Gold medals and memecoins

We’re halfway through the month and I thought I’d quickly look over some recent happenings in our corner of the world.

But first, a reminder: On Friday May 23 at 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific, we have our live interview and Q&A with Bonnie Tsui. Please dial in on Zoom to join us for an hour of conversation and questions about our pick for May, On Muscle, Bonnie’s work, and undoubtedly her thoughts on health, fitness, and the body.

We’ve had quite a few new members over the past couple of months, so I just wanted to lay out how it works and what’s expected of you: 

• We run the conversations on Zoom. 

• You are welcome to join on or off camera.

• You don’t have to have read the book!

• You can email in questions in advance

Attendance is usually pretty small, so this is a great opportunity to talk 1:1 with a great author—and something that is fairly unusual for a reading club. 

We’ll send out one more reminder before the event, but I hope to see you there.

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Catching up on other news elsewhere in the Curious-verse, I was happy to see that Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves (CUR005, September 2024) scooped up the gold medal for non-fiction at the California Book Awards. 

Frostbite was honestly one of the most interesting and stimulating books I picked for the club last year, and the prizes are put together by the Commonwealth Club of California, which holds lots of good literary and ideas events right here in San Francisco and really knows its stuff.

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Elsewhere, I enjoyed this recent review of Ferris Jabr’s Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came To Life, (CUR003, July 2024) in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The reviewer calls the book “quietly radical”—an accurate description for something that is a real perspective-shifter. And as the flowers bloom and the butterflies are all over our garden, I renewed my appreciation for Ferris’s work. 

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I also wanted to mention a couple of interesting pieces from the authors of previous club picks that I read this past week: There was this Slate piece from Henry Grabar (CUR012, April 2025) looking at the recent population growth in some of America’s biggest cities and arguing that the metropolis is bouncing back.

“The stakes are high,” Henry writes. “The hardcore doomers of the early pandemic, with their predictions of imminent urban collapse, have long since been proven wrong. But cities are still in a fragile state, reckoning with how to support depopulating school systems, wounded public transit systems, and landed cultural institutions as federal funding evaporates and declining office values drain the tax base.”

And then there was a recent New Yorker piece from Kyle Chayka (CUR008, December 2024) that details the murky and mysterious world of Donald Trump’s memecoin operations. There are many concerning and dramatic things going on in our government at the moment, but all of the noise and fury has meant not many people are taking notice of World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency business from the Trump family. 

Kyle writes that “Its stablecoin, which can be easily and reliably exchanged for U.S. dollars, creates something like an entire Trump-sponsored underground economy. It’s as if a new bank had opened under the sitting President’s name, and it was being sent large quantities of funds by various foreign businesses and political élites. Major buyers of WLFI have included Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto entrepreneur, who bought seventy-five million dollars’ worth, and DWF Labs, an Abu Dhabi-based cryptocurrency trading firm, which bought twenty-five million dollars’ worth.”

It was a great, brief overview of an often-confusing situation.

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Finally, a reminder that you are always welcome to suggest books you’ve read—or books you are interested in reading—for future Curious Reading Club picks. Over the past few months I’ve had some good recommendations from you all: I’m a few books into that stack of titles with lots of reading still to do. 

But it’s really great to hear what kind of things you are interested in reading and sharing with the rest of the group.

See you on Friday?

Onwards

Bobbie