A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. 

Book List: The 50 Best Thrillers of the 21st Century in the New York Times Book Review, September 27, 2026. One of the high points of my weekend is reading the Book Review although I come away from it wanting to  acquire more books than I’ll have time to read. My wife and I both like to read although I choose mostly nonfiction while she goes for fiction. On one hand that’s good because we don’t compete over who reads a book first, but on the other hand, we buy more books than we would if we both read the same ones. Anyway, this week’s Book Review had their list of the 50 best thrillers of this century. I see that my spouse checked off 17. I read less than that. In fact, reading thrillers has been so rare for me that I can list the ones I have read here: “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson; “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy; and “The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

TV List: The Top 100 TV Shows of the Century. This was another New York Times list. To the extent I watch TV anymore, it’s either YouTube or Netflix. I dropped cable TV during the summer and though I have an indoor TV antenna, I only use it to tune in weather forecasts because for some reason I like seeing and hearing a professional explain the weather rather than just read about it. Because of my de minimis TV watching, I didn’t expect I would check off many shows on this list but I surprised myself by tagging 17 of the 100. My self-imposed criteria for saying I watched a show was to have seen at least three episodes in full. Often I saw more, but three gets you beyond the “I’ll just check this out” stage. Here are “my” shows with the years they ran indicated: The Wire (2002-08); Mad Men (2007-15); Veep (2012-19); 30 Rock (2006-13); Friday Night Lights (2006-11); The Americans (2013-18); The Crown (2016-23); Deadwood (2004-06); Band of Brothers (2003); House of Cards (2013-18); Downton Abbey (2010-13); Slow Horses (2022 to present); The Shield (2002-08); Ted Lasso (2020 to present); The Good Wife (2009-16); The Queen’s Gambit (2020); Justified (2010-15). 

Op-Ed: “Big Tech Fooled America Once. The Second Time’s Not Going So Well.” by Oren Cass, New York Times, September 13, 2026. The author is the chief economist at American Compass, “a conservative economic think tank.” He argues that as tech arose as a major piece of everyday life, most Americans believed in the altruism of tech pioneers and gave them the benefit of the doubt. But now that we’ve seen how it has turned out, with social media especially, hardly anyone believes what any of these guys say and hardly anyone believes these guys wouldn’t impoverish every one of us (or worse) if it enriched them even a little bit. One of the reasons our country is in such a precarious position is because billionaires can wield disproportionate influence in the political process because of their money. But on this issue, it seems that people on all sides of the political spectrum have common cause for standing up to the tech billionaires and since we still live in a democracy, that counts for something. 

Obituary:  “Peter Max, artist whose work breathed spirit in the 60s, dies at 88” by William Grimes in New York Times, September 18, 2026. Whenever I visit a place, I go to the local art museum, so I feel like I’m familiar with most notable artists. So whenever I see a full page obituary in the Times of an artist I’ve never heard of, I read it closely. Such was the case with this one. Several photos of his art illustrate the story. It’s colorful, exaggerated, almost psychedelic. If you ever watched the old Monty Python TV show, in between the skits they would do a cartoon-like short film that had wild images and sounds. Max’s work would fit in. He’s now on my mental radar and I’ll closely monitor how long it takes me to find one of his works on display somewhere.