News & Culture Weekly Roundup / August 31, 2026

Climate / Glacial Flooding in Nepal and Tibet

I met someone in graduate school from Nepal. In a master’s program about environmentalism in 2021, we all regularly talked about climate change. We traded disaster scenarios. Mine was sea level rise swallowing entire counties of coastal North Carolina by the time my grandchildren came of age. Hers was glacial collapse drowning whole villages down river in minutes. Just five years later, her ultimate nightmare has come to pass. Consider this tragedy as more than an alarm bell for the climate crisis. It’s a death knell. This is mythic, biblical -- and God’s no where near done with us yet.

Donate to World Central Kitchen.

Music / Billy Stings

Billy’s second major label album is out, and this is the one that’s going to make him mainstream. An album that contains profound meditations on grief and death but also “I Like Train Songs”, which contains the following chorus:

I'm on a choo-choo rollin'

Never comin' back

On the choo-choo rollin'

That's my kind of track

Perfect. Also, “Lay Me Down,” a new bluegrass standard, gave me chills on the first listen. Route it through your best speakers. This release plus seeing in concert Kacey Musgraves and Steep Canyon Rangers, a North Carolina bluegrass staple, all in one week has made me homesick for the American South.

Television / Widow’s Bay

It’s almost two weeks until the Emmys, so less than two weeks until I get to watch Widow’s Bay sweep the Emmy’s more thoroughly than my grandmother swept the kitchen floor. The blend of dry comedy, horror anthology, remote Atlantic fishing village aesthetics, local government drama, and Matthew Rhys makes it my perfect show. I bow down to creator Katie Dippold and director Hiro Murai.

Books / Famesick

My turn to borrow Famesick, Lena Dunham’s hot new memoir, from the library has finally come. While I don’t give it a rave, two things will stay with me: 

1) Lena didn’t deserve the hate. She wasn't on a mission to personally inflame the American zeitgeist. She was simply a girl making her art, and people love to eviscerate successful women no matter what they do (see Taylor Swift, KATSEYE). Let her be!

2) Even if you have fame, privilege, and near unlimited resources to get better, if you are a woman with a chronic illness, most doctors will not take your pain seriously. 

In Memoriam / Dolly Parton 

Kacey Musgraves said and sang it better than I ever could at her Boston show this past Friday.