#80: Heated Rivalry's hockey butts are trying to kill me
Death By Consumption
12/2/25 - 12/8/25
Last night, Justin and I got our first-ever Christmas tree, and it turns out he and I have very different ideas of how you should string lights on your tree. Our sides essentially boil down to: "evenly space them out and make sure all the cords are hidden" vs. "just shove that shit in there wherever and be done with it." Anyway, we survived the ordeal, and now I understand why my parents absolutely hated doing that every year.
This week: I watched the outrageously horny new gay hockey show, I saw the absolutely perfect new Park Chan-wook, I surprisingly liked a Netflix movie, and I read a very good historical overview of the Islamic world.
There are billions of people on this earth, and all of them have Substacks, so I can't say this for certain, but: it feels like this has to be the only newsletter on the planet to cover both softcore gay porn and a history of Islam in the same email, right? So I guess that's something to be proud of!
Heated Rivalry, episodes 1-2 — on HBOMax
I'm not saying Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is gay, but it is rather suspicious that HBO started airing softcore gay porn and Netflix suddenly decided they had to own the network. And I'm not accusing Paramount's CEO David Ellison of anything, but it is interesting that he saw a parade of spectacularly beefy hockey butts and thought, "I have to own this at any cost." I'm sure there's more to the fight to buy Warner Brothers than a high-level tussle over who owns the rights to drop by set the next time they're filming a Heated Rivalry locker room scene, but I just think the timing is interesting, that's all!
Heated Rivalry — and sorry if I'm gaysplaining here — is a new HBO show following two rival hockey players who, basically, have sex with each other. A lot. There's Hollander, the Canadian hockey star (who plays for an American team, I think? I'll be honest; I have zero interest in the hockey parts of the show — thankfully the show has no interest in hockey, either!), and his main rival in the league, Rozanov, the dashing Russian who, I think, randomly plays for Boston?
Look, it's not worth getting into the hockey details of it all — I really cannot overemphasize how little hockey there is in this hockey-based show. When Hollander and Rozanov fuck, you see every single position, every single moment of insertion, every bit of the action. But when it's time for them to play hockey, you see them skate out onto the ice, and then we cut to them in the locker room, like, "Wow, that was quite the game, huh!" This might frustrate some viewers, but this is actually how gay people view sports. We're mostly watching just to get a glimpse of their asses, so it's no surprise this show is a smash hit; we greatly appreciate a sports show that finally cuts to the chase. I think at least 3 years' worth of hockey championships are played out over the course of the first episode alone, and I could not tell you who won any of them. Who cares! Let's hit the showers!
Sure, there are allegedly other plot points, but the show knows you're here for the sex and not much else, so it wastes no time in getting you there; within the first 15 minutes the main characters are already going at it, and doing so while leaving almost nothing to the imagination. Be warned: this is not a show you watch on a plane, unless you want to be put on a List. Releasing this show during the holidays is absolutely diabolical; I'm picturing thousands of young, closeted gays watching this in their childhood bedrooms late at night, headphones on, one paranoid eye on the door.
The porn is one thing, but for me the aspect of the show that had me absolutely screaming was its bizarre obsession with tracking how much time has passed. In the first episode alone, we speed through at least 2 years, with the show updating you on precisely how much time has passed along the way. Between practically every scene, we get a title card with an update: "14 months later," "12 months later," "4 months later." After a while, it started to feel like a bad 30 Rock joke, as if we'd start getting down to "2 hours later," or, hell, why not "25 seconds later"? I understand that this is a key part of the books the show is based on, which I believe tracks at least a decade of their lives — you see, since they play for opposing teams, they can only meet up when their teams play each other, which only happens a few times a year (I think? Again, I know nothing about hockey, despite coming from a hockey family, who I assume are reading this entire thing with absolute horror).
But whatever the reason for tracking it, I really do not need to know that 4 months have passed if it's not important! We all understand the concepts of "time" and "space," and how people's bodies and lives move through them. That is not only how the world works, but it's how stories have worked forever! Characters do something in a scene in a specific location and at a specific moment in time, and then we cut to another scene, which typically happens in a different location, at some later time. Ta da! We understand how this works, so there is really no need to keep updating us on the simple act of time passing. (Though I do like the idea of some obsessive psychos on the internet feverishly tracking the continuity errors in the gay hockey porn show. You know they're out there!)
I sense the show will get a little more serious, a little more plot-focused as it goes on, but I hope it remains as minimal and un-serious as it has been thus far. I'm not interested in exploring the realities of being gay in Russia through the lens of Heated Rivalry, but thankfully it seems the show also has no interest in the larger "what does this say about society?" of it all. Queer media always tends to have some sort of larger meaning forcibly grafted onto it, as some panicky justification for why straight people should care about it. Which I think is why this silly, sexy show has gotten so big so fast (other than, you know, the sex) — it feels genuinely different from the gay shows that have come before. This one was made for exclusively gays (and the girls who like watching gays), with absolutely no interest in justifying itself to a larger audience. If you want to watch hockey you can watch hockey, and if you want to learn about the struggles of gay Russians or sports stars you can watch documentaries about those things. But if you want to see very attractive men flirt and fuck, well, you come (sorry) to Heated Rivalry.
No Other Choice (2025) — streamed via nefarious means
This new film might be one of my favorites from Park Chan-wook, who already has an extremely stacked filmography. But it really feels like one of the key movies of the year, a pitch-perfect bleak comedy about what people might resort to once there are, like, 5 jobs for humans left.
It follows a father, named Yoo Man-su (played by Lee Byung-hun, who I shamefully recognized as "the Squid Game guy") who's worked at a paper mill for 25 years, earning his family a very comfortable little life. Which, of course, all falls apart when an American company takes over and lays him off, alongside hundreds of other workers. When Man-su struggles to find a new job in the increasingly narrowing paper industry, he resorts to desperate measures: namely, killing the guys who seem to have better resumes than him. Once they're out of the way, he figures he'll be at the top of the list for the one job that seems to be available.
It's a spectacular character story and a brutal commentary on the situation we're all in right now: if you're not at the top you're kind of fucked, so of course people will start turning on each other. And it feels telling that the people who made these decisions and are actually to blame are barely in the film; the bosses show up to ruin hundreds of people's lives in an instant before quickly leaving, without even a fraction of the guilt Man-su feels about going after his targets. (Of course, firing and killing are different magnitudes of evil; but from an American lens, where firing means losing your healthcare, there's sometimes not really that much of a difference, you know?)
Man-su does atrocious things, of course, but can you blame him? We're all in a knockdown, drag-out fight for the remaining table scraps of our calcifying economy, so it's no surprise that some people, like Man-su, will feel like they truly have no other choice. This is a hilarious, uncomfortable, beautiful, perfect movie that, ironically, is probably not playing in a theater near you because of corporate consolidation in the film world. Everything is going great!
Train Dreams (2025) — on Netflix
I'm surprised by how much I enjoyed this movie. It seemed slow and dreary, and the fact that it was released on Netflix kind of made it feel like it was in the Yellowstone universe, but this was a shockingly beautiful and devastating film that snuck up on me. Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones always feel like such random actors to me — I know they're out there doing a lot of stuff all the time, but it never really felt like any of my business, you know? But I guess I need to become an Edgerton-head, because Train Dreams really got me.
The plot is simple, when there even is a plot, but this is the kind of film you just have to be in the right mood for, and to let wash over you. It's absolutely beautiful, one of the best portrayals of the Pacific Northwest I've ever seen — the trees feel unimaginably huge and old, and every inch of ground is covered in a thick, nearly hallucinogenic shade of green moss. This is one of those films that isn't really "about" anything, except it's about everything: life, death, love, loss, guilt, pain, aging. It's a quietly heavy movie, one there isn't much to dissect after, but one you want to sit with for a while. Don't plan on watching it before a holiday party!
Destiny Interrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, by Tamim Ansary (2009) — paperback
Those of you who hate when I write about boring history books are going to hate this, but I promise you that this book is anything but boring. Destiny Interrupted makes its aims explicit from the start, telling you it intends to serve as almost a "parallel world history," tracking humanity through the lens of the Islamic world, rather than the Western-focused histories people like me grew up with. It's a huge task to cover: 1500+ years of world history in a mere 350 pages, but somehow, impossibly, it pulls it off. I am not joking when I say this book should be taught in schools!
Of course with such a high-level view of basically all of recorded history, there will be a lot of important moments glossed over (at times, entire kingdoms and empires rise and fall in a matter of paragraphs), but I never felt like it was rushed or brushed-over. This is mostly due to Tamim Ansary's style, which is conversational and light, which keeps you engaged throughout, even though at times it felt almost too conversational. Like, I'm not sure I need to be told that Nizamiya University in Baghdad was "the Yale of the medieval Islamic world" to understand that it was a big, prestigious university. (Unless his point was that Nizamiya University mostly served to churn out arrogant blowhards whose only purpose in life is to make as much money as possible while holding society back from real progress, in which case it was a great comparison!)
As with any great history book, there are fascinating tidbits that give me that little tingle of excitement about history, most notably the history of the secretive Islamic death cult called the Assassins (they weren't named that because they were assassins; assassins are called that because of the cult), who seemed to exist purely to cause chaos. The Assassins, who lived in a secretive mountaintop castle, like Dracula, sent suicidal killers to infiltrate and publicly murder key figures all over the Muslim world. Anytime it felt like Islamic society was finally about to pull it together and unite, the Assassins were there to fuck it all up. When the first Crusaders arrived in Jerusalem, rather than helping Muslims defeat them, the Assassins aligned with the Crusaders, and killed all the key players most likely to organize a coherent Muslim resistance (thankfully, the Crusaders were so stupid and careless that they eventually messed it all up on their own). I mean, please tell me you still think history is boring after reading shit like this:
Murders of this sort happened an astounding number of times during the early Crusades. Some of the murders were not proven to have been the work of the Assassins, but once the terrorist narrative had been reified, the terrorists didn't need to commit all the terrorist acts. They could claim any murder that bore their stamp and use it to forward their cause. Apparently, they kept detailed records of their work, but because they were so very se-cretive, no outsiders had access to these records at the time, and when the cult was finally destroyed by the Mongols in 1256, it was destroyed so thoroughly its records were almost all erased from history. Therefore no one now knows how many of the murders attributed to Assassins were actually committed by them. Rumors and whispers tell us they cast a grim shadow over their times but we will never know the scope of their impact on the Crusades: the records are gone.
A secretive cult of capital-A Assassins infiltrating royal households and murdering rulers for 200 years, who lived in literal mountaintop castles, were ultimately defeated by the Mongols, and were wiped off the map so completely that they remain forever shrouded in mystery? If they taught this shit in schools, we'd be overwhelmed with graduates with history degrees. (Actually, that sounds like it would be really annoying, and maybe we shouldn't teach this in schools.)
This is a genuinely eye-opening book that, somehow, pulls off its central thesis, offering a comprehensive overview of world history through the lens of Islam, while also explaining why the Western world "triumphed," and why the Islamic world remains as divided and contentious as it currently is. What's most compelling is his central argument that Islam, unlike other major religions, isn't just a system of beliefs, but actually contains a system for how to organize society itself — how a community should coexist and work together. More than once, he draws explicit and convincing parallels between early Islamic societies and socialism (giving us, if you believe the New York Post, an exciting preview of Zohran's NYC, coming to you in 2026!!!). The early years of Islam are so beautiful and idyllic — scholars debating the fine points of theology, philosophers inventing algebra and pushing science forward in a way that wouldn’t be replicated for 1000 years, Muslim rulers allowing Jews and Christians and polytheists to live peacefully and completely un-converted in Muslim-ruled territories. There's a surprising amount of equality to be found here, which you wouldn't believe if you only read panicky headlines.
It's only when the Mongols came in, the book argues, that the Islamic world really started to change. Those dastardly Mongols arrive like a wrecking ball and commit a massive, unexpected and devastating holocaust, murdering millions of Muslims and destroying entire cities, practically salting the earth behind them. They turned the Middle East into a desert, literally, by destroying the well-developed and engineered irrigation systems that had allowed the desert to flourish for centuries — the Mongols are, the book claims, why the fertile crescent stopped being so fertile, and why places like Iraq are now desert. The effects of their crushing assault are still felt to this day.
But interestingly, Islam kind of won in the end, as the Mongols stuck around and ended up converting to the religion, basically transforming from invading Mongols into the next generation of Islamic rulers in the Middle East (this is also why, in addition to the Silk Road, Central Asian food is so fucking good — these guys just took all the best shit from everyone). But such devastation still had to be grappled with: why had God allowed Islamic society to be destroyed so thoroughly? The answers people landed on are predictable, as we've seen pretty much anytime human society suffers an unexpected catastrophe: we lost our way, God got mad, so now we have to become more conservative! That'll fix it! Thus, in the wake of the Mongol invasion, Ansary argues, were the theological seeds planted for the creation of new branches of a more radical, more militant form of Islam. This new interpretation of the religion would mostly simmer for centuries, until it all came to the forefront in 2001.
It's a persuasive argument, if overly simplistic — the Mongols ravaging Baghdad 700 years ago also did 9/11? Okay! — but any "conclusions" like this in history are always going to feel overly pat and simplistic, especially when presented in a 350-page book covering nearly 2 millennia. But the book isn't here to convince you of anything, which is one of its greatest strengths. It's simply here to introduce uninformed Westerners to a whole swath of history we haven't been introduced to before. And the closer we get to modernity, the more eye-opening the book gets — we see the effects of both World Wars on the Islamic world (which, of course, being a "world war," had massive effects over there, most obviously in Israel-Palestine), and all the reasons why efforts at true democracy were often cut short. (Spoiler alert: the US doesn't come out looking too good!)
This is, simply, one of the most interesting history books I've read in years, one that very gently shamed me for not already knowing a lot of this stuff, while holding my hand to educate me on the history of, like, half of the fucking planet. It's a great introduction to that part of the world, and more than anything a great reminder that no one controls or owns history, and that the "center of the world" only depends on which way you're looking at it.