Daniel O'Brien's Newsletter: January '25!
JANUARY 2025
Hello! This is the official substack of me, Daniel O'Brien, six-time Emmy-winning Senior Writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, author of How to Fight Presidents and its adaptation Your Presidential Fantasy Dream Team, Head Writer for the Cracked De-textbook and editor and contributing author for You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News (a New York Times Bestseller), and co-host of the popular hang out podcast Quick Question with Soren and Daniel (now on YouTube). I co-created, co-wrote and co-starred in Cracked After Hours, which is easily the most popular thing I've ever done, but that's in the past. This is the latest issue of my substack, a thing you signed up for on purpose.
Every month I will send an email with a list of what I'm reading, updates on whatever I'm working on if applicable and that's really it! We're back to work at my day job (LWT) and there's a new old president and my wife and I just bought a house, so "what I'm reading" lately has almost exclusively been "hateful and alarming yet utterly unsurprising dispatches from the White House" and various "Things Every New Homeowner Does Wrong" guides you can find on the internet. It feels like it's been a thousand years since I've been able to engage with a novel even though the real timeline is probably closer to Christmas, but what is time? One day I will be able to again read something that isn't either a Times article about how it's now illegal to think pronouns or that we're renaming all Chipotles "Hamburgers," or an instruction manual for installing blinds that has pictures of bald goblins with screwdrivers instead of words, but that day isn't today and tomorrow's not looking great either. Here are some books I read back when I still could.
Dead Detective Mountain: (John Swartzwelder)
I've lost track of how many of Swartzwelder's Frank Burly novels I've read at this point, but I can read a million of them. For the COMPLETELY uninitiated, Swartzwelder is the legendary Simpsons writer behind almost 50 of what's considered golden era Simpsons's episodes. He's a weird genius recluse who started self-publishing "detective" stories starring Frank Burly, a detective who is sort of like Homer Simpson but indestructible and with no redeeming qualities. The books are line-after-line hilarious and incredible quick reads. DDM is his latest and it's great, though my favorite is probably How I Conquered Your Planet.
The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency: (Chris Whipple)
Another Ryan Holiday recommendation. A trip through the last several decades of Chiefs of Staff, a position I knew embarrassingly little about. Good lessons on leadership and service. It sounds really dry and if I'm being honest when I picked it up I thought it would live on my Forever Next shelf, the large stack of books I promised myself I'd read but probably never will (shout out Devil in the White City and that boring-ass Harry Truman book I accidentally got when I meant to get the other one). But it was great and fascinating and just incredibly readable.
My Funny Cowboy Dance: (Jack Handey)
Another legendary comedy writer (SNL, Deep Thoughts), another hit collection of short, stupid, perfect humor pieces.
Wedding People: (Alison Espach)
Actually funny, romantic and sweet. A woman gets cheated on/dumped and decides to end her life in style at a fancy hotel. TWIST— a wedding has taken over the hotel all weekend long and due to believable plot reasons our protagonist can’t go through with her suicide plan and gets swept up in wedding shenanigans. It was full of poignant lines ("Love is visible, it paints the air between two people a different color, and everyone can see it.") and featured my favorite, casual description of an uptight character, "A man who would only eat Oreos in private."
And that's it! I'm exhausted because I just moved infinity boxes and now there are still infinity boxes to move. Read books, run, volunteer at your local food pantry and call your parents. Bye.