Weekend reads

And one movie for your weekend watchlist.

I enjoyed the audio version of Exit Interview, Kristi Coulter’s memoir about her 12 years in Amazon management, so much that I went back to the beginning and listened again. (Thank you, free Libby app! Support your local library!) Coulter recounts the grueling schedules and unrealistic deadlines that had her downing a bottle of wine every night, but her prose is so witty and well paced that you find yourself chortling while shaking your damn head. Silicon Valley companies may be known for their “libertine” ways, Coulter writes, but the austere Amazon vibe is more like “a meeting of the Presbyterian budget committee.” Her crushing workload requires that she outsource routine tasks like housecleaning and assembling a wardrobe to a small army of “professional sister wives.” And then there’s the Amazon lingo: frupidity (when the infamous Amazon frugality is indistinguishable from stupidity), CRAP (said of items that Cannot Realize A Profit), FFP (frustration-free packaging). Some parts of her experience defy satire: Coulter constantly overachieves and is constantly denied a promotion. When she asks her boss what she needs to do to get to the next rung, he replies brightly, “Change the world!” Amazingly, Coulter managed to get sober while still working at Amazon. Also amazingly, her book is available on Amazon. Find Coulter on Substack here:

The Exciting Game of Career Girls

.

Rebecca Solnit on money, crime, and anomie in San Francisco

Solnit — whose 2008 essay was the germ of the useful word “mansplaining” — turns her attention to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she has lived for many years (as have I). In a 6,000-word piece for the London Review of Books, “In the Shadow of Silicon Valley,” she considers how concentrated wealth and “a kind of shrinking from human contact” have radically altered the region:

The choices tech titans make in their personal lives – gated communities, private schools, private jets, mega-yachts, private islands – show that a segregated, shrouded life is their ideal. But they profit off technologies which, while encouraging our own social withdrawal, are focused on capturing as much information about us as possible. That is, we are both more isolated and less private than we’ve ever been. I have never to my knowledge seen any of these billionaires, but by necessity I use their platforms and software and move among their employees. I live in a city and to some extent in a world that has been radically reshaped by their urges and ideals, which are not my urges and ideals.

Susan Orlean is on Substack!

I’ve read just about everything Susan Orlean has written — if you haven’t yet read The Library Book (yes, libraries again). The Orchid Thief, or Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, you are in for three big treats — and I follow her fannishly on Instagram, so it was with giddy pleasure that I discovered Orlean’s new Substack newsletter,

Wordy Bird

. And good news for my fashion clan: she’s writing about clothes, among other topics. From the Welcome:

I’ve long wanted to meditate on fashion in a way that’s different from what I’m seeing elsewhere—fashion as memory, fashion as sociology, fashion as three-dimensional functional sculpture that has to stand up to repeated wearing—so that will be one consistent thread in these posts. I also always have a lot to say about writing, so that will figure in a big way, too. I’m going to include a little section called Show Notes that will be quick mentions of purely practical stuff (things to buy, tools to use, books to get) that I can’t resist sharing with you.

Twenty-four hours in San Francisco Bay

I’ve been on a bunch of relay teams in pools and in open water, but wild pinnipeds couldn’t drag me into doing what

Pia Hinckle

did earlier this month: a 24-hour relay in San Francisco Bay, one half-hour leg at a time, through darkness and rain and 54°F/12°C water, with just a brief nap to sustain her. Pia is a fellow member of the Dolphin Club, and while all of us Dolphins pride ourselves on doing crazy/hard things, the 24-hour relay is crazy/hard in an extremely special way. Read Pia’s account: “The Mad, Mad, Mad 24-Hour Relay Swim.”

“Make no mistake, AI is being trained to imitate style as well as story.”

Here’s a chilling report from

Laura Lippman

, author of the Tess Monaghan mystery novels and many other excellent books: “I asked a bot to break story on the novel I’m revising, posing the question: Can you help me write a story about a 68-year-old woman who goes to Paris and finds herself caught up in the search for a Pakistani antiquity, a statue of a Phoenix-like bird?” The results were … well, see for yourself: “Our Robot Overlords.”

And for your viewing pleasure

I finally got around to seeing You Hurt My Feelings (2023) thanks to a free Kanopy loan. (Another public-library perk! The film is also available on various streaming platforms that require subscriptions.) It’s a marriage comedy — and also a therapy comedy and a comedy about writing and writers — that pokes at the myriad ways we lie to the people closest to us, out of kindness or cowardice or just to put an end to an uncomfortable situation.¹ The film is directed by Nicole Holofcener, whose work has often failed to register with me. But YHMF seems tighter, more consistent, better balanced between laugh-out-loud humor and cringey self-awareness. And the cast, led by the peerless Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and Tobias (Prince Phillip) Menzies, and co-starring Michaela Watkins (why is she not in everything?), David Cross, and the fabulous Jeannie Berlin, could not be better. Watch the trailer.

1. I may be a little envious of the white-lying families in YHMF because my own family was in the opposing camp: the George Washington I-Cannot-Tell-a-Lie school of interpersonal communication. Once, when I was 9 or 10, I hopefully asked my mother whether I was pretty. She appraised my skinny, spectacled self for what seemed like a full minute and then declared, “You have very expressive eyebrows.” Thanks, Mom!