News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Watch Monsters on TV and Fight The Real Monsters Banning Books Plus: Exploring space and dispatches from Minneapolis By Molly Templeton | Published on February 27, 2026 Photo: Apple TV Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Apple TV Is anyone else counting the days until daylight saving time kicks in? I could just, you know, really use a little more sunlight. My solar cells need recharging. My evening walks need brightness! Let there be liiiiiiiiight! Sorry. Having a moment. While I would like to make like a cat and curl up in a sunbeam, oblivious to the world, I’m entirely too online for that. So I’ve been reading, and asking for recommendations, and getting really really really excited for the return of a certain monster-centric TV show this week. It’s time! It’s really time! Brace yourself for titans, stay warm, and tell your friends you love them. It’s Monarch Time and I’m So Freaking Ready FINALLY. Today, Friday, February 27, we finally get the second season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, a show in which I did not at all expect to get deeply invested in when it premiered in 2023. I haven’t kept up with the Godzilla movies. I have been feeling deeply franchise-shy after the diminishing returns of the MCU. But this is something else—character-driven, intriguing, rich with mysteries and complications, and despite the Titans, human-sized. The cast is great across the board, but I really, really love Anna Sawai, who went on to win a Golden Globe for her work in Shogun. The Expanse’s Dominique Tipper shows up all too briefly (everyone on The Expanse, like everyone on The Magicians, should get a million excellent roles). Kiersey Clemons (The Flash) deserves them as well. If you found the younger Russell, Wyatt, quite grating as John Walker, I absolutely do not regret to inform you that he makes up for it in this show. He plays the younger version of a character played by his dad, Kurt, and it works better than it should. It’s all very complicated and intergenerational and fantastic; bravo to creators Matt Fraction and Chris Black for making it work. If you haven’t watched the first season yet, get thee to Apple TV, immediately. Megan Giddings Stays Open-Hearted in Minneapolis Megan Giddings writes fantastic books. Her haunting debut, Lakewood, was an NPR Book of the Year. Her second novel, The Women Could Fly, is the kind of dystopia that isn’t, really; its vision of a nation controlling its women is all too real. (I loved that book.) Giddings is also an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, which means she lives in Minneapolis—and that’s what she writes about in a new piece for McSweeney’s. In “Open-Hearted in Minneapolis” she writes, “Here we are in Minneapolis donating food, we are donating games and books and art supplies to kids who can’t go outside or visit their friends, we are donating coats, we are donating meals, we are donating time, we are donating the same fifty dollars back and forth, we are donating whistles, we are learning how to make a functional community when it’s our own government disrupting our lives.” It’s a beautiful, infuriating, necessary reminder that while the headlines from Minnesota may have changed, the reality of living there hasn’t. The way she ends the piece cracked something in me—maybe something that needed cracking. It’s so hard to stay openhearted. But it is also necessary to try. Books! In! Spaaaaaaaaaaace! You ever have a little subgenre awakening? Like, say, you realize that you’ve loved a genre all along, and you just hadn’t quite figured that out about yourself? I’m having a space opera moment. I want to read all the big epic massive (yes, I’m being redundant on purpose) space books. Space fantasy also welcome, always. This is, in part, because I’ve just read Claire North’s Slow Gods, and Bethany Jacobs’ This Brutal Moon is up next, and there’s a new book in James SA Corey’s Captive’s War coming soon. But I need more. So I asked the internet for recommendations, and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten so many, so quickly. Among the ones I most want to read just as soon as I have time for more books: Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series; Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan series; Megan O’Keefe’s Devoured Worlds; and Simon Jimenez’s The Vanished Birds. There are just so many. They all look so good. So I’m telling you about them. Let’s have a little space opera moment, shall we? The Book Banning Attempts Continue—And Are Getting Worse (Almost) every week, in these posts, I write “Call your reps” in the intro. I don’t often specify what about, simply because there are just too many things to be angry about at any given current moment. But this week there’s a specific thing that just popped up on my radar: a nationwide book ban bill that has been introduced in the House of Representatives. The bill seeks “To amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to prohibit the use of funds provided under such Act to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, and for other purposes.” It then goes on to define “sexually oriented material” as material that “includes any depiction, description, or simulation of sexually explicit conduct (as defined in subparagraphs (A) and (B) of section 2256(2) of title 18, United States Code)” or “involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism.” As Kelly Jensen writes at Book Riot, “The latter is an intentionally harmful word used as a cudgel to harm trans people. Such a broad definition also ensures that this kind of bill could be applicable in any situation where it would benefit the banners. It isn’t a stretch to see a bill like this used to outright ban all books by or about LGBTQ+ people under the guise of it being ‘sexually oriented.’” You know what I’m going to say here. Call your reps. Especially if they are among the sponsors of this horrendous bill.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Watch Monsters on TV and Fight The Real Monsters Banning Books appeared first on Reactor.