Morning Person is a weekly newsletter packed with obsessively-curated recommendations and ideas—let’s get to it!

📚 Mean Baby by Selma Blair: On a whim last Saturday, I bought a single ticket to see Selma Blair in conversation with Esme Weijun Wang at the Portland Book Festival. To my surprise and delight, Selma was so much weirder and off-the-cuff than I expected her to be (clearly, I hadn’t read the book yet), riffing on her relationships with her mother and alcohol, the value of following her intuition, the ways in which living with MS feels like a second act, and never being a flawless woman like her co-star Reese Witherspoon, whose sweaters, Selma mused in wonder, “never pilled!” The next day, I picked up Selma’s memoir, which, true to her on-stage promise, isn’t a celebrity tell-all but vulnerably expands on what it means to always feel other or uncomfortable in your own skin, and what to do with that feeling.

🎧 “If Books Could Kill” Podcast: Co-hosts Michael Hobbes (of “Maintenance Phase”) and Peter Shamshiri (of the Supreme Court podcast, “5-4”) pull the thread on overhyped nonfiction, or the kind of “airport bestseller” you’d expect to find at a Hudson News. The first two episodes take on Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and, in classic Hobbes fashion, methodically and hilariously pulls apart the jumped-to conclusions, questionable logic, not-so-covert racism (in Freakonomics, particularly), and doctored math that abound in both. Anytime I listen to a Hobbes podcast, I walk away smarter, but also realize how much I take at face value—and the importance of asking harder questions of things we, as a culture, take for granted.