Welcome! It was the week when we just couldn't stop talking about Adele. It was the week when Tiger King came back, which is a good reminder of just how long we've been living in a pandemic. And it was the week when the National Book Awards announced new winners. Let's get to it.
Opening Argument: Love What You Love This Weekend
This has been just a punishing week around the NPR teams that cover arts and culture. As many of you will have heard, NPR Books editor -- and regular Pop Culture Happy Hour panelist -- Petra Mayer died last weekend. I've spoken about my fondness of Petra already, especially on our podcast episode about her, and I'm glad I've had that chance. I have to candidly tell you that scraping together words today is not easy, so this is going to be a short one.
But I would be remiss not to take a minute in Petra's honor to use this space to advocate one more time for the single most important thing I learned from her, which is this: Love what you love. As long as you're not hurting anybody else or yourself, your passions for what you love to read and watch and hear and think about and talk about are to be embraced. Petra didn't just watch The Great British Baking Show; she learned to make stuff. She didn't just love Steven Universe; she dressed up as Rose Quartz.
Allison Shelley/NPR
She loved books so much that she could genuinely always recommend something. She got mad and she got frustrated, but she always wanted to get back to being delighted. She loved Comic-Con because it was full of people who felt their enthusiasms deeply, but your enthusiasms don't have to take that shape. Maybe they take the shape of revisiting your favorite book, or writing to your favorite author to tell them you appreciate their work, or dropping a text to somebody you know and saying, "I think you'd really like this movie."
It's true, but a little too simple, to say that liking or not liking things is not an identity. It's true, because nobody wants to just be a jumble of thumbs-ups and thumbs-downs. But the way you love your books, your films, your shows, your games, your dances and your songs -- that really is a part of who you are. That you like Doctor Who might not be a personality, but that you generously share with and learn from other people who also like Doctor Who? Yeah, that's part of a personality. I don't know anybody who said, per se, "I will miss Petra simply because she liked extravagantly written fantasy novels." But I do know people who said they would miss her because she acted on that affection to the benefit of others -- her audience, and the writers of those novels, and the underrepresented critics who needed space to reflect on them.
So love what you love, in a way that's good for you and good for other people. And maybe, maybe, make yourself a rad costume.
If you are a Stephen Sondheim person, as I am, please enjoy the Tiny Desk (Home) Concert from the cast of the new Broadway revival of Company.
I have to admit I have not sat down to Blown Away: Christmas, the holiday version of the Netflix series about glass-blowing. But that's only because I'm saving it for myself. If you like a nice, calming show where people do good work -- that's also incredibly suspenseful because sometimes things explode -- it's there for you.
Want to get ahead on a couple of things we'll cover next week? Cowboy Bebop is on Netflix now, and King Richard is coming to theaters and HBO MAX!
What We Did This Week:
Harper Smith/Atlantic Records
Stephen, Glen and Sofie Hernandez-Simeonidis talked about ABBA as the group released its first album of new material in 40 years.
Amil Niazi and Ronald Young, Jr. sat down with me to talk about something we all care about deeply: the Below Deck franchise.
Stephen, Glen, Barrie Hardymon and I recorded an episode where we talked about Petra Mayer and played lots of tape of some of the great fun we had with her. We miss you already, dahling.
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