The Audacious Roundup
For the week of July 21st
AUDACIOUS BOOKCLUB HAPPENINGS
Book club news! We’re partnering with the lovely people at Allstora for the Audacious Book Club. Now, you can sign up to have the monthly selections delivered to your doorstep each month!
Our July selection is Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin. We will have a live book club discussion with the author on July 30th at 8pm EST/5 am PST. Registration is open! I hope to see many of you there. I’ve put together an Audacious Book Club storefront if you want to buy current or forthcoming book club titles. There is a bookclub FAQ if you have questions about how it all works.
THE NEWSLETTER WEEK IN REVIEW
Roadmarks
Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Roadmarks” by Jesse Lacy. Jesse is a writer from the Shenandoah Valley currently residing in Richmond, Virginia. They are an MFA candidate in nonfiction and fiction at Virginia Commonwealth University, where they are an associate nonfiction editor at
PERSONAL & PROFESSIONAL NEWS
I’m so excited to be speaking at @freefromdotorg’s Survivor Wealth Summit, happening August 11–14 in Downtown LA. There will be 600+ survivors in attendance. Four days. Bold conversations. Collective healing. Economic justice. Survivors: Get your $50 ticket through July 31 with this code: specialdiscountforyou
Register at freefrom.org/summit
Thanks to you guys and other readers, The Portable Feminist Reader is a NYT bestseller! So thank you! And if you haven’t gotten a copy yet, there’s still time! (And there will always be time, it’s a book.) And check out Love Letter to a Garden, by Debbie Millman.
Book and project buying links: Books I’ve Written, RGB Imprint Titles, Rebind: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
READING MATERIAL
The regime is up to their usual bullshit. Open up a newspaper or your favorite news website/app and you will see that fascism is here, institutions have no integrity, and politicians have no standards when it comes to power or adjacency to power. We’ll skip those links this week.
That said, people in Gaza are starving not metaphorically but literally. They are dying from hunger in a world of segregated abundance. The world is allowing this to happen. When people try to get what little food that is being disbursed by the IDF, they are risking their lives, again, literally. They are being killed. When we say never again, we have to mean never again for any group of people.
Brian Kohberger has been sentenced to multiple life sentences in prison.
Amy Sherald is cancelling her Smithsonian show because they wanted to censor her work.
Lots of people are visiting the MET Museum in NYC.
RIP Malcolm Jamal Warner aka Theo Huxtable among many other roles. We learned a lot from Theo. He seemed like a lovely man.
RIP Tom Lehrer, a musical satirist.
RIP Ozzy Osbourne.
Soon, Uber will pair women drivers and women riders if that’s what they prefer.
This is basically organ snatching. This does not assuage the fears of people who are skeptical about organ donation.
French president Macron and his wife are suing Candace Owens because Owens continues to claim that Macron’s wife is… a man? WHAT? It’s so bizarre.
RGB author Eshani Surya is a debut author to keep on your radar according to Publishers Weekly. I, of course, agree. Eshani’s novel Ravishing will be out on 11/11/25.
Rich people doing rich people shit.
Speaking of rich people, David Geffen is in the middle of a weird, messy divorce.
New Chris Ware stamps!!!
A review of the new Thomas Chatterton Williams memoir.
A conversation with that billionaire obsessed with immortality who looks unwell as he touts wellness.
Buckingham Nicks is being reissued!
I really appreciated this piece by Brandon Taylor about how he teaches students to give feedback that focuses on craft.
A man has documented his lifetime of reading!
NFL players have been selling their ticket allotments for more than face value.
There is a Tesla diner in L.A. and hopefully the food doesn’t explode like the cars do.
Joe Budden is doing umm…. well in the podcast space?
A brief history of the “kiss cam.”
In TX, of course, a man is suing a CA doctor for providing his girlfriend with healthcare he disapproves of.
I’ve never thought to pair video games with romance, but someone else has!
A Vermont engineer is reviving pay phones (for free) so you can make calls in areas with bad reception. Excellent vibes.
Debbie Millman shared her relationship to journalling.
There is a new Netflix show, Hunting Wives, and some scissoring takes place. ::insert scissor emoji::
Here is an appreciation of the mid-day meal.
The Washington Post is hemorrhaging subscribers. I mean… journalists… or is it both?
Venus Williams played and won a tennis match; she’s back on tour for… wait for it… health insurance. American exceptionalism at its finest.
I love puzzles so I enjoyed this essay about the pleasures of the process of puzzling.
This one time, a lime-colored dildo got thrown onto a WNBA court.
At the final performance of the Cowboy Carter tour, there was a mini-reunion of Destiny’s Child and then they walked off stage as the child of destiny strutted on. I was there. It was incredible.
I always love your round-ups. You find the most interesting stories! Thank you.