Now Playing: March 2025

Our March 2025 edition of Now Playing features a film that devastates, music that relaxes, and books best listened to, all from our contributors!

Sophie Hoss

A song I’ve had on repeat is “Seven Wonders” (Early Version) by Fleetwood Mac. No matter how many times I listen to it, it’s always pure magic. I never realize how tense my shoulders and jaw are until that song comes on and my whole body relaxes. Stevie Nicks is a miracle. Also, two excellent TV shows: AP Bio and What We Do In the Shadows. 

Dante Fuoco

Last week, I went with my partner to the Paris Theater to watch a special screening of Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy." Michelle Williams plays Wendy, a houseless woman whose precarious life worsens when her car breaks down and her dog goes missing in Oregon.  Predictably, I was gutted. The movie was released in 2008, the year I graduated high school. This was the dusk of Dubya's reign (a terrible time curiously defanged by Democrats ever since Trump's rise to power) and at the dawn of Obama's tenure (an optically better yet nonetheless morally rotten era of drones and deportations, curiously romanticized by liberals). As my Split Lip Magazine memoir might suggest, I am interested in mapping the confluences of my life, pop culture, and politics—especially in relation to gender—many years after the fact, when I have more insight and distance. "Wendy and Lucy" is more than just a great film. It's a window into a time of personal and political change. 

Eleanor Fuller

Now playing: The Flamethrowers written and narrated by Rachel Kushner. I was ambivalent about audiobooks and whether they “counted” as reading until I started listening to one with my mom during her final illness last January. She died before we could finish it, but the pleasure (bittersweet) of listening to Colin Walsh’s Kala together stuck. I finished it alone (in tears) and bought another immediately. Kushner’s Creation Lake. I only know Rachel Kushner reading her own work aloud. I have never held one of her books in my hands and I probably never will. I don’t want to. I’m sure this is mixed up with grief in a way I don’t fully understand, but hearing her words the way they sound in Kushner’s head makes me feel closer to them. Plus, I can’t help wondering what my mom would think: whether she would roll judgy eyes at Reno and say “that’s enough for today” or laugh at Didi Bombonato and ask for “just one more chapter.”