Kurt Vonnegut’s writing is so wildly creative that it seems he found inspiration in just about anything and everything he encountered in life.

One particular element of his youth, growing up in Indianapolis, was playing in the school band, and in Vonnegut’s Complete Stories, there is a section titled “The Band Director” that center a series of five stories around a caricature of his own high-school band director. These connected stories explore how music, patience, and small civic rituals shape kids’ lives. Read together, they make a strong argument that ordinary teachers and modest institutions, such as band directors and school rituals, are where character, self-worth, and community are quietly made.

“The Kid Nobody Could Handle” (1955, Saturday Evening Post; later in Welcome to the Monkey House) introduces George M. Helmholtz, “a very kind fat man with a head full of music,” the devoted band director at Lincoln High. When he sees Jim Donnini, a troubled boy living at a diner, Helmholtz gently intervenes: after catching Jim vandalizing school rooms, he trades his prized trumpet (said to have belonged to John Philip Sousa) for the boy’s cherished black leather boots, insisting Jim take the trumpet and play. It’s a sentimental setup and a little unbelievable, but the story sweetly shows how a teacher’s faith can change a kid’s path.

★★★★½ 4.5/5

“The No-Talent Kid” (1952, Saturday Evening Post; later in Bagombo Snuff Box) follows Walter Plummer, tone-deaf and forever angling for a letterman’s jacket. He’s a thorn in Helmholtz’s side, yet his persistence and a clever resolution around a prized drum show Vonnegut’s thesis in action: not everyone can excel at everything, but most people can find one or two things to love and do well. It’s heartfelt and satisfying.

★★★★½ 4.5/5

“Ambitious Sophomore” (1954, Saturday Evening Post; later in Bagombo Snuff Box) returns to Helmholtz’s conflicts with the school powers that be, this time an assistant principal tightening the budget. Helmholtz insists on a particular uniform and prop to help a piccolo player march straight, arguing that small investments in dignity matter. It’s the smallest of the band stories, but a funny, humane reversal of how high school arts often get short shrift compared with sports.

★★★½☆ 3.5/5

“The Boy Who Hates Girls” (1956, Saturday Evening Post; later in Bagombo Snuff Box) puts Helmholtz into an existential wobble when he misreads a student’s drunkenness for marching failure. The episode exposes a teacher’s doubts about method, authority, and unintended harm and is an empathetic portrait of a man wrestling with the limits of his influence.

★★★★☆ 4/5

“A Song for Selma” (from 2009’s Look at the Birdie) is a gem that folds mistaken identities, awkward teenage passion, and creative pride into an ambiguous but deeply human comedy. Based on the confidential IQ files in the principal’s office, a kid named Schroeder is a genius. He’s written a mountain of compositions for the band over his years at Lincoln High. But one day he tells Helmholtz he no longer wants to write music and instructs the teacher to trash all his work. But then dumb kid Big Floyd suddenly turns in a love ode about a classmate named Selma for the band to rehearse. Selma sneaks into the IQ files and determines Floyd is really the smart one and Schroeder the dumb one, and that Helmholtz is also a genius. Helmholtz claims to know nothing about IQ measurement but discovers Selma had misread the files, mistaking the IQ numbers for body-weight calculations. The story is one of the richest, funniest pieces in Complete Stories and left me eager to next read the section on “Behavior.”

★★★★★ 5/5

Also read Part 1 of my series on Vonnegut’s Complete Stories: Kurt Vonnegut clearly saw a future of overpopulation that would lead to many ethical questions

https://popculturelunchbox.substack.com/p/kurt-vonneguts-high-school-band-stories

I was drawn to The Vacationers by Emma Straub because it’s set in Mallorca, Spain. I’ve never been there, although I think I’ve flown over it and looked down at it a couple of times on the way to Africa, but the little island is home to one of my favorite tennis players, Rafael Nadal, and he has a massive tennis training center there. Even though tennis doesn’t play a major role in the story, Straub uses the setting well, including a big tennis center where a former tennis star gives lessons, to help give shape to one of the novel’s many good storylines.

Another reason I was drawn to the book is that Straub has been on my to-read list for too long. For one, she is the daughter of Peter Straub, who co-authored The Talisman with Stephen King. She also owns an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, which is pretty cool in its own right. But she also has several other books that sound right up my alley, including Modern Lovers from 2016, which I’m always up for because of the rock ’n’ roll angle, and the collection Other People We Married from 2011. I love it when novelists release short stories because they are such a great way to sample an author and see whether they write to your personal beat.

Based on The Vacationers, from 2014, Straub is on my beat. Franny and Jim Post are the heart of the family but have major hurdles to navigate as they celebrate 35 years of marriage. Meanwhile, they must put on a good face for their children, 18-year-old eye-rolling and sex-obsessed Brown University-committed Sylvia and late-twenties Bobby who brings along his older girlfriend/personal trainer Carmen. Frannie’s long-time best friend Charles and his husband Lawrence provide a buffer zone for this potentially explosive combination of humans under one roof. The locals who appear (Sylvia’s tutor and Frannie’s tennis coach) provide much of the sexual tension that fires the story.

Straub is known as a favorite for fans of the juicy beach-read genre, and The Vacationers shows why. It’s a breezy, entertaining, and excetionally well-written novel, with compelling characters and fully realized back stories set in a location well worth visiting, if not in person than at least via the written page. I loved the way she tied together the ending, with realistic resolve but also creativity.

Based on The Vacationers, released in 2014, Straub is on my beat. She turns a sun-soaked family vacation into an emotionally layered exploration of trying to heal relationships filled with somewhat minor tensions. Franny and Jim Post are the heart of the family, but they have major hurdles to navigate as they celebrate 35 years of marriage. Meanwhile, they must put on a good face for their children, 18-year-old, eye-rolling, sex-obsessed Sylvia, who has committed to Brown, and late-twenties Bobby, who brings along his older girlfriend and personal trainer Carmen. Franny’s longtime best friend Charles and his husband Lawrence provide a buffer zone for this potentially explosive combination of humans under one roof. The locals who appear, Sylvia’s tutor and Franny’s tennis coach, provide much of the sexual tension that fires the story and keeps it tumbling along.

Straub is known as a favorite for fans of the juicy beach-read genre, and The Vacationers shows why. It is a breezy, entertaining, and exceptionally well-written novel, with compelling characters and fully realized backstories set in a location well worth visiting, if not in person then at least via the written page. I loved the way she tied together the ending, with realistic resolve but also creativity.

★★★★½ 4.5/5

https://popculturelunchbox.substack.com/p/in-the-vacationers-emma-straub-delivers

Álvaro Enrigue landed on my radar not long after I got my undergrad literature studies degree because of his 1996 novel Death of an Installation Artist, which later was named one of the key novels of the Mexican 20th century.

So he’s been on my list to read forever, and to finally dip my toes in, I started with his also highly acclaimed 2013 short-story collection Hypothermia, which is said to explore “the brutal gravity of cultural misunderstandings and the coldly smirking will to self-destruction hiding within our irredeemably carnal lives.”

Enrigue has Mexican and Spanish heritage, received his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, and teaches at Hofstra University. His writing reflects a world-weariness, including settings such as Washington, D.C., the North Carolina Outer Banks, California, Mexico, and beyond.

Here are my thoughts on the first four stories from Hypothermia:

“Dumbo's Feather” kicks off the collection and I instantly liked Enrigue’s vibe. There’s nothing earthshaking about the story, but it is a slice of life about a writer whose wife once thought he would someday be famous. His son doesn’t respect his art, but at least his friends consider the married pair to be Renaissance people because, even though they have almost no money, they love to enjoy the arts and the finer things in life. By the end, the writer is resolved to be a really strong TV watcher, with a viewing room he plans to design that will be second to none. Hilariously apathetic.

★★★★☆ 4/5

”Self Help” kicks off a section of the collection titled “Scenes From Family Life.” I found nearly every single sentence of this minor story gripping, or at the very least amusing. Told from the perspective of a jaded, drunk, and unsuccessful writer, possibly the same one as in the first story, he panics a little at the thought that he and his wife have a baby on the way and practically no money. He then irritates his boss, who threatens to fire him. But when the writer challenges the boss to say he could write a good book, he is given a contract for six months, during which time he delivers what turns out to be a self-help bestseller on the art of discipline. All irony aside, the writer returns to crafting a novel, which gets published and sells a grand total of 423 copies. It doesn’t really matter that I just told you the entire story. What matters is the journey, and the clear fact that Enrigue is a genius of humorous storytelling.

★★★★★ 5/5

“Gula, or: The Invocation” is where Enrigue comes back to earth a little bit. A writer and his wife are struggling with their life in Mexico City and have decided they will move. He runs into an astrologer friend in the supermarket who predicts a series of maladies that will infect their lives over the coming months, including the predicted death of their beloved cat Gula. This is another very short story, and while entertaining in its structure, it falls pretty flat in terms of character development and motivation.

★★★☆☆ 3/5

“Diary of a Quiet Day” is about a literature professor who is vacationing with his family at the North Carolina Outer Banks. He decides to stay home while his wife, son, and wife’s relatives go off to sightsee in Kitty Hawk and across Cape Lookout and Ocracoke. He realizes it’s the first time he’s had what he calls a bachelor day in a long time and devours a huge amount of the relatives’ Froot Loops, Doritos, and Diet Coke. Throughout the day, he reads and intersperses his thoughts about The Odyssey and the nearby sinking of Blackbeard’s ship with his own worries. He becomes suddenly uncomfortable being in a situation of having little responsibility, like when he himself was younger, and wells up with worry about whether everyone is still safe on their trip. It’s again an excellent short story, made even better by my familiarity with the Outer Banks.

★★★★½ 4.5/5

Enrigue’s short stories reveal how absurd, funny, and quietly despairing ordinary life can be, and that mix makes him worth reading. The start of Hypothermia has me entranced. When I finish it, I’m looking forward to his 2022 novel You Dreamed of Empires, which reimagines life at the height of Tenochtitlan civilization, in 1509, when conquistador Hernán Cortés meets Emperor Moctezuma.

https://popculturelunchbox.substack.com/p/alvaro-enrigues-stories-reveal-a

The biggest block of John Oates news over the past year has been about the collapse of his relationship with longtime songwriting partner Daryl Hall, but there is a lot of positive going on in the 78-year-old musician’s life as well. He recently released a solo album, is playing some tour dates throughout 2026, and has published a compelling memoir.

What makes Change of Seasons worth reading, at least in the first section, which I cover here, focused on Oates’ childhood and then the 1960s, is that it does not just revisit the breakup or the recent headlines. It also tries to explain how Hall and Oates came together in the first place, why they worked so well, and what Oates thinks the duo really was. That makes the memoir feel less like a score-settling exercise and more like a useful history of one of pop music’s most durable partnerships.

First off, according to him, Hall and Oates are not a duo ...

https://popculturelunchbox.substack.com/p/john-oates-tells-the-story-of-the

Brooke Gladstone says the media is an influencing machine, and her case is stronger than ever. In The Influencing Machine, the NPR On the Media host and journalist uses a graphic novel format to trace how news, publicity, power, and public suspicion have been tangled together for centuries, and most of what she lays out still feels painfully familiar.

I’ve been re-reading the book, and what stands out most is how foundational her argument is. Yes, the media world changes constantly, but the basic machinery behind reporting, bias, influence, and public distrust remains very much intact.

I can relate to her point that reporting is a compulsion for many journalists. One reason I write is because writing helps me understand what I’m trying to communicate. Gladstone seems to operate the same way: she has to report something in order to understand it herself. And once she does, she can’t wait to see how we all drink the content from the hose.

The “influencing machine” started long ago, she concludes, with publicity people, but real news reporting may have begun when Julius Caesar decreed that the Roman Senate post its daily activities on a note outside the Colosseum and have it sent to provincial governors. Soon, divorce, crime, and orgies were being printed alongside the political news.

Over in the U.S., after the Revolution, rather than taxing newspapers like is done in the UK, the delivery of papers was subsidized in order to build a watchful citizenry and a central government that knows it’s being watched. Gladstone calls this “America’s greatest contribution to civilization.”

That said, there would continue from that day a long history of presidents and the federal government lying to the public. Even with Senator Joe McCarthy’s five-year anti-Communist campaign and Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam coverups, it took until the 1971 exposure of the workings of the American government leading up to the Vietnam War, via the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times, for the public to better understand the depth of the lying.

As a country, we rarely learn our lessons for long. After 9/11, George W. Bush brought back Richard Nixon-like spying and undermined the Watergate-era law that made presidential records public.

But back to the influencing machine. One question Gladstone wrestles with is why the public has such low regard for the press. Sometimes it’s inaccuracies, like when it was reported that 50,000 children go missing every year and that number, seemingly coming out of thin air, was reported by the media and then by politicians. When the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst blamed Spain, even after it was found that there was no evidence for this. Hearst simply wanted a war to get started that his company could report on. Lou Dobbs of CNN was practically a yellow journalism industry all to himself. He claimed on the air that an invasion of illegal aliens was threatening the homes of many Americans and that there were 7,000 cases of leprosy over the past 30 years, when in fact there were three. He also claimed 33 percent of the nation’s prison population was illegal immigrants when only 6 percent were.

While journalists do overall tend to tilt liberal rather than conservative in the U.S., it’s not necessarily in the way you think, and Gladstone points out that liberal media actually overrepresents conservative views more so than liberal ones. One George Mason University poll in 2009 found that there is one way the media are definitely biased, and that’s against presidents.

Other major biases?

• Relating to the surprise quoting of conservatives above, journalists will often bend over backwards with a fairness bias by offering equal time to opposing viewpoints.
• News needs to be new, so there is often a bias toward lack of follow-up.
• Emphasizing bad news is also a bias, and it makes the world seem more dangerous than it actually is.
• Humans oppose change and often like things to stay the same, and because of this status quo bias, the media tends to ignore positions that advocate for radical changes.
• Access bias is another major problem, in that journalists are often held captive by their sources and want to remain in their good graces to get good quotes and stories. John McCain and George W. Bush were liked by reporters, and that may indeed have caused an access bias that resulted in journalists self-censoring themselves.
• There is also visual bias, which can generate attention in a story that doesn’t deserve as much, or vice versa.
• There’s narrative bias, a problem particularly with science stories that are typically ongoing and don’t really have big, raging new headlines, but get them anyway by editors.

Gladstone argues that media bias is less some kind of a conspiracy than a structural system built into how news gets made, packaged, and consumed. I’m breaking my reading of the book into two articles. This part focuses on the origins of the influencing machine and I think Part 2 will go into the modern forms the machine has taken.

https://popculturelunchbox.substack.com/p/brooke-gladstone-shows-how-the-media

Of the handful of movies I’ve seen lately, the one must-see is The Secret Agent, which was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards and lives up to the hype.

Most of that is due to star Wagner Moura’s charming turn as Armando, a former researcher making his way to Recife during the 1977 carnival holiday in Brazil. It is clear right away that this is taking place during the country’s military dictatorship and, because he has caught the attention of a corrupt official, nothing is made easy for him as he attempts to visit his son Fernando, who lives with his in-laws after the death of Armando’s wife.

Moura’s performance led to many firsts, including becoming the first Brazilian actor to win Best Actor at the Golden Globes and to be nominated at the Academy Awards.

The acting is phenomenal, the cinematography and plot are worthy of Quentin Tarantino, and it is also a valuable history lesson on a South American country, like Chile, that was ruled during the period with brutality. The military sided with conservative forces, including the Catholic Church, in a 21-year nationalist campaign that featured media and citizen censorship and a conservatively estimated 434 people either confirmed killed or missing, along with 20,000 people tortured.

It is the first movie I’ve seen that seems to really set the viewer in that unique time and place, and it is among my favorite Brazil movies ever, alongside City of God and Black Orpheus, with I’m Still Here next on my viewing list.

★★★★★ 5/5

John Mulaney: “Baby J”

I figured this would be a major hoot. But unlike some of his earlier masterful standup and work in Kroll Show and his Mulaney sitcom, this 2023 set is a little depressing as the Georgetown grad discusses his intervention and sobriety. Somehow it seems he was far funnier when he was abusing drugs.

★★★☆☆ 3/5

Lola Versus

This 2012 rom-com slipped past me, and it is a lot like Frances Ha, which was also released that year and also starred future Barbie director Greta Gerwig. The two films are like more modern, female-led versions of Woody Allen indies, with lots of intellectual dialogue to go along with some laughs and some love. Zoe Lister-Jones co-wrote it and plays Gerwig’s friend, who helps her navigate disastrous relationships, like one with Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who later hit it big on TV’s The Bear. Bill Pullman and Debra Winger play Gerwig’s not-overly-concerned parents.

★★★★☆ 4/5

Knock at the Cabin

This 2023 psychological gore-horror thriller, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, is surprisingly clever and compelling. It probably helps that Jonathan Groff, from Hamilton on Broadway and also the spectacular TV show Mindhunter, stars as one of two dads who go to their cabin with their young daughter, only to have their vacation interrupted by four strangers with very bad and very strange news. Dave Bautista is the leader of the visitors and was well cast as a unique character.

★★★½☆ 3.5/5

People We Meet on Vacation

Another rom-com I watched arrived on Netflix earlier this year and stars Emily Bader as outgoing Poppy and Tom Blyth as homebody Alex. They become best friends after sharing a long ride from college back to their hometown. Although they are polar opposites, they end up taking a weeklong summer vacation together each year. But there are problems for the relationship and, although the movie is a little long in unpacking them, it mostly kept me interested with snappy storylines and great views of places like New Orleans and Tuscany.

★★★☆☆ 3/5

https://popculturelunchbox.substack.com/p/brazils-the-secret-agent-leads-the