Saturday Night/Sunday Warning S2E3:

Another episode of weekly recommendations and other assorted entertainments.

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 the free hit before the paywall where the airlock of the starship Discourse allows entry to paid subscribers only…

5 Things I Actually Enjoyed This Week

1. ARTICLE
What Does It Mean to Reinvent Journalism? by Allison Hantschel for Dame.

Hantschel’s article is about the much-hyped, endlessly disappointing, dubious-crypto-cash-bankrolled startup Semafor but it’s also about media in general:

More and more amplification of anti-democracy, anti-woman, anti-minority sentiment creates the perception that deeply unpopular policies (banning abortion, attacking trans people, censoring books) are commonly held and difficult to oppose.

Of course, good journalists should be able to look beyond their own lives, their own biases, their own circumstances. A privileged upbringing doesn’t always dictate myopic coverage of wealth and power.

But surrounding yourself with people just like you makes it much more unlikely that your privilege will be challenged.

This is why we focus on the people who are telling the stories. If you come from one community, one class, one milieu, and you only talk to the people within that community, and you only receive feedback from people in that community, then naturally your coverage is going to reflect what that community thinks is important.

2. ALBUM
Mercy (2023) — John Cale
Apple Music | Spotify | Vinyl

I was tempted to write a lot of metaphors and analogies to describe John Cale’s first album of new material in 10 years but instead, I’ll just say, it’s good. It’s neither wilfully obtuse nor welcoming with open arms, and Cale’s choice of collaborators (Laurel Halo, Actress, Weyes Blood, Dev Hynes, Sylvan Esso, Animal Collective) leads to a record that feels itchily present rather than valedictory. At 80, John Cale has not settled.

3. PODCAST
’The Comment Section: Part 1 ft. Elena Cresci’ — Ten Thousand Posts

Hussein Kesvani and Phoebe Roy’s “podcast about posting” is reliably good; the first episode of their mini-series on the history of the Comment Section, with Muay Thai champion, video editor and journalist Elena Cresci, also answers the question: “What in the hell is going on with male fitness influencers these days?” If you don’t have time to dissect the discourse, they’ve done it for you.

4. ESSAY

The truth about everything*

's The truth about 'Material Girl'

I’m a big fan of Justin Myers’ writing; the latest instalment in his Madonna Diaries is a cracking read even if you’re not as fascinated by ‘Madge’ as I am:

Lyrically, the song has the clipped, know-it-all tone of a teenager rolling their eyes and telling you to get out of their room. ‘No way!’ ‘That’s right!’ ‘Material Girl’ barks at you, talks over you, it’s broadcasting, this is not a conversation. I was barely nine but I already, definitely understood that women traditionally didn't get the space to talk about men this way, like disposable, vacuous dummies only there to provide financial sustenance and… well, even by that age I realised she was supposed to be shagging these men. 

I reckon I’d first heard the details of what went where in the school playground a few months earlier. The way Madonna sings about men in this song is how men had, for decades, centuries, untold millennia, spoken about women – vessels for their pleasure, or servants. I didn't know much but I knew I didn't want to be that kind of man and I was looking for an escape. Madonna offered it, ‘Material Girl’ the musical equivalent of a rope ladder slowly unfurling down to you from a waiting helicopter.

5. NEWSLETTER

Read Max

by

Max Read

, particularly Matt Yglesias and the secret of blogging

Last week’s edition of this series recommended a profile of Matt Yglesias and, at the risk of subjecting you to dangerous levels of Yglesias, I want to point you towards this article on why what the hard-boiled egg does works out for him:

… the Yglesias profile’s very existence reminds us of an important rule of thumb for navigating the content economy in the 21st century: Under the present regime, there is no real downside risk to posting. You might lose a small handful of subscribers or followers if you overwhelm their inbox, or write an egregiously bad post -- but on balance you will never lose as many readers from “posting all the time” as you will gain new ones. I’m not even talking here about controversial or outrageous writing, though its success is a reflection of this basic principle. Even the most anodyne, mediocre writing fulfills the requirement of regularity. (What is the “Wayne Gretzky” quote? “You miss 100 percent of the audience conversion opportunities you don’t take”?)

This understanding of publishing, which suggests that rough-and-ready, quasi-automatic writing done on a regular, frequent schedule is ultimately more financially sustainable than refined and thoughtful writing published when necessary and appropriate, can seem counterintuitive, if not unbelievably cynical and depressing. No one wants to pick “quantity” over “quality” when it comes to their own work, and most readers, given the explicit choice, would say they prefer one great newsletter a week over five “coherent” ones. But the fact is that as much as people might complain that a given newsletter appears too frequently for them to read it, or that a person's byline is ubiquitous, in practice, the vast majority will not unsubscribe or mute or ignore. Meanwhile, every new post brings with it the possibility of new readers and an expanded audience. The more you write, the better. What do the top text-based content-creation entrepreneurs of our time have in common? Logorrhea.

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Beyond the paywall: This week’s list of newsletters that nearly got written, a micro-essay, and the special bonus recommendation…