longing, seaside reinvention, and the stubborn hope that a life can still be beautiful after loss. If you've ever wanted to disappear to a small island and become a slightly different version of yourself, this one will get you.
Writing Creativity and Soul
I know that most of us are not professional writers, but I am absolutely enamored by Sue Monk Kidd’s new book Writing Creativity and Soul so I’m going to tell you all about it. It is a lovely, winding rumination on the permission to create. She names the stuckness of life, the long middle of becoming, the fear that creativity belongs to someone else. If you want to find some of that strange courage of beginning before you feel ready, this book will convince you that the creative life is less about brilliance than attention, honesty, and staying open long enough for something true to emerge.
Live to See the Day
I just started this book and love it already. The author Mark Medley is also the Deputy Opinion Editor at The Globe and Mail (shout out to Canadian excellence!) and I got to know his wonderful brain when he was editing my piece on ridiculous roadside attractions in Manitoba. The book has a wonderful premise: what do we learn from people who are trying to do impossible things? He talks to people searching for lost treasures and aliens. He follows the story of a woman trying to win votes for a national animal political party who never wins more than two hundred votes after exhaustive door-to-door canvassing. Why do we devote ourselves to tasks or causes that we may never see come to fruition? It’s a wonderful question, and I can’t wait to have him as a future podcast guest so I find out more about the deliciousness of trying.
THINGS I’M LOVING
Postage Stamp Scenes
To know me is to know that I am obsessed with the world’s largest things, but here’s a zag you probably saw coming… I also love very tiny things! When I stumbled upon these incredible POSTAGE STAMP SIZE works of art, I went down the rabbit hole of the artist’s Instagram. I dare you not to fall in love.
ODDS AND ENDS
Your Name in Landscape
The NASA/USGS Landsat program provides the longest continuous space-based record of Earth’s land in existence, helping scientists track the changing planet across decades. It also produced one of the most unexpectedly delightful NASA projects imaginable: a website where you can type in your name and see it spelled out with real satellite images of rivers, deserts, forests, and landforms that somehow resemble letters from space. Thanks, NASA.
Having ‘Boring’ Conversations Is Actually Really Good for You
We joke a lot about being “small talk survivors,” but it turns out those tiny conversations might actually save us. A recent study found that people who chatted with a neighbor in the elevator or a stranger in the grocery line enjoyed it far more than they expected—and those small moments of connection can ease loneliness, anxiety, and depression.
Maybe we don’t need every interaction to be profound. Sometimes it’s enough just to feel seen by another person for a minute.
Man Goes Viral for Crashing a Fashion Show on the Beach
If you need a good giggle today, you’re welcome. That’s all.
Totally Professional Xylophone performances
I’ve been trying to make my own fun lately by taking everything TOO SERIOUSLY so which led to this deeply powerful performance of “Under the Sea.”
Doing Terribly Well hat
I stopped by Rainy Day Books in Kansas City to sign a few books and a few of you asked about the hat I was wearing (and wear a lot lately). It says Doing Terribly Well. It’s one of my favorite responses to “How are you?!” and apparently also yours.
Also available: sweatshirts, stickers, mugs, and a few other things for people who like to wear their feelings with some dignity.
Reflection
I promised us a Joyful, Anywhere season where we can practice putting ourselves in the way of joy, so this week’s spiritual experience is inspired by the band of 80+ men I watched with unbridled glee. See if you can dig out an old instrument, remember an old song, or sing something loudly (badly! It doesn’t matter) that lets you noodle around. Share the song that comes to mind and what it reminds you of. I’d love to hear it (and bonus points if you commit to performing it for an unsuspecting loved one sometime soon.)
"You Can Call Me Al," by Paul Simon. This song can bring me out of (Cue "Hee Haw!) "deep, dark, depression, excessive misery," at almost any time. I've never understood what it means, but I find it clever and "jumpy!" That bass solo is phenomenal! I can't sing it or play it but. I sure can jump and bounce to it!
RBC movie so good! Read the book too it will bring a joyful glow on the inside. I have been reading a ton lately- it's been surprisingly therapeutic- definitely read The Correspondent!!!