What to Watch and Read This Weekend: The Intergalactic Adventures of Coach Taylor in Lanterns

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What to Watch and Read This Weekend: The Intergalactic Adventures of Coach Taylor in Lanterns

Plus: Why every book is boring until it isn’t and a brief history of the internet

By Molly Templeton

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Published on August 14, 2026

Photo Credit: DC Studios

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Photo Credit: DC Studios

I was not in the right place (or time zone) to see the eclipse or the Perseids this week, and I’m sad about it. I hope you got to experience something cool in the sky. August continues to August about, hot and confusing, muggy and occasionally smoky, as we either look forward to or dread the return of fall. (Both? It can be both.) Somehow, August brings both interesting TV series and interesting books, and is no longer the media doldrums it once was. I am mostly here for Lanterns, but I am also, a little, here for Reacher (and hopeful that this new season is better than the last, which sagged under the weight of its scenery-chomping villain and relentless fatphobia).

In August, we watch men pummel things, I guess. But we can also read about the internet, and about books, and about history, to lightly hint at the other topics discussed below. If you’re going outside, don’t forget your sunscreen; always remember to hug your friends and call your reps. It’ll be the midterms before you know it.

Green Light Go: Lanterns Is Here and I’m Ready

I feel pandered to, and I like it. The trailers for the new series Lanterns are undeniably superhero-y, but they are also … prestige-y. They are serious business. They are full of respected actors and not too many special effects; they set up a classic battered-veteran vs hotheaded-youth conflict; they promise me Kelly Macdonald AND Garret Dillahunt alongside stars Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre. Watching Aaron Pierre take no shit in Rebel Ridge was a source of great joy; I hope he continues to take no shit in Lanterns. I have never in my life cared about Green Lanterns or their fancy rings or their space-cop mythology, and yet, as it turns out, if you cast a show just right, and figure out how to make it walk the line between comic-book chaos and grown-up seriousness, I will get really excited about? I’m really excited about Lanterns. Don’t let me down, Coach Taylor!

Lanterns premieres on HBO Max on August 16th.

Are All Books Boring?

I’m fascinated by this essay by Emma Adler at Public Books: “Every Novel Is Boring—Until It Isn’t.” Are they?? Adler describes an experience of reading that’s entirely alien to me, but does so in a manner so confident and calm that I began to question my own reading habits. Adler’s argument is that every novel has a “volta,” a term borrowed from poetry, which refers to a shift or turn. She writes, “Even as someone who loves novels, I rely on my expectation of a volta to keep me going. I push through unpromising beginnings, even middles, trusting that eventually, something will click, and then reading will become not just easy but compulsive. If you told me before I started a novel that there wouldn’t be a volta (as occasionally there isn’t), I would never open it.”

This has just never occurred to me. Never! And frankly I don’t want to start looking for or waiting for the volta in the things I read! Still: Adler’s piece is full of examples, and it’s fascinating, and part of her argument is that maybe we ought to tell students about the volta, so that they understand that a book being “boring” at the start is the process. This makes me want to ask what “boring” means, and how we all experience boredom—or something similar to boredom—differently. One reader’s boredom might be another’s anticipation.

A Mysteriously Appealing Novel: Téa Obreht’s Sunrise

I can’t quite figure out what it is about this book that’s caught my eye. The three timelines? The way it sounds like it engages with the mythos of “the West” in this country? The disconcerting cover? The phrase “challenges the myths we think we know” in the description? I can’t even really tell if Sunrise has speculative elements (Obreht’s previous novel, The Morningside, was certainly climate fiction). LitHub says it’s “an unputdownable, metafictional, and nimble page-turner.” Kirkus called it a “virtuoso performance.” I feel, as I read reviews and praise, like there’s something here that no one is telling me. Which makes me absolutely want to find out what that might be.

An Unanswerable Question: What Was the Internet?

If you are of a certain age and/or a certain type of long-online person, the tense in this question may make you feel things: “What Was the Internet?” asks the title of a collection of essays at the Boston Review. Was. I mean, it’s still here—we’re on it right now—but it’s not the same. I’m not done with all of these yet, but even the first piece is worth your time: Siva Vaidhynathan on what Google has done, and is doing, to our experience of the web. He draws the ugly and necessary line between Google’s 2009 plan to scan all the world’s books straight through to Google’s nigh-unavoidable shoving of AI into everything; he argues that Google, the company that used to take us to so many places online, is now closing all the doors. He says it a lot better than I do, though. “A web fragmented into paywalled enclaves is not a public sphere either. It is simply Googlization’s endgame arriving by a different road: a public information commons dissolved, whether by extraction or by retreat.”

Later on in the collection, Joanna Walsh looks at the positive side of the web, and Cory Doctorow closes the whole thing out with a piece called, ominously, “Managed Decline.” I don’t think you’d want to read all of these essays at once, which is why I’m not done yet; these are for doling out, for tackling one at a time to give yourself room to think (and breathe). But I feel pretty confident they’re all necessary reading.[end-mark]

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