Liars and Saints

 The stingray, or manta ray, is a crucial part of "Moana." An elderly ally--Grandma--informs Moana of her wish to become a stingray. "When I die, and I resurface, I want to be a manta ray...." In Polynesian culture, the manta ray represents wisdom, grace, and protection. And that's how Grandma is characterized; she lets Moana grow at her own pace. No need to rush Moana or make assertions--even when Grandma "knows better." My daughter is obsessed with the stingrays at the zoo. Nearby, there are majestic creatures--snow leopards, panthers, gray wolves--but the stingrays take top honors. This is because Susie can touch them in their "Touch Tank"; sight and sound have minimal appeal, but touch reigns supreme. Susie considers both what is alien and what is familiar about the stingray. Alien: "Is that piece on the tail the stinger?" Familiar: "The guy in the corner--that one. Is that one asleep?" At the Met, for several weeks re...

  Roz Chast just wrote a book about the bizarreness of her kitchen. Many of us choose not to talk about "the chipped mugs, the poison under the sink, the freon tubes" -- but Chast puts this stuff front and center in a memoir. The book is not just about kitchen-focused revulsion, but also about the difficulty of "swimming upstream." Many people feel *fond* of their kitchens -- they use the room for a casual cocktail hour, or they publish essays about their joyful cooking memories. (In "Still Alice," the well-groomed Julianne Moore wrestles with her early-stages dementia while also preparing an elaborate Christmas meal in her immaculate kitchen.) ....If you are at odds with your kitchen, you are also at odds with American culture; you can't participate when people chat about food preparation as "the heart of the home." I'm grateful for this weirdness -- I "feel seen" -- and I hope we will get more from Chast before she retires.

 To me, Amanda Seyfried is immortal for "Mean Girls." She has had a fabulous career, though she has never topped that Tina Fey/Rachel McAdams masterpiece. For "Law and Order: SVU," Seyfried did terrific work as a kind of Elizabeth Smart stand-in. (Seyfried's guest appearance is legendary, and you have to do quite a bit to boost yourself above nearly thirty seasons of colleagues' SVU performances.) I also recommend Seyfried in "The Housemaid." Finally, "The Dropout" is entertaining, but, like others, I wonder if it's morally questionable. I wonder, if you're going to fictionalize very recent events, why would you not change the names of the real-world people you're thinking about? (Seyfried is taken to task about this--but shouldn't the focus also include the "Dropout" scriptwriter, Liz Meriwether?) Watching Nathan Fielder's clever "You Can See Everything," I admired several choices. First, I admired...

 The other video I constantly watch is for Janet Jackson's "Miss You Much." I'm not a Jackson scholar; I'm just an enthusiastic amateur. But I do love her. In her youth, Janet is positioned as a girl next door. So, in "Miss You Much," we see her hanging out with peers at a billiard parlor--she is deflecting gossip about a possible crush. (It's difficult to imagine that--at any point in her life--Janet has traveled *anywhere, to any location* without a retinue of professional handlers.) ....The "girl next door" phase also involves one of my favorite lines in any verse of any song--Janet describes having worked hard all week, having just cashed her paycheck. The idea of Janet Jackson living paycheck to paycheck is something that makes me giggle. For a while, Janet is so successful, you just need to pick a common phrase and set it to music, and it becomes a hit. "Miss You Much" grows out of someone, a writer, noticing that he often b...

 My son's worst behavior occurred over the summer. His teacher had disappeared--in her place, a twenty-year-old materialized. The classroom became chaotic, and my son expressed his distress by trying to poop in my backyard. There is a long history of autistic kids having an idiosyncratic relationship to poop. If you have a developmental delay, then your behavior around poop can resemble a toddler's behavior--and we all know what toddlers can do with their poop. Staring in horror through my kitchen window, I wondered which of my sins had led to this moment of cosmic retribution. *I do not read the school emails about the local kid-friendly production of "Cinderella" and the district-wide "move-a-thon." *I am withdrawn. I know that lowkey behavior around an impulsive kid is a good move--but I take this idea to the extremes. Being lowkey is different from being withdrawn. *I permit screenings of the Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" segments. These are n...

 Maurice Bailey was a man who tried to take a sailing trip with his wife. The trip went off course, and the two amateurs were stranded in the ocean (on a tiny raft) for many weeks. Bailey came home and published the story of the disaster--and sales went through the roof. Unfortunately, Bailey's *subsequent* voyage went very well--so the subsequent account (a *new* book) did not sell well. No one wants to read about a tediously successful voyage. I thought about Bailey while I made my way through "Notes on Being a Man," perhaps the worst book I've ever read. I planned to stop reading around page 80. But my hatred for the book was so strong, it pushed me forward. I felt an intense pleasure in my loathing for the writer, Scott Galloway. Do you know how, if you follow the political spectrum way, way far left, eventually the radical libertarians actually begin to seem like radical conservatives? My disdain for Galloway became so powerful, it began to resemble enjoyment. Re...