Good things come in threes

Hello and welcome back to The Span, Defector’s longest-running Culture newsletter. Today, we’re giving you plenty of stuff to read, watch, or look at over the Memorial Day weekend.

Here are some cool blogs from Defector:

Here are some cool blogs from elsewhere on the internet:

In honor of the upcoming three-day weekend, we asked a few Defector staffers about their favorite things that come in threes. For my money, you really can’t top the queen of immersive, propulsive, heartbreaking trilogies, Robin Hobb. In a just world, she would be way more famous than Brandon Sanderson. —Brandy Jensen

Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy

The Nordic tradition of confessional writing has no greater pillar than Tove Ditlevsen’s masterpiece: The Copenhagen Trilogy. I love contemporary confessional writing (Knausgaard, Ernaux, Cusk, Levy, etc), but there is something raw and unfiltered about The Copenhagen Trilogy that draws me back in over and over again. In Childhood, the narrator dreams of becoming a poet; in Youth, she evolves and grows. Finally, in Dependency, she is consumed by a terrible marriage and an addiction to drugs. Ditlevsen writes with a deft, brilliant confidence that feels intimate,messy, and mesmerizing.  —Kelsey McKinney

Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights

When I think of the best things in our culture that come in threes, the first thing that comes to mind is my favorite painting of all time, by my guy Hieronymus. I've frankly never seen a painting that goes harder. The left side, depicting the Garden of Eden, is crawling with unicorns and weird little guys scuttling out of a mysterious pit. The right side, depicting Hell, has a guy living in a studio apartment hollowed out of another guy's chest, and also a pot-footed bird king swallowing a naked guy with birds flying out of his ass. And, of course, the star of the triptych is the center—a paean to erotic pleasure, an early Netherlandish cruising ground, a testament to the idea that a fruit can be a hat or a loincloth. And who can forget the dissociating owl! "Get me out of here!" he hoots from the canvas. "Get me in there!" I hoot from beyond it. —Sabrina Imbler

Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Final Architecture

Wow, some big mysterious space monsters are destroying the universe planet by planet. It’s not exactly original sci-fi stuff. But the fun in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture books, as it is in basically everything I’ve read by him, is the creativity of getting there: The lived-in world he has built, the constant introductions of new and intriguing alien species, the development of our eminently likeable protagonists from self-interested rogues to quasi-willing heroes. Sometimes you just need a thick epic trilogy that goes down easy as milk. —Barry Petchesky

Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy

Perhaps the pinnacle of the yearner’s artistic canon, is Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy. The light is so golden and soft. The future is just here within your reach if you are brave enough, honest enough, and horny enough. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have a romantic chemistry that feels so real and hopeful in the first, and only morphs and evolves with each movie. I will watch them forever, even if they are sappy as hell. —Kelsey McKinney

Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past 

A lot of us on staff are Three Body Problem fans (technically, 3BP is the first book, and the trilogy is called Remembrance of Earth's Past). Cixin Liu is horrendous at writing women, and his dialogue can be stilted, but the sheer scale of his world-building (really, universe-building) is incredible. I love to take an edible before bed, then try to lay out the plots of the second and third books in my own head and fall asleep in awe of his imagination. —Jasper Wang