128: July 2025

It’s been hot and buggy in Chicago. My backyard is full of pollinators around the wildflower garden and mosquitoes just about everywhere else. The fireflies are fading away and the cicadas emerged sometime in the past few weeks. We had a cold spring that turned into a muggy, wet summer, and everything I planted has been sluggish. The cherry and grape tomatoes are just beginning to ripen; I ate the first full-size tomato this week on an egg salad sandwich. The abundance of rain made the insides of the tomato expand faster than its skin would allow, so it sort of split on the vine, but that didn’t make it any less tasty. I have at least a handful more already full-size, although they’re still green. The jalapeños and serrano peppers I planted are slap happy, bushy and green and full of baby fruit. We’ve already eaten a handful of sunset raspberries and blackberries off the bushes I planted last fall. The corn I planted in spring flops over if it hasn’t rained in the last day, although miraculously it’s still growing ears. The next few weeks will be a game of produce chicken—I’m hoping to harvest the corn before the local raccoons discover it, a very real danger that grows with every passing day alongside the corn.

What I wrote:

Busy month at Seeing & Believing! I reviewed Sorry, Baby, Superman, Eddington, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

For Bright Wall/Dark Room, I wrote a Double Features column about baseball, life, existentialism, and the movies Eephus and Everybody Wants Some!!

My fiction debut was technically published at Broad Sound last month, but it went live online this month, so I'm going to plug it here again.

What I talked about:

I also joined the fine folks at the Broad Sound podcast to talk about chapter three of Vineland.