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Not the Jack Black that you’re thinking of. This is the autobiography of a burglar at the turn of the 20th century who feels like someone ripped out of a cartoon or something. I love stories with unreliable narrators, and this one takes the cake. Full of safe-cracking and train-hopping, it’s one of my favorite books. At one point, he buries a bunch of stolen cash in the ground, and returns years later to retrieve it only to find the stash trapped beneath a house that was built on top of it.
Mar 15, 2022
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Mar 4, 2025
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John Swartzwelder is the funniest writer in the world. I don’t know that I could write about him and do him justice, but he was a longtime Simpsons writer and then started self-publishing books that are so incredibly joke dense it will blow your mind. Here’s a quote from The Time Machine Did It, one of his many books following a strange detective named Frank Burly: “When I first became a detective I had tried solving crimes the way mystery writers do: coming up with the solution to the crime first, then working back to the point where you don't know what the hell is going on. But for some reason every time I tried that I ended up locked in a closet.”
Feb 24, 2022
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By David Sedaris. Hilarious snippets of his diaries. I love to have a book that I can read tiny snippets of when I have a free moment without getting confused on the plot.
Jan 9, 2025
Top Recs from @chris-maggio
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It’s very important for you to know that I have no taste when it comes to clothing, but a generic, black, pullover hoodie should be in every photographer’s toolkit. It has a ton of utility: it can be a napkin, a drop cloth, a pillow for when you need to take a break. I can’t be worried about what I look like when I’m out taking pictures, and a black hoodie rarely looks stained. Long story short: I need to be wearing clothes that, if I fell into a huge puddle, I wouldn’t care. I’d just throw it in the trash and keep on moving.
Mar 15, 2022
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A great book about the birth of Los Angeles based around the intertwining portraits of engineer William Mulholland, director DW Griffith, and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. It presents the city as founded upon myth, greed, and man’s desire to conquer nature- which I think fits into the narrative of just about any metropolis in the USA. In New York City, we have a tendency to write off LA as some kind of self-indulgent city of cars and convenience, but there’s a part of me that thinks that LA’s image is far more honest than NYC’s: it more nakedly illustrates our innate desire as humans to exploit the Earth and each other to claim what we think we deserve as individuals. It’s a true illustration of the “every man for himself” brand of American ambition, and, in my opinion, New York is exactly the same, but we’re just a bit better at hiding it.
Mar 15, 2022
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My girlfriend Elena made me join this App and now I’m hooked. Every day, you’re given a random 2 minute window to snap a photo with both the front and back camera on your phone simultaneously, and you’re only allowed to see your feed if you do so.You have to think on your feet, and the results are often amazingly banal. It’s a lot of photos of blurry countertops, boring landscapes, and your friends working at their computers. The imagery feels straight out of boomer Facebook posts.
Mar 15, 2022