SEPTEMBER 2026 VOL. 3

a monthly digital coffee table book, curated by myself, to share my favorite recent musings with you.

film

“insensitive” - jann arden

On a random early 1990s day in Calgary, Canadian singer-songwriter Jann Arden was low on cash, so instead of taking her usual route to get coffee, she scraped together some coins and took a different route to find a cheaper cafe. Along the way, she heard a woman painfully singing from her basement window. Jann knocked on the door, and a woman named Anne Loree opened up and told her how she waited tables at a restaurant and had fallen in love with the chef, only to have him leave her for a new waitress. Heartbroken, Anne went home, wrote a song about it, and happened to be singing it for the first time when Jann walked by. Jann asked if she could perform it at an upcoming concert, and the rest is history. She went on to record the song, which became a worldwide Top 10 hit and changed both of their lives.

food

cucina alba

I’m the rare person who thinks the NYC food scene is incredibly varied, but mostly just… meh? (In fact, I think the food in Los Angeles is superior in nearly every way.) In my 22 years living in nyc, I can count on one hand the number of meals here that made me want to jump out of my seat and shout about how good they were. I recently had one of those meals at an Italian restaurant in Chelsea (inside the Lantern House building, which I lovingly refer to as “the root beer barrel building”). We had many dishes, but one has been on my mind ever since: the orecchiette for the table. A massive bowl of orecchiette pasta tossed in a not-too-spicy arrabbiata sauce, topped with table-cut burrata and basil. We shared it among four people, but honestly, I could have ordered the entire bowl for myself, skipped every other appetizer, entrée, side, and dessert, and left with the happiest belly.

performance

can i be frank? at soho playhouse

This one-person show centers around Morgan Bassichis, and their time as an artist-in-residence in Sag Harbor, NY. they quickly address the question I was shamefully asking myself: what on earth actually does one actually do at an artist residency?! As Morgan describes it, it seems to involve a lot of walking, sitting in cafés, observing the world, and, apparently, waiting for something unexpected to come along. Their daily routine of sitting in a local café takes an unexpected turn when someone mentions their brother, performing artist and activist Frank Maya. Morgan falls down a rabbit hole, contacting Frank’s exes, friends, and family, and turns the research into a 90-minute show that feels part memorial, part séance, and part obsessive adoration. it also featured spellbinding mic-cord choreography.

film

HERB & DOROTHY

This documentary tells the story of Herb and Dorothy Vogel, he was a postal worker and she was a librarian, who together built one of the most remarkable art collections in the world. They collected work exclusively from undiscovered artists, with two conditions: it had to fit their budget, based on his postal worker salary, and be MANEUVERABLE enough to transport on the NYC subway to their rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment. They bought an early Picasso as an engagement gift to each other, received a piece from Christo in exchange for cat-sitting, and collected artists like Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Mangold long before they became famous.

They never bought art as an investment. They only bought pieces they adored. Their collection lives on at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and they also donated more than 2,500 works to museums across all 50 states.

wellness

walden journey set

This meditation mat, pillow, and eye mask set is wildly expensive, but it’s also one of my most sacred wellness products. I first discovered it at a sound bath at Official Ritual in NYC, the same space where I first experienced my beloved Kochi chimes (mentioned in july 2026 edition), and I felt like I was being cradled in heaven’s arms. The mat folds up nicely for storage, but when fully stretched out, you lie down, rest your head on the buckwheat pillow, put on the lavender-scented eye mask, press play on a meditation or transcendent playlist, and let your spirit drift wherever it wants to go. I bought mine during their holiday sale, which is really the only time I’d recommend buying their insanely expensive products. Every time I use it, I feel like I’m returning to myself.

travel

munnar, kerala, india

Munnar is a hill station in Kerala, a southern state in India that locals call “God’s Own Country,” and I wholeheartedly approve of the name. A hill station was a British term for a high-elevation retreat in India, and Munnar is exactly that: endless rolling hills covered in tea plantations and gardens. I stayed at Tall Trees Resort, where I spent my days picking tea leaves and learning about tea. One of my favorite discoveries was learning that All true tea - whether green, black, white, or Darjeeling - comes from the same tea tree plant. What makes them different is how the leaves are processed after picking. Chamomile, rooibos, and mint, meanwhile, aren’t technically teas at all because they come from entirely different plants. sidenote: the book, life of pi, begins in munnar!

art

charles demuth

For my college Art History 101 final, we had to choose a piece of art to write a paper about, so I went Googling for gay artists who depicted gay men in their work. I landed on American artist Charles Demuth, who was famous for developing a style known as Precisionism, but I was most drawn to his paintings of gay men. Some depict sailors dancing together, others show men holding hands, and his self-portrait places him in a gay bathhouse. While these images might not seem particularly shocking in 2026, Demuth painted them in the early 20th century, when LGBTQ+ life was rarely represented openly in art or public life. He died in 1935, but his work can still be found in world-class museums including the Whitney, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Demuth Museum of Art in his hometown of Lancaster, PA. Thank you, Charles, for making the world a little gayer at a time when it desperately needed it.

roller coaster

roller coaster, dizzee world, muttukadu, india

This might seem like a random choice, but this roller coaster holds so much history and meaning for me. It originally opened as Corkscrew at the now-defunct Geauga Lake amusement park in Ohio. It was the first upside-down roller coaster I ever rode, and once I finally mustered the nerve to get on, I never wanted to get off. I must have ridden it until midnight. It was sadly removed in 1995 to make way for another coaster, but luckily, it lives on at an amusement park in Tamil Nadu, India. I dream of making the pilgrimage there someday and riding it from sunrise to sunset, just like I did all those years ago.

coffee

x-roads cafe, 119 knickerbocker ave, brooklyn ny

If you love coffee, art, room to breathe, and meditation, I can’t imagine a more perfect spot in NYC than X-Roads Café in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Upon arrival, you walk through a portal of painted loops and images that slowly transport you into a space with a café, a massive outdoor courtyard, and a yoga studio. They host dance parties, meditation classes, and community events, but it’s also the kind of place where you might find yourself having a deep existential conversation with your best friend while two strangers casually join in. It’s the perfect intersection of spirit, art, and coffee. The name really does fit... it’s a crossroads in every sense.

literature

an odyssey by daniel mendelsohn

With all the hoopla surrounding Christopher Nolan’s upcoming cinematic take on Homer’s The Odyssey, I figured this was a good time to shout out An Odyssey, a memoir by classics professor Daniel Mendelsohn and his 81-year-old father, Jay, who enrolls in his son’s college course on The Odyssey. The parallels between Telemachus searching for his father, Odysseus, and Daniel trying to understand his own father are beautifully observed. The book also follows Daniel and Jay on a 10-night cruise retracing Odysseus’s seafaring journey. It also illuminates a universal experience: sometimes we become curious enough to really ask about our parents just as we may be running out of time to ask.

little wonders

deepest parts of the ocean

I worked on cruise ships for many years and often wondered just how deep the ocean was beneath me. It wasn’t until I took geology in college that I discovered this fascinating fact: the deepest parts of the ocean are actually along coastlines, not in the middle. Here’s why: mid-ocean ridges are enormous underwater volcanic mountain ranges that create new oceanic crust. As that crust spreads outward, it eventually collides with less dense continental crust, causing the oceanic crust to subduct, or pull it down into the Earth. This creates deep underwater trenches, which are the deepest places in the ocean. The deepest point on Earth, the Mariana Trench, sits just off the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, while the deepest part of the Atlantic, the Puerto Rico Trench, lies just north of Puerto Rico.