Once a month, I share the best of what I’ve been reading, watching, and exploring. Enjoy!
Our Portland home is for sale
We thought it would be our forever home—until we realized Portland wasn’t our forever city. It’s the best home I’ve ever lived in, and I will always miss it.
It sits on 1.2 acres, ten minutes from downtown, with its own forest, walking trails, and a creek running through it. Heated pool, ten-person hot tub, barrel sauna. A home theater downstairs, and a kitchen designed by a well-known Portland restaurateur. Standing in the living room, you forget the city is there at all.
We’d spend our mornings in the hot tub, afternoons by the pool that ran into the night, long dinners, movie nights, walks through the woods.
Now it’s someone else’s turn.
See the listing here. You can reach our agent, Tracy Hasson, directly at tracy.hasson@cascadehasson.com or 503-312-2759. And if you know someone looking, I’d love it if you passed this along.
Books
Darby, Love . . .: (Alive Things Mom Said to Me Before She Died) by Darby Hudson. Hudson is an Australian poet whose mother had a unique way of seeing the world. After she died, he started sharing the things she used to say to him, and millions of people found them. This book is the collection.
Here’s a flavor of what you’ll find: “Darby, love, when you go for a walk, remember to tell things you love them aloud. Trees, clouds, fire hydrants. Tell all the things you love them.” And a few pages on: “Darby, love, never apologize for something, then fart. It’s not a time to relax.” It lives on our coffee table now, and it makes me smile every time I pick it up.
Shows
The Bear, Season 5 (Hulu). One of my favorite shows ever, and this is the last of it. Most of the time when you’re watching television, you know you’re watching television. This never felt that way—the writing and the acting sit so close to how people actually talk and behave that I stopped noticing the difference. I’m going to miss it.
Films
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026). [Theaters] A young director is handed a dying slasher franchise to revive and goes looking for the reclusive actress who played the lead in the original. Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson are a phenomenal pair. Funny, strange, and unsettling, often in the same scene. I’ll never look at dipping sauce the same way again.
Thelma (2017). A young woman leaves her strict religious parents for university in Oslo and falls for a woman in her class. She finds that what she was taught to believe and what she wants can’t both survive. Then her body starts doing things no doctor can explain. Joachim Trier made this film before The Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value—same eye for family damage, pointed somewhere much stranger.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass (2026). Zoey Deutch plays a small-town hairdresser whose fiancé cashes in on their “celebrity sex pass,” so she heads to Los Angeles to even the score with hers: Jon Hamm, playing himself. It’s completely unserious, and it commits to the stupidity with total sincerity, which is the only way this kind of film works. Same director as Wet Hot American Summer, and it shows. I left smiling.
Dangerous Game (1993). Harvey Keitel plays a director making a film about a marriage falling apart while his own falls apart off camera. Not a comfortable watch, but worth it for Madonna’s incredible performance alone.
Related
Bold
