Saturday Night/Sunday Warning S2E7: League of Shithouses
Another instalment of weekly recommendations and miscellaneous items.
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 bit before the paywall arrives to conceal bonuses and unwise honesty.
6 Things I Actually Enjoyed This Week
1. ARTICLE
Who is the best exponent of the ‘dark arts’ at your Premier League club?
by Athletic UK staff for The Athletic
Looking at which player/players in every Premier League team are the best at “[stretching] the rules to the limit,” aka "the dark arts or shithousery”, this is one of my favourite kinds of pieces from The Athletic. It comes at football from a slightly orthogonal perspective, leans on the expertise of each reporter, and has enough interest in it that even a non-football fan could find something in it:
Manchester United
For years, Casemiro confounded La Liga viewers with his ability to avoid bookings. Barcelona fans said he was a sign of the match official’s favouritism towards Real Madrid. Spanish newspapers joked he wore a cloak of invisibility.
He has a knack for getting away with things he really shouldn’t. In the most recent Manchester derby, the Brazilian was jostling for the ball with Riyad Mahrez on the edge of the United box, got frustrated with his inability to win the ball back and simply shoved the City man to the ground. No foul, no booking.
Casemiro is thought to be learning English quickly but there must be something to the manner in which he talks to referees after they’ve given him a warning that allows him to diffuse a situation and avoid a booking.
Casemiro is so good at not getting booked, that his yellow card and suspension against Crystal Palace in January saw Steve McClaren fall out of his seat. His VAR-assisted red card in the reverse fixture at Old Trafford was his first direct red card in 366 games playing in Europe.
(And don’t be fooled by Tyrell Malacia’s lovely smile either. The Dutch left-back was nicknamed “a pitbull” by Louis van Gaal for a reason.)
Carl Anka
2. ALBUM
Shook — Algiers
Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify
Shook is a dense, eclectic, enervated, political and apocalyptic record, with the Atlanta band combining intensely local references and sharing the mic with a lot of other voices, from Zack de la Rocha, Billy Woods, and Backxwash to Egyptian singer, Nadah El Shazly. It manages to be righteous, angry, cynical, and joyful all at once; the product of a band of almost dizzying virtuosity.
3. ARTICLE
Watching Tucker Carlson for Work
by Clare Malone for The New Yorker
As someone who picks through the worst of the British press and wider media, I have great sympathy for Kat Abughazaleh of Media Matters, who as this profile’s title puts it has to “[watch] Tucker Carlson for work”:
“I watch Tucker Carlson so you don’t have to,” the bio spaces of her social-media accounts read. Abughazaleh has been professionally watching Carlson, who has around three million viewers a night, for nearly two years. “You don’t know Fox News until you are watching it for a job,” she said. “You see all these patterns emerge.” The Fox universe is a place with a different “news” sense than most of the country, she said—narratives about I.R.S. armies, food shortages, race wars, and predatory trans activists—but its niche story lines are likely predictive of what we’ll be talking about over the next two long campaign years. Though, in Abughazaleh’s view, Carlson has floundered a bit since the midterms. “I think he’s still kind of lost right now,” she said. “He’s not really sure what direction to take it.”
4. ARTICLE
Jeremy Strong Will Never Break
by Gabriella Paiella for GQ
Jeremy Strong is an extremely intense guy and that means he gives good quote, even when he’s desperately trying to avoid it. I’m still thinking about the moment in this piece where he rocks up wearing a beanie over a bucket hat. Why? But seriously, why though?
Sweater, jacket, and corduroy pants, in shades that vary, by degrees barely perceptible to the human eye, from taupe to cappuccino to acorn. On his head: a brown bucket hat. On top of that hat: a second hat, a brown cashmere beanie.
“My wife told me that somebody said something like, ‘The three things you’re going to be certain of are death, taxes, and that Jeremy Strong will be wearing brown.’ I don’t know, it’s inexplicable,” he says about his uniform style, before providing multiple explanations.
Number one: “In a way, it’s a metaphor for the rest of my life. I gravitate towards an extremely narrow band. That’s all that I want and I don’t want anything else.”
Number two: “This is maybe half bullshit, but maybe not total bullshit: I spend so much of my life wearing costumes, I feel almost denuded in my style. It’s so consistent and neutral that almost anytime I put on any wardrobe, I feel profoundly different from my baseline self.”
Number three: “It’s monastic. Monastic chic.”
5. PODCAST
Turned Out A Punk #443: Marissa Paternoster from Screaming Females
by Damian Abraham (of the equally excellent Fucked Up)
I recommended Screaming Females’ new album Desire Pathway last week. This is a great conversation with the band’s singer and guitarist, Marissa Paternoster, exploring how she, well, turned out a punk. I love this podcast generally but this is an especially great episode.
6. ARTICLE/LIST
On his 60th birthday, 23 little-known sneaker stories about Michael Jordan
by Aaron Dodson for Andscape
This was a really clever way of marking MJ’s 60th: A series of short anecdotes about him and the history of Jordans:
3. The one about Skechers
Told by Jasmine Jordan, oldest daughter of Michael Jordan: “As a kid, I was rocking a lot of Skechers, which was not OK in my father’s eyes. I used to beg him, ‘Please, let me get the light-up Skechers!’ Or, the shoes with the wheels. He would let me wear them for a day, then the next day, they would end up in the trash. It didn’t matter what pair they were. It didn’t matter who bought them. If they were in his house and they weren’t Jordans on my feet, they were in the trash by the next day.”
Beyond the paywall: This week’s list of newsletters that nearly got written, a micro-essay, the weekly playlist, and a special bonus recommendation…
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