Your homework this week is to read Lionel Shriver’s latest Spectator column (“Keep your politics à la carte”) and then go for a long walk. While you’re on that walk throw on Scott Galloway’s latest No Mercy / No Malice post (“Listen”) as read by George Hahn. If you should happen to come by any strangers, be nice to them.

I’m not sure what we did to deserve Maria Bamford or her recent memoir, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere (2023). She reviews in passing, for example, a self-help book by using the framework of that self-help book against itself, and it’s not only unspeakably hilarious it also qualifies as high art.