By Josh Gondelman — 03 Aug 2026

#195. Attention Spans and You

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Hi everyone,

I've been feeling a little run down after my quick recent trip to Chicago, and my even quicker trip to DC last week. I was once again a part of Chris Duffy's extremely fun comedy/science panel show Wrong Answers Only in our nation's capital. Also on the panel were Shalewa Sharpe and Alison Leiby. Alison and I spent the train ride both ways doing a little work on a new project and a lot of complaining, none of which I will subject you to now. Also on the show was a statistician who told us that the number one misconception people have regarding his field of study is that after enough losses in a row you're due for a win. Frankly, I was not ready to hear that that's a false assumption. Because I was feeling a little bedraggled (because of the summer cold, not the statistics revelation) I spent the weekend mostly doing apartment-tidying and sneaking out to tell jokes, but I was not up for a lot of adventure.

On Friday night, I holed up at home with Maris and watched Boots Riley's new movie I Love Boosters. I was a big fan of Sorry To Bother You, Riley's last feature, and I was disappointed that my schedule didn't let me catch Boosters in theaters. I'm so glad we made a point to rent it though because I loved it!!!

First of all, the movie looks great. There are so many delightful practical effects and other visual flourishes, from creative edits to bright costumes and makeup. The whole enterprise just pops in a way a lot of made-for-streaming movies are not designed to. It's also weird and philosophical enough that you really need to keep your eyes and ears on the screen, which is good in both the small picture (makes for an exciting movie) and the big picture (rejects the compulsion to be "second-screened" as you do other stuff). I had to ("had to") answer a few texts while we were watching, and I was actively mad at myself for looking away at all! Everyone worked so hard making this good movie for me and others to enjoy!

The performances were all terrific–Keke Palmer is such a capital letters Movie Star–and the plot got progressively weirder as it went along in ways that felt both surprising and earned. I legitimately teared up at the end as everyone realized the power of solidarity and–separately but relatedly–the importance of friendship.

I am also extra invested in Boots's success as a writer/director because of the one time we were back-to-back guests on a Chicago morning show and met briefly in the green room. So congratulations to my close* personal** friend*** on his latest triumph. (These asterisks lead nowhere just fyi.)

This week I'll be joking around at Frankenstein's Baby (tonight) at Union Hall. Then Thursday-Saturday at 5pm each evening, I'll be performing as part of the Lions and Legends live recordings, brought to you by Rebecca and Eric, the team responsible for Circle Round. These recordings are kid-friendly and they've always been a lot of fun, so I'm sure this week's will be too, weather permitting!

Also! My 7:15 show at The Comedy Studio in Cambridge, MA on 9/19 is all the way sold out, and tickets for the late show are selling well too. We added a 4:30pm show for any early-to-bed folks who wanted to see my new jokes. (Originally we were going to add a 6pm on Sunday, and then we realized that's the beginning of Yom Kippur!)

Some dates are still coming together, but my schedule really picks up in October. I'll be in Irving, TX (10/21), Houston (10/22), San Dieg o (10/28), Chandler, AZ (10/29), Pittsburgh (11/12), and Cleveland (11/13) so far, and I'd love to see you there if you live nearby! The newsletter is free (payment optional and appreciated) because I want people to enjoy my writing and to know when I'll be around, and it really means a lot to me when folks buy tickets and come out to the live shows!

Oh also! I haven't re-posted this link in a little bit, but the good people at Blonde Medicine gave my standup special a new thumbnail that makes it clearer you get to see me telling the jokes! Finally, this cardigan gets its due thumbnail-style (and I'm honestly very happy to have the great work of director Chris Werner, DP Russ Swanson, and production designer Mark Newell visible right up front). Check it out if you haven't yet! It's totally different from the hour I'm taking on the road.

PEP TALK FOR ATTENTION SPANS

Matt Damon as Odysseus in front of his ship and crew. — Are you not entertained? (I know that's from a different movie but it applies here too!)

Forget, for a moment, that the biggest movie of the year is based on a millennia-old poem attributed to the second most famous Homer in most people's modern minds. We'll get to that later. I want to start with the fact that we are currently witnessing a critic-off after scholar and translator Emily Wilson fired some shots flaming arrow style at Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of her work. Her critique was biting and a little much (and it got, let's say, racially weird at times), but more people than you would have bet a few years ago are following along and grappling with what it means to base a movie on an ancient Greek text.

Between the sniping from classicists and the massive success of the film that sparked the debate, it's a banner time for snlobs (the snobs of slobs). You don't have to read the epic poem to have an opinion on Christopher Nolan's fidelity to the story's original themes. And snagging a ticket to a 70mm film screening (a technology I barely understand) is an upset victory for any Criterion subscriber looking to visually maximize their viewing experience and condescend to their unlucky friends who had to settle for a puny IMAX theater.

Hanging in for three-plus hours of a sprawling action movie isn't exactly a highbrow demand of an audience, but it's something. The Odyssey isn't Nolan's most philosophically dense or chronologically experimental film. And as destabilizing as Tenet can feel, it's not quite a night at the opera in the original German or Italian either. But it's at least lightly encouraging that people are engaging with literature and reading it as well, or at least intending to, based on sales of the Wilson translation of the poem.

I haven't seen Chris Nolan's Odd Squad yet, in large part because it would entail leaving our dog at home alone for quite some time. And I'll confess, in the past I have been a long movie hater. (Why do we need The Avengers in three-hour installments??????) But directors using their clout to create long form features (a tip of the cap to last year's dueling blockbusters by Ryan Coogler and Paul Thomas Anderson) and having them hit is a helpful data point against the conventional wisdom that everything has to be TikTok length or it's not worth making.

It's possible, of course, that our brains are still largely cooked. Viewers may be leaving the theaters in droves and asking ChatGPT to explain the movie's ending to them. We may be experiencing a singular confluence of many kinds of (gender neutral) film bro being pulled into screenings all at once. But I don't think that's the case. And I have been taking pleasure in the fact that this movie is based on a big-c Classic, and through extremely reasonable casting decisions still managed to ward off the segment of the audience that uses Michelangelo's David as an avatar on Twitter and calls you by your first name in the replies. It feels like lots of people are talking about literature and some people are even reading it. As Maris wrote earlier this year during the height of Strangers/Adult Braces/Yesteryear-mania, it's nice that people are thinking and talking about books (and not just to lament a literacy crisis).

In aggregate, these pings on the cultural radar have broadly affirmed for me, for the first time in a while, that people want art that–even if it's not challenging, per se–takes a little chewing before you swallow it. We're not just waiting around to be force-fed AI-generated videos of racialized produce engaging in sexual entanglements. In an ideal world, the conclusion execs would draw is to produce even more thoughtful and engaging art, and to support more diverse artists; it's the right thing to do, and there's clear demand for movies and books from women and people of color (two groups that overlap in obvious ways but I always have a hard time indicating that I know that so I use parentheticals like this to avoid annoyed comments). I hope that this happens, and additionally that we continue to stake out real estate in our own brains so that we can spend our time on activities we actually like instead of whatever cuts off the credits of what we're already watching to autoplay next.

Artistic ambition is important to keep alive, and it's crucial that artists with the opportunity continue to aim high, just not so high it angers the gods.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

This is such a sweet message! I did not do much editing! I did add the nickname!

I am a college professor about to start a new school year. I’ve taught hundreds of first-year students, but now I’m having to send my own child 11 hours away to college and I’m not sure I’ll be able to look out at my classes full of first-year students and not start sobbing.
- Putting the "Mess" in "Semester"

This is going to sound sarcastic, but please believe I am being sincere: Congratulations on having a new and huge feeling. So often, our emotions can feel like reruns. Annoyance at the unhelpful automated responses from a "customer service" phone number. Pleasant surprise when traffic isn't as bad as you feared it might be. Bafflement at the vastness and popularity of Taylor Sheridan's television empire. We've been all of those places before and we'll be there again.

But you've crashed headfirst into a whole new deal, and it's the only time you'll ever feel precisely this way. You'll never again send your oldest child eleven hours away to college and experience this specific sensation of forcing your whole heart through a paper shredder. I promise this is good.

Keeping your heart open to this magnitude of love means you are a human being with an enormous capacity for connection and care. This is maybe too Massachusetts of me to say but: Sometimes something feels like shit because you're doing it right. Like how exercise makes you sore and sweaty...or how spicy food makes you sore and sweaty. Not everything good hurts (an important lesson for some people to learn). But every occurrence this big is at least a little heavy. And even though, deep down, you know it's fine and normal and probably even healthy for a kid to move away for school, it's hitting you as hard as a full semester's worth of textbooks dropped onto the canvas top of the dean's convertible like a prank in an 80s movie.

Your heartache will diminish with time; what you're experiencing isn't a loss any more than South America was stolen from Africa when Pangea split up (if Africa and South America both had smartphones). But you'll be different now. You'll know the other side of what your students are feeling at the beginning of every year in an even-more-immediate way. And you've added a new facet to your understanding of what it means to be a parent. Your life is richer and deeper for allowing yourself to experience this fully.

You're feeling like shit in a way that will eventually leave you better than before, and considering all the other ways you could be feeling like shit, that's not so bad at all.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
The Strokes - "Falling out of Love"

As is sometimes the case here, "Falling out of Love" is not explicitly a feel-good song. You can probably tell that from the title. It's just that there's a specific endorphin somewhere in my millennial brain that gets released when The Strokes put out any kind of good new music. "Falling out of Love" has the pacing of a lazy river ride at a water park. It's not the most thrilling or dynamic, but sometimes you need a break, and you just want to bob along at a relaxing pace for a few minutes.

The heavy autotune makes the song feel more like Julian Casablancas's solo record than a classic Strokes jam, but that's pretty good too. I've listened to it a bunch since the album came out (even though I think it was released as a single a few weeks in advance), and I feel comforted by the ability to put my ears in familiar sonic hands (???) for a little while. It's a feel-good feel-bad, which can be just as good as a feel-good feel-good if you're in the right mood.