(VERY good subject line, a day before it’s 2026.)
Things are always dead in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, so it’s nice that people can take the time to do what they really love. Sheek is watching Price is Right re-runs, Jada’s playing Ms. Pac-Man, Styles is eating Taco Bell, Eric is on the run from the feds and I’m here writing this newsletter. (Eric is actually editing next week’s Die Hard episode. No days off!!!)
But there’s a new episode up today, which just premiered at 10am on YouTube! We ran down some of the year’s greatest moments on our showcast — Best killer in a movie we reviewed? Best running joke? Whitest movie? — and measured them up against your responses. (We also threw in some categories from your suggestions: Biggest turn in Karate Man’s life? Who had the best and worst picks?) Eric was laughing a lot while editing it, so I bet it’s a good one. RELATED: I also don’t have dementia, so I remember laughing a lot while recording it.
I’ve never really made New Year’s resolutions, but last December, I dusted off my NYC library card and (in an effort to break my phone addiction) I picked up a reading habit. Unfortunately, I didn’t break my phone addiction in the process. I learned a lot, I forgot more, and while I think it’d be cool to rank the books I read, I think there are better ways to review or recommend my haul. Here’s blurbs for my top 10:
(Full list, for context: Frankenstein*, Crime and Punishment*, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, Kent State: An American Tragedy, Silence of the Choir*, Lorne, Huck Finn*, The Containment, James*, ++The Light Eaters, Rejection*, When It All Burns, Random Family, Waiting for Britney Spears*, ++Martyr!*, ++There’s Always This Year, Everyone Who is Gone is Here, ++One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, ++Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson, Flesh: A Novel*, Shade, The Beast in Our Clouds, “Make It Ours”: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh, Careless People, Hamnet*, Murderland, Blank Space.)
*denotes a work of fiction. ++denotes one of my top five or whatever, these things change.
++The Light Eaters, by Zoe Schlanger: Plants are so so so much smarter than we previously known. I suggested Styles read it — maybe he did, I haven’t asked — but it’s fascinating. For instance, they make decisions, they can be vindictive, they can react to pain. I brought it up during the Happy Gilmore episode, and I’m bringing it up here again.
++There’s Always This Year, by Hanif Abdurraqib: on LeBron, America, basketball and what it means to leave the places you’ve known, or to love and not be loved back. Incredibly moving.
Everyone Who is Gone is Here, by Jonathan Blitzer: About the border crisis. Okay, not a fun beach read. It’s a sad story — to call it a mess or a quagmire is to belittle it; America fucked up the region and its every attempt to fix it makes it worse — but it’s also about the lengths one takes to survive the impossible.
++One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad: About Gaza, and how this world convinces us that only some people deserve humanity. Maybe the book of the year.
The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North, by Michelle Adams: A shameful run-down of how close we were to having well-funded schools in inner-cities, in response to Brown vs. Board of Ed. It’s about how fear wins and white supremacy continues to hold on. Brought this up (and Huck Finn and James) on the Sinners episode, but didn’t really go into it.
++Martyr!*, by Kaveh Akbar: an often-funny novel where a kid so badly wants to be not just remembered but a martyr — without knowing what he’d be a martyr for. His mother’s death sends him spiraling; when an older woman artist in Brooklyn fills that role, he obsesses over her approval. As soon as I put it down, I almost read it again.
Shade, by Sam Bloch: About global warming, but really about how government limits access to public shade in order to punish the lower classes.
++Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson, by Mark Kriegel: Mike Tyson had nothing — no money, no family, no stability — but everyone around him saw him as a personal meal ticket. Written by a longtime respected boxing writer. This is the first volume of what is going to be a trilogy.
Flesh: A Novel*, by David Szalay: Maybe the most uniquely told story I’ve ever read. There’s sex, war, jail, love, money and a detached prose that allows you to speed through it all. The first chapter is pretty crazy. I never tired of the story or the style in which it was written, which is saying something.
Hamnet*, by Maggie O’Farrell: Sad! Now it’s a movie, but the book is better. (Same with Frankenstein, which I’d put in my top 10 but I don’t feel like writing a blurb.)
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, by Caroline Fraser: I know, I know, Styles and Jada always accuse me of being a serial killer. So, I read this to make sure I wasn’t one. Turns out, I’m probably** not!!!! Fraser does incredible research and finds that heightened levels of toxic metals (arsenic, lead) in the ground and air of the 1970s really screwed with the brains of Ted Bundy, Green River Killer and others. It really was something in the water of the Pacific Northwest. That being said, sort of an exhausting book — just a lot of grisly murders, each grosser and sadder than the last, which made me question why I was reading it.
**probably!
People on Instagram have suggested I read less world-saving books. Respectfully: fuck off. It’s nice to know about what’s going on and, to that end, I have a book about the dangers of AI coming. I also have a book about Earl Weaver, the manager of the Baltimore Orioles, on the way, as well as The Iliad (in advance of The Odyssey movie coming out). So, there’s balance! Join my book club, I’m the only one in it.
On behalf of Eric, Jadakiss, Sheek and Styles, I’m wishing you a very happy and healthy new year. 2025 was tough — the past few go-rounds have all had their issues, but we’ve gotten this far, and (maybe it’s just the flipping of a calendar page but…) I’m excited about 2026. I’m ready to leave this year behind, I’m ready for whatever is on the way and I hope you are too. Sending love from the showcast, we’ll see you on January 5 for our live Die Hard episode (taped in Brooklyn) and January 12 for No Country for Old Men.
If you’re looking for more of us in the dog days before New Year’s, here we are on Million Dollaz Worth of Game with Gillie + Wallo. We don’t talk much, but we do get to say how the show started, and Sheek finds a fellow Sinners hater in Gillie.
As always, you can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Instagram, TikTok and right here, for our weekly newsletter. Also, here’s our merch shop!
Feel free to suggest movies for us to review here! People hit us every day for us to review movies, and the only way for them not to be lost is in the Google form, linked right there.
The latest movies people suggested have been The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus with Heath Ledger and The Wraith with Charlie Sheen, neither of which I’ve seen. Also Heat, which I imagine we’ll cover on the show soon.
Jada keeps threatening to choose Claudine, with Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones, so I watched it today on YouTube. I’ll reveal my thoughts if/when we do it on the show! Just know I’m ready!
Which episode was the one with kiss singing Billy Joel’s “movin out”