What I'm Watching & Reading: July 13, 2026
Featuring new comedy offerings from Brandie Posey, Avery Moore, Marissa Goldman, and Mikey Heller.
Good afternoon from Humorism headquarters. It’s been a little quiet over here lately, but only because I’m cooking up some exciting things for you, the reader. More on that soon. For now, here’s a roundup of comedy specials and shorts I’ve enjoyed lately, plus some light reading on the history of employee ownership, new novels about male friendship, and San Francisco’s AI elite.
Brandie Posey: Milk Job
Brandie Posey, an effortless storyteller with a knack for teasing out the absurd and even shocking from the everyday, recorded this album-slash-special in Portland and released it through Burn This Records, the DIY label she founded in 2023 with the hope of building an equitable, artist-friendly home for middle-class comedians. I’ve been having a difficult time deciding which of my favorite parts to highlight: obviously I loved the cinematic opening sequence, a roast of comedians who take themselves too seriously, and even now I’m making myself chuckle as I recall the title joke, about her father’s coping mechanism during the pandemic—drinking excessive amounts of milk. When you’re done watching the special, check out Burn This Records’ other releases here.
Avery Moore: Avery’s Special Movie
I really enjoyed this playful new special from Austin (and now LA) comedian Avery Moore, who dances between the serious and the silly with such deftness you start to wonder if, huh, maybe the two aren’t actually so different. Come for her jokes about sobriety and wanting to eat cigarettes like Pocky; stay for her bit about wanting to fuck Disney’s Robin Hood, the 2D cartoon fox.
Office Hours on Mark Normand and Sam Morril
Tim Heidecker making fun of Mark Normand and Sam Morril. What else do I need to say?
Max Distance
From filmmaker Marissa Goldman, a funny and unsettling short about a remote worker (a wonderfully dour Anna Seregina) stalking her neighbor (a wonderfully silly David Brown) until she finally lands a date that, naturally, careens out of control. There are some really beautiful shots in here from DP Victor Ingles, who knows how to combine a home office and a Zoom screen into an external representation of a woman’s madness. If you like Max Distance, do check out Goldman’s other work.
Soup Frogs: Clem’s Nondescript Crush
In this animated short for Adult Swim’s “Smalls” channel, writer-director Mikey Heller (We Bare Bears) imagines a whimsical world where frogs eat soup at bars, or at least at one bar. In this installment, bartender Clem (voiced by Heller) is having a normal evening with his regulars (Joe Rumrill, Dewey Lovett, and Branson Reese) when his crush (Katy Fishell) shows up and some hijinks ensue. I’m looking forward to seeing more of these frogs.
The Drift: The False Promise of Employee Ownership
Livia Wood
After World War II, during the so-called golden age of American capitalism, profit-sharing and employee stock ownership regained momentum, with some union leaders pushing for plans that provided bonuses tied to companies’ successes. Modern profit-sharing models emerged in the 1970s, after the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 created a retirement scheme allowing employees to own shares in their companies: the ESOP. Louisiana Senator Russell Long became an important advocate for the bill in Congress after the idea was introduced to him by the lawyer and political economist Louis Kelso. Over dinner, Long reportedly gushed to Kelso that it would “make haves out of the have-nots without taking it away from the haves” and called it “the kind of populism I can buy.” A few years later, the senator told a think tank that ESOPs would “make our form of government and our concept of freedom prevail over those who don’t agree with it.”
The advent of ESOPs decidedly did not accomplish that, but the program did allow owners who sold their companies to reinvest the proceeds in other securities, deferring capital gains taxes. This made ESOPs incredibly attractive to private equity firms, as they could use ESOPs to delay — or perhaps even avoid altogether — significant capital gains tax liabilities. “A private equity firm could theoretically defer taxes almost indefinitely by continuing to roll sale proceeds into new transactions,” explained Pete Stavros, then a business student at Harvard, in a 2002 paper. And ESOPs held an additional advantage for corporations beholden to large, organized staffs. “ESOPs were used to save struggling companies in unionized industries,” Stavros continued. “Using an ESOP, a company near bankruptcy could often convince its labor union to accept certain cost-cutting measures such as lowering wages and/or closing plants.” The idea was that employees, by becoming owners, would be trading present-day concessions for future stock appreciation. This manipulative tactic was soon used to hasten the dismantling of unionized companies entirely.
The New Yorker: The Lost Art of the Bromance
Katy Waldman
If the gender disparity in friendship has attracted disproportionate attention, this may be because men are publicly struggling in other ways. They aren’t attending and graduating from college at the same rates that women are, or at the rates that they once did, and they’re dropping out of the labor force in larger numbers. Unmarried young men lead the rest of the population in sedentary, solo leisure time (a metric that gets at hours spent chasing dopamine hits in front of a screen). The male-breadwinner model has eroded, and there’s a sense that men, bereft of their traditional purpose or identity, need, in the words of the manfluencer Scott Galloway, a more “aspirational vision of masculinity.” Perhaps helped along by gendered expectations of strength and silence, the idea that men are friendless has taken hold. A 2020 “Saturday Night Live” monologue from John Mulaney crystallized the conventional wisdom. “Your dad has no friends,” the comedian informed viewers. “If you think your dad has friends, you’re wrong. Your mom has friends, and they have husbands.”
NYT: In San Francisco, Even $180,000 Tech Salaries Are No Longer Enough
Ms. Razniak and Mr. Woodbury are not struggling by any conventional measure. But as a wave of artificial intelligence wealth is set to deluge San Francisco, even young tech workers who came to the city chasing the Silicon Valley dream have started to say an affordable future feels increasingly out of reach.
That’s because as the A.I. companies OpenAI and Anthropic — both with headquarters in San Francisco and valued at nearly $1 trillion — prepare to go public, an A.I. elite has emerged that can outspend other tech workers. The two companies, along with Elon Musk’s newly public SpaceX, could mint more than 20 new billionaires among current and former employees, according to an analysis by Sacra, a private markets research firm.
“I feel a little bit like I’m not good enough to live here anymore because I don’t work at an A.I. company,” Mr. Woodbury said, even though his salary puts him roughly in the top 20 percent of American households, according to Census Bureau data.
