Treehouse

compiled by Rachel Bondurant

Contest update: We’re completing the process of reading entries and are moving on to selecting the finalists for our Unusual Prose contest. We should have some more substantial news for you in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

Summer is here! Yay! But if you’re not a “Yay, it’s summer!” kind of person, Paste has the playlist for you. They’ve collected a list of 40 bummer-summer songs and conveniently ranked them from a little sad to kill-yourself-depressing. Links for listening to each song are included, since bummed-out people aren’t the most inclined toward unnecessary activity.

While you’re over there, and because I’m a sucker for the show, check out the 15 best episodes of Arrested Development. I don’t know how you couldn’t know this, but the new season is up on Netflix Instant. So indulge some nostalgia with this list of episodes before hitting Netflix for some real quality end-of-series satisfaction.

Usually I’m not inclined to encourage celebrity voyeurism, but this is for art, man. And Miranda July is spearheading it, so count me in. “We Think Alone” is an online project commissioned for an exhibition called On the Tip of My Tongue. It consists of e-mails from the inboxes of people in various stages of celebrity including Kirsten Dunst, Lena Dunham, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Etgar Keret. 20 e-mails over 20 weeks starting July 1st. I can’t help it; I’m curious enough to give it a look.

My reading recommendations this week are both nonfiction. The first is humor from the ever-reliable humorist David Sedaris. He has a piece in The New Yorker about having guests (and, more importantly, guests rooms in which to keep them). The second comes from the other end of the spectrum: not so much funny as incredibly interesting and not a little disconcerting. It’s featured in Psychology Today and it’s an excerpt from a book entitled Confessions of a Sociopath written by M.E. Thomas who is a highly successful attorney, law professor, and otherwise functioning human being in society. She’s also, as evidenced by the title of her book, a diagnosed sociopath. You don’t have to buy the whole book, but I do think you’d be missing out on something if you don’t read the piece.