The Maris Review, vol 53

Maris Kreizman

06 May 2025 — 5 min read

What I read this week

The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis

Did you ever meet someone online and just know you were destined for IRL friendship? I first met Niko Stratis when she asked me to do Blue Eyes Crying by the Chips, a podcast about the songs we love and the places we've cried listening to them in public. My episode was called Crying After Work at the Duane Reade listening to Harry Nilsson, and in that episode we talked about the splendor of the grocery store song.

So I was so delighted to open her new essay collection and see her describe the Wallflowers song "One Headlight" thusly: "It's a perfect grocery store song because it feels alive, and it feels real and tangible and human. It's easy to poke fun at or mock grocery store radio rock, but to me and my heart it always feels like home." I love Niko's music writing because she's too focused on how the songs make you feel to be any kind of judgmental (this is far more interesting to me than more technical music reviews). The pure emotion of a song cuts to the heart of it and why it matters, which is why, even though growing up she considered herself punk, this is a book about Dad Rock.

Niko is exactly the person whose memoir in songs I would want to read and I'm delighted to tell you that it didn't disappoint; it's a lovingly constructed mixtape about the importance of music within a personal quest to understand who you really are, or what you're meant to be.

Niko was born and had lived for many years in the Yukon: "Whitehorse was a small, isolated town nestled in the middle of the lower end of nowhere up in the frozen parts of Canada." There's a specific kind of masculinity that gets pushed in places like Whitehorse, the kind where you might get bullied for being a "f**" if you don't look and act like a cowboy. Niko spent much of her life doing physical labor – from early jobs in a grocery store to a young adulthood as a glazier – yet still managed to feel uncomfortable in her body. When she tells her therapist she might be trans, the therapist tells her she's sick but she can be healed. She mentions electroshock therapy. Fuck this noise. The publication of this book is a testament to Niko's strength, and it's a love letter to some of the songs (I love that we both gained entry to The Replacements from watching that 1990s masterpiece Can't Hardly Wait) that guided her on her way.

Before I finish let me give you just a little bit more of a taste of her writing because I can't quote the whole thing but it's so good:

Catch me and Niko in conversation on Monday and watch us become IRL friends at Rough Trade Below at 6pm. Or buy one of her delightful shirts. Or both. But definitely get your hands on a copy of this book.

Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left by Eoin Higgins

I don't give a fuck about Glenn Greenwald. I want to make that clear because this is a book that is very much about him, and his journey from libertarian truth teller to far right Fox News shill. I also don't particularly care about Matt Taibi's individual story of hypocrisy, either. But what I do really care about is considering the ways in which tech billionaires have trampled the media and remade it to reflect the will of those in power, how they're hoarding wealth and consolidating power and quashing voices critical of them, all while still considering themselves to be nerdy underdogs (and of course they still call themselves free speech absolutists). This is why I'll be thinking about Eoin Higgins's incisive recent history of tech's increasingly right turn and its fallout in media. And the book includes a who's who of quotes from other writers I really trust: Luke O'Neil, Taylor Lorenz, Osita Nwanevu, Jacob Silverman, Malcolm Harris, Anna Merlan, Brian Merchant. I highly recommend to the very online (which is likely you if you're reading this).

No platform is pure, almost like no book publisher is pure except for some small indies, but I want to be as far away from the tech bros as I can be. I'm off of Elon's Twitter, I'm no longer on Zuck and Peter Thiel's Facebook (but I am on Insta) and I have said so long to the Marc Andreessen-funded newsletter platform Substack, where Nazis get paid and platformed. Last week my friend Leah Reich wrote a great thread about the realities of moving away from Substack to the Ghost newsletter platform. It's not an altogether easy move. I really do miss the interaction I was able to have on Substack. It was so easy to use and so easy to find a community. It's a little lonely here. But I'm also really delighted to not have to constantly think about the ethics of publishing over there.