Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high-signal curation of things worth your time.
This week: hidden worlds in plain sight. A fake ’60s hit that became real nostalgia, a KGB colonel living a secret double life for eleven years, the Letterboxd for photobooks, twin sisters on a bloody revenge mission, and Delhi as seen from one foot off the ground.
1. That Thing You Do! : The Fake Band That Became Real Nostalgia
It may sound like a good idea to make a film about a one-hit wonder band from the 1960s. But then you have a problem. You have to write the hit song.
Tom Hanks had that challenge with That Thing You Do!, the 1996 movie he wrote and directed about four guys from a small city in Pennsylvania whose band records an insanely catchy song and briefly becomes famous.
To me, the film is pure fun. It follows the Wonders (they’re originally called something else, but I won’t ruin the joke) as they go from playing local talent shows to hearing themselves on the radio, touring the country, and eventually going on national television. Don’t expect evil managers or crazy rock-and-roll excesses. It’s not the Goodfellas arc, where the manic rise is followed by a descent into hell. It’s mostly just four young guys riding a big wave, and then it fizzles out.
Hanks really captures how exciting it must have felt while it lasted.
But for any of this to work, they needed a hit song. So Hanks put out the call: write the song. Around 300 versions came in. One was from a then-little-known songwriter named Adam Schlesinger, who had just co-founded the band Fountains of Wayne (you may know their biggest hit, Stacy’s Mom).
After the film came out, something funny happened: the fake hit became a real one. “That Thing You Do!” reached #41 on the Billboard Hot 100, #22 in the UK, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. The soundtrack eventually went platinum.
The Wonders never existed. Play-Tone Records never existed. None of these songs were actually on the radio in 1964. But almost 30 years later, there are people who grew up with this movie. To them, the song is a real hit, and they feel real nostalgia for this fake band from a fake version of the ’60s.
Hanks even named his real production company Playtone after the record label in the movie. I don’t know, I kinda love that. [Liberty]
🎬 That Thing You Do! (1996)
2. The KGB Colonel Who Spied for Britain for Eleven Years
Of all the books I have read so far this summer, the one that stands out is Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor. I am probably a little late to the Macintyre fan club, but I have joined it now, and I have joined it with enthusiasm.
The book tells the story of Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB colonel who spent more than a decade passing Soviet secrets to British intelligence while continuing to climb the ranks in Moscow and London. Around that story, Macintyre builds a portrait of spycraft itself: the dead drops, the tradecraft, the constant low-grade terror of a double life. Macintyre had more than 100 hours of taped interviews with Gordievsky and interviewed every British intelligence officer involved in his case. You feel that access on every page.
There is enough context to understand the era, but Gordievsky’s story stays firmly at the center. Macintyre has done so much reporting that even the smallest scenes have texture. And the book moves. You just keep turning pages.
I will not say more, because I do not want to spoil how good it is. I will say that it deserves every piece of praise it received, and that it does the thing great nonfiction is supposed to do: it reads as well as fiction.
The book is so good that — just having finished it — I'm starting it all over again. [Jimmy]
📘 The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre
3. The Letterboxd for Photobooks Has Arrived
The photobook is one of photography’s most enduring forms. But discovering a great one has always been a scavenger hunt — trawling used book sales, Instagram rabbit holes, small press websites, and the stacks at bookstores where you overhear someone say “you have to see this one.” I’ve been collecting photobooks for years from all of these places, and I’ve always wished there were one good place to keep track of what I find. Photobookers comes pretty close.
Photobookers was built by Éanna de Fréine, an Irish photographer who founded The Velvet Cell in 2011, an independent publisher that has put out more than 60 photobooks. At its core, the site is a big curated database: search for a photographer or publisher, find their books, save the ones you want, follow people whose work you like. But there’s also an editorial side, with featured books and photographers and longer interviews. I like the way the site describes the idea: “a hub, not a dump.” There’s also an iOS app, and it’s free.
I found it at exactly the right time. Social media has become a powerful discovery engine for photography, and my Instagram and X bookmarks are jammed with photographers and new books I want to track down. The work is easier than ever to stumble across, but keeping track of it is still a mess. Photobookers fills a real need. A few of my favorites are “Dormant Season” by Erinn Springer and “Driving Through Flyover Country” by Lewis Ableidinger. [Taylor]
4. Is God Is : A Revenge Movie Bound by Fury
A combination of the World Cup, work, and that deeply unfortunate side-effect of existence known as “a social life” has taken a sledgehammer to my movie-watching over the past few weeks. But there have been highlights. Modern cinema is back (although I’ve long argued it never really left): any month where you can go see The Invite, The Furious and The Odyssey in packed-out screens is a good one.
My viewing of Aleshea Harris’s revenge-thriller Is God Is was less satisfying. The film never got a theatrical release here, so I was forced to watch it at home: an imperfect solution at the best of times, but doubly so for a film as lively as this one.
Racine and Anaia (Kara Young and Mallori Johnson) are twin sisters who were badly burned in a fire started by their father (a silkily venomous Sterling K. Brown). When their absentee mother summons them and demands they take vengeance so she can die in peace, the sisters hit the road. Bloody hijinks ensue.
Joel Coen once said that a director’s job is “tone management.” This is Harris’s feature directorial debut (she adapted it from her own 2018 play), and her superpower is how delicately she balances the film’s seemingly conflicting sensibilities. There are hints of Tarantino in its bloody set pieces and exploitation-movie DNA, but this has far more on its mind than the subpar Pulp Fiction knockoffs that populated the 1990s, folding in bouts of hyper-earnest melodrama, goofy humour, and magical realism.
Add in the episodic plot and it should all feel overwhelming, but by and large the film holds together, its disparate elements bound by a barely concealed fury. More please! [Ed]
🎬 Is God Is (2026)
5. The Cats Who Owned Delhi
I have a weakness for books about, around, based in, or even remotely connected to Delhi. Because Delhi is my city, the city I was born in. So Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings had an unfair advantage with me from the start.
This novel is about a bunch of feral cats that live in Nizamuddin, among dargahs, ruins, rooftops, drains, and trees, and have their own codes, rivalries, and myths. They call us Bigfeet and share a common language called Junglee (pretty obvious, I know). There is an old Siamese named Miao who teaches kittens to hunt and a tom named Hulo who patrols the territory. Things go sideways when an orange kitten named Mara shows up. She is a special one who can project herself across distances through her whiskers and is what the cats call a ‘Sender’.
Many authors anthropomorphize animals but end up giving them too many human qualities that break character. Roy never pretends to humanize the cats. They remain feral, sweating, mewing, eating rats and doing whatever cats do.
I loved how she built a microcosm of a civilization using the cats’ version of the Nizamuddin neighborhood with its iconic dargahs, canals, lanes and trees. The book gives a strange sheen to the place with the raat ki rani smelling ten times stronger. The shift in perspective reminded me of the Panchatantra tales I read as a child: talking animals making their world feel strange and exciting while smuggling in lessons about our own.
The author was a literary critic for years before she wrote her first novel. The Wildings won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award in 2013 and also has a sequel, The Hundred Names of Darkness. If you want to see Delhi from a foot off the ground, go for it. [Aashisha]
📙 The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy, illustrations by Prabha Mallya
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