Lifestyle
How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Jason Mantzoukas
When you read about Jason Mantzoukas’ ideal Sunday in Los Angeles, it’s important that you imagine him holding a cup of coffee in basically every location and situation. He knows all the places around the city where he can get caffeinated before he goes on to do anything else.
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
Fittingly, the actor, comedian and podcaster has brought an excitable, unpredictable and hilarious energy to his roles on shows including “The League,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Big Mouth.” Last year, he brought his gleeful sense of mischief to the U.K. competition series “Taskmaster.” And Disney+ recently finished airing the second season of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” where Mantzoukas portrays Mr. D (a.k.a. Dionysus), and he’ll soon wrap up a stint on Broadway, where he stars in Simon Rich’s play “All Out: Comedy About Ambition.”
For the continuously busy Mantzoukas, sometimes the perfect Sunday means never leaving the house. “All I want to do is make a whole pot of coffee, get the paper and a big stack of unread comic books, and sit on the porch.” When he does explore the city, he favors the spots where he similarly can just hang out for a while. But before that, how about a refill?
10:30 a.m.: First cup(s) of the day
I’m a night owl, so on a Sunday especially, I’m going to let myself sleep in. Then I’m making coffee. My first three cups of coffee are all from home. I’m making a French press. L.A. beans though, either Counter Culture or Go Get Em Tiger would be my beans of choice. That and the newspaper are the beginning.
Almost immediately upon getting up, I’m going to start playing the radio. My mornings are either LAist or Howard Stern if it’s a weekday. But on Sundays, I’m trying really hard to not do any talk, just music. It’s KJazz, or something like that. I’m also obsessed with a radio station called WYAR that I can’t recommend enough. It’s music from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. It’s the teeniest, tiniest radio station out of Yarmouth, Maine.
Noon: Hike bros
I’ve hiked with the same guys for years now. It’s all guys that I’ve done comedy with for 20-plus years. We usually do one of the Griffith Park hikes because it’s convenient for everybody. The conversation topics are: What is wrong with us physically? What doctor recommendations do we need desperately? Then it is gossip — gossip from within our world, gossip from outside of our world. Then it is just earnest conversation, like checking in emotionally. And then quite a bit of dumb bits, like really dumb bits.
We do these hikes a couple of times a week, and it’s so fun and funny that we have started doing an improv show at the Elysian Theater that’s called Hike Bros. It is just us trying to approximate on stage what it is we do on hikes. It’s ridiculous.
1 p.m.: Comic book restock
After the hike, I’m in a good position to go to Secret Headquarters in Atwater Village, which is my home comic book shop. They keep a list of what comics I want them to set aside each week.
There’s a series of graphic novels called “Hobtown Mystery Stories” that are like, what if David Lynch wrote Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew-style teen detective books? I got super into them because I was in Secret Headquarters and one of the people there was like, “Oh, I bet you’d like that book.” On the internet, I miss having those trusted people.
2 p.m.: Recording digging
I want to kill time in a way that is about discovery, exploration, but also, like, “Oh, I want stuff.” That’s record shopping. L.A. has always been Amoeba for me, just in terms of I love wasting hours in a store that has a deep bench for every section of music that I’m interested in. And then if you want to do the extra work, DVDs as well. There’s a lot of great smaller record stores around town that I love, but there’s something about killing two hours at Amoeba.
6 p.m.: Dinner hang
What I want from an L.A. dinner is I just want to hang there. Little Dom’s is a great hang. You can spend hours there. You’re always going to run into people. My hope is that we can all just hang out and that we’re not going to be rushed out because they have another seating.
8 p.m.: Nighttime activities
I’m going to want to do one of three things at night:
I want to go to the movies, and I’m talking Vidiots and the Vista and the New Beverly. We can all go to all the regular theaters and see all the blockbusters, but L.A. has fantastic theaters that are doing incredible programming,
If I’m not going to the movies, I want to see live music as much as I can, but on a much smaller scale than I used to. I’m excited when an artist that I love like Mary Lattimore or Jeff Parker has a residency at Zebulon because I’m like, “Oh, great. That is not a big crowd. That is very easy, very manageable.”
Then I either want to be doing a comedy show or seeing a comedy show. There’s such a vibrant scene now. The Elysian in Frogtown is a great spot. We do Dinosaur Improv at Largo. I think Largo is pound for pound, maybe the best venue in town. Dynasty Typewriter, another great one. UCB, the OG. Over the course of a month, these are all places that I’m doing shows at, but these are also places that are showcasing some of the best comedy in L.A.
11 p.m.: The missing piece
At this point I’m done being social. I don’t want to talk to anybody anymore. My goal when I get home is a jigsaw puzzle — with either a podcast or jazz on in the background — until probably like 2 in the morning.
I do these puzzles from a company called Elms Puzzles and they’re hand cut, so they’re incredibly difficult to do. It’ll take me a month to do one. They are prohibitively expensive, so much so that I don’t buy them. They have a rental program. They send you a puzzle, you do it, you send it back to them, and they send you another puzzle. Which is perfect, I don’t need to do a puzzle more than once.
It is a great way to put myself into a frame of mind to go to bed, especially if I’ve done a show or watched a movie. If I’ve been stimulated, doing a puzzle for a couple of hours is a great way to decompress.
Lifestyle
Why Gen Z is movie-maxxing : Pop Culture Happy Hour
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession.
Focus Features
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Focus Features
Two big horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, just smashed all box office expectations. So much of their success has been driven by Gen Z, which is now the biggest moviegoing demographic. But what makes a movie a Gen Z movie? Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse talks about this trend with Sam Adams and Reanna Cruz.
If you want to hear more about these movies, check out these episodes:
In ‘Obsession,’ love hurts. It really, really, really hurts.
‘Backrooms’ brings YouTube horror to the big screen
Zendaya brings ‘The Drama,’ we bring the spoilers
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Lifestyle
10 new books you won’t want to miss in July
I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.


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