So begins Laurie Stone’s essay titled “Bad Dinner Guest” in the Paris Review. It’s not long and you should read it. She disagrees with someone about abortion and this happens:

The judge looked like he had been shot, but not immediately. You know how, in movies, when someone is shot they stand there for a few seconds with a surprised look on their face? The judge didn’t fall down dead, unfortunately. He pushed back his chair, shot up, and shouted that he was leaving. He couldn’t be at the table with a person who could speak to him that way.

Her writing is propulsive and the story is filled with tension. It’ll take less than 10 minutes and you’ll probably feel pretty strongly about it for a while.

I hadn’t heard of her before. Glad I have now. She has a Substack – I’ve read her two newest pieces and if the one above works for you, they will too. She’s also a fairly frequent contributor to the Paris Review, and writes paragraphs like this about a cafe owner in 1990:

The owner hated his customers because he’d created the wrong kind of flock in us. We were a band of deadbeat loners, off whom rose different kinds of sadness that united us into a force. The owner was a loud and theatrical gay man I also felt for because he may have been as lonely as we were, and he was trying to establish a business. I don’t remember if he had a boyfriend. I remember the startling freedom of his contempt for us—and by us, I don’t mean the customers who came and left in a timely fashion and didn’t turn his place into a campsite. He would thrash about, sighing and slamming down the cups he bussed after one of us moved on. It was theater. The boss staged his show, and we were the audience.

In the first piece I linked, she mentions two documentaries that haven’t hit my radar. This one is new(ish), came out last year about someone I’ve never heard of:

Great use of the Portishead track.

The other one is older but also well-rated, somewhat harder to find (despite being an HBO doc):

Lots to dig into here.