Inspiration on my job hunt from those closest to me, plus The Marginalian's accumulated wisdom, North Korean aggression, A.I. and tragedy, election nonsense, in-flight magazines, and more.
A place that's neither work nor home but yours just the same, plus everyday photography, email regrets, the most remote place on earth, election politics, and more.
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.
