"Deadloch" & a great article about Chicago

Monday reading #3

Monday Reading is my weekly recommendation of something(s) I’ve found thought-provoking or fascinating Please share with a friend who might enjoy it and, if you want to support writing here, consider a paid subscription! Either way, I appreciate you.

This arrives late, but I decided to send it anyway, in the spirit of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good or … whatever. I have three things for you this week:

Deadloch press still, Amazon Studios

1. Deadloch on Amazon Prime

   This show about two detectives investigating a series of murders in small-town Tasmania is wonderful. It was released weekly beginning June 1, but it’s concluded and is available for your bingeing pleasure. It’s sort of about a group of lesbian gentrifiers who have moved into town and have, hmm, shared their culture with the community, a context used to very funny effect. (No one TERFs out, though trans identity, even in the abstract, doesn’t really come up, so it is … lacking but not insulting, in my view.) More than that, the music drops are perfect. There’s one in the first episode that absolutely had me screaming. Let me know when you get to it.

2. Katie Prout, “Anatomy of an Intervention,” Chicago Reader, July 12

   My friend Katie Prout is one of my favorite writers, and I’m so glad that the Reader lets her get weird and go long. (Her story about the largest Godzilla convention in the world is a delight.) Here, she writes about community violence disruption, which is a key part of any discussion about police abolition—though it’s much more common to read stories about when it doesn’t work. In this case, it did. (In a related vein, here’s an incredible story about a successful, complex restorative justice process spearheaded by a North Carolina DA’s office that came out last month in the Guardian, written by Oliver Laughland.)

3. I’d started this email with what was supposed to be a short piece about the new book Say Anarcha, about an enslaved woman whose midwifery taught J. Marion Sims a great deal of what he knew and on whose body he experimented when he “cured” her fistula in what has been considered a pioneering gynecological advance. I … have too much to say about it for right now, but I will write about it soon.

Have a good weekend! More on Monday.