2026-02-25 04:13:20
Wuthering Heights is always a stranger book than you remember. This holds true whether you last read it in high school, or a month ago. There is always some weird detail, some brutality, some incomprehensible human interaction that you overlooked. Everyone remembers the ghost of Catherine Linton at the window, pleading to be let in, but do you also recall how our gentleman narrator “pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes”? Catherine’s famous declaration about Heathcliff—“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”—sticks in the mind, of course, though years and Instagram quotes have a habit of turning it into an expression of romantic sympathy, instead of what it actually is: a description of the total obliteration of sovereign selfhood. You might have held on to a vague sense that there are a lot of dogs in this book, but do you remember that one of the dogs is named Skulker? Or that Skulker the dog has a son, named Throttler?
One of the things I hadn’t remembered was how little we are told about the environment around Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. This is particularly strange, given that I always think of it as a novel deeply concerned with setting. If you had asked me a week ago how much of the book is dedicated to long and detailed descriptions of the West Yorkshire countryside I would have answered “quite a lot,” and I would have been wrong. We get a bit about Penistone Craggs (“bare masses of stone, with hardly enough earth in their clefts to nourish a stunted tree”), some river sounds, a lot of fog, but not a whole lot else. We think about Wuthering Heights as a novel about place, but it is better described as a novel about not knowing your place. Foundlings rise, sons are brought low, servants are hilariously emboldened, and the path between one house and the other is sometimes obstructed. Lockwood, our narrator, is out of place—you get the sense that he was meant to appear in a comedy of manners but got lost along the way. The reader is often equally confounded, between the multiple Catherines and Lintons and general sense that everyone in this book is stark raving mad.
Wuthering Heights is always a stranger book than you remember because it actively resists your comprehension. It is, in fundamental ways, a book about things we do not and cannot know. This goes back to the inciting event—we are never told why Mr. Earnshaw brings an unnamed orphan back from Liverpool. We are never given a clue as to Heathcliff’s origins, or how he makes his fortune during his three-year absence.
2026-02-25 02:56:58
Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about rug spills, shitty Chinese takeout mainstays, college visits, and more.
Your letters:
Mike:
2026-02-25 02:04:52
My academic funding was running out and my patience with the delirious pace of start-up culture had run thin. You might say I got fired; I might reply that I was never really hired in the first place. But the point was, I needed to go back on the job hunt. So I logged into LinkedIn and started networking.
Going only by the strength of my notifications, the world was whipsawing back and forth between the thrill of revolutionary new discovery and the gloom of the imminent devastation of everything we hold dear. It was the best of times to look for a job; it was the worst of times to be a young professional. It was the age of unbounded wisdom at our fingertips; it was the age of foolishness subverting our best intentions. It was the epoch of belief in the arrival of a higher power; it was the epoch of incredulity at the credulous fascination with tawdry tricks. It was the season of the dawn of a new Light; it was the season of fall into a hitherto unknown Darkness. It was the spring of hope and change; it was the winter of despair and rapine. We had everything before us to discover, we had nothing before us to ever do again, we were all going direct to the Heaven of plenty, we were all going direct to the Hell of plunder. In short, the period was so much like Dickensian London that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
After a large number of applications and a small number of interviews, I found myself with a job offer at a large, relatively benign local company. And in the latter part of last year, I began a new career as an AI Scientist.
2026-02-25 01:38:12
Industry has always been a show with a lot of "too online" energy: a cocaine tornado of culturally in-vogue reference points, from Euphoria to Safdie brothers movies to TikTok vids about finance bros. So it shouldn't be too surprising that while the internet is conspiracymaxxing about Jeffrey Epstein and all his enablers and backers, the series' fourth season introduces a shadowy figure bent on financial domination, sexual manipulation, and extortion. After all, it was no accident that Epstein's own origins trace back to the world of Wall Street.
That said, I am worried that the show's maximalist ADHD mandate has finally caught up to it. It's hard to say a show that delights in jumping sharks has jumped the shark, exactly, but it does seem like Industry may have bitten off more than it can chew, leading to an uneven season where the highs are kind of dulled for feeling rehashed, and the lows are a lot harder to overlook.
The decision to move on from Pierpoint wasn't an altogether bad one, though the boiler-room intensity of having all the characters in the same room, not knowing whether they might kill each other or fuck (or both), was key to the excitement of the previous seasons. Following the characters out in the world has expanded the show's scope, but the result hasn't really been any more fulfilling and certainly isn't any more coherent. To return to the Epstein angle, Max Minghella is good at playing Whitney Halberstram, the supervillain tech finance bro, but the combination of his James Bond nemesis energy mixed with Patrick Bateman makes it feel as if the writers arrived at his character after playing a game of evil-CEO bingo. Despite those flaws, I did sort of like him as the Epstein-like puppet master blackmailing everyone around him. But the reveal that Halberstram is just a patsy of even more shadowy forces borders on QAnon ridiculousness and boring writing.
2026-02-25 00:56:45
One dreary weekend this past December, I decided to fight back the winter gray with the color and vibrancy of musical theater. I routed myself not to Times Square but to the closest AMC, which was screening the recorded live performance of the 2023 revival of Merrily We Roll Along.
If you just shuddered in horror at the thought of seeing a recorded play or musical as a movie, wait, hear me out. Before I had ever seen one for myself, I assumed that a live theater performance put to film would offer the worst of both forms. As a bonafide theater-lover, I was skeptical of film’s ability to capture the magic of a live performance, and thought a static screen would flatten the energy and dimensionality of the stage.
But then I saw one. It was 2017 in Montreal. Together with a friend, I had shuffled through the downtown slush of snow to my local movie theater to see the 2016 revival of Falsettos, an incredibly spare show that included just seven cast members and a set of gray, modularly designed stage furniture that the cast manipulated to form settings like a kitchen counter, a chess table, or a shrink's couch. The effect was stunning, even for a movie theater audience. We could see how the show’s scenes scaled to hold pomp or intimacy, or how the smallness of an actor juxtaposed at times with the largeness of the stage. The camera, with its powers to zoom in and out, could frame each setting in a way that heightened the viewer’s sense of immersion while staying faithful to the spirit of the show. I entered the movie theater a skeptic, but I left a believer.
2026-02-24 23:01:00
For Cherien Dabis, it all comes back to 1948. Her latest film All That's Left of You takes place primarily across three different decades, with a brief visit to a fourth at the end, but for her, this story couldn't be told without depicting the events of the Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians in which they lost their homes and land, the basis of the ongoing fight for self-determination.
All That's Left of You, which Dabis produced, wrote, directed, and starred in, spends time in 1948, 1978, 1988, and 2022 as it follows three different generations of one Palestinian family as history happens to them. Zionists bomb them and drive them out of Yaffa; Israeli soldiers stop and harass a father and son; a teen joins a protest in the streets. None of these acts of violence are shown in particularly lurid ways. Instead, Dabis focuses on how it shapes the lives and outlooks of her characters, played by herself, the late Mohammad Bakri, and two of his sons, actors Saleh and Adam Bakri.
Earlier this month, I spoke with Dabis about the difficulties of filming and selling All That's Left of You, the balance of education versus entertainment in producing a film based on history, and the level of detail within the production design. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
