Happy 2026, my friends! Now that it's the end of January, I trust you’ve had plenty of time to secure your word of the year, color of the year, person of the year, vision board, to-do list, to-don’t list, bucket list, affirmations list, and intermittent fasting schedule. Following the advice of the great Krista Tippett, I'm structuring my year around important questions: who do I want to be? What do I want to see in the next twelve months? What's the deal with this pop life, and when is it going to fade out?

The answers may unfurl with the great wheel of the year, but here are plenty of reading, watching, and listening recommendations to tide you over in the meantime.

What I'm reading

Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

Dax Shepherd described Sapiens as the book everyone owns but no one has gotten around to reading yet, and I can confirm: this one has been on my bookshelf for at least three years. But I'm reading it now! Slowly. It's an audacious project—summarizing all of human history for us mortal idiots in less than 500 pages—and even Harari admits most of the pre-history stuff is conjecture. But it is interesting conjecture. And if you have, say, a twelve-year-old kid at home who likes to ask about Cro-Magnon Man over breakfast, it is nice to have something other than a Pauly Shore movie to refer him to. You'd like this one, nerds.

What I'm watching

Death by Lightning, Netflix

Obscure presidential history, unhinged Matthew McFayden, slow-paced episodes with historically believable faces? Into my veins, I tell you, into my veins! Yes, Death by Lightning is a little boring, and no, you haven't seen this many bearded white men since the big Alone reunion, but it's a fascinating treatment of James Garfield, our least-anthologized assassinated president. Did I mention Matthew McFayden is here? With both hands?

What I'm listening to

Unlikely Animals, Annie Hartnett, Audible

A young woman named Emma, who was declared a natural healer at birth but ended up dropping out of medical school anyway, comes home to her ailing New Hampshire family and runs through a wacky cast of small-town characters struggling with the opiod crisis. Downer? No sir! This book is so thoroughly warm, funny, charming, and weird that I've replaced all my podcasts with it. The ghosts in the town cemetery are the narrators. Truly, you guys, I haven't enjoyed a book this purely in a very long time, and the audio version is fantastic. Get it, get it, get it.

What I'm thinking about

I'm in Indiana, so I'm thinking about college football, I suppose.

Not by choice, of course. Indiana University won a (the?) football championship (of the year? of the world?), and when something happens to an Indiana sports team, it happens to us all. At the end of the game, the entire state rose in unison, cast aside our pork tenderloin sandwiches, and sang the Indiana Beach theme song while thousands of out-of-state fireworks exploded behind us. John Mellencamp wept.

So now the IU people are doing what they do, only now everyone is kind of an IU person? Which leaves me to follow the example of my grandmother, a woman who does not always understand my accomplishments, but who has supported them with the same phrase for the past forty-two years nonetheless: "How neat, Leese."

Oh, a football championship? How neat, Hoosiers. How neat.

All of this hubub has put me in mind of a tale—two, actually, which are my only meaningful experiences with college football. That's because I went to Ball State University—the Harvard of Muncie—where we held sports as one might hold a butterfly or a hand grenade: loosely, and for as little time as possible.

I don't know why Ball State is that way, but I'm almost certain it's not my fault. The university just doesn't have the kind of sports legacy that encourages alumni to create entire adult identities out of where they went to college. Generally, we like where we went to school. Every BSU grad I meet is pretty happy with their college decision, and, as a teacher who has worked with, mentored, and based fictional villains on a great many colleagues, I can tell you this: ain't no college in Indiana putting out better teachers than Ball State University.

But that's not quite enough to get us slopping about in the equivalent of candy-striped sweatpants—cardinal-feathered joggers?—and so in the early 2000s, Ball State was hanging on to its Division I status by its fingernails. That's how I ended up going to the one college football game of my life. A friend asked if I wanted to go, I asked if I looked like I wanted to go, and then she said, "Didn't you hear? They're giving free hot dogs to any students who show up."

Yes, to meet our D1 attendance numbers, Ball State bet on processed meats to fill the stands, and they bet correctly. That's the day I went to a college football game. It's also the day I learned I looked like—and was—a person who would sacrifice her principles for a hot dog.

I recall that I did not have fun. First there was "tailgating," which for me involved a limp grip on a can of beer and a lot of sighing, and then we sat on metal bleachers and watched Ball State lose. Someone tried to teach me the words of the school fight song. I was either too hot or too cold, I can't remember which, but since the stadium is outdoors it was one or the other. The hot dog, to the best of my recollection, was fine.

My second encounter with college football was the following year. A friend from high school invited me to stay at Purdue for the weekend because, in what must have been the result of some ill-fated university presidents' poker game, Purdue and Ball State were playing each other. In football.

Are football opponents assigned at random? Or are they some form of punishment for schools with insufficient hot dog incentives? Who knows. All I knew was that I probably needed to do something different for the weekend. As we have discussed, my college Saturdays were largely consumed by Lord of the Rings cast commentaries and boxes of Zebra Cakes, split between me and my roommate on our lint-covered futon. By September, I'd gained seven pounds and I was beginning to hear my Elijah Wood poster speaking to me at night. So I drove to West Lafayette.

There I had the perplexing experience of walking around a Sports School. Have you ever been to a Sports School? You can tell by the ratio of banners to students. A regular school has approximately one school banner for every twenty students. A Sports School has no students at all, only people who are temporarily allowed on campus to hold banners. Some of those people will be shirtless.

We were almost to my friend's apartment when one such person, clad in naught but beaded necklaces, gym shorts, and flip-flops, leaned over his black-and-gold-bannered balcony and shouted, "HEY!'

He was pointing at me. Too late, I realized I was wearing a Ball State t-shirt. I always wore a Ball State t-shirt. When I was in college, they were buy three, get three free at the campus bookstore, and in the course of a year I'd replaced my entire wardrobe with them. If I'd died an untimely death as an undergraduate, my parents would have had to bury me in a Ball State t-shirt. It wasn't a school spirit thing, is what I'm saying. I didn't choose violence; I chose whatever wasn't crusted with anxiety sweat and Zebra Cake crumbs.

"HEY!" the guy shouted again, jabbing drunkenly in my direction. "BALL STATE SUCKS. WE'RE GOING TO KICK YOUR ASS!"

This remains to me a baffling statement. He may as well have leaned over his railing and screamed that we were breathing oxygen. I looked at my friend for guidance, but all she did was wave to the banner person and shrug.

I stared up at him for a moment, probably looking, from his vantage point, like someone he might send to fetch a Christmas turkey. Eventually, I said the only thing I could think of in reply.

"I... I know?"

I'm not sure that he heard me, or that he was in a state to have heard anything except the crushing of aluminum against foreheads. He screamed some more things about boilering up, etc., and my friend and I walked away. I stayed for one night. Did we tailgate or hang around the stadium or listen to the game or something? I can't remember. My only other memory from that weekend is the pervading thought I clung to until I left: "Elijah Wood would never."

And you know what? All of this is fine. It's fine! So I don't like football—so what? We don't have to go to a game together, you and I. In fact, this veers into the other post I drafted this month, "Please Stop Bringing Your Husbands to Backstreet Boys Concerts Because They Are Ruining the Vibe During 'Hey Mr. DJ,'" but we'll have to leave that for another time. For now, remember that in this post-internet society, you can like your things and I can like mine, and soon we'll all graft our eyeballs onto ChatGPT so it can watch the things we like for us anyway. How neat!

Writing updates

The novel is coming along nicely! I'm at 79,000 words and well into Act III, so as long as no new characters show up or turn out to be dead the whole time or something, I think I can easily get the first draft finished in the next couple of months.

And it is, indeed, a first draft. I have paid the price for my 50k word sprint, and I have paid it in adverbs. It's going to be a long edit, my friends. Send Zebra Cakes.

See you on the other side of whatever major body of water you can now ice skate across! Stay warm and CHIRP CHIRP.

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