#69: It's presidential death-watch season!
Death by Consumption
8/26/25 - 9/1/25
Summer is dead, and so is the president. Never mind that it's still gorgeous and warm out, and that he is "giving" an "address" today — I know in my heart what is true, and both things are finished. Sure, he may technically still be breathing and moving around, but something shifted this week and now the world is on Presidential Death Watch. Yes, our next president will be some sort of Peter Thiel-powered AI Trump that will unleash even worse horrors than the real Trump, I'm sure, but for now the nation has entered whatever the opposite of hospice is. Did you put the champagne on ice? What are you putting on your playlist? Are you excited to see if JD Vance's mascara runs when he cries?
This week, I killed summer and jumped ahead to Halloween by watching three horror movies, I fell in love with Elizabeth Gilbert's crazy ass, I enjoyed NYC's most charming asshole Keith McNally's new memoir, and I continued my random ongoing fixation with North Korea.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) — streamed at home
I'm going to be honest, for a moment I forgot that Ryan Phillippe showed his butt in Cruel Intentions, and not this, so when we got to the scene in which he takes a gratuitous shower, I was like: here we go!!!! Alas, this movie was for younger audiences so the camera, at most, only went low enough to show us 6 of his 8-pack. What a waste! Anyway, I know most people preferred Scream, but I Know What You Did Last Summer was a young Danny's choice for sexy teen slasher, and watching it all these years later, it might somehow hold up even better over time? It's campy, it's fun, it's quintessentially 90s — just a good, nostalgic film with an all-star cast, and it made me appreciate Gen Z's obsession with all things 90s. We had it so good back then!
I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) — streamed at home
Reboots/sequels are, of course, exhausting, but at least this one had the decency of knowing its place — it nailed the tone of nostalgia and references to the earlier films, while still finding new ways to have some fun. Sure, it has a bit of that Netflix slop quality — stilted dialogue in which characters tell each other exactly what's going on just in case you're on your phone at home; "jokes" about modern life that feel written by an AI programmed by a 50-year-old incel; really weird, too-bright lighting and costumes — but this is a remake of I Know What You Did Last Summer, not, like, Do The Right Thing, so I'm not going to get upset it felt kind of cheap.
The biggest issue is that none of the new cast can really hold a candle to the original cast, charm-wise, which the film seems to know, as it relies on cameos from most of the original cast to keep your interest (including a very good, genuinely surprising post-credits cameo! Marvel post-credit scenes found dead). And it was very fun seeing Freddie Prinze Jr. again! He looks great and seems like he's had a good life, which is nice :) It did make me google "how does Freddie Prinze Jr. make money," though. Where has he been! Is SMG his sugar mama? I'm jealous!
Together (2025) — streamed at home
I have apparently steered hard into the time of year brands love to call "spooky season." All it takes is a 1% feeling of very very slight chill in the air and I'm overdosing on scary movies, I guess. Together is kind of The Substance for straight people, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it! Starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco (the much cuter and, as far as I know, not-cancelled Franco brother), it's a very simple, very dumb movie that uses relationships and codependency as fodder for body horror.
The film, thankfully, doesn't fall into the trap of overexplaining the mystery or lore, giving you just enough details to be like: sure, sounds good, I'm tracking kind of! The gore wasn't as gruesome as I was expecting, but when they do go for it, they really go for it — let's just say that I wasn't exactly rushing to have heterosexual sex anytime soon, but after a specific scene in this I'll probably sit that whole thing out, thank you very much.
"My Once-In-A-Million-Years Love Story" by Elizabeth Gilbert — in The Cut
There really isn't anyone else quite like Elizabeth Gilbert, who regularly implodes her entire life and then lays it bare for all of us, completely exposed to our judgment. Her latest escapade, excerpted here from her soon-to-be-released book, finds her leaving her husband for her best friend, who is dying of terminal cancer while also relapsing into drug addiction. And Elizabeth handles it all... not well!
I can’t even tell you when I collapsed into the utter abandonment of self that is codependency in its most deadly and life-destroying form. I can’t name the exact moment when I made her into my higher power, or when I surrendered all my will and agency to her, or when I decided that it was my job in life to serve her every desire — no matter how much it cost me, physically, emotionally, or financially.
At this point, if you're Elizabeth Gilbert, and you find yourself in a happy and stable situation, do you worry that you've run out material? Do you feel the need to blow it all up, just for the next book? (From one story she tells in this excerpt, it sounds like at least one friend has these concerns about her, gently suggesting she should go to sex-and-love-addicts anonymous meetings. This all made me wonder what it's like to be Elizabeth Gilbert's close friend: meeting her for coffee, talking about some annoying situation at your office, before asking, "What's new with you?" and next thing you know she's telling you about injecting heroin into her dying girlfriend.)
If nothing else, this excerpt does what book excerpts rarely do for me, and actually made me want to read the book, rather than feeling like I got the juiciest part of it for free. In fact, not only has it made me want to read this book, but it's also made me want to go back and read Eat, Pray, Love for the first time. I need to make sure I'm properly steeped in the Elizabeth Gilbert lore before diving in!
I Regret Almost Everything, by Keith McNally (2025) — hardcover
Keith McNally, owner of Balthazar, along with a whole empire of mostly French restaurants and bars in NYC, has a notorious presence in the city and online as a gruff, well-connected personality who tells it like it is — most famously a few years ago, when he publicly banned James Corden from Balthazar for being rude to his staff. You'd think, after a series of debilitating strokes a couple years ago, he'd have chilled out, but thankfully he has only barely softened. In his new memoir, he flagrantly names names, calling out and publicly shaming anyone who has ever wronged him (he makes sure to let you know that Patti Smith is absolutely terrible to waitstaff), while also pointing just as much of that shame towards himself.
It's a self-lacerating memoir that stays true to its title, as he freely admits all his wrongdoings — the times he was cold or harsh to his children, the way he treated his parents or certain staff members, even the details of the sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him. It starts to feel a little much at times, as if this much self-flagellation is meant to perform penance rather than actually atoning for genuine wrongs, but at the same time it feels like a man with real regrets trying to work his feelings out on the page.
And no one can say Keith McNally can't write a compelling sentence! A few of my favorites:
“The James Beard Awards are the American restaurant industry’s equivalent to the Oscars, and equally repulsive.”
“I’ve no wish to kick a man when he’s down, but in the case of Bill Cosby, I will.” (This banger of a sentence is, unfortunately, undone by Keith's frequent and full-throated defense of Woody Allen — I can imagine the back-and-forth he must have had with his editors about maybe deleting those sections.)
“No one likes failure, but for Americans it’s worse than bladder cancer.”
He's the only semi-famous personality I've ever seen start a chapter of their memoir with the sentence, “I’ve had two homosexual relationships in my life," before giving you all the dirty details. He remains an extremely complicated, often-frustrating, deeply compelling asshole, and I hope he writes an even angrier second book.
The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project, by Robert Boynton (2016) — hardcover
I told you last week I could feel a North Korean kick coming on, and this investigation of North Korea's secret decades-long abduction program definitely scratched that itch. It's a wild story: starting in the 70s and continuing through the 2000s, North Korea would kidnap people, mostly from Japan but occasionally from Thailand or as far away as Europe, where they would disappear into North Korea forever.
These kidnappings are insanely brazen (at one point they snatch a 13-year-old girl off a Japanese street as she's walking home from badminton practice), and for a long time the families are left assuming their loved ones were murdered or drowned. But slowly stories or photos started trickling out from the DPRK, showing some of these missing people, grown and often with children of their own. And yet still the Japanese government refused to acknowledge it or push for it, in an effort to avoid confrontation with their very testy neighbor.
It all came to a head in 2002, when North Korea finally admitted to it (though they only admitted to 15 kidnappings, and claimed 8 were dead, while the other 7 were happily living in North Korea), which, I guess, imploded Japanese politics. The book explicitly compares the revelations to 9/11, in the way it completely reoriented the country's politics. Shinzo Abe used it to rise to power, and Japan became even more nationalistic than it already was, much as we saw in the US after 9/11. In Japan, politicians that had attempted to negotiate with North Korea for the return of the abductees were mailed pipe bombs, about which one member of Shinzo Abe's government said, "They got what they deserved." Japan's always been ahead of us, it seems — even in right-wing government-sponsored terrorism!
The most telling moments are how diligently both "sides" work to demonize the other, and to prevent anyone from humanizing the "others." When, in a Japanese article, one of the abductees — who had, after 24 years living and raising a family in North Korea, been returned to Japan — says about his Korean minder, "Sure, he watched us, but from our point of view, he was someone who would take us shopping. They were not bad people," the Japanese government freaks the fuck out, and bans anyone from interviewing the returned abductees. God forbid we learn there are humans just trying to survive in North Korea, as well!
(It's not the same thing, of course, but after I visited North Korea, I noticed a similar thing with some Americans: every once in a while, someone would react weirdly, bordering on hostile, when I said that I genuinely loved all the North Koreans I met. Some people, I guess, really do buy into nationalism, and desperately need to villainize entire populations! But, of course, it's only North Koreans that are brainwashed, not us.)
This book, while slim, packs a lot in — from the personal stories from abductees about their decades in North Korea (easily the most fascinating parts of the book), to historical overviews of the many ties and conflicts between Japan and the Korean peninsula. Obviously, Japan committed horrific acts when it colonized Korea, but the book spends a lot of time focused on the unique situation between the two — to call it "colonization" is almost misleading, in how complicated it was.
As Boynton writes, "Japan’s colonial empire was a rare example in modern history of one ethnic group annexing a similar, neighboring ethnic group, as opposed to distant ‘natives.’” Japan and Korea (and China) had had hundreds and hundreds of years’ worth of trade, interaction, and interlinked history, before Japan decided to colonize. So separating the two, after the war, is incredibly complicated — what constitutes separation? For Korea, how do you deal with the fact that you were colonized and abused by a country that you had previously been deeply tied to? And for Japan, how do you deal with your guilt and culpability? As Boynton says, the unique cultural ties between Japan and Korea mixed with the postwar hostility between the two, led to an “almost obsessive concern with similarity and difference: a passion both for detailing the links that bound the colonizer to the colonized and for assiduously tending the frontiers that kept them apart.”
It's an incredibly thorny and complicated history, one this slim and focused book can't even scratch the surface of, but I fear my North Korean (and, by extension, Japanese) history moment is only going to get worse from here.........