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Continuing to stick to my mid-August resolution to do this thing, but posting on a Monday this week because holiday, celebrate, no one wants to read the internet until they’re facing real life again. Lots of links back through August this week as well because my holiday was catching up on things I said I’d read but ghosted. And I made a new logo, look at that.
Good Reads
File under: Thanks, I hate it. A deep look at how the nearly 80-year-old who has been running Saturday Night Live for some 40 years emotionally abuses his staff and perpetuates the Hollywood studio system of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, making a cut off of everything SNL alums do once they leave the show (unless they get famous enough to have more power than him). Leaves the “is it funny” question on the table.
Incredible read about the migrants, who are largely Indigenous peoples from Ecuador, selling candy in the New York City subway stations these days. The reporter, along with the help of Voces Latinas, a nonprofit that supports Latin American migrants, spoke to a handful of recent immigrants who were bussed from crossing the Texas border to NYC. In the case of one person, who had arrived at LaGuardia one day and been put to work by her family selling candy the next.
Journalism Fails Miserably at Explaining What Is Really Happening in America (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
This made the rounds on journalism Twitter/X/Bluesky/Thread last week. The writer is correct in their assertions that coverage of the 2024 election, based largely on the coverage of the first Republican debate, is missing the point by continuing to cover the election and the party as if it’s business as usual. There’s also a fair point about the journalistic need to cover both sides as if the failure is equal and the deck is still even. But there’s not a lot of guidance on what to do. If anything, I guess we’re supposed to just hope the AP notices and…issues some guidance on covering authoritarianism in the longest-running democracy in modern history?
I don’t love true crime or scam stories but I do have a penchant for stories about the ultra-wealthy and influential doing both of those things. This was a gripping read, my eyes were bulging out of my head the entire time. It’s got lies, manipulation, theft, Nazis, art, tax havens, divorce, Page Six, Carravagio, and the Met. Once again, the refrain: If we closed about a million tax loopholes we could have a social safety net.
I’m still thinking about this story and I will be for a long time. You’ve heard about Freudian analysis of dreams, and paralysis in R.E.M. sleep, as well as the theory that we’re twitching in our sleep because we’re acting out our dreams. Turns out, it’s none of that. It’s so much weirder and cooler.
Good Stuff
A reading from the book of Gen Z: “Mary entered her motherhood era. That same night, an angel appeared to some shepherds nearby saying, ‘Ayo, wait a minute. The son of the top G has just been born and he will save everyone from their Ls. I’ll tag you with his @.’ And a multitude of angels appeared spitting the holiest of bars.”
@gen.z.bible.stories Replying to @abi_glz03 is this what writing poetry feels like? #gospelbygenz #fyp #millennial #fypシ #funny #xyzbca #storytime
This podcast is Tig Notaro, Fortune Feimster, and Mae Martin in conversation. It’s the funniest shit I’ve listened to in quite a long time.
Zach Bryan
Did I sleep on the person who now has the No. 1 album in the country and the longest-charting country single for a man on the Hot 100? Yes, I slept. But now I am awake and obsessed. This album is so good, and it opens with a poem. When they call country music three chords and the truth, this is what they mean. Here’s my favorite track.
Ladies and gentlemen, my song of the summer because it’s summer until about September 22 part 3
My Stuff
No new episode of SMXR this week so instead here’s something kind of major I published earlier this year that ties into another podcast. During the pandemic I worked on a podcast called Songs in the Key of Death, telling the true stories behind murder ballads, including “Delia’s Gone.” This piece was also a pandemic project, where I took the script for that episode and polished it into about a five-thousand word piece of creative non-fiction. It’s not a genre I’ve worked in much but I think it came out great and I was really pleased when this literary mag accepted it — I’d been on the hunt to find it a home for about two years at that point.
The idea for this “how I spent my summer” story came to me when I was talking to Tim Love, a celebrity chef out of Fort Worth, at a presentation Live Nation put on about their food for the fancy seats at Starplex (I refuse to call it anything else). We were chatting about how he’d just gotten the Jonas Brothers to play one of three concerts kicking off their latest album at his venue and restaurant Tannahill’s in the Stockyards and got to talk about all the music festivals he works with doing artist catering. It turns out, he’d just piloted an idea to make it all a lot better than a buffet at a small Texas festival and he’ll be expanding it in October at Austin City limits. Which is pretty cool.