His influences are wide-ranging, and I think this glimpse at some of the artists he'd love to work with speaks volumes about his sound:
Mount Rushmore of artists you would love to collaborate with?
Abraham: What’s crazy is I’ve already collaborated with two of them! Another one would be John Legend—I absolutely love him. Then there’s Jon Batiste, and John Bellion—three Johns! John Ian, from New York, is another incredible artist and producer. Oh, and Norah Jones would be amazing too. I’d say those individuals for now. So, if you’ve got a 'J' name, I want to work with you!
I didn’t know Alexander’s work until the fall of 2023. While in Louisville, Kentucky, I attended a small concert by St. Paul and the Broken Bones, maybe my third (?) time to see them. For their opening act, a lone man with a guitar: Alexander.
I really loved what he was doing, and after a few songs, I knew I wanted to have his album. I went to the merch table and purchased it in vinyl.
A little while later, the man was standing at the table, talking to fans and signing autographs. I couldn’t resist.
He penned a lovely thank you for supporting his work, and I’ve spun that record quite a few times, probably more than any other vinyl across the past year. It’s kind of a perfect easy-listening soul-inflected album.
Bright Wall/Dark Room unlocked its entire Issue 51, dedicated to the great director. Some great essays thinking about and discussing one of the most enigmatic and original director in cinema history.
I was rejected from a job with a company that previously laid me off. It was a demoralizing blow, another in a long line of rejections but stung especially since I was hoping my previous employment there would win the day.
I needed a distraction. I knew just the thing: Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. As I prepared to make my way, I discovered my car battery was dead; the endless cold was just too much for it.
My driveway is angled down, with two high retaining walls on either side—one along my lawn, the other along the neighbors'. Basically, it's impossible to get a car in a position to jump the battery off.
I turned to Courtney's car. It would be my salvation, and after the film, I'd go to Lowe's to get a jump-start power station. I tried to pull Courtney's car away from the curb and—I couldn't move. It was basically snowed/iced in place, its low clearance no match for the mounds that had been pushed toward it from the street's center. So back inside I go, in search of a shovel. I have to dig the car out.
A few sweaty moments later, I'm on my way to the cinema, and the film is exactly what I needed: a big dumb heist movie that let me just turn my brain off for a while.
Afterwards, at Lowe's, I realize I've walked in two minutes before closing. I rush to the aisle, and I see the various battery-related products. Instead of just buying the one I initially saw in my search, I was seduced by one that was a bit cheaper. I decided to get it, and I rushed out without paying too much more attention.
I get home, and I quickly realize that I've messed up: I've bought a battery charger, not a jump-starter power station. To use the one I'd bought, I would need to have the device plugged into an outlet while attached to the battery. This wasn't what I'd wanted at all.
But, I thought, there is a garage at the bottom of this slanted driveway. It's got an old manual door that opens into a tiny, low-ceilinged garage that I don't often use unless it's going to hail. I think to myself, "Maybe I can salvage this if I can put the vehicle in neutral and guide it into the garage." So I go back outside to give this a try.
For the second time in a few hours' time, I'm shoveling. I figure since it will just be me pushing and gravity pulling, I didn't want any big snow banks or chunks of ice to get in my way. A few sweaty minutes later, I'm satisfied I've done about as well as I can.
I get in the car and try to turn it on in order to move the gear shift into neutral. The battery struggles and fails, but there's enough power to allow me to move the gear shift into neutral. Once there, I realize that the steering wheel is pretty well locked up, and I don't think I'm going to be able to do this Plan B.
Dammit. Oh well, I think. No harm, no foul. At least I tried.
But then I got caught in some kind of shitty feedback loop, where there was not enough power (or something more technically complicated was happening), and I could not get the gear shift back into park. Unable to get the vehicle back into park (or again, something more technically complicated was going on), I could not actually turn the vehicle all the way off.
The instrument panel is lighting up like a Vegas slot machine, and then my headlights and tail lights start flickering and blinking and all the while there's this clicking that makes me think I might just be sitting on a time bomb of some sort.
A quick Google search for how to shift the gears when the battery is dead leads me to a small little plastic place covering a hole, in which is supposedly a button that, if pushed with an flat-head screwdriver, would allow me to shift the gear even though the battery is dead. Well, I found everything but the button under the plastic cover. Didn't stop me from sticking a screwdriver in there in a real let's-see-what-happens mindset, and what do you know? That also doesn't work, plus I hear an unsettling crack sound that makes me fear I've messed something up more than when I started.
Finally, I give up. I put the parking brake on, and I go get Courtney's keys yet again and set out, this time to Walmart since Lowe's is already closed. In the hellscape that is Walmart after 10 p.m. when it closes at 11, I could find no one to help me get the actual device I needed out of its theft-proof glass case. A trip to the front of the store to ask for help yielded a "Well send someone back there." I waited, and you guessed it—nobody came. I went back to electronics, which had previous been devoid of workers, and found two this time. Told them my plight and they made a call that I could actually hear over the store's intercom system. Finally, a little gremlin of a man approached and helped me out. While we searched for a register at which he could ring me up, he was telling me some story about how a certain register in the automotive section didn't like him, so we'd just use this one over in sporting goods. And then he told me that he'd essentially stolen from the store by taking cash for purchases and not actually ringing it up.
"Yeah, sometimes someone will just give me like $200 cash and I won't even ring it in," he said. I nodded along politely and gave him a good-for-you smile, but then I wondered, "Is he making a soft pitch to me for a similar arrangement? Well, I hope not, because this thing's only $100."
And upon ringing it up, it ended up even cheaper at somewhere in the $80s (not sure if that was the doing of the little gremlin man or just regular good luck, but I was happy for it), but let me tell you, folks: The EverStart Maxx 1200-Amp Power Station is worth every penny.
Once I got the thing home and charged it for a little while, it was the only thing to be hassle-free on a Monday from hell. I hooked it onto the battery and it was nearly instantaneous that I could now crank the car and finally cure all the ping-ponging lights on my instrument panel.
If you're living in a cold part of the country and know that some of the colder day of winter may still be ahead of you, I can't recommend this little addition to your garage more highly. It saved my battery, but more importantly, my sanity.
I'm admittedly new to tennis. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't have opinions on different brands of tennis balls.
We've settled into being a "Dunlop household," favoring the brand's ATP Championship Extra Duty (fitting since it's the tournament ball for the Australian Open which starts today). Before that, we'd preferred Wilson's U.S. Open Extra Duty. We leveled up to the U.S. Open from Wilson's Championship Extra Duties. We bought a goo-gob of Penn Extra Duties because they were so affordable, but fresh out of the can, we felt they lacked a certain pop and bounce; now they've been relegated to my piss-poor serving practice.
It's with this rank amateur's experience that I read this exploration of the question from Defector.
It's an interesting piece that entertains complaints from various players, but most relevantly, it contains a fairly frank and revealing interview with a marketing vice president at Penn. He doesn't shy away from the reality that the pandemic's disruptions definitely contributed to some quality issues (though he says they've since been squared away), and he posits a handful of other potential issues that might account for some of the players' complaints that, he thinks, are being unfairly placed on the ball.
The question doesn't get a definitive answer, but the piece explores a lot of ground before coming to the conclusion that perhaps the very act of asking "Have the balls gotten worse?" put the idea in the heads of players who already tend toward neuroses when it comes to what could be negatively affecting their games.
More generally: Do you know how balls are actually made? I didn't until I read this:
To create a tennis ball,two separate rubber ball halves are filled with compressed air and fused under high temperature with a heat-activated glue. The resulting rubber sphere is abraded, then coated in a different glue, then wrapped in flaps of that yellow-green felt covering. A third glue, applied to the edges of the felt, forms the white seams we see on the surface of the ball.
After reading it, I went looking for what the process actually looks like. It's oddly satisfying to watch, and it's wild to think this factory churns out these balls 24 hours a day.
I've been fascinated by the concept of "Quitter's Day." Mostly because I'd never heard of it until this year, but anecdotally, I can totally relate to how the day got its name.
I think the part of me that relates to it all too well is a bit bummed to realize the day was only two Fridays into January, though I'm quite certain I've quit many a resolution by this point.
I enjoyed David Epstein's post about it in his wonderful newsletter, Range Widely.
There, he has a conversation about goals and goal-setting and stick-to-it-ness with economist and journalist Tim Harford.
I especially like one small part of the chat where Epstein draws a connection between goal-setting and research he'd done on the rhetorical strategies of Martin Luther King, Jr.
DE: He uses a lot of concepts and analogies repeatedly, with slight variations, and one that comes up is Odysseus versus Orpheus. Odysseus lashed himself to the ship's mast to avoid giving in to the song of the sirens. Whereas Orpheus, in one myth, used his beautiful music to drown out the sirens' song instead of restraining himself. And in another myth, during his journey to the underworld to retrieve his love, he used his music to charm Hades. So King would talk about not aiming for the absence of hate, but rather working for the presence of love. And I think that's just a very interesting concept in general, of not just getting rid of a thing you don't like or restraining yourself, but replacing it with something or promoting something that's better or more attractive.
It's a beautiful strategy when applied to King's rhetoric, but a really valuable mindset to carry into New Year's resolutions as well: Simply saying "I want less of the bad stuff" isn't nearly as powerful as saying "I want more of the good stuff."
I didn’t watch the funeral service for former president Jimmy Carter yesterday, but I thoroughly enjoyed this interview between John Heilemann and James Fallows, who, at 27, worked for Carter as the youngest White House speechwriter ever. Heilemann’s podcast, Impolitic, is one of my favorites, so this was like catnip for me.
He’s an infinitely interesting fella, and his assessment of Carter’s legacy and insights into our current political landscape is invaluable. I’m just a huge fan.
I rewatched Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City last night. Not for any real reason other than Peacock told me it was leaving soon, which, in the age of crippling indecision brought on by near limitless choices, I find incredibly helpful to actually stop scrolling and just pick something.
I think I might have put the film on once before when it first came to the steamer, but I’m not even sure I finished it or was actually watching all that closely. For all intents and purposes, I essentially had not seen it since Courtney and I went to see it at Ragtag, the local arthouse theater here in Columbia.
Man, what a great movie. That’s what has gone overlooked. I rarely need reason to remember that I’m enamored by Anderson’s work, but during the week that my mom visited us in Columbia, we spent one night settled in watching my Criterion Collection edition of The Grand Budapest Hotel. We lingered a bit on the behind-the-scenes extras after it was over, and it was mesmerizing to see the images come together.
I found a similar short video, hosted on the awesome Kodak Youtube channel, of how Anderson and Co. made the fictional town of Asteroid City. I love everything about it, and the fact that it’s Kodak, celebrating work shot on film, makes it even better.
But in watching the film, one might resonate with one character’s cry: “I still don’t understand the play.”
It’s a layered meta textual film, and it definitely rewards repeat viewings. But I really enjoyed this Thomas Flight video essay about the meaning of the film. There are times when the explanation gets a bit convoluted (by his own admission), but I think he lands on a (if not necessarily the) fundamental truth of the film.
I love the contemplation of how the artist’s life experiences and emotions find new life through the characters they create and inhabit. It’s how we connect so deeply with well-crafted writing and performances: There is universality in the hyper specific, and if we want others to feel through our works, it pays off hugely to mine our lives for the realest parts of ourselves.
Since tomorrow is Quitter’s Day, the second Friday in January and the day by which upwards of 80% of people will have given up on their New Year’s resolutions, I thought I’d share a simple little guide for those of you who, like me, might be trying to do more journaling in 2025.
I found the act of collaging (also one of the tips from the article) helpful in allowing me to be creative with a touch of randomness thrown in and overcome the inertia inspired by the blank first page.
On my most recent trip to Tennessee, I was looking for something in my dad’s old workspace, and I came across these canvas tool bags made by Klein.
They were just sitting on a shelf, two of them stuffed into the third, and I immediately wanted them. For what purpose, I didn’t know. But I asked my mom if she would care if I had them, and when she said she didn’t, they came back to Columbia with me.
I don’t know if I’m necessarily a natural fit to have these bags, considering their purpose. I’m not exactly the handy type (though a part of me desperately wishes I were). It was (to me) a running joke when my dad (probably not joking) would say he had the perfect gift idea for me: a drill, a miter saw, or some highly specific tool he’d been talking about recently for some project he was doing.
I always laughed it off, said I didn’t want or need anything like that, and that if I had to guess, he was just suggesting it so he could “borrow” it from me. He’d laugh, but also say that everybody needs a fill-in-the-blank.
I didn’t have it in me to get through the question to my mom, but part of me desperately wanted to ask: Did he ever say anything about having a nincompoop for a son when it comes to tools?
I think I’ll continue to struggle with the differences between him and me, wondering, pointlessly, what life and our relationship might have been like if I were a little bit more handy, a little bit more inclined to such things, a little bit more like my little brother.
I couldn’t get the question out because I couldn’t overcome choking on the words and stifling tears at the same time, but on another level, I knew the question would be fruitless. Because I don’t actually think my dad ever said anything about me being a dunderhead with tools. I don’t think he thought, and even if he had, I don’t think he was the type to put words to it.
I just wanted something positive and affirming of our differences, something from him, that recognized we seemed to be cut from different cloth but how that was OK all the same, that he never looked at it as a failing of mine or wished I were any different.
In reality, I should take more solace in the part of me that knows the thoughts and comments weren’t in him because that is all the proof I need that he didn’t feel that way. But call it a fathers-and-sons thing: We want something, anything, after they’re gone to tell us they didn’t make nearly as much out of our perceived shortcomings as we did. To feel seen for what we are and what we aren’t and loved anyway.
As you may be able to deduce, we didn’t say the deeper, harder things. It wasn’t our way, but there is a part of me that wishes it had been. We said the big things, the “miss yous” and “I love yous,” but in those dwindling days, I couldn’t get through big speeches to unload all that I’d never get a chance to say again.
And when I didn’t, it led to all sorts of wonderings, pitiful yearnings to uncover something that might feel like an unspoken trove on his side of things, too. Even when asking would have been sad and largely unfair to my mom, who likely wouldn’t have had an answer and would have seen me wrestling with my emotions, trying to figure out what to say (and probably becoming quite sad herself).
All of that to say: I really just like these rugged, colorful bags. Looking at them makes me miss my dad, but they also make me feel close to him, like a little bit of him resides in his possessions. I know I feel that way about the gifts he gave me. Having them close is a comfort, and that’s not nothing. The bags don’t have anything in them just yet, but I’m thinking perhaps some art supplies, which make possible hobbies that Dad and I actually did share.
And who knows? Maybe one day I’ll know what I’m doing well enough to justify buying so many tools that these bags, sure to stand the test of time, might just be the perfect home for them.
“Attention, where we put our conscious thoughts in any given moment, is the substance of life,” he writes.
Hayes acknowledged much in our world is set up to dominate our attention, but more importantly for those of us who may wish to exert a little more control over our attentions, we must recognize the bit inside of us that wants our attention to be taken, the part he calls “the unsettled self.”
That unsettled self is what powers this “attention age,” where so many things fight and clamor for ours; companies are delivering products and experiences that know we long to be distracted, to be consumed by anything but our own thoughts.
Hayes cites philosopher Blaise Pascal, who called such inward thoughts and meditations one’s “own chamber.”
“When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men,” Pascal observed in “Pensées,” his collection of essays published in 1670, “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”
Hayes laments a practice that besets me, too: listening to podcasts. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing, but the use of it as a crutch certainly can’t be good.
Years ago, podcasts came to fill my ears during my walks, conditioning me to feel a little panicked without one.
This is exactly how I feel. I catch myself, even when just doing some chores around the house, pausing things to go find AirPods and selecting something to listen to, as if the few moments of doing a particular task in silence were going to be end of the world.
All of this made me think of some of my favorite parts of Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, which I recently finished.
When describing what her students should put in their composition notebooks, she wrote:
What goes into your dairy are things that you noticed when you became present—that is to say when the hamster wheel of thoughts and plans and worries stopped long enough for you to notice where you were and what was going on around you.
I see a lot of connection between Hayes’s points and how they’re keeping me from what Barry expected from her students: My inability to sit in my own chamber isn’t just robbing me of precious alone time but it’s also affecting how I interact with (or, more and more, fail to interact with) the outside world.
I’m going to try to make a point to follow her advice on keeping a daily diary because it’s a solid checklist to make sure you’re still an active participant in the world.
What You Did
Start by noticing what you notice as you go about your day, you DO things—sometimes intentionally and other times by accident.
What You Saw
You may find yourself staring at something for “no reason,” a label on a bottle of juice, a pigeon, a wisp of hair on the nape of someone’s neck—or you may see something spectacular: a fight or a fire or an accident.
Something You Heard Someone Say
And listen to what people are saying—overheard conversations are fu ll of good lines. Pay attention to how people really speak. Write down what they say.
I wasted no time getting back there in the new year.
I saw Robert Egger’s newest film, Nosferatu. As I said in my Letterboxd review, I appreciated the craft of the film more than I enjoyed the storytelling/narrative experience of watching it.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Big Picture episode dedicated to the film, vampire films more generally, and an interview with Robert Eggers. He’s an incredibly thoughtful filmmaker, and the degree of research he did to make the film is genuinely impressive.
This one shouldn't come as any surprise, considering my love of the press and my time as a professional journalist. But since I left the paper, I don't have a home filled with slowly yellowing newsprint anymore. Sure, I have many print copies of my old stories, but I haven't been a regular subscriber of a print newspaper in a minute.
I just picked up the massive Sunday edition of The New York Times, and I just love the heft of it. Before I knew it, the entire interior of my car smelled like newsprint.
I'll just say it: Daily newspapers are a miracle. I wish there were more of them. Seeing this one definitely makes me interested in the Times home delivery options that are less than every day, either the Friday, Saturday, Sunday option or just the Sunday one. Either way, I feel like I want to make print a bigger part of my life in 2025.
This one will serve a particular purpose: After reading through it, I think it will be repurposed as wrapping paper. It cost me $6, which is on par with any wrapping paper you'd get at Target, but this one tells me about the world, entertaining me while educating me. What's not to love?
Like any gifted musician, there are flourishes of genius that can feel thrown off and had you not been there to see it, you wouldn't even know you'd missed out on it. That's the joy and ephemeral nature of live music and improvisation.
A small obsession with this concept started with this incredible clip from an interview with Chris Wallace.
Too often, that's it. Even though it wasn't live music for me, watching at home on CNN or here on YouTube, there was nothing to suggest that this was something Batiste hadn't dreamed up on the spot, a riff that simply came to him as he was proving a point.
There are other examples of this for me. For example, the way Stevie Wonder sings "It's Your Thing" by The Isley Brothers at the beginning of Questlove's documentary Summer of Soul. (It's about 3:30 minutes into the film, if you're interested.) Something about it—the groove of it, the tone of his voice, all of it—got to me on a deep level, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I wanted to find it, but there was no longer recording to be had.
Another is from the documentary The Greatest Night in Pop, about the recording of "We Are The World." The film's various talking heads are remembering the night, and they talk about the moments in between takes, where Ray Charles would sit at the piano and bang out these remixed gospel-y versions of "We Are The World." I was captivated by this and couldn't help but wishing there was such a version, but of course, there isn't. It was nothing more than a genius noodling around. (This moment happens at about minute 56 in the film, right before an endearing anecdote about how Charles needed to go to the restroom and, of all people, Stevie Wonder said he'd show him the way. I'd clearly found this moment so rewatchable (for both the gospel rendition and the story) that when I pulled up the film in Netflix to check the time stamp, the film was already at the precise moment in the film from the last time I'd gone looking for it.)
After seeing Batiste play that mash-up of Beethoven and blues/gospel above, I was already resigned to it being another in the list of "I wish that were an official Thing and not just something I heard once."
But sometimes the universe just delivers.
Imagine my joy when, about two weeks ago, Batiste released Beethoven Blues, an 11-song album of remixed classics (with a promising "Vol. 1" on the cover that makes me hope there's more where that came from).
This is such a stunning collection of images. And a reminder of the value of newsrooms staffed with talented professionals.
Some that caught my eye:
The container ship Dali rests against the wreckage of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge on the Patapsco River, on March 27, 2024, as seen from Pasadena, Md. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Elise Mertens, of Belgium, serves against Naomi Osaka, of Japan, at the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament, on March 11, 2024, in Indian Wells, Calif. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
Lava flows from a volcanic eruption that started on the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland, Nov. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)
Check out the entire collection to see a brief snapshot of 2024.
I took some pictures while walking across campus to the library tonight and liked the way they looked. Behold, Francis Quadrangle, the Columns, and Jesse Hall in all their glory.
My favorite podcast app, Pocket Casts, sent its version of a year-in-review feature, and it's one of my favorite things.
It's fun to see my year in podcast-listening documented and categorized for me, since I don't include podcast episodes in my culture diaries (though I'm toying with the idea of starting).
I listened to a wide array of shows, but my top shows definitely tracked my interests: news and current events, film, and TV.
Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day newsletter is already indispensable when it comes to understanding internet culture and explanations of what the hell is happening on most social media networks. He's fluent in internet; it makes him a great teacher.
But he's stepped up his game even more with a (relatively new) podcast: Panic World.
It's been going for about two months now, but I just fell into it like a rabbit hole today. Which is appropriate, since it's all about internet rabbit holes of the craziest sort.
The tagline with which he begins every episode describes the podcast as exploring the "moral panics, witch hunts, and viral freakouts that bubble up out of the weirdest corners of the internet."
I started with the episode on QAnon, in no small part because of yesterday's election and some of the cuckoo stuff that was going around online in the final days. And then I just couldn't stop myself. (Doesn't hurt that he interviews some of my favorites from other podcasts.) Caroline Calloway on being a woman the internet loves to hate. PJ Vogt on the Tide Pod Challenge (my goodness, I forgot that was an actual thing that happened). Ellie Hall on Kate Middleton conspiracy theories. Michael Hobbes on whether screens are frying kids' brains. David Sims on The Blair Witch Project.
Just a very thorough and entertaining primer on some truly crazy stuff that shouldn't really be a thing but totally is.
Not too long ago, I shared an episode of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, Revisionist History, that was a preview of his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point.
My rather off-the-cuff review is this: I liked it. I know, I know, I know the numerous qualifications that could go along with this, from social scientist types who say Gladwell oversimplifies things or that his schtick has run its course.
All of that may be true; I'm not an expert in any of the subject matter he discusses, and there are certainly times when I know there must be more nuance than a short, pithy story will allow.
But as an act of storytelling? An act of organization and structure designed to pull you in and keep you engaged as it ping-pongs off of seemingly random, disparate topics? Well, on that score, it's a rousing success.
Gladwell's voice as narrator is just the same as he uses for his podcast, and it's easy to see how and why, when reading his own material, he's so effective. It's quite impressive as just something to study, to strive for, to emulate.
I think one of my favorite things about this book is related to Gladwell's audio production company, Pushkin Industries. Instead of the same-old, same-old when it came to downloading the audiobook version of Revenge of the Tipping Point, I bought it directly from Pushkin.
It came to me simply as another entry in my podcast app of choice, Pocket Casts.
The rationale is simple; the technology is possibly even simpler. And I just loved the experience. Sure, I had to move things around and adjust things to make sure that my podcast app settings didn't mess up the listening experience (namely by organizing the chapters manually in my Up Next feed (since there were other podcasts already there), but otherwise, it was seamless.
Much like I thought the blending of the podcast form and audiobook form was novel yet simple in a previous book, The Bomber Mafia, so too was the logistical experience of actually getting the audiobook in the first place.
Couldn‘t have imagined how much joy this little dingus would bring me when I picked her out from the shelter in Oxford, Mississippi more than a decade ago now.
That short update was in fact a plea for help: Glass said that the show’s ad revenue had fallen off a cliff (the same one that many shows across the industry had already encountered), and it expected the coming year’s ad dollars to be a third less than what they were bringing in a few years ago.
As a result, they were starting a subscription model. Not that it would be required to hear the show at all, but one that was clearly calculated to help keep the lights on, to enable to keep making the show they always have.
None of this is particularly untrod ground for Glass and Co. I mean, This American Life started as (and still is) a public radio show, and one of the ways they grew in those early days was to record unique pledge-drive messaging that stations could use if they agreed to carry the show. Public radio is in the DNA of the show, and public radio lives and dies by pledge drives.
But it’s shocking to hear this podcast going this route. It’s such a staple; it’s the OG. For it to be feeling the sting of shrinking ad support feels like a bad omen for podcasts more generally. So here’s the link to the subscription option, cleverly branded “This American Life Partners.” If you love good storytelling and are in a position to help, consider supporting this one.
More than that, the revelation has made me think of whether I’m oversubscribed. (Spoiler: Yes.) Because that caveat at in the previous section was real: “in a position to help,” which has always been a thing, is more complicated now, not for the regular economic reasons like the increased cost of living across the board (though that, too) but simply the fact that so much of what we love is going behind a paywall.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a strong supporter of subscribing to our favorite publications instead of bitching about how we’ve run up against their paywall. I’m not changing my mind on that: It remains necessary and a great use of your money.
But in this creator economy, so many of our favorites are now asking for money to make a living or simply subsidize the work they’re doing that we’re consuming. I’m thinking of namely podcasts and newsletters.
I love so many of these that there are truly too many to list, and that matters when you have to choose how much love there is to go around. When they say, quite reasonably as marketing copy goes, that you can give a month’s worth of support for the cost of a single fancy coffee. Can’t argue with it, and I can feel the knee-jerk desire to click “subscribe” every single time I hear that reasoning.
But I forget that every single one of them is making the same argument, and if I zoom out to consider what I spend on subscriptions per month in total, well then, that’s quite a different story entirely now, isn’t it?
In a roundtable of newsletter creators, Deez Links queen Delia Cai said, in an aside to a longer point: That's part of a whole other conversation about how much emails should "cost" and what they should provide in return. (The $50/year Substack norm feels so unsustainable in at least fifty ways!). She doesn’t say this lightly, as she was laid off from Vanity Fair back in May, brought back the newsletter, and started a paid tier for subscribers. I respected her take, despite the inherent contrariness to her own financial well-being, because she said what we’re all thinking. Streaming services (both movies/TV and music); publications (though fewer of us) in both digital and print (way fewer of us); apps that offer us increased productivity, digital storage space, or some other modern-life utility; podcasts; newsletters. The problem with many of these is the same: There are free alternatives, so why would I pay?
It’s often less out of necessity, and more out of a sense of allegiance. “I want to support this, even though I don’t have to for it to exist.” That’s the kind of support This American Life is counting on, and hopefully it works out for them. But if you’re a fan and hesitating to open your wallets, I feel you on this one. It’s hard to support everything we love.
I went to see Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit this summer in St. Louis. It was a relatively small venue and mostly a general admission free-for-all when it came to the standing-only main area. The show was, predictably, amazing.
Before the show, I’d been sitting at a bar just down the street from the venue when a couple sat just around the bend of the bar from me. I can’t remember if it was a tee shirt one was wearing or I simply overheard something they said, but in between sips I asked them if they were going to the show.
They were, and when I asked if they’d seen him before, I quietly assumed I’d have the better story to tell, namely the one time I’d seen him before had been at Red Rocks.
They were indeed impressed by that story; they’d not been fortunate enough to catch him there. But they’d seen him so many times this year alone that I was quickly brought up as a mere poseur when it came to my fandom.
The wife said she’d been to see him multiple times at the Ryman Auditorium back in my native Tennessee, and I said that I was pretty sure they were going to release another live album from those performances. She’d heard the same thing.
And now it’s here. Don't miss out on some truly great live versions of some of the best storytelling put to music.
That's essentially the premise of Cullen Hoback's new HBO documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery. Satoshi Nakamoto's identity has been a mystery for as long as Bitcoin has been a thing, but Hoback's film may have cracked it.
From a Bitcoin truther point of view, I should be up front that I don't actually care that much. Not invested in it, don't particularly understand it.
But I do love a good mystery, and the film makes a compelling case that Peter Todd, one of the early contributors on the technical side of Bitcoin, is actually the mysterious Nakamoto.
I linked to this Kevin Roose write-up about the film because it answered for me a question I could have found elsewhere, which was: Why does this film feel so much like another HBO documentary about uncovering a mysterious internet figure (I'm talking about Q: Into the Storm) that also made a compelling case at its conclusion?
Well, the answer's simple: Hoback made that one, too.
How cool is this video of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s “Hurricane Hunter”?
Bumpy ride into Hurricane #Milton on @NOAA WP-3D Orion #NOAA43 "Miss Piggy" to collect data to help improve the forecast and support hurricane research.
— NOAA Aircraft Operations Center (@NOAA_HurrHunter) October 8, 2024
I didn’t even know this thing existed, so of course I had to look it up. It’s a Lockheed WP-3D Orion. She’s called Miss Piggy. (There's another plane called Kermit. Too perfect.)
Love everything about them. Read more about them here:
The lede from the Atlantic story tells you all you need to know:
As Hurricane Milton exploded from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 storm over the course of 12 hours yesterday, climate scientists and meteorologists were stunned. NBC6’s John Morales, a veteran TV meteorologist in South Florida, choked up on air while describing how quickly and dramatically the storm had intensified. To most people, a drop in pressure of 50 millibars means nothing; a weatherman understands, as Morales said mid-broadcast, that “this is just horrific.”
Gladwell used his Revisionist History podcast feed to give the public a sample of the new project, in audio form. It, much like his recent book, Bomber Mafia, blends podcast and audiobook into a new experience, and it's a captivating listen. Whether Gladwell's voice is perfectly suited to the narrator role or I've just grown used to it, I can't tell, but I love it. And then he mixes in actual interview tape, just like a podcast, to the extent that I'm curious what it looks like on the page.
Whatever the result, it works. It just does. I mentioned before that I don't fully know what to do with all the Gladwell criticisms out there, because many of them strike me as a honest and principled. But the guy just tells stories in a way that I find utterly addictive. And maybe that's fine, as long as I don't take his simplified conclusions and parrot them as the conventional wisdom at cocktail parties. If I can maintain a bit of detachment from the grand conclusions of "This is the answer to how this works in the real world" and instead just let myself be swept up in the storytelling and interconnectedness of ideas, I think I'm fine. And you probably will be, too.
But I’d sort of declared Lewis bankruptcy after his most recent book, Going Infinite, was met with some rocky reviews. I don’t think a single one of them would have cut against those three descriptors I listed, as the critics’ complaints had little to do with the quality of the reading experience.
The book, about Sam Bankman-Fried and his crypto empire FTX, was being published right as the rest of the world was properly learning that the whole thing was a house of cards. And the reviews didn’t like the book’s framing or ultimately Lewis’s takeaways: There were many, many, many, many critical reviews.
And it sort of bummed me out. I sort of just let these conventional-wisdom takes be enough for me, without investigating it myself, despite a good friend, whose news judgment and literary acumen I trust, said, “No, no; it’s a good book, and I don’t think the criticism is all that fair.” I just passed on the book.
Lewis told the story in the first place because he knew Sean Tuohy from grade school; they were friends. He’s had some harsh things to say about Oher after the lawsuit was announced, and his reporting seems less than stellar at times. Further complicating it for me, my former boss is one of the lawyers representing Oher, and I don’t pretend that automatically makes his arguments true but there’s a part of me that can’t help but root for him, even more than I was already inclined to. But in rooting for him, I can’t help but feel like I’m vilifying Lewis in the process.
So I haven’t really engaged with his work. Until that Washington Post story, and it truly wowed me.
The ongoing saga of the tennis magazine, Racquet, is interesting to read about but sad to think about.
I love tennis; I just wrote about it. And I love the magazine; I had a subscription for a while.
It was a quarterly, and the books themselves were works of art. But, in the cold, hard light of business, those aren't the features of a money-making endeavor. The company's co-founders are currently counter-suing each other, but the heart of their dispute is rather quaint: What is the purpose of a magazine? Or a media company?
It's not quaint because those are necessarily easy questions to answer, but rather the options feel both obvious and quite far apart.
One founder wanted to be a magazine company, where the star product is the physical periodical. It is a purist's pursuit of publication.
The other wanted more, bigger, better; she wanted Racquet to be a name that straddled the media world and the tennis world. She wanted to host events and collaborations and generally find ways to make money.
My heart is with the purist. Always and forever. There is nothing like working on a physical media product. When I was working at Vox Magazine in graduate school, I was in charge of features in the print edition. When I was a newspaper reporter, my feature writing was often the anchor story for one of the two main section's of the print issue. I love the satisfaction of holding something I helped create; it's the best.
But my head wants the magazine to survive, and I know that right now, in this day and age, partnerships and collaborations are the bare minimum that many publications have to consider to make ends meet. I don't care about the lifestyle elements quite as much, but that's because I'm not the high-roller they would be aimed at. To me, the magazine itself is more than enough, but I'm probably an outlier in that sense.
I hate that these differences tore the founders apart; I really like them together because I liked the thing they'd brought into the world. It's given us a second upstart tennis publication though, which I love. So I wish them both well, and I'll greedily gobble up the quality contents of both.
Brian Reed, the mind and voice behind the wildly popular podcast S-Town, the offshoot of the podcast that changed all podcasts, Serial. It followed Reed's investigation into an alleged murder that was brought to his attention by a man named John. By the time it was all said and done, the show, short for Shit Town (the name John had given to his home), was about John, in all his complicated, captivating, bizarre, brilliant glory.
But John killed himself. It was a shock to Reed, who'd grown fond of the man, and that was when the decision to focus the show on John—after his death.
Which raised some thorny ethical questions, namely, "Should this story have been told at all?"
Whether that was the impetus for Reed's new show, Question Everything, or just a handy first episode, it made for great listening. Question Everything is, Reed says, an effort do just that—but in the realm of journalism. It's supposed to shine light on the process, to question how and why decisions in reporting and storytelling get made, and if they live up to lofty goals of journalism as such a cherished democratic institution.
In this first episode, Reed subjects himself to a thorough grilling by a journalist he'd dodged when the show came out. Australian journalist Gay Alcorn called S-Town "morally indefensible," and she was his first guest. She was unsparing in her questions (though her tone belied a sympathy with the position Reed had been in and her underlying trust that he was not, in any way, a bad person for having done the series), and there's something so pure and honest about Reed's sometimes rambling, often uncomfortable answers.
They are hard questions. There are things he wished he'd done better (or not at all), but you can tell he's still quite proud of the work he made (as he should be; it's an incredible feat of storytelling).
But it clearly brings to mind Janet Malcolm's famous quote that began The Journalist and The Murderer:
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
Every episode and every question asked in the new podcast won't likely be "Is this morally defensible?" but it's a worthwhile project to ask all sorts of questions that plague journalists but rarely get answered publicly.
This short clip reel of Ohtani’s unreal offensive performance that made him the first player in MLB history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a season is unreal. Just absolutely unreal. It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.
I think I first became aware of DeMille by reading another author: Vince Flynn.
In one of his Mitch Rapp novels, Flynn put into the mouth of one of his characters this sentiment: She was going to curl up with a Nelson DeMille novel, with his trademark wisecracking heroes.
That might have been high school. Then in college, I remember the joy of stumbling across Word of Honor in the University of Memphis library, roaming the stacks on the top floor where I’d often work. I was riveted. And it was such an organic experience, the discovery and taking a chance on a book simply because the description caught my eye. I consider that such a fond memory in my reading life.
I can’t remember exactly if that was before or after I’d found Plum Island and The Gold Coast, but it was those three books that made me a fan.
John Corey was the character whose books I never missed. They were the definition of page-turners to me. Whats more was Flynn’s character was right: They were funny, and laughter is a key memory I associate with reading him. Always struck me as a hard thing to do, make someone laugh from just words on a page, and I loved how he seemed to have a direct line to my funny bone.
I hadn’t read much of his latest stuff, until earlier this year I listened to The Cuban Affair, and I was delighted to find many of the same joys, right there waiting for me, as if to say, “Well, duh. Where have you been? Because I haven’t gone anywhere.”
Now that he has, I might have to go dig out some of my copies and revisit him again.
There is not a day since April 14th of last year that I haven’t missed my dad. But on multiple occasions, I’ve been quietly thankful that he isn’t here to see this presidential election.
The rhetoric around the election has been detestable, and I’m not confident he would have been immune to the ugliest parts of it.
He was, for many years, a diehard watcher of Fox News, and he was a testament to the network’s power and influence. It warped his worldview, and at some point during the Obama years, my mom simply forbid Fox News in the house. They watched old Hollywood mainstays on Turner Classic Movies, instead.
Fox News was, in its way, both a sort of soundtrack and time-capsule of many important memories in my life. It was Fox News where our household got much of its news on 9/11 and the days, weeks, months, years, and wars that would follow.
It was Fox News that we sleepily threw on in the background right as my brother was about to ship out for Navy basic training. We were in a hotel room in Knoxville, Tennessee, and we woke up to news of a mass shooting in Las Vegas during an outdoor country music concert.
A few weeks before my dad passed away, I remember sitting in his hospital room as news and commentary played after The Covenant School shooting in Nashville. Of course, it was Fox News. It was close to home, just a few hours away in my home state of Tennessee, and it felt somehow worst to hear this tragic news along with the talking points of Fox News, many of which my dad would nod along with from his hospital bed. The news itself was too much, too sad, too familiar, too much of the wrong kind of distraction in light of a still-new cancer diagnosis.
About a week or so later (early in the week he would pass), I remember rushing back to Tennessee, and when I got to the hospital around 4 a.m. after driving through the night, Fox News was on in the waiting room outside of the ICU. I remember thinking it was somehow more unhinged and, in their estimation I'm sure, edgy when only the most diehard viewers and not many others were watching. The channel was as natural as the air we breathed down there, and while the TV's volume might have bothered a few of the other weary souls trying to sleep a few hours, I was probably the only one having to hope that nature and the laws of physics wouldn't betray me and eject my eyeballs from rolling them so hard at what was being said by D-list anchors in the extended Fox News universe.
I was thinking of Dad as I listened to the first episode of Slate’s Slow Burn podcast’s latest season on the rise of Fox News. The podcast has been one of the best in the game since its inception, and this season promises to be not just entertaining but vital to understanding our current reality. I miss him, and before I missed him like this, I missed the version of him that wasn't so Fox News-influenced.
For only the second time in the magazine's nearly 180 years, it's only endorsed one candidate: Joe Biden, in his contest against Donald Trump.
On Monday, it maintained consistency with its decision from four years ago by endorsing Biden's vice president and Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris.
In the November election, the U.S. faces two futures. In one, the new president offers the country better prospects, relying on science, solid evidence and the willingness to learn from experience. She pushes policies that boost good jobs nationwide by embracing technology and clean energy. She supports education, public health and reproductive rights. She treats the climate crisis as the emergency it is and seeks to mitigate its catastrophic storms, fires and droughts.
In the other future, the new president endangers public health and safety and rejects evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies. He ignores the climate crisis in favor of more pollution. He requires that federal officials show personal loyalty to him rather than upholding U.S. laws. He fills positions in federal science and other agencies with unqualified ideologues. He goads people into hate and division, and he inspires extremists at state and local levels to pass laws that disrupt education and make it harder to earn a living.
Only one of these futures will improve the fate of this country and the world.
I loved this conversation between Ezra Klein because it reminds me so much of what it's like to discover a book or author: There is no time limit to it.
There was no shortage of interviews with Smith when her most recent novel, The Fraud, came out just over a year ago.
But that does not mean there's nothing interesting to be found in the novel now, and beyond that, Smith hasn't stopped thinking about countless topics. She's particularly eloquent in this episode on:
populism
the value of emotionality
hierarchical revolution
oppression
identity
the brilliance of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death
life without a smart phone
technology as a "behavior modification system"
aging and loneliness
I especially loved her on how broad the concept of intelligence actually is but how we define it too narrowly too often. It's just an encompassing view of the world and of people, one that forces us to decentralize ourselves and whatever value we might attach to our way of seeing the world:
What we define as intelligence, we define it so partially. I’m so aware, without trying to sound falsely humble, that I am a complete idiot about so many things, but that I have this particular intelligence in a very, extremely narrow area that’s allowed me to make the life I’ve made. But if you asked me the most basic facts of the universe or even the relationship between the sun and the moon, basic math, geography, I mean there are acres of ignorance in my life no matter practical knowledge, to do things with your hands, to make things, how to run a group, how to speak to people, how to relate to others—it’s endless, the things I’m not good at. There are many, many contexts in the world I can go into and be a true fool. Truly lost. And that’s important to know when you move through the world. That this thing you call intellect, this thing that you value, this thing that may even be the basis of your meritocratic existence has limited use. And there are many, many ways to be intelligent in this world.
Sometimes the universe smiles on me, and my interests align. Here, it's top-notch journalism, podcasts, and music.
The most recent episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour features an interview with one of my favorite bands, Lake Street Dive, and bonus for the listener, they play some songs live in the studio.
The interview focuses on their modest beginnings and how, now 20 years into their careers, they're headlining Madison Square Garden.
To highlight just how modest those beginnings were, consider this:
I interviewed Rachel Price, the powerful and sultry lead singer, for the Columbia Missourian back in 2018.
Hard to overstate their rise in popularity when the move is from Columbia's Stephen's Lake Park and an interview with me to Madison Square Garden and an interview with David Remnick.
But it couldn't happen to a better group. Check out the interview, learn about their chemistry together and their longevity, and get the treat of a few performances.
Tony Zhou’s hit Youtube channel, Every Frame a Painting, has taught more people about the finer points of film editing, in approximately 5 minute chunks, than entire film schools. (Maybe that’s exaggeration; who knows? I’m a fan.)
But his channel has been silent for years now. There was probably a reason given, an announcement made back in the day somewhere, but I just never saw it.
So I’d go back and watch old ones, just because they were so well-made and the insights were just effortless and often eye-opening for the viewer. Simply put: One of my favorite Youtube channels remained my favorite despite being dormant.
And then suddenly he wasn’t. I saw a brief video announcing new video essays alongside another bigger project.
Then on Monday, I just happened to scroll across Youtube just 2 hours after his newest video essay was posted. I was among the first viewers. (It now sits at at 280,000 views; many (if not most…if not ALL) of his other videos have been viewed many millions of times over, so there was something (admittedly nerdy) cool about getting to be such an earlier viewer.
It’s about The Sustained Two-Shot, and it was an instant classic.
I’ve been on a bit of an AI kick lately, even more than my normally grumpy attitude toward it, for no particular reason other than stuff just keeps popping up.
This bonkers trailer for the upcoming Francis Ford Coppola film, Megalopolis holds the championship belt right now for biggest WTF when it comes to using AI.
Think of Jeff Goldblum’s line from Jurassic Park: Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Here’s the add in case you haven’t seen it (hopefully it will continue to work):
"True genius is often misunderstood..." - the new official trailer for #Megalopolis highlights negative reviews from throughout Francis Ford Coppola's career pic.twitter.com/uPvado0VHd
When I first saw it, I thought it was a cool approach: highlight big-name naysayers from the past thumbs-downing some of the biggest and most beloved films in the history of cinema.
But, for whatever reason (laziness or just letting my guard down), I didn’t wonder “I wonder if these are actually true.” Guess what, dear reader? They weren’t.
Here’s Bilge Ebiri in Vulture doing the basic level of journalism and simply fact-checking the quotes from these supposedly famous negative reviews:
This is the key paragraph of his brief story on it:
What’s the intention here? Did the people who wrote and cut this trailer just assume that nobody would pay attention to the truthfulness of these quotes, since we live in a made-up digital world where showing any curiosity about anything from the past is seen as a character flaw? Did they do it to see which outlets would just accept these quotes at face value? Or maybe they did it on purpose to prompt us to look back at these past reviews and discover what good criticism can be? If so, then it worked, in my case. I’ve read a lot of Pauline Kael reviews in my life, but I’d never read her review of The Godfather. I encourage you to do so as well.
Like, what was the point? At what level could this have seemed like a good idea? Is someone getting fired today (or yesterday, more likely)? Did a lowly researcher say “I’ll just ask ChatGPT for negative reviews from famous critics, and the bot just did its thing? Or could this have been a more calculated and purposeful screwup? Just why and how, how and why, a million times over.
I thoroughly enjoyed a recent opinion essay in The New York Times by Curtis Sittenfield, in which she went head to head with ChatGPT in a writing contest to see which could write the better beach read. This type of contest is just the latest gimmicky piece of content created to feature the writing of a chatbot for the express purpose of letting readers assess it in context.
The elements for the prompts were voted on by NYT readers, and the results were pretty damning.
They don’t put a thumb on the scale: The writing samples are anonymized and readers are allowed to judge for themselves.
I don’t think it takes a deeply discerning person to be able to pick out the one written by a human. Where it sings, the other is just serviceable.
It’s not a technical deficiency that gives away which is which. It’s soul. One has it, and the other, at best, is attempting it (though we know it’s not “attempting” anything at all).
What made me happy was how sure I was reading Sittenfield’s that I’d identified the human example. It didn’t have to wonder. It was alive (and a damn good story). The other just wasn’t.
Is that enough to make me feel better about artificial intelligence coming for my job as a writer? No, not really. Because too often readers are perfectly content with “serviceable” and “good enough.” But does it give me a smug bit of satisfaction that humans still solely posses the inputs needed to make a story feel alive such that a reader can confidently know, “This is the one”? Yeah, it does.
Ted Gioia, in his newsletter, The Honest Broker, said that if we listen closely (but without too much strain), we can hear the death rattle of the once-mighty magazine.
He uses National Geographic as a case study, and the picture he paints is bleak.
He talked about how popular the magazine had been in its heyday.
Not long ago, 12 million families in the US subscribed to National Geographic, and many held on to every issue. Even in my working class neighborhood, I saw copies displayed on home bookshelves as some kind of iconic repository of the world’s riches.
This rings true to me. I remember the years as a kid when the magazine showed up at my parents’ house. I remember the largely unused front office of my grandfather’s sign shop help decades worth of issues, lined up like encyclopedias, in precise order.
If I’d known where my life would take me back then, it might have occurred to me for National Geographic to be my dream job. But it was already a shadow of its former self by the time I went back to journalism school, and now it’s fallen even further.
He highlights the dilution of the brand and the running away from what had made the magazine great: longform journalism, science writing, and travel writing.
I can’t even imagine the magazine without those key elements. I can’t imagine the disappointment of those who were laid off thinking they’d landed a dream job.
Gioia points to a pretty simply (yet devastating) cause:
Legacy media’s unwillingness to pay for good writing is the single biggest warning sign that its decline is irreversible. You might think that National Geographic or Sports Illustrated would try to hire the best talent it could find—that’s the obvious way to turnaround a journalism business. But they don’t see it that way. They lost confidence in writing years ago.
Gioia also points to a future that contains his newsletter and many like it:
So if you see a newsstand filled with magazines, go and enjoy it now. Because in the future, you will only see something like that in a museum of defunct media. I’ll mourn their passing. But those who work in journalism can’t waste too many tears on these dinosaurs—these disappearing magazines of the past. That’s because we all need to get to work building something solid to take their place.
I work with words. Pretty much always have. I love them, and I love the craft of putting them together to make arguments or essays or articles or novels.
I help college students work with their writing. It’s the third year of ChatGPT on campus, and it’s hard to describe the suspicion and distrust the technology has bred.
I don’t think about it so much in the realm of “cheating,” but I think about all those times that my assignments piled up and my priorities out of whack and I realized something was due in less than an hour and just had to vomit up something, anything, so as not to fail the assignment.
Was that the best use of my college dollars? Most assuredly not. But was there still value in it? I think so. It wasn’t so dissimilar to times writing assignments in a class, where the work you’d done, the things you’d read, needed to be recalled and compiled quickly in a coherent piece of writing. It wasn’t going to win any prize, but its very shagginess was, in retrospect, a mark of the (admittedly imperfect) human behind the words.
ChatGPT erases that scenario entirely. Of course students will continue to forget about assignments and need to produce something in a rush, but the technology can do it in literal seconds.
That’s hardly the most concerning use of ChatGPT, but I remember talking to a professor in the Honors College at Mizzou who said the problem came into play whenever we outsource our thinking. I think that’s exactly right.
Did I watch all of the episodes in a single night?
Yes, Chef!
Should I? Probably not. I should have savored it, like an expensive tasting menu, but I gorged it like a bag of Doritos. The season is just as good as it’s ever been, but the forward momentum in the plot is minimal. The movement happens by way of depth: Each person is revealed to us a little more deeply. That’s why we watch. Sure, we want to know what happens to the restaurant because we’re rooting for this ragtag band of misfits. But we care about them beyond their roles in the kitchen: We want them to be happy and taken care of and to find peace and love and relief from a largely unrelenting world. The season provides more context and background for many of them, and it continues to document the growth of nearly every character. They feel real, as complicated and lovable as any family member or friend in our real lives. It’s a marvel.
You know those posts that say, “I watched all of such-and-such so you don’t have to”? Did I do that? Yes. Except 86 that last part. You absolutely have to watch this. It’s as good as it gets on TV.
Ep. 1: Felt a little disoriented between a largely plotless episode. That’s not a complaint. I could have watched an entire season in the montage-filled depiction of both the day immediately after the crazy season two finale. That much I expected, but I wasn’t expecting the time-travel bits that showed mostly how Carmy got to where he is. It was a masterful bit of table-setting for a new season, with little done to advance the ongoing storyline of this new restaurant. But it catches us up with this gang that we’ve come to love in such an elegant, graceful way, with a beautifully soft score throughout that all comes together to put you at ease, as if to say, “I’ve got you. You’re in good hands.”
Ep. 2: This is where the show’s comedy comes back. That first episode was so atmospheric; it was beautiful and quiet compared to the show we all know and love. And within seconds of this one starting, we’re back to laugh-out-loud hilarious line readings. The sheer volume of laugh lines per minute is off the charts.
The quasi-opening credits tour through various Chicago food-service locations, where many of the participants wave directly at the camera, felt a part of a different show but it was just so endearing.
As the scene in the kitchen grows from various two-shots to a full on ensemble is a masterclass of writing and staging.
Ep. 3: Here’s the chaos we’ve come to expect. It’s like someone said, “The feeling of PTSD—how do we make that a TV show?”
Uncle Jimmy steals the show, constantly worrying about where they money is.
Ep. 4: The first few minutes are a simple two-shot, just Carmy and Claire, and it’s a testament to the writing on the show. Not just on a macro level, but each individual line. Nothing happens in the scene, but you could watch it go on like that for the episode’s entire runtime. So lifelike and broken-in. It’s silly and lovebird-ish at times, but then somber and tense, and finally thematically profound. All in less than 4 minutes, without a single camera move.
Some top-notch Faks action.
Dad Richie is the best Richie.
Ep. 5: Quietly beautiful Marcus episode, which is fitting for a quietly beautiful character. From the opening scenes of clearing out his mom’s house and sitting on the steps with Syd, they bond over membership in a painful club: those who’ve lost a mother. There was such sadness in his simple statement: “I wish she’d gotten to try the food.”
Sammy Fak for the win.
Know who else loves Marcus? Nat.
Ep. 6: Great use of clocks in the early scenes. Tina’s entire world changes in just 4 hours’ time. The episode serves as an example of adding depth to a character who already feels fleshed out despite scant screen time; in just a few minutes, we understand her life more fully than any triumphs or failures in the kitchen ever showed us.
Time shift got me again. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Bernthal remains the magic fairy dust sprinkled ever so lightly throughout this show.
Heyo! Directed by Ayo. She’s got a great eye. Watch out, world. A real one here.
Ep.7: This show does memories as well as any I’ve ever seen. I think part of what makes us love these characters so much is that the chaos of their lives in the kitchen are just distractions from the stuff of real life, the hard things, the reality that the world keeps spinning and waits for no one. Carmy, Richie, Syd: Each of them is dancing on the edge of a memory constantly. Something else this show does better than any I can remember: Pairs its characters together in interesting and revealing ways. It doesn’t matter who gets together in a given scene, it always works.
What’s it like to be haunted? Uncle Fak will tell you.
Dueling partnerships! The drama!
Gary gets in on the memories: Triple-A ball. Such a touching scene.
Nat, you beautiful sunfish. What were you thinking?
Ep. 8: Mothers and daughters. Daughters and mothers. What more can you say?
Ep. 9: It’s not be entirely clear how the restaurant has been doing in terms of popular or critical opinion. It was a deft touch to see Syd reading profiles that all focus solely on Carmy while wearing a faded Scottie Pippen t-shirt. This episode doubles down on the excellent character pairings: Carmy and Unc, Unc and Computer, Richie and Tiff, the Fakses and Claire.
The number of gorgeous women who call Faks “my love” is unrivaled.
Ep. 10: I couldn’t help but wonder if funeral dinners like the one depicted here are a real thing when restaurants close. I’m guessing it is. Which is such a cool idea: one last meal, one last service, with friends and co-workers. It’s the perfect setting for the various deeply philosophical musings that happen throughout the course of the show: What experiences are most meaningful and most memorable, how to be good (or possibly great) at something, the value of food as a shared experience, the necessity for balance and restraint, the imperative to live.
Thomas Keller is the GOAT.
The guest stars in this episode are elite.
Looks like a mixed review where it counts. Sets up next season beautifully.
He’s got to be the show’s great white whale: He’s one of the best to ever do it and he’s never been on the show before. It’s so fitting that he would be their final episode.
Not to be too dramatic, but I treated the moment with some solemnity, not a tongue-in-cheek sort but an honest variety. I took the episode out of my earbuds and instead piped it through my big stereo, letting the voices and conversation fill the entire room instead of just being piped directly into my ear canal. That straight-to-the-dome quality of podcasts helps breed that heightened intimacy we feel from the medium; it’s why we feel like our favorite hosts are just friends. And in that spirit, I let my friends in and made drinks to settle in and enjoy each other’s company properly.
I further altered my normal podcasting mode by slowing it down to a normal speaking pace. It served nobody’s interest for me to speed it up. For once, I wasn’t trying to get through a podcast; I was intent on savoring it as long as possible. I sat with a pocket notebook, and I took notes, trying to drink in the knowledge pouring out of a master. It was quite lovely, a nice way to spend the evening and one I could always repeat from the show’s deep archive but just wouldn’t be the same.
Again, not to be overly dramatic, but when Max Linsky started wrapping up the episode, thanking the many along the way who’ve helped to make it possible, I got legitimately sad. My eyes watered. And I know that’s a silly thing. I do. I get it. But it was as natural as breathing in that moment; it could not be helped. The show meant the world to me. It was everything I loved about journalism school, everything I loved about working at a newspaper, everything I love about working with journalism school students. And I will miss it. And them. Max let me know, through the episode’s final words, that I wasn’t alone in how I felt, when he thanked the many listeners who took the time to reach out. The podcast mattered to a lot of people, and in a small way, that bucks me up. Feels less lonely in a moment of sadness. His response to the notes and thanks was perfect:
We should all be lucky enough to do work, to make things that mean something to other people. It’s the best. It is the absolute best.
Their latest, Good Together was released on June 21, and it’s quick and supremely enjoyable listen. The grooves are impeccable, and it’s a nice treat to both hear Rachel Price’s vocals soar as fully as ever but also to hear her cede some verses over. It’s not unheard of for her to sit a verse out, but it’s a definitely a different sound, and this album makes great use of it. Feels fresh and exciting but not unfamiliar.
I heard a few of these songs when I saw them live last year in Kansas City, but it’s nice to hear them in context of the rest of the album.
Early Favorites
Dance With a Stranger; Help Is On the Way; Seats At the Bar; Twenty-Five
Coates might just be one of the most-interviewed on the 12-year history of the show. He’s never not great. It’s interesting to listen to the different moments in his career, as he grew from a great writer to a household name.
Honestly, I couldn’t think of a better second-to-last episode of the show. And I was glad to see that he was working on another book, because I was prone to wondering what he was up to nowadays.
His latest book, The Message, sounds awesome. From the publisher:
Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic "Politics and the English Language," but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories--our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking--expose and distort our realities. In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book's banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation's recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city--a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book's longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground. Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country's most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world--and our own souls--and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
One of the good still-good things on the internet: George Saunders’s Substack, Story Club.
Today he wrote in response to a great reader question, summed up in this paragraph:
Ah, the eternal conundrum, the tug of war between imagination and reality. While the right brain strives for abstraction, metaphor, symbolism, the left brain struggles for certainty, objectivity, the material. Where's the ideal interface? How much critical analysis is necessary to enjoy a story? Is it sufficient to read for the pleasure of the experience? Are all impressions, conclusions, interpretations equally valid? Is a story whatever the reader thinks it is? Or, to paraphrase Orwell, "All interpretations are equal, but some interpretations are more equal than others"?
The question’s actually much long and better and entertaining than just that bit, but this is the heart of the matter.
His response is kind of perfect. Because we do both, don’t we? Or at least want to.
I wrote recently about wanting to recharge my reading habit, and this newsletter came at just the right time for me.
You ask, “Is it sufficient to read for the pleasure of the experience?” to which I would answer with a resounding YES. It is totally sufficient. It’s all there is. It’s also necessary, if we have any desire to understand the thing better, to first read it for pleasure. Without that first read, we’ve got nothing to work with. I always read for pleasure (reaction) first. For sure. And, for my money, it’s perfectly fine if a person wants to stop there. However, if a person doesn’t want to stop there – if they feel that there’s (even more) pleasure to be had, by way of asking what makes the thing tick (why it gave them pleasure, or didn’t), then I’m good with that too – and I belong firmly in this camp. Approaching stories technically has definitely helped my work – although, as with all things, I find I have to do it “just right” – not too much and not too little.
Of course his answer goes beyond the most basic response; he’s a creative writing instructor (in addition to being an award-winning author). Of course he values the deeper analysis of books.
But when you’re trying to get back into reading as a dedicated hobby, it can feel like there’s a right or wrong way to go about it. It’s nice to read a reminder that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Reading is enough.
I really hope you’ll read the entirety of his response. It’s great insight to his process as a writer and reader, and it can illuminate your reading and creative process.
Here’s a great piece of sports writing done at a lightning-fast clip. Shane Ryan at Golf Digest puts the reader in his head and on the grounds at Pinehurst No. 2, where Rory McIlory, one of the best (and most popular) golfers on the planet, missed two very short putts in the final holes of the U.S. Open that obliterated his chances of 1) winning and then 2) forcing a playoff.
It would be beautiful writing if he’d taken a few days to publish it, but its immediacy is what elevates it to even greater heights.
It’s not just a tick-tock of what happened, though it has that flavor, too. It’s more cerebral than that; it’s philosophical almost.
It wrestles with what Rory must have been thinking as much as it wrestles with what we, the fans, were thinking. What he, the golf writer, was thinking.
It just works on so many levels, and the writing is stunning. File immediately in: Things I Wish I’d Written.
It seems like a simple question, but I’d guess the responses to it would be quite varied. The question could be asked at any point, but it’s an interesting moment to ask it just days after Twitter (sorry, X)(nope, sorry again, still Twitter) decided to hide “likes” from public view.
Likes and retweets make up the currency of the platform. Likes are pretty much the currency on any platform. They’re how we mark engagement with our content.
It’s as simplistic as it is understandable that we might think the answer to the question is: I want likes.
I don’t create enough on social media accounts to say I’ve ever been much of a likes chaser, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find it intoxicating when just a handful of(literally count them on your fingers) likes have rolled in on a particular tweet. I can see why people would chase that feeling. And once upon a time ago, it was a great place to build a following. Not so much anymore.
I’ve decidedly redirected my efforts to this website and its accompanying newsletter. So what is it that I’m chasing?
Readers? Subscribers? Engagement? Some combination of the above is probably the best answer. It’s a return to the early 2000s kind of internet, before social media, when the web was dominated by individual blogs. That moments not coming back, and to the extent that it has tried, it’s probably been seen in the newsletter explosion a few years ago, thanks to Substack.
Caroline Crampton, of The Browser and her own books and newsletters, recently talked about being “in public” as a creative and, more basically, a person.
Her foray into the attention economy was pegged to selling her most-recent book, A Body Made of Glass:
I started this year fully intending to do this. And I did, for a few months — I showed up on social media, I made videos about my life for the first time and started getting thousands of views for each one, and I said yes to every opportunity to write a promotional piece that I was offered. But as I got more and more tired, and closer to burn out, a question kept plaguing me: what did all of this even have to do with writing a book? As I edited dozens of video clips together to make a 60-second TikTok with enough jump cuts in it that viewers wouldn't instantly scroll away, my doubts grew further.
I just deeply respected her decision to opt out:
So I'm not going to. I will write about what I'm doing, as writing, in my own space, unmediated by other forces. I stopped writing a personal email newsletter several years ago when newslettering became my dream job at The Browser, but now I want to bring that practice back into my days. I want to write about my work to people who have chosen to hear from me and nobody else, with no external forces shaping what I say, how I say it or whether they are able read it. Perhaps I will be leaving potential sales on the table if I retreat from the conventional book promotion hustle like this, but with some reflection I have decided that should that be the case, it will have been a worthwhile sacrifice. That's what I learned from this intense period of publicity: I cannot take part in it while also making work that is worth publicising.
I have only moderate amounts of readers and subscribers, so it’s easy to imagine what they might feel like and assume it’s great. But in this day and age, it doesn’t take too much for that to tip into the undesirable.
This article from Slate sums up the feeling of having too many expectations on you simply because people have chosen to engage with what you’ve produced.
It describes the balance between appreciation of the attention and the exasperation.
On one hand, what newsletter creator wouldn’t want their work to resonate with their audience so much that it drives them to reach out? On the other, how does a creator navigate the responsibilities and expectations of a parasocial relationship that formed without their buy-in? Is it now their obligation to not just provide customer service, but be a “good friend”?
This is probably not normal, and I recognize that. I also realize that I do like the idea of leaving a digital footprint. I think about it when I think about this blog and what I want it to be at the end of the day. Ideally, I want it to be a catch-all for what I'm thinking and reading and doing. This is exactly what some people use their social media accounts for, but I've just never been one of them. I'm not likely to start this late in the game, either. I don't know why one seems better to me than the other, but it does.
If I’m lucky enough to bring a few readers with me along the way, all the better.
I found this list of suggested reading list of works to check out if you need a reminder that all creative work is stymied from time to time. It’s useful not just for the recommendations but for the little nuggets it pulled out of them as advertisement for their fit in the list.
I especially loved this one from the blurb on Lynda Barry’s What It Is.
The core of the arts is play, Barry argues: something children undertake with great seriousness until they learn to be aware of what others think, which can choke off creativity. But the key, when you’re blocked, isn’t simply to think harder. It’s to relinquish control, “to be able to stand not knowing long enough to let something alive take shape,” Barry writes.
