I have a story in this week’s issue of The New Yorker. It is a profile of Johnny Knoxville; here is a link if you’d like to read it. At some point during the piece I was marking up a biography of Evel Knievel with a highlighter— basic research—and I said out loud in my room to no one, “I could get used to this.” (In case you were wondering whether the article was fun to write.)

Now for some books. One of them is enrobed in scandal; the other was recommended to me by accident. Just another freaky week in bookland…

The Life of M by Rachel Cusk
Fiction, 2026

The scandal here is that apparently The Life of M is a thinly-veiled portrait of Natalie Portman, and that Portman might be unhappy about it.

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We’ll start with a quick trend report from summer 2026 in New York City. Here’s what I’m observing on the streets of the biggest apple:

Cargo shorts
Sage-green athleisure separates
Black toenail polish
Conversations about being dehydrated
Socks with sandals
Pastel yellow
Cobalt blue
Tencel minidresses, Tencel tank tops, Tencel everything
Bikini top instead of a shirt
Raffia basket bags
1920s-style lingerie as outerwear
Jeans with the waist cut off like Mariah in the Heartbreaker video
Flip-flops
Sadly, jorts
Happily, books

Yes, books are everywhere. Physical books. I don’t know why and I’m not complaining. Love to see people sprawled on the grass or hunched on the subway clutching a rectangle of pulped wood. Love to see a hardcover peeking from a basket bag or a paperback chilling in the back pocket of a jort. Even a jort.

Below, a whole bunch of options to stuff in your jorts.

Cloudthief by Nathaniel Rich
Fiction, 2026

A few months ago the publisher FSG stupidly shut down the imprint MCD, which published all their best books. Big publishers: they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Cloudthief was part of the MCD lineup; it will still be published but I do not know how robust the publicity engine will be, given the death of the imprint. All to say, don’t hesitate to exercise your pre-ordering finger if the endorsement below intrigues you.

The narrator is a 35-year-old magazine writer living in New York in 2014. His friend has a clever idea to rob storage units, and on one of their plundering missions the two discover a person living inside a unit. The storage-unit-hermit is a young woman called Virginia—not her real name—and the narrator quickly becomes entranced by Virginia’s “alternative lifestyle.” She comes and goes by night and earns money placing bets through illicit online prediction markets. Her grand plan is to live an untrackably private life, though we’re unsure whether her motives are noble (wrest freedom from tech autocracy) or venal (enhance her ability to commit crimes undetected) or neutrally experimental (find out whether privacy is possible).

Because Virginia is beautiful and speaks like a dire fortune cookie, the narrator falls in love. She conscripts him in a plan to rob data centers; the idea is that lifting servers from a Google warehouse will provide them with a windfall of secrets to sell on the black market. The two drive across across the country with wigs and burner phones, paying for anonymous motel rooms in cash, using false names. It is a heist novel, and the wish-fulfillment occurs not only on the level of riches but of ideology. What if a couple of troublemakers could undermine the primacy of our Silicon Valley overlords with nothing but pluck? What if history could be corrected?

I was all in on page 5, when I read this tossed-off line of description:

On the bus we passed a file of identical A-frame houses that formed a long scream: AAAAAAAAAAAAA.

A page-turner built from prose like that, mamma mia.

RIYL: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, caves, dry flush toilets like the kind Matt Damon uses in The Martian, Trevor Paglen, Sondheim’s “Assassins”

To the Wedding by John Berger
Fiction, 1995

I get the sense a lot of readers have a low tolerance for formally experimental fiction. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’ll begin with a warning label that To The Wedding is confusing for 15 pages and then reveals its logic and offers—not only transparency, but transparency of a delicate power that falls beyond the remit of third-person-limited narration.

This is true of a lot of Great Novels that carry the reputation of being opaque: 15 pages of confusion followed by an ice-bath immersion of clarity. If you’re capable of understanding a Christopher Nolan film you are overprepared for a novel like To the Wedding.

It is the early 1990s in Europe. A young couple, Ninon and Gino, are to be married in Italy. We follow the lovers as they face a tragedy with rage and ingenuity. Meanwhile, Berger cuts to Ninon’s father as he motorcycles to the wedding from France and to Ninon’s mother as she travels from Bratislava. A short and cinematic novel about work, family, sacrifice, beauty, illness, sex and death: all of life’s major concerns are present.

If you want to decode the narrative logic yourself, hell yeah. If you want me to do it for you, you widdle baby (just kidding; happy to help), here’s a simple key:

• The blocks of first-person narration belong to Ninon and to the blind Greek peddler.

• The blocks of third-person narration belong to Jean and Zdena, who are Ninon’s parents. Berger often refers to Jean as “the signalman” because that is his day job.

• The blind Greek peddler is not directly involved in the love story. He is a clairvoyant character who dips in and out to annotate the prose.

Those new to Berger’s fiction, as I was a couple of months ago, ought to start with G. That book will rearrange all the seeds in your melon. Most people recommend his Labors trilogy as the next stop on the Berger train but my vote is Wedding.

RIYL: Grand love stories, Wong Kar-wai, Pasolini, recent European history, Annie Ernaux’s combination of sociology + passion, Shirley Hazzard, and—weirdly—Faulkner

Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer
Fiction, 2026

Another bonbon of beach reading, and a prime example of what Kaitlin Phillips calls a lifestyle book— “lots of ideas for living tucked into it.”

A baronessa hiding in the hills of Tuscany places an advertisement for an archivist to catalogue her art collection in exchange for room and board. The ad finds its way to an American college student graduating with a degree in Archives and Record Management. The student is handsome, naive, and adrift. Finding no locally remunerative outlet for his studies, he answers the baronessa’s ad and soon finds himself alone at a little Italian train station “so fanciful you might unwrap it and find it was chocolate.”

As you may have guessed, this is a novel in the tradition of “an American travels to Europe and loses his innocence / commences his sentimental education.” (A novel in the comic subtype of the tradition, I’ll add, not the tragic.) The baronessa is 92 years old, afflicted with vertigo, indefatigable. For most of the novel we don’t even know the narrator’s name because she calls him “Giovedì” (“Thursday” in Italian) and declines to be corrected.

“Giovedì’s” primary duty is to entertain his employer and submit to her schemes. His secondary duties include rose-pruning, olive-picking, and learning to recognize a Venetian courtesan by the style of her shoes. In his spare time he studies the social customs of the fallen aristocracy and attempts to solve the (paper-thin but completely sufficient) mystery of why he’s REALLY been imported by the baronessa and whether it involves the commission of a felony, a misdemeanor, or a mere infraction.

Greer is the author of Less, a novel that was awarded the Pulitzer. It was probably fine but don’t ask me, I read it and remember nothing. The Pulitzer fiction prize is a hazardous way to navigate the literary landscape. Here I’m pleased to announce that the Molly Young Committee has recently awarded Villa Coco a prize for First Rate Opportunity to Luxuriate In a Caper (F.R.O.L.I.C).

RIYL: Marzipan, Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce, Walter Pater, Lambrusco

Postscript. Let me wedge this in: Luca Guadagnino made a movie about OpenAI that stars Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman. It was meant to be released by Amazon but after spending $40M or something on the film, they dropped it for being overly critical of Altman. (To prepare for the role, I heard that Garfield spent months studying pieces of shit…)

Very cowardly of Amazon! Just when it seemed that the film might never see the light of day, independent distributor Neon came to the rescue. Good job, Neon. I wrote some taglines for the movie poster but who knows if they’ll reach the public eye. None of this is related to Villa Coco except on the topic of Italian rascals. (Guadagnino.)

Four quick recs

Two Lives by Janet Malcolm: A lesbian psychodrama and a portrait of an era. You don’t need a preexisting interest in Gertrude Stein to love the book. In fact, it may be better if you’re indifferent to Stein—all the better to isolate and appreciate Janet Malcolm’s Triscuit-dry wit.

The Success and Failure of Picasso by John Berger: A preexisting interest in Picasso definitely required. The cover cracks me up. To read it is to subject the person across from you to the most penetrating gaze of 20th century art.

Radishes cleanse the brain: This is a short essay for The Paris Review blog, not a book. Whenever I read Nicolette Polek’s writing, I experience the strong wish that we could be neighbors. She has a way of re-enchanting the world. Here she butterflies from one topic to the next—

•A plant whose leaves taste like raw oysters
•Hildegard of Bingen
•Home insurance
•Lent
•Fire

…and connects them all with ideas as sturdy as they are lightly-spun. In one section she condenses 4k words worth of Andrei Tarkovsky analysis into 7 sentences. This is what grace in prose looks like. Gosh.

How I Achieved My Body, Mind, and Spirit Goals By Cutting Out Water: A blog post from the anonymous 21st-century prophet who goes by Father Karine. This is the last thing you need to read about wellness culture. Nobody does satire like this lady; The New Yorker should retire its “humor” column Shouts & Murmurs in defeat. One of the commenters compared her flow to a Mark Knopfler guitar solo and I think that is a fine piece of literary criticism.

Sometimes I mock up my favorite Father Karine lines on Zazzle garments. Ha ha.

The streets are alive with language

We’ll close out in the usual manner, with a dispatch from our national license plate correspondents. Thank you to Ava, Blair, Burke, Cassidy, Dana, Drew, Eric, Holly, Kevin, Lori, Margot, Meg, Nick and Tom.

As ever, keep your eyes peeled and send any favorites to mollybethyoung at gmail.com. The treasure hunt never ends.

Other links: zines + Instagram + the last long magazine piece I wrote (don’t worry another piece is coming soon and it is even more bludgeoningly long, like twice as long…start buffing your reading glasses)

Farewell,
Molly

Gardeners love to complain about routine maintenance—weeding, watering, mulching— but we would not have it any other way. It is wonderful to be needed by beautiful things.

Every morning and afternoon I visit my neediest friend upstairs. It is …

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Below are my beach read recommendations for summer 2026, which starts today. Now, this phrase “beach read” isn’t a slur— not in my hands. To qualify, a book must satisfy two requirements:

One is the weight of the book. I’m talking physical weight. A beach read must be short enough not to cause a dent when the spine rests on your nude sun-damaged belly.

The second quality is that it must have a high conversion rate. Meaning, everyone (or nearly everyone) I’ve pushed the book on in years past must have reported back enthusiastically, regardless of the reader’s race, color, creed, gender, age, national origin, cup size, caffeine tolerance, compliance with traffic laws, opinion about Dylan going electric, ability to tie cherry stem in a knot with tongue, etc.

That’s why there are no brand-new books on the list. Not enough data.

A few of them are out of print, so you’ll have to activate your sourcing skills. Hurry up! We only have three months.

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You never know what you’re going to find in that wild terrain between a book’s title page and its table of contents. Sometimes you find nothing. Sometimes you find an affectionate (if unsurprising) dedication to a spouse, a parent, a child. Sometimes it is the place where you first encounter evidence of an author’s hypertrophied funny bone or gonzo sentimentality or abnormal soul or—

(See below.)

Of course we would never discredit an author who uses a book’s dedication page for its officially sincere purpose. Or anyone who skips it entirely. Or anyone who finds the overlap of Dedication Page and Acknowledgments Section to be inefficient and even troubling…

But what a happiness it is to discover the rare aberration!

And then to hoard a bunch of them in one big stash!

If you get to the end of the following and remain hungry for more dedications (you maniac), here are the earlier collections: part one and part two.

Blessings on the book,
Molly

People-watching in LA

Every time I go to LA I think: It is crazy that I don’t live here. And every time I return to New York I think: How could I live anywhere else. Some version of this occurs when I visit any city or town or hamlet in the USA—a pause where I wonder whether I might live there. But my heart always returns to the two magnificent coastal metropoles of our nation. What they lack in quality they often make up for in quantity, at least when it comes to my favorite hobbies of people-watching and eavesdropping.

The hotel room where I was billeted in LA last week was dated and dim, with rusty fixtures and a faded handprint on the ceiling above the bed. My first thought upon entering was: “This is a room where nonconsensual sex has occurred.” I raked aside the torn curtain. A single window looked onto layers of squalor and splendor: tents, palms, mattresses, hilltop manors, a billboard of Spencer Pratt For Mayor.

Then it was the next day. I had a few hours before work and decided to drive to the Silver Lake reservoir for a walk. The process of leaving the hotel was whatever the opposite of a “psychological thriller” is: first my door was jammed, then the elevator broken, then the light in the staircase was out, then the lobby closed for cleaning, etc.

🎶You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave 🎶

I broke free through a fire door and gassed the rental car reservoirward. I remembered the reservoir loop fondly from my brief spell of living in LA, even though the loop is not beautiful. (It is a dusty track around a concrete basin circled by a chainlink fence.) This time there were signs posted everywhere warning about a groper. The groper was described as tall, dark-haired, and bearing an Apple Watch—which narrowed it down to roughly 100,000 people. Hopefully they nab the bastard soon!

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I never know whether it is a good thing to be in The Zone or Flow State or whatever you like to call it. When visiting San Francisco I didn’t dip a toe in The Zone. Not even the crescent edge of a pinkie toenail. For the first few days I tried to sit at a desk during stolen moments and work, but I was in town for superseding reasons—family reasons—and work quickly became impossible and undesirable.

Luckily the work was postpone-able. So I hid my laptop in the closet like an embarrassing secret and lived Zenly for those weeks, attending to filial intricacies and running the house and observing the passage of time.

By the time New York swung back around, I was raring to return to my assignment. And boy did I return. I was in the first stage of it, the reporting phase. (The second phase is writing. The third phase is editing. The fourth phase is fact-checking. The fifth phase is trying to get paid).

Because I am a solitary mammal, reporting feels like an endurance test. Interviewing people or cold-calling them and persuading them to talk to me, and then paying Talmudic attention the whole time—it makes me sweat! Not from fear, but from exertion. You wouldn’t believe how much laundry I do when I am reporting a story, because of all the sweating.

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You cannot make it up. On day five of my trip to San Francisco I sat at a café next to two clergymen talking about how they’ve started using Claude to write their sermons:

“It’s very easy to plug in a particular portion and Claude does the rest.”

“Exactly. It’s a collaborative effort.”

“I told Sheryl and she said, ‘It’s like John Lennon and Paul writing music together.’”

Satanic.

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ACCIDENTALLY OPENING THE DISHWASHER MID-CYCLE
Why does a sense of obscenity and shame wash over me when I catch my dishes “in flagrante delicto”?

THE BANALITY OF AGING
One of the many things you discover as you age is the shocking amount of people who move through life in daily physical pain.

FRIZZY BRAIN
Does your brain ever feel frizzy? Unruly, unpredictable, centripetally excited? The cure for frizzy hair (mine at least) is to drench it in water and let it reconstitute its natural pattern. I’m pretty sure the same is true of frizzy brain—that the quickest way to cure it is by immersing your whole self in water. Ideally an ocean. Sometimes a shower works.

GRAFFITI BOOKS
Not books about graffiti. Those are fine. Here I’m talking about a certain kind of (usually nonfiction) book that clearly, from page one, has no reason to exist other than as an extended graffito on the part of the author—a way for a delusionally persistent person to scrawl “I WAS HERE” on the surface of life and be comforted by a momentary reprieve in his sense of vast melancholic obscurity.

ENGLISH (LANGUAGE)
While reading a novel one day I came across a new word sough, and looked it up in the dictionary. According to the dictionary, sough means “a moaning, whistling, or rushing sound made by the wind in the trees or the sea.”

Discoveries like this offer a momentary ecstatic delusion that there is in fact a word for everything. But then, quick on its heels, comes an undoing of the delusion. Shouldn’t trees and the sea have separate words for the noises produced by their interactions with wind? Surely the physics of those sounds are different enough to merit two words I’ve never heard of instead of just one.

A second complaint about English is: the absence of a word that describes the pleasure of ripping something out by the root, like a weed or a unibrow hair.

HANGNAILS
Surely we should have evolved out of them, by now.

HYDRATING
To wake every morning in a panic of aridity and heave yourself from bed to swallow gulps of water, knowing that this will launch a daylong cycle of tiresome fluid intake followed by fluid expulsion, forever and ever without end, until bed.

INVOLUNTARY ANAGRAMMING
All day I think about anagrams. I am not bragging. This is not a trait that is comorbid with coolness or intelligence. It is not monetizable. It is a trait that (I assume) has already been rendered obsolete by AI. All it gives me is the involuntary knowledge that, for example, GAVIN NEWSOM is an anagram of SAVING WOMEN.

LACK OF FAITH
Why, when reading a book, do certain passages or facts hook onto our minds while the rest swim away? Well, ok, sometimes the reason for a passage hooking itself is immediately obvious. But often it is not. And in the “not” situations I really have to force myself to copy the passage down on paper instead of dismissing my interest and moving on.

I know that I should be transcribing the mysteriously frictive excerpts; I know that if I fail to do so they will vanish; I know they always make their purpose clear in time—and yet it is so easy to forgo this constant minor act of faith.

THE LUMP OF SORROW
Occasionally a lump of sorrow squats in my chest. It’s the lump that forms whenever I am not Onto something. The lump, once it has found residence, is worsened by circumstances such as remaining indoors all day. The lump possesses a horrifying will to expand, provoking me to do things I don’t normally do: dwell in past embarrassments, think circular thoughts about painful and irremediable topics, crave obliteration.

THE PACE OF NEWS
Reading the news is like sprinting up an endless staircase with a dog snapping at your heels. The stairs never end! The dog never tires!

UNDERTHINKING
A habit worse than overthinking. By far.

Happy spring. Below are two book recommendations, a crazy publishing story, and news from our domestic license plate correspondents.

-Molly

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Last year I cobbled together a treasury of intriguing book dedications. Many of you pitched in with your own offerings. (For which, ¡thank you!)

Today we continue this mirthful tradition.

As ever, if you encounter a pleasing book dedication in the wild, do not hesitate to send a pic to mollybethyoung at gmail.com. Kindly include the author name and book title, and indicate if you wish to be credited or remain anonymous.

Dedicatedly,
Molly

Find part I here.

The World Happiness Report is back. Almost every year since 2012 the UN has published an irresistible annual ranking of the world’s countries from most to least happy. The 2026 report named Finland the #1 happiest nation on earth for the ninth year in a row. What a streak.

Because I wrote at bludgeoning length about the above topic last year, I was invited this year to a luncheon at the residence of the country’s General Consul. The invitation didn’t specify or imply an agenda other than “Yet again, Finland is happy.”

Of course I RSVP’d yes—I was tremendously curious to see the apartment of a Nordic diplomat. And mildly curious to see who else had been invited, and for what reason. Plus, it would be fun to write a Party Report about a polite semiformal luncheon. Plus-plus I love the word luncheon. Luncheon luncheon luncheon.

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I wish I’d never absorbed the notion of an “attention span” because now all I can think about is how stubby mine is. Especially for the pile of required reading (required because it is related to an assignment) currently squatting on my desk.

This happens every time. The instant a topic becomes mandatory, it is enveloped in a fog of dullness. The fog is accompanied by a random and powerful interest in any other topic that comes up. During the first 20 pages of [redacted assigned reading] I was assailed with intrusive questions about gas chromatography, the movie Platoon, the maximum size a chrysanthemum flower can grow, and where the writer Denis Johnson was born.

Plus the two books below, which, due to being consumed in a fit of defiance, acquired an extra naughty glow.

The Documents of the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace
Suspense, 1930

Certain forms are so difficult to execute well that I approach them with pre-lowered expectations. For example: soufflés, one-act plays, epistolary novels. This above is an epistolary novel that doubles as a mystery that triples as the only novel Dorothy L. Sayers wrote with a collaborator. Seemed like a recipe for thin gruel.

I only read it because whoever designed the cover deserves a posthumous Genius Grant. I had to experience the text that led to the interior monologue of some uncredited person thinking, “I see ripe persimmon behind a cropped Don Crowley illustration of bedsheets rendered Vermeerly and a corpse with anatomically impossible trapezius muscles. The lettering will be my own invention—something vaguely ecclesiastical, with chaotic Basque inflections.”

One reason the type is perturbing—and then I promise we’ll evacuate Font Corner—is that the letters individually differ. Why are there two kinds of R? And two kinds of A? (below). Not to mention the variations in S and the E. (Shudder.) You need not be afflicted with expertise to be subtly—perhaps imperceptibly—discomfited:

Of course, a lot of great covers festoon bad books, and I had to find out whether the designer had been moved to greatness by the text or by some unrelated agent of inspiration. Having read it, now, I vote the former.

We begin in a suburb of London in the late 1920s, in a house full of unhappy people: a prosperous married couple, their lady’s maid, and two young men—a painter and a writer—renting the maisonette. The first chunk of novel unfolds in letters among these people and secondary characters. Because we have access to nearly everyone’s interiority, we find each character sympathetic, even as they find each other irritating or pathetic or evil. It’s a clever way to thwart a reader’s attempt to identify a villain—we can’t quite shed their self-conceptions, and nobody is a villain to himself!

The psychological insights are sharp and the plot is satisfying. Innards and outtards of novel have achieved superb compatibility.

RIYL: Novels about intelligent British people misbehaving (so, Iris Murdoch novels), Sleuth (1972), Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die (1938), foraging for mushrooms

American Spirits by Anna Dorn
Fiction, 2026

Serious question. Why are there so few synonyms for “lesbian” (adjective form) in English? “Sapphic” is corny. “Queer” is obviously too broad. Surely there are better options in other languages. Polyglots, sound off.

Given this constraint I’m always impressed at Anna Dorn’s ability to write lesbianically without succumbing to bland repetition of that word. She is also unafraid to be a little bit psycho, as an author—American Spirits is about a pop star who granularly resembles Lana Del Rey and the book’s dedication reads For Lizzy Grant and Del Rey appears yet again in the Acknowledgments section. Dorn, you lunatic! Is any novelist having as much fun as this woman?

It is that quality—the palpable fun being had—that guarantees I will read whatever she writes, even if I never care about the putative subject matter (Del Rey in this case; in previous cases: astrology, law school, viral fame, white rappers who are not Eminem).

Most of American Spirits switches between the perspective of the Lana figure, who is named Blue Velour, and that of her #1 fangirl-turned-assistant, Rose, with interludes from a subreddit dedicated to speculation about a romance between Blue and her (female) music producer. When Covid hits, the three women—pop star, assistant, producer—retreat to a redwood-encircled luxury cabin in Northern California. Two albums get made and three people go berserk. The pages turn themselves.

NB the book comes out in April but is pre-orderable.

RIYL: Poetic descriptions of vaping, googling Cory Kennedy once every 5 years, being a female born between 1984-1990, Emmanuel Carrère’s “fictional biography” of Philip K. Dick, which by the way bears one of the greatest titles of all time

If I were allowed to teach—ha HA ha—in any institution I would teach a course called WWJD (What Would Janetmalcolm Do), featuring an All-Janet curriculum. The class would cover archival research, ethics in journalism, intellectual property, concision, and locating the right moment to insert a tiny joke in a serious text. Willing to tailor my lectures to any age group from 12-100. Students caught using AI in their papers will be whipped. No crying in office hours.

I’d like to congratulate three readers on their follow-through in obtaining vanity license plates prompted by these two posts. No drug can replicate the euphoria of knowing that you are driving around in a four-wheeled shrine to the spirit of “why the hell not.”

If you’re inspired to customize but need that extra push, I just checked the NY state database for a few more options, all available:

Thank you for reading!

Feel free to send reader mail or book recommendations to mollybethyoung@gmail.com. Your remarks may be included in a future edition so don’t write anything that could get you fired. Or better yet, DO but include a preferred pseudonym. What your employer doesn’t know won’t hurt them.

Farewell,
Molly

Minasan, mata konnichiwa. Last week, you and I forgot our worries and wandered the streets of Tokyo, making memories to last a lifetime. Today we continue our explorations in an attempt to absorb the world’s most unabsorbable city.

Let’s begin.

p.s. At the bottom of this post is a list of Free or Inexpensive Things I Especially Enjoyed In Tokyo, in case anyone has a trip planned and wishes to pursue activities that imprint indelibly on the psyche.

We’ll kick off the day with a visit to the egg vending machine, which discharges eggs at a cost of 6 for ¥500, or roughly $3.

The egg machine is located in a quiet residential neighborhood, which poses a mystery. Other than “tourist-trap novelty”—which this machine is not, based on location— what might justify the existence of an egg vending machine? Is there a scenario in which a person might urgently need 6 raw eggs and prefer those eggs to be more expensive and less fresh than the eggs available at one of Tokyo’s 24/7 convenience stores?

We conclude that the egg vending machine is not a site of transaction but, instead, a shrine to some ancient god of whimsy whose domain refuses English translation. Hopefully our ¥500 offering will appease the deity.

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Step away from your worries for a moment and travel with me, why don’t you?

First, let’s slip into something comfortable: a pair of individual enclosures for our big toes. With proper attire, these digits will remain warm through the chillier hours of a spring day in Tokyo.

Next, we’ll purchase a box of Fat Spread to lubricate our morning toast and power us through the day’s adventures.

In Meguro City we’ll duck into a phone booth to make an important business call. Next, we’ll stop at a konbini (convenience store) for refreshments—only to gasp at our luck in spotting a rare double rainbow of plastic cutlery!

While we’re at the konbini we may as well stock up on butter, snacks, a perfectly-designed pencil, and a magnifying glass. These may come in handy.

Of course we’ll leaf through men’s FUDGE magazine to discover the latest trends.

Ah, one final thing. Can’t leave without tossing an edible sweet potato paw into our cart

…or a vial of refreshing nose spray, in case a romantic interest comes along to sniff our nostrils

…or a bag of these, for obvious reasons. Ok, time to check out. Good thing we visited an ATM earlier today. Amazingly, we’re able to pay for our entire cart using coins. Unlike their poor devalued kin in the USA, coins in Japan still hold value.

Onward. We pass, and admire, a row of retrofuturistic apartment buzzers

..as well as solo glove resting enigmatically on an embankment.

At the sight of this sign we sheepishly dispose of our Krylon cans and move along.

Our ride is here. Let’s hop aboard and visit Shinjuku.

“One of everything, please.”

Next, let’s meet up with author and Tokyo resident W. David Marx at the Togoshi-Ginza shopping arcade.

Here we can ask David a question that has been hounding us all day: Why are there almost zero public trash cans in Tokyo?

David explains.

“Tokyo co-hosted the World Cup in 2002, shortly after 9/11. The city was concerned terrorists might plant bombs in public trash bins and removed a lot of the bins temporarily. Not surprisingly, they discovered that the cost of waste removal plummeted in the aftermath of the bin removal. Interestingly, the presence of litter didn’t increase. The taboo against littering was strong enough, as a social habit, that a lack of bins had little effect. So the city just continued not having them.”

“What do people do with their garbage?” we ask.

“Fold it up and keep it on their person until they can locate a trash can.”

“So everyone is smuggling garbage all day?”

“It’s possible,” says David.

We nod in recognition. Deep inside our purse festers an ice cream spoon, a receipt for coffee, a used Band-Aid, two Kleenex and a now-empty bag of Skinless Wieners.

Next we visit a beauty store to see the latest cosmetic advances, including Artclass Frottage Pencils and Blurry Pudding Pot in a stunning pink shade called “MULE”

David waves goodbye to us in the Ebisu neighborhood, where we try not to stare at this totally normally shape of building.

Suddenly, a sign appears.

We heed the sign and head to a grocery store, where we find a basket of eggs masquerading as garlic

…and a bucket of corn in captivity.

At a yōshoku restaurant we restore ourselves with hayashi rice served in a gravy boat.

Dessert is a scoop of chestnut ice cream covered in sweet potato floss. “Floss”, we think to ourselves. What an unexpectedly pleasurable form for a tuber to take!

Whew, it has been a long day. At the train station a looped steel-drum recording of the zither theme from The Third Man is playing over the loudspeaker. We wonder why—and we will never know.

Before heading home for good, we can’t resist taking one final lap through central Tokyo on the circular JR Yamanote train line. We set a timer to measure exactly how long it takes for the train to complete one full loop. (Answer: 1 hour, 3 minutes, 52 seconds.)

Back at the tiny rental unit we shroud ourselves in blankets to stay warm and turn off the ceiling lamp using a remote control. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Goodnight, we murmur. See you in the morning.

This is a deluxe edition. However, it is also a wobbly edition because I proofread it after an adversarial encounter with some vitamins. Mother always said, “Don’t take vitamins on an empty stomach or you’ll ralph them right up.” Once a year I forget what Mother said. Today was that day.

I commuter-ferried over to Alice and Leon's house in the morning, and there—lulled by the comfort of old friends, the drowsy yawns of their poodle, the incandescence of antique lamps—I swallowed a handful of mystery vitamins and was immediately ill. Alice passed me a slice of plain bread through the bathroom door so I could roll it into Rosary beads and eat them slowly to soak up the nausea. My beads offered little protection against the devil’s ejecta.

Items are supposed to enter and exit the body in a single direction— no u-turns!

So that’s your annual reminder to listen to Mother. Below are some page-turners that got me through the coldest month of the year. Plus some upcoming events…

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In the modest amount of words below we will discuss a picaresque novel, a softly deviant essay collection, spiders on meth, and an idea about composting the bodies of rich people.

I dunno, man…

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One of the best things that happened to me in 2025 was that one of you clever readers, encouraged by this list, nabbed a vanity license plate reading UNGUENT. The reader reported that their UNGUENT plate led to some unexpected positive exchanges. The amount of happiness this brings me is: A Lot.

At a time when things are falling apart and gyres are widening and people are recklessly citing Yeats, one way to remain human is to abet mischief in tiny ways.

Here is a list of 75 vanity license plate ideas. They are all available in NY state at time of posting. And probably in other states, too, though I haven’t checked.

Send me a photo if you end up snagging one of them!

-Molly

Two book recommendations, a medieval fairy punch, and a moneymaking scheme for your consideration. Stay warm, amigos…

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
Fiction, 1973

Something Iris Murdoch has in common with Too $hort is that they are both committed to “getting freaky in the right situations.” In Murdoch’s case, the situation is: novels. Her official work as a philosopher is lucid, with a clear origin point (Plato), and feels as sensible and chewy to consume as fiber. Her novels, of which there are roughly 1 million, are fiber’s opposite. They are bizarre, sexy, easily digested objects.

The plots often feature conniving upper-middle-class British people having affairs and ruining their own or each other’s lives. Her novels veer recklessly in quality. Martin Amis, reviewing one of Murdoch’s crappier efforts, wrote: “It would be futile to summarize the plot. Life is too short. The book is too long.” Ha ha. A lot of her novels are too long. But not this one. Amis gave it a stamp of approval, calling it “intricate and fascinating.”

The story is presented as the memoir of a persnickety writer named Bradley—at first he is like Charles Kinbote if Charles Kinbote were dreary instead of insane, but then Bradley falls in love and does indeed go insane. His passion is a spark that lights the fuse of his limited social circle and soon everyone is exploding for separate but related reasons. I bet every character is based on someone Iris Murdoch knew and I bet they all stopped talking to her once the book came out.

People tend to start with The Sea, The Sea when embarking on HMS Murdoch but this is the better novel on all dimensions. One of those dimensions is, it has 95% fewer descriptions of canned food.

RIYL: Pale Fire, tricky framing devices, allowing your decisions to be influenced by dreams, getting drunk and confessing stuff

The Tattoo Murder by Akimitsu Takagi, translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm
Mystery, 1948

I can count on one finger the number of times I’ve read a book on the basis of its author bio. This is the finger:

Akimitsu Takagi was born in Japan in 1920 and went on to work as an aeronautical engineer until the end of the Second World War. He later decided to become a mystery writer on the recommendation of a fortune teller.

Sold sold sold. I gather The Tattoo Murder is a canonical locked-room murder mystery in Japan and am stumped about why it isn’t ubiquitous everywhere else, given how well the genre translates. Perhaps it is too gruesome and upsetting, both as a plot and a historical document of postwar Tokyo.

The book was published in 1948 and takes place in 1947, so the war wounds are really fresh. Stray dogs nose through burnt buildings, bathhouses open and close on the whims of fuel availability, formal gardens are converted into sustenance vegetable patches. Our protagonist Kenzo Matsushita is an ex-soldier trying to rebuild his life in Tokyo when he meets a tattooed mystery lady. After a single memorable tryst he falls in love— only to be dragged into a body-horror nightmare when the seductress’s corpse turns up in an impossible crime scene. Flawless puzzle-plot ensues.

Often flawless prose, too: “A rodent-colored dusk had fallen over the troubled city of Tokyo.” Or, “It’s the quintessential sound of lunchtime in Japan: the sibilant din of noodles being aspirated into hungry mouths at great velocity.” Sibilant din, jeez.

The novel truly is creepier than anything you’d find in an American mystery of the same time. It is also far more emotional: the characters are pummeled with grief, nauseated by gore, tearful with remorse. The anomie of the hardboiled genre is present but it is differently aestheticized; Takagi is dealing in a malaise too profound to brook “coolness.”

He was also a photographer of otherworldly talents:

RIYL: The Third Man, David Cronenberg, József Debreczeni's Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz, tattoo culture

Department of health

A medieval herbalist once wrote of his recipe collection: “Most of [these] I am confident are true, and if there be any that are not so, yet they are pleasant.” That’s a nice attitude, doc. Pleasure is neither sufficient nor necessary when it comes to medicine, but we are all surprised and comforted on the rare occasions when it is present.

Medievalers were heavy users of fennel for all manner of ailments—swelling, eye problems, ear problems, anguished stomachs. I found a recipe in which fennel juice was poured into a mixture of milked almonds, sugar, ginger juice, and wine. It sounded like a dainty feminine punch, so I made it, and lo, it was Goode. Creamy, green, sweet. A fairy nectar.

To make it, chop a fennel bulb and a thumb’s worth of ginger and put those in a blender with 1/2 c water. Then strain the blended mixture into your almond milk, add a few spoonfuls sugar, and as much Riesling as your liver can handle. Now you are healthy.

Department of moneymaking schemes

Last time I was on an airplane I got a faraway whiff, from row 42, of the warm chocolate chip cookies that were being served in first class— and it gave me an idea: what if I baked and packed, say, 100 chocolate chip cookies in my carry-on luggage on next trip and traveled up and down the aisles of the economy section selling them at an audacious (but not insulting) markup? Could probably clear $800 as a cookie-dealer to a captive audience. What would Delta do, arrest me? If anyone has experimented with unlicensed vending opportunities on commercial aircraft, get in touch.

More book recommendations from the archive: mutant tree thriller, Gone Girl redux, noir serial killer, lesbian French militante, and countless others…

Thank you for reading. Please consider purchasing an eight-dollar cookie from me on your next flight.

Farewell,
Molly

Discover cinnamon-sugar croissant

1. Halve a croissant longitudinally and pan-fry it in butter.

2. Add cinnamon-sugar.

3. Eat.

When this idea first made landfall—”What if I made cinnamon-sugar toast using a croissant instead”—there was a rush of adrenaline so powerful I can only compare it to getting barreled.

Build a theremin

Last year Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote an essay1 about an intellectual crisis he endured after realizing that he didn’t know what a computer was—

“Forty years on [from when I first encountered a computer], the technology in the gray box is everywhere, shaping my life in every way, which is strange in itself, but perhaps stranger is the fact that I have never cared about it, just taken it for granted and seamlessly incorporated it into my life. Not once in those forty years have I turned my attention to technology and tried to understand it, how it works in itself, how it works in me. It’s as if I had moved to a foreign country and not bothered to learn its language, as if I am content with not understanding what is happening around me and just settling for my own little world.”

I won’t divulge how Knausgaard resolved his crisis, but it involved traveling 2,000 miles to a Greek island. A simpler way to get a rudimentary handle on computers would be to build a theremin with this kit. It shows you how to use a transistor to manipulate the flow of electricity in a circuit—which is a useful launchpad for computer self-education.

I know the linked kit is designed for children, but I had a patchy education and this thing met me on my level. The bonus of a theremin is that you wind up with a musical instrument that you can use to torture your neighbors.

As an aside, my first exposure to electronic musical instruments came through Suzanne Ciani, which I now understand is like saying “Frank Gehry built my dollhouse” or “Alexander McQueen designed my onesies.” To child-Molly, Suzanne was simply a woman who lived in the same town as I did—a woman whose coolness resulted not from innovations in electronic music but because she gave me a job when I was 12!

Of the job I remember nothing. Of Suzanne I remember: a) very nice person; b) made a beautiful from-scratch spaghetti sauce.

Read some books slowly

There are books that, when they are cracked, initiate an unfolding of the reader’s sensibilities. It is thrilling when this happens. You can almost physically feel your body opening to welcome this foreign book-shaped object into your being. My most recent instance was Haunts of the Black Masseur.

When I encounter one of these rare books I read it at a snail’s pace. Maybe 6 pages per hour. Unbelievably slow. The impulse is to speed through and greedily accumulate pages on the verso side but when you’re moving through a spectacular landscape, don’t you instinctively slow (not quicken) your pace to admire it? Certain kinds of reading belong to the category of “experiences too hallowed / intense to be rushed.”

In same category: prayer, kissing.

Travel to outer space and back

This is a suggestion for easy (and free) programming if you happen to be in NYC over the next couple of months. I’m calling it “To Outer Space and Back!”

There are two stops on your journey. First, find your way to The Drawing Center at 35 Wooster and enjoy the exhibit on UFOs and paranormal phenomena. The theme is loosely interpreted by people representing every slot on the sanity spectrum.

My favorite was a piece called Study for Moral/Volumes/Verbing/The/Unmind, by Shusaku Arakawa (1977). Pictured below with its creator. This is one where the technical skill and visual elan of the artist are equal to the urgency of the transmission. Not always the case with paranormal art.

Many of the diagrams involve frantic arrows and swirls. Theosophy is present.

Anyway, after vibrating through two rooms crammed with cosmic conveyance, walk a few blocks north to return to your home planet, via Walter de Maria’s Earth Room at 141 Wooster. This is a gallery filled with soil and nothing else. It was installed in 1977.

You may not take photographs of Walter de Maria’s soil. Its aroma drifts into the corridor that you cross to reach the installation; if you pause there with eyes shut you can dwell in earth’s most hospitable odor— and find yourself reminded that soil is not so much a substance as it is a process.

Feel free to ask the attendant questions, as I did, although you may not want to repeat mine, which are transcribed here—

How often is the soil watered?
About once a month.

Is the soil turned?
Yes. With a rake.

Do you get to do those things, or does somebody else do them?
I do both!

Do things grow in the soil?
Yes. Sprouts come up regularly. And sometimes mushrooms. I remove them.

What is the insect situation?
There are centipedes, but never to a degree that is a problem. Oh, and in summer we get fruit gnats. But not too many.

And then, there were some questions I wanted to ask but thought of too late. These included, How often do people surreptitiously scatter seeds across the soil? For example, have you ever noticed a spontaneous crop of marigolds or something that would lead you to suspect intervention? What is the pH of the soil?

Both exhibits are free.

Keep a running list of Recent Questions

When you have a non-urgent question, write it down and do not Google it. Instead, permit the question to loiter in a notebook or on a piece of paper taped to the wall. I’ll tell you why in a moment. Here are three of my Recent Questions:

When were scissors invented?

Which animals figure most often in fairy tales and why? (Toads seem disproportionately present, eg)

Why did thousands of years elapse between the invention of paper and the invention of toilet paper?

Ok. The reason to keep a running list is because if you do, you’ll unlock a powerful suctioning force that delivers answers to your door. Every time I write down a question, I stumble into the answer in the form of a book or expert or other superior-to-Google entity. It usually takes a few months, which adds the spice of delayed gratification.

Of course you’ll say, “Molly, what you are describing is a well-known cognitive backdoor.” But this little game doesn’t hinge on awareness; that’s why I included the example questions above! It’s not as though I learned about toilet paper yesterday.

For now I am content to consider it a mysterious mechanism, and will state for the record that I’m a reliable narrator who doesn’t believe in chemtrails / Illuminati / has no opinions about jet fuel acting on steel beams / etc.

Try it! The worst that can happen is nothing.