Pop Culture Diary: This Week's Reviews, Reads and Roundups: 'Listers,' 'Sly Lives!,' More

What I've Been Into...

"Listers: A Glimpse into Extreme Birdwatching" (2025). Two stoner brothers get a whim to birdwatch and we see how even one of the most wholesome, benign and pleasant-seeming pastimes can devolve into weirdness and competition.

Owen and Quentin Reiser, in their hilarious if-a-little-too-long documentary, chart their wayward trek across the U.S. via van in search of ticking off as many birds as possible from their "list." Along the way, they encounter some weird birds, along with various fowl. Humans being humans, it turns out there are some loonie birdwatchers out there: Making a hobby a job, trying to out-do one another and splitting heirs on what sightings "count."

The Reisers get caught up in the fever, but come away thinking that maybe just watching birds just to see birds may be more fun, and more important, than checking them off a list. Stream it on YouTube.

"Sly Stone Lives! (The Burden of Black Genius)" (2025). Questlove, who's emerged as a brilliant documentarian (check out 2021's "Summer of Soul) digs into one of the saddest stories in popular music, Sly Stone's sudden slip from hitmaker and cultural revolutionary into substance abuse and irrelevancy.

Via exhilarating live performance footage, vintage interviews and compelling current-day analysis from Andre 3000, D'Angelo, Q-Tip and more, the film demonstrates the additional burden being Black places on brilliant artists. Not only do the face the pressures that come along with charting new territory and taking risks, they fade prejudice from outside their community to conform and succumb to racist expectations, there's a pressure from within, too, to represent and give back, along with self-doubt and suspicion that they might not be worthy of success.

It's a deep topic for a documentary, but Questlove makes it look easy. The fact that I'm still sad and struggling with the message it sent says a lot, too.