The Maine Lobsterman and Olivia Rodrigo Music That Got Us Through the Week

I can’t believe I’m recommending paying attention to a man, but I simply adore Jacob Knowles. I love his videos about lobsters, barnacles, female crab notches, saving birds, and whatever else happens on his lobster boat.

How can you not be charmed by Jacob teaching you how to put a lobster to sleep? Or by how he told the world about “the prettiest egged I ever caught??” Or by how he saved the blue lobster to show us all???

I’m simply enchanted by the man and his love of lobsters. Please do not tell me anything about his beliefs outside of lobsters. My heart can’t take any more bad news. —Caitlin Cruz

Smash Mouth’s lead singer Steve Harwell passed away on Monday, which I learned via a New York Times breaking news alert. In all honesty, at the moment I thought it was a bit of an overreach. A 90s Cali-alt rock band whose music soundtracked gimmicky ogre movies? Deserving of its own NYT push notification?

But as the week has progressed, I’ve relistened to some of Smash Mouth’s music, read this excellent reflection on their influence and spirit in The Atlantic, and reconsidered my feelings about a band I’d mostly written off as a punch line. The music is funky, weird, and has a sonic groove that hooks into you. Maybe that small bit of shame one might feel listening earnestly to Smash Mouth needs to be released so we can just enjoy a good thing. —Kady Ruth Ashcraft

Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album, Guts, deserves a full listen…and I really struggled to pick a standout track to recommend if you somehow only have the time to listen to one. But “ballad of a homeschooled girl” latched onto my neurons, and I’ve been whistling the chorus since this a.m.

Rodrigo did a perfect job of tapping into the universal feeling of thinking you’re on the outside of everything and everyone, and turning it into a rocker riot grrrl banger. “Feels like my skin doesn’t fit right over my bones,” she sings in the first verse, and “I made it weird, I made it worse/Each time I step outside, it’s social suicide” in the chorus. I’m guessing she was inspired by her homeschooled childhood, but this song also spoke directly to my only-child heart and the 9-year-old me who always felt “on the outside of the greatest inside joke.” And also all the other-aged versions of myself who were always just like, “Why the fuck am I so fucking awkward, fuck.” I will have this song (and this album!!!!) on repeat for a very, very long time. —Lauren Tousignant

Film buffs may recognize Guinevere Turner’s name as belonging to the co-writer and star of 90s new-queer-cinema classic Go Fish (she also helped inspire Chasing Amy). For something completely different, pick up her recent memoir, When the World Didn’t End, which details her time in the Lyman Family cult (also the subject of a 2019 essay Turner wrote for the New Yorker). Turner deliberately writes from her POV as a kid, resisting a retroactive adult analysis, and it turns out to be a gobsmacking device when the horrors begin to unspool and she recounts them matter of factly, in her kid’s voice. It’s rare to see mundanity and a relatively slow pace used so effectively in writing. When her mother left the cult around the time of Turner’s adolescence, so did she have to leave, and the home life she describes with her mother’s partner, “FP,” is so harrowing that the book becomes a full-on horror show. That she was dying to get back to the cult says everything about the state of her teenage years. This fearless account is not recommended for the weak-stomached or people who have a hard time reading about abuse. —Rich Juzwiak

“High-octane” is a phrase used way too often to describe action movies, so trust that I do not say this lightly: Extraction 2 is high-fucking-octane. Higher octane than even the first Extraction movie, which was chock full of the stuff, so much so that the protagonist literally died at the end.

The stunt work in Extraction 2 is incredible to behold; you could call it art if that didn’t offend any nonviolent sensibilities you might hold. Then again, if you’re against violence, definitely do not watch this movie. And in this sequel, Chris Hemsworth’s Tyler takes on a bit of softness, as he’s tasked with helping his ex-wife’s sister flee her abusive Georgian mobster husband, who’s locked her and her kids up in jail with him. The premise is intense, but rescuing family and finding redemption looks good on Tyler. So does body armor.

(And please excuse my tardiness; this sequel came out in June, during a span of months after I had been booted from one borrowed Netflix account and was still scrambling to lock down another free workaround. Bastards.) —Sarah Rense

What could be better than a feed full of sweet little kittens, lovingly cared for by a handsome man? Nothing, I tell you. (Don’t even think about it, he’s married.) I had seen Abdul’s content in my feed but hadn’t followed because I thought I had enough cat posts, but two recent videos made me correct this grievous error. The first shows him literally burping kittens after a bottle feeding on a purple blankie over his shoulder. The second was an “unboxing video” of his current litter of foster kittens, which are all named for constellations. (I’m officially a Cassie stan.) Abdul has a stunning resident cat named Bambi, and she interacts with all his foster babies and has an adorably weird meow-screech. Don’t repeat my mistakes, follow him immediately. —Susan Rinkunas

Sometimes I’ll read the blurbs from other authors on the covers and backs of books, and sometimes I won’t. It’s usually such a small part of my decision whether or not to buy a book that I’ve never considered the time and effort it must take to ask someone for a blurb and/or be the person who provides the blurb. I figured they just appeared out of thin air! (Joking, mostly.)

But it’s apparently a lot of time and a lot of effort, so much so that the entire publishing industry hates them—the other descriptors used in this Esquire story are “dread,” “excruciating,” and “anxiety-riddled.” I love reading about the worst parts of other industries that are not my own, and this was a rollercoaster. We should ban book blurbs! But, also, I’ll never not read one ever again. —LT