Steely Dan's The Royal Scam is a mid-'70s homage to low-level dealers and sad-sack divorcees, making it the perfect gateway drug to one of rock's most beloved, reviled and sampled bands.

And while the Dan sing about decidedly broken people, their signature studio sound is notoriously pristine. The unlikely marriage of mint instrumentals and low-life characters feels oddly like a gin and tonic, just as at home in blue-collar taverns as in bougie banquet halls.

Nowhere is that juxtaposition starker than on "Kid Charlemagne," featuring a guitar solo so joyous it almost makes me forget the song is about a has-been LSD kingpin watching the sun set on his drug empire.

And that's the magic of this album. Whether it's "Haitian Divorce," a reggae-infused tale of a Caribbean love affair gone wrong, or the pure funk of "The Fez," I'm reminded there's beauty in failure and humour within our lowest moments, and that genius is not only for the pious and the good, but also for the failed and the human.

Along with our wins, we rack up plenty of losses as we amble through life, and sometimes we just need a reminder to stop taking ourselves so damn seriously.

I'm convinced Dan Simmons was a time traveler. Stay with me.

Hyperion (the book) is about a group of pilgrims traveling to Hyperion (the planet) to reach ancient structures moving backward through time and the Shrike, a nightmarish creature that'll force them to confront their own secrets and failings.

The novel is a rare example of genre fiction by an author who loves literature and ideas as much as robots and spaceships. It'll tickle your brain with literary references while respecting your literacy.

The entire narrative structure is based on The Canterbury Tales. It quotes Shakespeare. Hell, the book is named after Hyperion, John Keats's unfinished epic poem (fun fact: Keats also happens to be a character in the book!).

And here's where the time travel comes in. A civilization living 700 years in the future is somehow… us. They numb themselves with tech that's basically smartphones. Their space travel leaves everyone feeling completely misinformed and disconnected. No one knows how to solve any problem, ever. AI and humanity have a "will-they-won't-they" relationship (except it's a lot more "kill" than "marry" or "fuck").

I don't know about you, but sure feels like the past decade to me…

James Kestrel's Five Decembers felt like exposure therapy for my OCD. It had me digging into my couch's cat-scratched cushions as Detective Joe McGrady lost four years of his life to a war he never saw coming, one that lifted him right out of his comfort zone like a stuffy in a claw machine. There was nothing he could do to stop it.

Basically my worst nightmare.

The novel takes the crime noir genre and flips it on its head, doubling as a history lesson, with Pearl Harbor becoming more than just a catalyst for America's involvement in World War II.

You'll frantically whip each page to the side as you can almost feel the earth shake from bombs dropping out of planes in the distant orange Japanese sky.

History doesn't ask for permission before changing your life. Yet by the end of the book, you realize that control can be reclaimed.

Typically, crime noir offers shallow, frivolous narratives with protagonists who think they're James Bond. Instead, I'm left every week with a scene or a piece of dialogue that crawls its way into my ear and sinks its teeth into my brain.

So much so that the re-read might be coming a lot sooner than I had initially planned…

I really wanted to hate it... But Honora is shockingly awesome, and I can't stop playing it. I've basically been bingeing on humble pie since last spring.

You don't need the backstory. You don't need to know Flea grew up on Gillespie, Miles and Clifford Brown. That nearing sixty, he dusted off his trumpet to practice every day and plays horn and bass throughout. That it features Josh Johnson, Jeff Parker, Anna Butterss and Deantoni Parks among others, plus appearances by Thom Yorke and Nick Cave.

Legit, none of that matters.

"Golden Wingship" starts the record off with abstract noise like the tuning of an orchestra. Then the bass vamp of "A Plea" kicks in, hitting you in the chest like a Mack truck and leaving you begging daddy for more.

You can't even put this thing in a box. "A Plea" gives 1970s protest song vibes. The "Thinkin Bout You" cover, backed by strings, with the melody alternating between electric bass and trumpet, is... magical. And overall, Honora is in full ADHD mode, glitching from trad jazz to modern electronic.

But it all. Makes. Perfect. Sense.

When the Thom Yorke cameo isn't even close to the best moment on an album, you know it's one of a kind.

The Residence is a rare bird of a show where the unflappable Cordelia Cupp, played beautifully by Uzo Aduba (Orange Is the New Black), leads a wild goose chase at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue after chief usher A.B. Wynter is found dead as a dodo.

The script by Paul William Davies is novel and fun, the cast of characters ranges from birdbrained to crazy as a loon, and most interesting of all is the intertwining of Cupp's investigation with chirpings from a later congressional committee hearing.

The result is a dizzying display of finger-pointing and cagey alibis where suspects come home to roost by the dozen, making that chicken-or-egg conundrum of old feel as easy as duck soup.

The cast is stellar on the whole, and Maira Kalman's illustrated title cards are cute as a duckling. The cinematography is gripping with its animated cut-outs of the White House, outdoor time-lapses and bird's-eye view flyovers from room to room, while the set design feels way better than those overcrowded guided tours your mother hen probably forced on you during that one trip to DC.

Riveting from the rooster's first crow to the final swan song. For once, "for the birds" is a compliment.

P.S. There's birding. Did we mention the birding?

Take Interpol's 2002 debut Turn on the Bright Lights, one of my favorite records of the century.

The music is derivative, the band members wear suits and, worst of all, they have cringeworthy lyrics like: “Well then hook me up and throw me baby cakes ’cause I like to get hooked.”

But here's the thing: it works.

Turn on the Bright Lights is a testament to the power of romantic post-punk when all the elements are perfectly assembled, like Tolstoy writing a thousand-page novel about war, aristocrats and the meaning of life that's somehow impossible to put down.

Heavy drums and bass complement Interpol's signature angular guitars on the opening track "Untitled," while "Obstacle 1" embodies the tense and urgent nature that dominates the first half of the record, with the back end more subdued and nocturnal.

No track captures this better than "Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down," a six-and-a-half-minute cinematic epic that combines sweeping orchestral beauty with the story of a woman experiencing a tragic fall from grace.

This perfect soundtrack for falling leaves and crisp air will leave you reflecting on life, in all the right ways. So as autumn closes in, I implore you to get hooked on this incredible, hypnotic achievement.

You can never rush a bowl of ramen. First you contemplate it. You gently take in the aroma. This film asks the same of you.

Where an American script would give you dialogue, Eric Khoo cuts away to a still lake, an empty staircase, and you hear the conversation anyway. You hear it better because the version in your head is the one you would have said.

That is ma, a Japanese concept where negative space gives shape to the whole. Ma is the pause between the lines, the shot that lingers. You only get it if you wait.

The one time two people finally say everything, she yells in Cantonese, he yells in Japanese, neither understands anything, but the feeling is heard.

Khoo is Singaporean, and Ramen Teh is a love letter to his native land, the noise of the hawker centre against the hush of a Takasaki ramen shop, an uncle who talks with his mouth full next to a nephew who barely talks at all.

The movie is also a reckoning with the injustice of bygone feuds and their effect on the generations that follow. It is a film about forgiveness and food. It is the richness of umami, a flavor never on the surface yet always deep within the broth.

But none of that is said. You will only feel it if you take the time to let the movie slowly seep in.

Jackie’s Bag stems from two recording sessions, twenty months apart, bookending 1959 and 1960, the two years jazz tore up the rulebook and started having a full blown identity crisis.

In that span, Miles drops Kind of Blue and sets off the modal revolution, Trane drops Giant Steps and buries everyone in sheets of sound, and Ornette drops The Shape of Jazz to Come (and Change of the Century), basically telling jazz it's been doing it all wrong this whole time.

And we got Jackie McLean sitting right in the thick of it, listening hard.

So when the needle drops on Jackie’s Bag, Jackie Mac is in straight-up Charlie Parker mode on "Quadrangle" and "Fidel", breezing through bebop lines over steady hi-hat, while "Blues Inn" sounds like it came right off Blakey’s Moanin’.

But then "Appointment in Ghana" comes out of nowhere like a haymaker and knocks you the fuck out.

From the first notes of the intro to the galvanizing AABA with syncopated accents and flowing bridge, this thing’s perfect. All that even before McLean steps up for the first solo and takes off like Jumpman at the All Star game.

The rest of the album also hits pretty hard, but if you do just one thing today, hit play on "Appointment in Ghana".

Innervisions was a spiritual awakening. Nothing less. It introduced me to a new musical universe and left a clean schism in my life: before and after 1970s Stevie Wonder.

In the late 90s, my then-girlfriend bought me the LP for my burgeoning collection. I kind of knew Stevie had been a child star in the 60s and made a few cool funk songs, but that's akin to vaguely registering Michelangelo played with clay.

The second the needle dropped, the driving synthesizer on "Too High" had me nodding and by the time side one wrapped up on "Golden Lady," I was already dreaming of spending the rest of my life running in a field, watching flowers bloom.

After flipping the record, I got hit with "Higher Ground" (objectively the best distillation of soul-funk ever recorded at Motown) and by the time the Latin-infused "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" came on, Stevie had the Conn Smythe fully locked up.

Innervisions embodies that whole decade: funky, political, introspective, and sexy.

Stevie also played every instrument on most songs, which was like finding out Michael assembled the Air Jordans you're wearing.

Anyway. Listen to the god damn record. You'll never be the same.

It's not a self-help book or a philosophy book, either. It's more like growing a third eye in the middle of your forehead.

The Score gives you the words to explain why you feel out of breath running races you don't remember starting.

C. Thi Nguyen is a fascinating guy, a gamer, a philosopher who writes about games, a cook, and a climber. He's seen how letting the wrong numbers rule you can turn something you love into a slog.

Because we're all playing games. And games have scores.

I'm a writer. I live to write and I write to live. I'm obsessed with my daily word count. But after reading The Score, I realized I'm sacrificing what makes writing special (creativity, accomplishment) for something that doesn't even really matter (bIg NuMbEr gO uP!).

The Score isn't about eliminating numbers and scorekeeping. Scores help you make sense of a world that's too damn big. But you should know when you don't need them. Because games, real ones, end. You mark up the scoreboard and then throw it away.

Keeping a never-ending tally in the game of life will just fuck you up.

For years, my post dinner party ritual involved showing Christopher Scott Cherot's Hav Plenty (1997).

Sometimes my friends would wonder if I was joking about loving this film, which follows a struggling grad student writer, Lee Plenty, who for some reason gets invited to spend the New Year's holiday with his crush, Havilland Savage.

But though the film is full of jokes, I seriously love it. The tenderness of the crush, for one.

Lee, played by the film's director, exhibits a beautiful vulnerability. Throughout, there's an expectant kind of tension of having one's crush and eating it too. Then there's the poem Lee reads at the end, after a weekend full of near misses is resolved with his crush seemingly crushing him: "Havilland's eyes, I am thinking."

The beauty of the film is in all the ways one yearns and hopes and then has to play it off. A crush sends you reeling, imagining and hoping for some kind of consummation, or confirmation.

The first time I saw Hav Plenty, I also saw my Havilland and that tension never lifted.

When he’d introduce new menu items, his usually dismissive demeanor would dissipate with interjections of “that’s a Thomas Keller technique!” leaving him beaming for a moment like a burned-out cook at the sight of a pint after a 16-hour shift.

To this day, the TFL cookbook remains infinitely more than a piece of nostalgia (sous-chef Grant Achatz anyone?). It provides an earnest and immortalizing glimpse into the heart and soul of one of the most iconic restaurants to ever grace the New World.

The writing is pristine and soigné, just like Keller’s white truffle oil-infused custards set in eggshell and served with the absolute most perfect single potato chip (recipe included).

But most importantly, The French Laundry is a celebration of Napa’s rich terroir, a manifesto for the love of food and doing things right at all costs, a bible of elevated cooking techniques re-modernized by one of the greatest chefs of the century, and an absolute must for anyone claiming to be a “foodie” (whatever the fuck that means).

“When you acknowledge, as you must, that there is no such thing as perfect food, only the idea of it, then the real purpose of striving toward perfection becomes clear: to make people happy. That’s what cooking is all about.”

This isn't the Aaron Sorkin of Bourdain biopics. So stop your whining, bro.

But wanna watch the early chapters of Kitchen Confidential come to life, with a 19-year-old Bourdain chasing the girl to P-town, MA, circa 1975, washing dishes in a lobster shack and falling in love with the noble (and not so noble) way of life that is professional cookery?

Brigade in unison: Oui Chef!

Granted, the script's not quite a perfect medium rare, but you ain't seeing this one for the story.

The cinematography of Cape Cod summer days is so good you can practically smell the iodine from your theater seat. Banderas's performance is phenomenal. Plus, there are enough Kitchen Confidential Easter eggs, subtle BOH idiosyncrasies, crude cooking banter, and Lobster Thermidor to satisfy the most hardened of die-hard Bourdain fans. And did we mention the killer soundtrack featuring everyone from The Stooges to Brian Eno?

"I'll be right here. Until they drag me off the line. I'm not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

Straight08, albeit only mildly clever when it comes to puns (808, get it?), excels at delivering an auditory mindfuck akin to "having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick."

Is it jazz? Honestly, who cares. Barsh, Guiliana, & Keyon in the same lineup feels illegal, like LeBron, Wade, and Bosh each dropping 30 in one night without ever fighting over who gets the rock.

Sure, there's a nod to Monk and one of the best covers of "Little Sunflower" ever (truly), but overall this thing just hits different.

The bass is swapped out for 808s, with Barsh's left hand conjuring lines unlike anything jazz has heard before, while his right lays down moody, ambient synth overdubs. Guiliana's nonstop slaying, because that's what Guiliana does. As the rhythm section steamrolls ahead, the structure somehow stays wide open for Harrold to soar over with beautiful, sweeping melodies.

One of my favorite albums of 2026 thus far. So grab your best pair of headphones (you'll need 'em for the 808s), hit play, and get ready to sit down (hol' up), and be humbled.