Sunday Paper Recommends—Week of September 20, 2026
This week at The Sunday Paper, we’re sharing a new book, podcast, and show that we believe will add inspiration to your days. We hope these suggestions open your heart and mind and encourage you to come together for meaningful conversations.
What We’re Watching
Leanne Morgan built a whole comedy around the moment her husband of 33 years walked out, and season 2 finds her family circling right back into the chaos. Sister Carol is still her ride-or-die, her parents are still meddling with love, and her ex Bill hasn’t gone far. What’s changed is Leanne herself, a grandmother figuring out who she’s supposed to be now, one Jell-O salad at a time. The ten new episodes bring some unexpected company along for the ride, with Lainey Wilson and Tyne Daly among the guests dropping into her world. Season 2 of Leanne is now streaming on Netflix.
What We’re Reading
Kelsey Crane isn’t just imagining a world rebuilt from the ground up. She’s a certified permaculturist and Rodale Institute ambassador who has spent years working the very soil her debut novel asks teenagers to save. In The Vanishing, six teenagers scattered across a polluted, overheated globe are handed identical VR headsets and an invitation into RIZE, a startlingly real simulation of the Earth their parents’ generation left behind. What starts as an escape becomes something far riskier: a plan to disappear from their real lives entirely and build an off-grid homestead in the Pacific Northwest, one rooted in permaculture and the kind of self-sufficiency their world has forgotten. Crane follows Astrid, Teo, Yekta, Ishaan, Rosalina, and Jayden as their utopia buckles under romance, ideology, and a winter that tests exactly how far they’ll go to save something worth saving. Pair it with Crane’s companion guide, How To Get Your Hands Dirty (and Save the World), which takes the soil science and food-forestry threads of the novel and hands them to readers as something they can actually try.
What We’re Listening To
Madeline Hill and Charlotte Wilder built The Sports Gossip Show around a simple idea: athletes’ off-field lives are as worth following as their stats. This episode puts that idea to serious use, working through a week that included Sydney Sweeney’s widely criticized sports betting ad, an AI-generated clip mocking ESPN’s Holly Rowe, and the muted response to domestic violence allegations against U.S. Open champion Alexander Zverev—and asking, pointedly, why these stories kept landing in the same seven days.
What We're Loving
Mary and Myra don’t know each other, but they’ve each learned to live fully alongside an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, one by walking her dog and doing crossword puzzles, the other by still singing with a choir. Their stories are part of Eli Lilly’s Brain Health Matters campaign, which pairs real accounts like theirs with something more practical: a clear breakdown of the disease’s stages and the signs that separate normal aging from something worth checking out. The campaign, backed by Julianne Moore, arrives with a simple message, that early is better than late when it comes to your brain. Just ahead of World Alzheimer’s Day tomorrow, it’s worth a visit to BrainHealthMatters.com.
Visit the Brain Health Matters Campaign Here!
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