The Weekly Wow List: 8/21/26

Happy Friday! Here’s a trio of staff picks for you to enjoy!

Bestselling Author Marie Benedict at Surfside Park

Ms. Benedict has written or co-written several New York Times bestsellers, including local favorites like The Personal Librarian, The Only Woman in the room, Carnegie’s Maid, The Mitford Affair, The Queens of Crime, and The First Ladies. Beloved by fans of historical fiction, her latest novel Daughter of Egypt tells the story of the woman who helped uncover Tutankhamun’s tomb and the mystery behind the fist female Pharaoh of Egypt. She’ll be here in town at Surfside Park on Monday the 24th at 7pm to talk about all of these and more, with a Q&A and book signing to follow. Books will be available to purchase, so bring your beach chairs or blankets and get ready for a enthralling evening! The event will move indoors to neighboring Community Hall in the event of inclement weather. – Sean Farrell

Lanterns

The superhero genre is surprisingly well-suited to the noir mystery format. Several comic books have explored it before, but it’s still a bit more rare (though not absent) from the films and TV shows based on them. In the first such offering from James Gunn’s tenure in charge of DC Studios, we follow Lantern trainee John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) as he is reluctantly taken under the wing of original Earth Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler). When they head out to rural Nebraska to investigate a possible alien crime, they find themselves drawn into something far more dangerous and wide-reaching than they could have imagined. Created Tom King, Chris Mundy (True Detective, Ozark), and Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers, Lost, Watchmen), the show is in good hands, and based on the clever and moody pilot episode, this looks to be appointment viewing. – SF

Color+

I’d seen ads for similar puzzlers before, but generally can’t stand the way that most mobile games quickly turn into relentless advertising machines that strongly urge you to start spending ever-growing quantities of money to advance beyond a certain point. Since this offering is included in Apple’s Arcade subscription, it eschews all of that however, allowing you to simply enjoy its color matching challenges.

The concept is simple enough: you are presented with several vials filled with varying colors of liquid with the goal of shuffling them around until you wind up with the like colors united. While it’s easy to pick up, after several levels things get gradually more difficult. Addictive, challenging, and satisfying. – SF