Saturday Night/Sunday Warning S2E2: Egg man profiled, goo goo a rube.
Recommendations, stray thoughts and assorted entertainments for the weekend crew.
This is the weekly round-up of things I liked in the past seven days (which is free) + extra content for paid subscribers. Read on for your free hit before a paywall looms up to ask if your name is down and decide if you are, in fact, coming in…
5 Things I Actually Enjoyed* This Week
*enjoyed here used in a very loose sense.
1. ARTICLE
The boring journey of Matt Yglesias by Dan Zak for The Wall Street Journal
Yglesias is a kind of “Sex Pistols at Machester Free Trade Hall” for a whole genre of “well, actually…” columnists whose almost machine-like commitment to being ‘rational’ producing some of the world’s most dipshit takes. This profile by Dan Zak contains a series of freezer burns as well as a perfect description of columnist brain:
Matt Yglesias can talk about supervolcanoes and about Habsburg federalism and about the semiconductor industry in Taiwan vs. China. He can talk about regulatory sensitivities around geothermal drilling. He can talk normative ethics and the Ghent system and occupational licensing and maritime commerce in Westeros, the fictional realm of “Game of Thrones.” He can talk about all these things and, perhaps more importantly, he can sound like he knows what he’s talking about.
2. ALBUM
Surprise, Surprise, Surprise — Miracle Legion (1987)
Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Vinyl
This wasn’t a new discovery for me this week; I’ve had a low-simmering obsession with Mark Mulcahy’s songwriting since the soundtrack to The Adventures of Pete & Pete — recorded by 3/4 of Miracle Legion under the name Polaris — acted as a gateway drug when I was a kid. Miracle Legion’s debut album is an emotional power pop classic that has never remotely got the credit it’s due. I think ‘All for the Best’ is one of the most beautiful songs of hope and resignation ever recorded:
3. PODCAST
Hell on Earth — Episode 1: GOD
A mini-series spun off from Chapo Traphouse, Hell on Earth promises to tell the story of the Thirty Years War and “the violent birth of capitalism”. The first episode, which begins with Chris Wade quoting his high school history teacher (“Europe and the West did not come easily into Capitalism, it was dragged into it bleeding and screaming…”), had me hooked. It’s inevitably going to piss a lot of people off.
4. NEWSLETTER
The author Hanif Kureishi started his Substack in September last year but on Boxing Day he “had a fall” which has left him in a serious situation in a hospital in Rome. His newsletter is now a contemporaneous diary of his situation. It’s a difficult, brutally honest and profoundly moving thing to read:
Tomorrow I will be leaving this place. This is my last day in this little room, my temporary prison. I will be moved to a much larger six floor facility where I’ll receive high quality physiotherapy. At the moment it feels as if my body is turning into marshmallow, that I am deliquescing.
I will also be able to meet others whose bodies are busted in different ways. My Italian is not so good but I hope to be able to bring some of those accounts to you, my new audience, if the patients agree.
A strange thing happened to me, I went to Rome with my wife for a few days at Christmas and now I will never go home again. I have no home now, no centre. I am stranger to myself. I don’t know who I am anymore. Someone new is emerging.
5. INTERVIEW
When I recommended this interview on Twitter earlier this week, a couple of people mistook that for a blanket endorsement of Knight’s approach to writing features/his attitude to them. It’s not that. I think this conversation is a really good insight into how long-form features are commissioned, reported, edited and promoted. Part of doing media criticism is about understanding the process; Sam Knight is really successful and it’s worth seeing him dissect the frog:
I did a story about Toto Wolff, who's this big deal in Formula One. He runs the Mercedes Formula One team, and they've won everything for the last eight years. But this season, they didn't win a single race. So the story isn’t actually about Formula One, it’s about a perfectionist who is used to being the best at something and then suddenly isn’t.
Beyond the paywall: This week’s list of newsletters that nearly got written, a micro-essay, and the special bonus recommendation…
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