By Josh Gondelman — 16 Mar 2026

#175. Light Sleepers and You

Hi everyone,

I’m writing from Los Angeles. where I'll be for the next two weeks for union stuff and also a headlining show at Dynasty Typewriter on 3/20 at 10pm! The wonderful Ify Nwadiwe and Aparna Nancherla graciously agreed to tell some jokes too! When I was in town a couple of months ago for not-standup, everyone was asking me when I'm going to do standup here. The answer is: This Friday!!! Tell your friends!

Flyer for my show featuring a photo by Mindy Tucker. — See you there, people of LA?

I didn't want to make any firm plans for the Oscars because I didn't know whether I'd make it into town in time, so I ended up watching most of the show alone in my hotel room five miles from the ceremony, which was funny. I think as I arrived, some people were leaving the building to go over to the Dolby Theater while I was going inside to put on sweatpants for the day. Regarding the show itself: Conan is such a good host! He takes the work (but not himself) seriously, and he projects so much ease on stage. I liked One Battle After Another and Sinners both very much, and I thought it was exciting to see a year where the two big movies in terms of buzz split a bunch of big awards, and there were still some left for other good movies. (Although like some other folks I do think it would have been nice if PTA had made at least a small pro-immigrant/anti-racism remark in one of his acceptance speeches, given the themes of his film!)

I also had a couple of friends/colleagues nominated for awards, which happens sometimes and is always so exciting. Huge congratulations on the nomination to Will Tracy who wrote Bugonia (and with whom I got stir crazy in the Last Week Tonight writers room every weekend for several years) and Tig Notaro who produced Come See Me In The Good Light, a documentary about her friend the late poet Andrea Gibson. A couple of friends also had movies premiere at SXSW last week, and I'm so hyped for them too. The entertainment industry: It's not just Mr. Beast yet! (A great joke at the end of the Oscars that I'm worried people may have missed because they turned off their TVs.)

Another exceptional thing that happened last week: LitHub published an extensive feature that Maris and Sandy Allen worked super hard on. They put together a collection of reviews by queer writers of books by transgender authors that had been overlooked by the New York Times while Pamela Paul (a chump) was in charge of book coverage. The books are extremely varied in terms of tone and structure and subject matter, and I got to see how much effort Maris (and Sandy) put in to curate the list, commission the coverage, and edit the whole thing. It felt like such an innovative and necessary way to support queer artists.

Maggie the Pug licking her lips because she has a little whipped cream mustache. I am holding out a cup full of whipped cream that is crushed because I squeezed it to get more out. — A pup cup for the pug of the hour!

A smaller lovely moment was celebrating Maggie’s first Gotcha Day with a pup cup (a small paper cup full of whipped cream, for anyone not plugged into the dog-filled corners of social media). When Bizzy died, Maris and I didn’t know when we’d be ready to get a new dog, but Maggie has been a perfect addition to our household. She loves to cuddle and explore the neighborhood. She has unlimited energy to greet friends and neighbors. She hates most other animals (and animal-shaped things when she sees them on television), which is her prerogative. She cannot be persuaded to modify her behavior with treats, and I admire her can’t-be-bought integrity. Thank you to the Pug Rescue of New England for bringing Maggie aka Magoo aka Magpie aka Moomoo aka Miss Bad Attitude into our lives. Here’s to a great year and many more to come.

PEP TALK FOR LIGHT SLEEPERS

a hand touching a casper pillow in a way that may be vaguely sensual? am i reading too much into this? — That's where your head goes, silly!

Waking up from a good night’s sleep is one of the greatest physical feelings the human body can experience. It’s like taking a hot shower for your brain or fishing the lint out of your phone’s charging port with a toothpick. (I can’t be the only person who suffers from chronic lintphone, can I?)

A bad night’s sleep feels like noticing your water bottle sprung a leak after it’s already started destroying the things in your backpack. By the time you realize how bad things are, they’ve probably gotten worse than you know.

You sense an uneasy night of rest happening at every instant. You feel the moments of unrealized slumber as they are pulled out of your body one at a time. Or your eye lids snap open — like a window shade jerked down and then left to its own devices — revealing you HAD been asleep, but no longer are. Oh and you’d only managed to drift off for seventeen total minutes. The night rushes past in agonizing slow motion, with any noise or change in temperature pulling you away from your trek towards REM.

It’s likely that as bad as you’ll feel in the morning (Prediction: Very), people won’t notice in the way you’d think. When I taught preschool, I’d follow up a sleepless night (whether it came by choice or by accident) by putting on a shirt and tie instead of my usual hoodie. “You look nice today,” my colleagues would invariably remark, despite the dark circles under my eyes that made it look like I had spent the evening at an underground fight club, getting absolutely pummeled.

Whatever ridiculous routine or apparatus you need to undertake to stay unconscious for several consecutive hours is worth it. White noise machine. Phone left on the roof of your house instead of by your bed. CPAP. Bonking yourself on the head with a coconut. It’s all in play. And last night’s agony may repeat, but it doesn’t have to!

Tonight is a new night. And as scary as it feels, for better or for worse, you’ll be even more tired then.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I did not edit this one much but I did add the nickname (obviously).

I'm about to get a promotion to a position that has literally been my dream job my entire adult life (running a biomedical research lab). However, every experienced lab head I know has been musing that they don't know how new investigators are going to survive the current financial climate. How do I process the joy of a lifetime achievement with the dread that I might be walking into a failure that I can't avoid? (I'm in the US, so I'm largely, but not entirely, dependent on federal research grants).
- LabBlueBlue

Let’s start off with a big sincere congratulations! You have worked so hard for so long to get to this point, and it’s a massive accomplishment that you got here! You have spent years doing good work for the world (unless you research how to turn solar power into carbon dioxide and microplastics, in which case I imagine you’d remain well funded), and your effort has paid off.

I completely understand your feeling of arriving at the end of a road trip to find that the place you’re supposed to stay has been ransacked by bears with flame throwers. And this is a situation where (at least) three things are true.

It rules to accomplish a dream. We already talked about this, but I wanted to reiterate that point.
It is a very bad time to be in the sciences, or the arts, or a human body lately. Thanks to some depositions we are finding out more about how a bunch of idiot racists were empowered to tear through our federal budget like hot piss through cotton candy. Money that could be going to research or any number of socially-beneficial programs has funded ruthless and immoral bombing campaigns overseas. “Buried under the jail” implies a reliance on our carceral justice system that I don’t love, but I do fantasize about everyone involved having a house dropped on them like in The Wizard of Oz, which I believe to be ethical to imagine. This situation most definitely does NOT rule.
When a dream becomes reality, it often feels different than you’d imagined. Sometimes the work itself is more of a slog than you’d envisioned. Other times your new coworkers make the whole situation a drag. Frequently the money is worse than you’d hoped. In rare instances, the federal government has hacked itself limb from limb and sold off its organs to the highest bidder, leaving you in charge of a mangled husk.

But it is YOUR husk now. You are going to do the best you can with what you have. It might not be what you’d fantasized about accomplishing, but it’s something, dammit!! If you could be daunted by suboptimal circumstances, the daunts would have gotten you by now. You are living the waking version of a dream, where the halo of speculation has been replaced by the glare of actuality. But you were never going to live the fantasy version of your life to begin with. I hope you get lots of good work done, and that the people who have stacked the deck against you find themselves suddenly allergic to all their favorite foods.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
De La Soul's Tiny Desk Concert

I know I just tossed a De La Soul song in the newsletter a few weeks ago, but this Tiny Desk really hit me where I live, so here we go again.

If you don't know, Dave, one of the group's three members, died in early 2023. I got to see Open Mike Eagle and Video Dave (different Dave, still alive) perform a tribute ("Stakes is High," also a part of this Tiny Desk) on the JoCo Cruise that year. I was moved nearly (or more likely, all the way) to tears. This NPR performance is such a beautiful blend of joyous and melancholy. There's a name tag on the desk as you can see, reminding the audience of Dave's absence, but also Maceo kept shouting out to his mom that being a part of this miniature concert series constitutes "making it" even for a group that achieved hip hop icon status four-ish decades ago.

It also brings me so much joy to hear how good the live instrumentation and vocalists sound. I love old school virtuoso performance!!! I don't consider myself a nostalgist, but I definitely appreciate an attention to detail when you're doing the thing. Not every recording artist has to be great live, but once you start touring, you really should strive to put on a show, in my opinion.

This twenty-three-minute set also renewed my gratitude for having seen De La live – summer of 2019, I just figured out, thanks to my unwillingness to delete emails – with the whole group intact. Similarly, I got to see the Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest before the tragic deaths of MCA and Phife Dawg. The new De La Soul album reminded me of the imperative to see the greats while they're still with us, and also that a loss doesn't mean that all is lost.