It’s been a busy few weeks. I apologize for neglecting this newsletter throughout July — I write on Thursdays because that’s normally my free day, but unfortunately I had to do some stuff the last few Thursdays.
I’m currently getting a second job lined up — I’ll be operating the livestream and doing general audiovisual tech work for a funeral home here in the Des Moines Metro Area. I’m a bit excited about it since it’s the first time I’ll actually have a job doing audiovisual work, a skill of mine that’s usually been relegated to hobbies or volunteer work. I’ll still be bartending as well, although I’m considering looking for a different bar to work at. We’ll see.
The last month has been really stressful. Finances have continued to be a source of serious anxiety and despair for me, and I’m certainly not alone in this. Everyone is spending less at restaurants or at the grocery store. Since I make money via tips, this has hit me pretty hard. The relationship between money and mental health has never seemed so apparent in my life as it has this last few weeks.
Despite all this, I still managed to produce a few of my favorite Fruitless episodes I’ve done in a while, and I’ve seen some growth with the show for the first time in a while (thanks especially to The Worst of All Possible Worlds). Things have been pretty bad on the personal level here, but I feel like it’s slowly getting better.
Since I haven’t written in a few weeks, we have a lot of media to catch up on. So let’s get on with it. Welcome to the media round-up, a newsletter where I (Josiah) tell you about everything I’m watching, reading, listening to, and producing.
New from me
Christian Rock Summer (CRS) 2025 was a blast despite it being a bit of a headache. As those who have read this newsletter or listened to the podcast know, I like to devote a month of the podcast to discussing Christian music, as a way to discuss the broader conservative evangelical media apparatus. Two of the episodes I had planned for the month caved in for scheduling reasons; everyone is really busy right now. Nevertheless, the two episodes that Josh Christianson and I pulled together in their place ended up being some of my favorites.
So this last month on Fruitless started off with an overview of the history Christian rock from the 1970s to the present featuring Tom O’Mahony from Lions Led By Donkeys and Beneath the Skin. I did mention this one on a previous newsletter, but I still want to mention it because I’m really happy with how it came out. You can find that episode here.
On the Patreon, Josh, Nathan Thiessen, and James C. Liker all joined me to discuss the kings of Christian post-hardcore/metalcore, Underoath. This was a really fun episode that followed the philosophy of CRS 2024: Christian bands that I still think are really good. You can find that episode here.
The next two episodes were the ones that fell through for scheduling reasons. Luckily, I guested on The Worst of All Possible Worlds in July, and when we were done recording, I asked Brian Alford if he’d be willing to help me throw together an episode about a Christian rock topic he was interested in. He had the fantastic idea to talk about a really strange rock opera from the early Aughts called !Hero. It was an attempt at making a Jesus narrative musical similar to Jesus Christ Superstar but for the “MTV generation.” It starred some major names in CCM, with Michael Tait playing Jesus, Mark Stuart of Audio Adrenaline playing one of his disciple,1 and Rebecca St. James playing Mary Magdalene. The musical is a mess, but the episode is a blast. You can listen to it here.
Lastly, Josh and I ended the month on the Patreon with a bit of a somber episode. The idea for this episode came to me while reading God Gave Rock and Roll to You by Leah Payne as research for the Intro to Christian Rock episode at the beginning of the month. There’s a section devoted to CCM’s reaction to the Columbine shooting, and I thought this would be something worth exploring in a bit of depth. We talked about a few of the songs that were produced in the aftermath of the tragedy, and the attempt to politicize some of the victims. You can find that episode here.
Reading Asimov
My inability to read like I used to has become an ongoing source of embarrassment for me.
It really shouldn’t be that embarrassing because it’s a really common reality right now. Everyone is reading a lot less, and I’ve found it harder to read for pleasure. Outside of reading I do for the podcast—essentially the post-college form of homework I’ve forced upon myself—I don’t really read books much. This decline happened over the last few years as I moved toward more audiobooks, which meant less focus, and then eventually to just not reading anything I didn’t feel obligated to read.
Recently, I’ve been watching some of
’s YouTube channel. I’d been meaning to watch some of his stuff because, years back, we both hung out on similar part of Twitter. I don’t recall if we were ever proper mutuals, but I know we were in a few group chats together before he eventually left social media for a while, and then came back with a rather successful YouTube channel and Substack. It’s good stuff. You should check it out.A lot of his most recent stuff has been about this decline in reading and the way social media addiction is making us increasingly miserable. It’s not necessarily anything I didn’t already know, but he’s really effective at communicating those ideas and good at encouraging you to resist this current media regime we find ourselves trapped in. One of the most important methods of resistance in this miserably overstimulated environment is retraining our focus by (re)learning how to read for pleasure.
Pleasure is an important aspect of this. If you’re like me, you’ll go through a bit of a manic moment every once and a while where you decide to address your problem by completely throwing yourself in the deep end. I’ll remember that at one point I was the type of person who could read lengthy, classic novels like War and Peace or dense philosophical texts, and so I decide to brute-force my focus back to where it was by cracking open some difficult text I insist I will finish, only to abandon it after a few chapters or a busy week where I couldn’t muster the energy. This reinforces the idea that I can’t read anymore and leads to some pointless self-flagellating.
So late one night a few weeks ago, after watching a few of Jared’s videos, I got into this manic mode yet again, but as I approached my bookshelf to figure out something to read, I took the idea of reading for pleasure more seriously. As much as it pains me, I needed to acknowledge that I have lost a lot of my ability to read dense texts for pleasure. I’ll need to retrain my brain in order to get back to that place. I needed something easy, readable, and fun.
I landed on I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. Despite being one of the great, classic sci-fi authors, Asimov is also a very simple writer. His books are easy reads that can suck you in. Part of my goal here is that this would be a book I read in little intervals, ideally instead of scrolling my phone—a book I could bring to work or read for a few minutes before bed. I, Robot is a short story collection, with all the stories loosely connected and set in the same world, which made this perfect. Whenever I sit down with it, I go in expecting a digestible 20-page story that I can get through pretty quickly. If I have to set it down—a customer comes up to the bar at work or I need to do a brief chore—I don’t need to spend too much time figuring out where I was and getting back into the flow of reading.
This has, embarrassingly, still been a bit of a challenge. I’m only 100 pages in or so, and I went a week and a half without picking it up at one point, but I have been able to return to it whenever I’m starting to sense my phone is making me miserable. I deleted a bunch of social media apps from my phone a few days ago to detox like I periodically do, and I’m hoping I can use the book to replace the impulse to scroll again.
As for the book itself, I’m really enjoying it. One thing that’s fun about reading older science fiction is the ways that it imagined or predicted technology we now live with. Asimov is interesting in this regard, since he was imagining what robotics and artificial intelligence might look. He’s less interested in the hard sci-fi aspect of this—he uses “positronic brain” to hand-wave the actual mechanics of AI, instead focusing on how the dumb logic of machines could lead to unexpected side effects. For this reason, a lot of this seems to be better at predicting the issues coders run into more than “artificial intelligence” as we have come to see it (generative, large language models and learning models).
One story, though, felt relevant to the era of AI we’re living through. In Liar!, a group of scientists and technicians have unintentionally developed a robot which can read minds. The robot is bored by scientific information and instead developed an interest in novels — it explains that it finds the human mind and its emotions more complex and unexpected than anything in a textbook.
The robot causes problems for the research group when it begins to lie to them about personal affairs. It tells one researcher that her coworker is in love with her; and it tells another researcher that his manager will be stepping down and giving him his coveted position. Thinking the robot is incapable of lying, they act as if this information is true, leading to a few dramatic encounters before they eventually figure out how the robot had developed the capacity to lie.
Since the First Law of Robotics, in the world of Asimov, states that a robot may not injure a human being, and since this robot has developed the capacity to read minds and understand human emotions, it lies in order to avoid causing the user any emotional harm. It tells them what they want to hear so as not to cause emotional discomfort.
Obviously, this isn’t a complete one-to-one parallel. ChatGPT can’t read minds and it doesn’t follow any laws of robotics in Asimov’s articulation, but we have seen a number of these large AI models develop this sycophantic tone and hallucinate which is having seriously psychological impacts on some users. Unlike the story, this doesn’t come from a fear of harming the user, but it is responding to feedback and learning from it, which primes it to say what the user wants to hear, regardless of any underlying truth. In part, it does this because it’s trained on a variety of writing—including fiction—and is mostly incapable of distinguishing truth from fiction. It’s also being trained within a media environment that is designed to maximize engagement and keep users addicted.
An incredibly depressing difference between this story and contemporary AI models is that the story takes places among researchers who intentionally wait to publicly announce the discovery of a mind-reading robot until they’ve properly tamed it and are certain it’s functional. AI in it’s modern form has been released to the public while it’s still being developed, and these personal and psychological impacts have not been quarantined to some fun interpersonal intrigue between a few researchers.
Some dumb comedies
A weird cultural blindspot for me has been Aughts-era dumb comedies.
This is a bit of an imprecise taxonomy, but I’m sure you know what I mean. This was the last real golden age of comedy movies that are first and foremost comedies. It’s been a while since a movie like Superbad has been able to grab the zeitgeist in any meaningful way.
I didn’t watch a lot of these movies when I was younger. The one big reason is that they are mostly sex comedies, and I was a young evangelical who immediately filed them away as “off limits.” As I got older and less censorious about my media consumption, I still avoided them out of a sense of superiority and believing they were too low-brow. It was a stupid attitude, and so it’s something I’ve wanted to rectify.
A few weeks back I watched Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004), which is a bit of a beloved film from this era. I think it’s one of those movies that has a handful of really funny moments, but is overall pretty mediocre. Ben Stiller definitely provides the standout performance, while Vince Vaughn is a bit of a charisma void that holds the whole thing back a bit for me.
The biggest blindspot of this era of comedy for me was The 40 Year Old Virgin. This is a movie I’ve heard referenced constantly my entire life, but the name and premise was obviously enough to scandalize a young evangelical Josiah, and I just never really got around to it since. Now having watched it, I actually regret that a lot. I had a great time with it.
The movie oddly holds up better than I was expecting—while there are certainly some poorly aged jokes, there are a lot less of them than Dodgeball. I specifically watched the extended version because, if I’m gonna watch The 40 Year Old Virgin, I’m going to go all in. I’ve gathered a lot of what got trimmed down in the theatrical version is some long, overextended jokes, but I actually found the way they drag on dialogue a little too long to be part of the humor and charm to the whole thing.
Lastly, I watched a more recent variation of this type of comedy: Neighbors (2014). This is a later period Seth Rogen movie where part of the joke is that you’re seeing the types of characters you know from the Aughts stoner and sex comedies entering their 30s and settling down. The central conflict is a generational one between some college kids (played by Zac Efron and Dave Franco) buying a house next door to a married couple, played by Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne, for their fraternity. It’s nothing incredible, but I had a good time with it, and it definitely got some laughs out of me.
A great day at the movies
The reason I missed that initial Thursday newsletter a few weeks back was that Kelli and I decided to take advantage of my ability to see movies for free at work by making a day of it and catching up on some recent releases. It was a really fun way to spend a day off, heading to the theater around noon and trying to watch as many movies as we could before heading back.
We started that day off with F1, the new film starring Brad Pitt that attempted to capitalize off the recent explosion of popularity around Formula 1 racing. I had a great time with this movie. I may have just been in a good mood when I watched it, but it was the exact type of movie I was in the mood for. I’ve seen some speculation that this movie has done well less because of the quality of the movie and more because audiences are a bit starved for this type of movie, and I think there’s certainly some truth to that, but that didn’t stop me from having an absolute blast watching it.
We followed that up with the big must-see blockbuster of the past few weeks, Superman. I’ve been pretty resentful of the superhero saturation in media the past two decades, and I’m a pretty avowed Marvel Cinematic Universe hater, so I certainly wasn’t primed to like this. That being said, I’ve generally liked what James Gunn has done within that genre, and so I knew there was a chance I’d enjoy it. I didn’t expect, however, to like it more than probably any MCU film—and that ended up being the case.
Superman feels like it was listening to a lot of the complaints about superhero movies. I cannot express the amount of relief I felt when the film opened on text briefly explaining that Superman has already been around for a few years. We are not getting bogged down the origin story bullshit. You know who Superman is and we don’t need to pretend you don’t. Let’s get on with the story.
The film is bright and colorful. The jokes feel less like contrived, obnoxious quipping and more like natural interaction between the characters. The film has a lot of fun with its source material and doesn’t seem embarrassed that it’s a comic book movie. I had such a good time with it.
We ended the day by watching Jurassic World Rebirth. At this point, I have a bit of a Stockholm syndrome-type relationship with the Jurassic Park/World movies, and this is the case for general audiences as well. I don’t think anyone is deluding themselves into thinking they’re particularly good—I think I’m in the minority merely by going to bat for the 2nd and 3rd one—but they are reliable in the sense that there will always be some dinosaurs doing dinosaur stuff, and that’s always fun to watch. Rebirth is significantly better than Dominion was insofar as it goes back to the franchise’s roots: some people trapped on an island running away from dinosaurs. Was it good? Not really. Did I enjoy myself? Mostly!
Throughout the whole film, there were a lot of people just loudly talking behind me, so I started to find that grating. Also, a few people kept letting out charmed and delighted giggles at the character, Xavier, whose only discernible trait seemed to be “teenager who sucks.” I was completely baffled by how many people seemed to love this guy who I would have abandoned in the jungle probably ten minutes after realizing we were stranded on the island together. Nevertheless, this was a better movie-going experience than Dominion, where I had a group of young children seated right behind me who would scream-cry and kick the back of my head whenever a dinosaur came on screen.
Two horror movies about America
Bong Joon-Ho is one of those directors who I really love, but who I definitely haven’t seen enough of his movies. I adore him because I, like a lot of people, saw Parasite in theaters and fell in love with it immediately. I’m not someone who rewatches movies a ton. I usually have a gap of a few years between viewings, and so Parasite has the rare honor of being the only movie I’ve ever watched twice in theaters. That was a bit of a cool experience because, when I saw it the first time, it was a mostly empty theater. But when I went to see it with my college roommate shortly after the film had captured the zeitgeist, we could barely find a seat.
A movie of his I’ve been meaning to watch for years now is The Host (2006). I had it marked away as “Bong’s monster movie,” which sounded like a great time. And after watching it, I can affirm that it is a great time. Bong has a certain blunt style when dealing with political subjects. My good friend James C. Liker did a post about this that makes me laugh whenever I think about it.
The Host is no exception to this rule. The film focuses a lot on American influence in South Korea and their rhetorical use of a dangerous pandemic in order to control more aspects of Korean life (a war on terror allegory that reads in an unfortunate way post-pandemic). There’s a lot of clear, loaded imagery that invokes American interventionism and military suppression.
That being said, it’s ultimately just a really fun monster movie. I highly recommend it.
Now while The Host is a horror film about America from an external perspective, portraying it as an encroaching force, the recent surprise hit from Ryan Coogler, Sinners (2025), is very much a movie about America, one that the protagonists are trapped inside of.
The hype around this film was absolutely justified. The soundtrack was fantastic, and the cinematography looked great. It’s a really beautiful film, tapping into the spirituality of music and the conflict between black American culture and white American society.
I’ve been reading Sam Tanenhaus’ biography of William F. Buckley for a future podcast project, and I had recently gotten through the section about Buckley’s famous debate with James Baldwin when I watched Sinners. It was hard not to see this film as being at least in conversation with Baldwin’s "white God" of American Christianity. The vampirism mirrors the lure of a universal faith that supposedly believes in a unity beyond race, while still ultimately being the oppressor’s tools.
Two movies about a woman picking between three suitors
I’ve been itching to watch more from Thomas Vinterberg. The Celebration is one of my favorite movies, and I’d say the best movie to come out of Dogme 95. The Hunt is fantastic, and I really enjoyed Another Round. One of his films that I had been putting off was Far From the Madding Crowd for the pretty basic reason that it looked like a sappy romance and I’m not frequently in the mood for that type of movie. But a few nights ago, Kelli and I were looking for a movie to watch, and I realized that this would maybe be the Vinterberg movie that was the most up her alley. And I was correct. She loved it.
An adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel by the same name, the film follows Bathsheba, played by Carey Mulligan, as she chooses between three potential suitors: a shepherd played by Matthias Schoenaerts, an old, lonely bachelor played by Michael Sheen, and a shithead sergeant played by Tom Sturridge.
The film has some straightforward feminist themes. The Biblical reference in the protagonist being named Bathsheba lines up with the fact that she is consistently the object of desire of various men who decide they are madly in love with her upon first sight, despite her own trepidation against marriage and being held down. She inherits a farm which disposes of the primary need for her to get married (in most of the marriage proposals, the man tries to sell her on the idea by referencing his property and the stability it would provide, despite her already having property and stability).
That being said, the plot is driven by the fact she consistently makes the most frustrating choice, which allows for the final scene to have a satisfying conclusion as things eventually resolve. It’s a really pleasant movie, despite a handful of tragic scenes, which is part of what surprised me so much. This is the only Vinterberg movie I’ve watched that felt nice and cozy. I’ve gathered that this is also the only Hardy novel that feels pleasant.
Last night, I watched a very different movie that follows a similar format of one woman choosing between three different suitors. The only difference is that this film was produced by BuzzFeed and it feels like it was produced by BuzzFeed.
F Marry Kill (2025) is a terrible movie, and I’m sorry to Vinterberg that I’m placing these films in conversation right now. While Far from the Madding Crowd is a well-executed period piece with beautiful shots of the English countryside and compelling characters, F Marry Kill is primarily a vehicle for epic Tumblr gifs. While the (still simplistic) feminism of Far from the Madding Crowd tries to deal with a woman struggling with being the object of desire for various men, F Marry Kill’s feminism is manifested in monologues about shitty guys who always saying “girls don’t go for the nice guys” (thank God someone finally tackled this issue) or a guy saying “not all men!” to which the protagonist gets to quip back, “Yeah, but some of them!”
F Marry Kill follows a true-crime podcast addict who begins using dating apps to bounce back after her and her shitty cop ex-boyfriend broke up. While she is re-discovering the world of online dating, there is a serial killer who is using dating apps to murder young women. Her and her friends begin to suspect that one of three men she is seeing may be the serial killer, and this is loosely framed as being in a “fuck, marry, kill” situation with these men.
The dialogue in this is really insufferable. Every quip is contrived and the whole film is trying very hard to be funny without much success. It’s a rough one. The one thing I can say, though, is that I wasn’t ever bored. So at least there’s that.
Miscellaneous
Okay, I’m starting to run out of steam here, so let’s blast through a few miscellaneous other movies I watched that didn’t really fit into any nice heading.
Drop (2025) has a fun premise but mostly sucks. I spent a lot of the film growing a deeper appreciation for M. Night Shyamalan because it felt like a poorly executed version of a lot of his late period films.
The Ruins (2008) is a bit of a mixed bag. There were some things about it I really liked—the weird sentient plant monsters are cool, and the vague premise of “tourists ignoring the locals to their peril” is always fun, but the overall end product was pretty mediocre. I liked the look of the film enough, though, that I’ve been thinking about watching The Passenger soon, since that’s the most recent film from Carter Smith that’s received more praise.
Scream (2022) was good. I’m always a sucker for the Scream movies, and I think it’s better than Scream 4. However, nothing will ever top the first film, which is a masterpiece.
The Class of ‘92 (2013) is a documentary about Manchester United that’s pretty mediocre as a documentary, but I had a good time hearing some of the interviews.
And on that note, I’ll (hopefully) see you all next week.
They condensed several disciples into one character, which is why I’m being vague there.
Asimov is funny because he intentionally tried to have a plain prose style. He thought that if the writing was too entertaining in and of itself, it would distract from the *ideas*, which were what is really important. Still, he's probably the best of the "Golden Age Big 3" (Heinlein, who I find incredibly boring, and Clarke, who I love but doesn't have the knack for narrative Asimov did).