Growing up, I was a guy’s girl. Yes, I had my best and closest girlfriends (you know who you are), but in school, I mostly hung around with the guys in my classes. This was, at least partially, because I’d been burned by a lot of girls. Guys didn’t come with drama (for the most part). However, I’d been a guy’s girl forever. According to my mom, as a kid, I always gravitated towards my uncles and boy cousins at parties.

Bar Cecil, 1555 S Palm Canyon Dr, Palm Springs (Plaza del Sol Shopping Center) Reservations | Website | Phone: 760-537-1122 (Reservations are online only) Our star rating: None (too new- opened April 2021- we only assign stars to restaurants open for more than four months) Throughout the pandemic, the creators of Palm Springs’ brand new Bar Cecil teased the dining public via social media with snips and clips of what they were doing inside an unusual, diminutive space next to a dry cleaners in a South Palm Springs shopping plaza (formerly Kiyosaku Japanese restaurant).

There is a moment in the Barbie movie when Barbie (Margot Robbie), in the midst of dancing at a Barbie party, turns to her Barbie friends and asks, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” The record scratches. The music stops. Dolls don’t think about death, the silence seems to say. Human beings do. It’s the first clue that Stereotypical Barbie is off to break the mold of plastic perfection — and teach viewers that meaning can only be found in the pulsing, painful, ecstatic mess of mortality.

Share Hegseth, Pete, and David Goodwin. Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation. Broadside Books, 2022. (paid link) Battle for the American Mind is, as the title suggests, a polemic. It is not a scholarly work, and it is not the work of academics. As a sort of academic myself, I know that academics often get the details right through painstaking efforts of erudition, but fail to tell a true or honest story about the whole.

Somebody Somewhere is an exploration of Sam Miller, a 40-something Kansan, who returns home to care for her dying sister, Holly, and a year later, finds herself still in her hometown, unsure what to do with her life. Through friendship and healthy nudging from her chosen family, Sam rediscovers her love of music and forges a life in Manhattan, Kansas.  Beth:  Thank you for the idea to write a post on this show.