Wednesday, July 15, 2026
Erling Haaland - the Viking
New Yorker - "Erling Haaland Plays Like a Viking"
By Zach Helfand
"Haaland’s style of play elicits not wonder but terror. He is enormous: six feet five, two hundred pounds, about the size and speed of the N.F.L. wide receiver Randy Moss. Watching him, I sometimes find myself giggling as I might over a big, obscene crash at a demolition derby. The play that did this to me most recently came in Norway’s first World Cup game, against Iraq. Haaland had already scored twice; Iraq’s Marko Farji was moving the ball across his box, with Haaland twenty yards away, until he suddenly broke into a sprint of bizarre ferocity—he has a quirk in his running form that causes his arms to thrash from side to side—heading straight at Farji, who, though still far from Haaland, seemed to abandon all soccer instinct and took off with the ball in the opposite direction, toward the sideline, while Haaland, for some reason, just kept chasing, and caught up to Farji right before they both went out of bounds, but in his overexuberance, before he could dislodge the ball, he knocked Farji to the ground and earned a foul, which caused him to let out a long scream, whether in frustration or as some battle-cry catharsis, I’m not sure. I’d never seen anything like it. I wanted to see more."
No More Millennial Bland; Gen Z Goo
NY Times - "The Glitchy, Gloppy Look of Now"
"Remember how things looked in 2016?
Direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker and Everlane introduced themselves in tidy, sans-serif typefaces. Pastels, especially millennial pink, surged onto Instagram feeds and Glossier mascara tubes. A “self-aware, stylized blandness” called normcore inspired art kids to reach for the drabbest of khakis. The overall effect was sterile but soothing, as if to suggest our lives might somehow absorb the cheerful legibility of a Casper mattress ad.
Fast-forward a decade, and this muted visual language — which came to be known as millennial blanding — has receded. Something misshapen and unruly is rising in its place.
Let’s call it hyper goo: a style of glitchy, gloppy maximalism that has landed on consumer culture like a wet sneeze. Text on shampoo bottles and pickle jars increasingly resembles the inner workings of a lava lamp. Negative space has grown cluttered with doodles that look as if they might have been made in Microsoft Paint."
"Remember how things looked in 2016?
Direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker and Everlane introduced themselves in tidy, sans-serif typefaces. Pastels, especially millennial pink, surged onto Instagram feeds and Glossier mascara tubes. A “self-aware, stylized blandness” called normcore inspired art kids to reach for the drabbest of khakis. The overall effect was sterile but soothing, as if to suggest our lives might somehow absorb the cheerful legibility of a Casper mattress ad.
Fast-forward a decade, and this muted visual language — which came to be known as millennial blanding — has receded. Something misshapen and unruly is rising in its place.
Let’s call it hyper goo: a style of glitchy, gloppy maximalism that has landed on consumer culture like a wet sneeze. Text on shampoo bottles and pickle jars increasingly resembles the inner workings of a lava lamp. Negative space has grown cluttered with doodles that look as if they might have been made in Microsoft Paint."
Werewulf
Written & Directed by Robert Eggers
Starring
Aaron Taylor-Johnson,
Willem Dafoe,
Lily-Rose Depp
Sunday, June 14, 2026
2026 World Cup Preview
FT - "Simon Kuper’s World Cup: Who will win?"
WSJ - "Can America’s Golden Generation Avoid the World Cup Curse?"
The Athletic - "A near-perfect World Cup opener takes the USMNT into uncharted territory"
WSJ - "The ‘Colosseum’ of Ear-Splitting Noise and Flying Trash That Will Open the World Cup"
BBC - "When will an African side win the World Cup?"
New Yorker - "How the Moroccan World Cup Team Became a Symbol of the Global South"
The Athletic - "Inside the making of Norway’s ‘Viking’ photo for World Cup"
2030 World Cup and the World's Largest Football Stadium in Casablanca Morocco
Arsenal's Path and Tactics to the EPL Title
Quentin Tarantion Names Black Hawk Down Best Movie of the Past 25+ Years
Variety - "Quentin Tarantino Names ‘Black Hawk Down’ the Best Movie of the 21st Century; His Top 10 Includes ‘Dunkirk,’ ‘Toy Story 3,’ ‘Zodiac’ and More"
"“I liked it when I first saw it, but I actually think it was so intense that it stopped working for me, and I didn’t carry it with me the way that I should’ve,” Tarantino said about selecting “Black Hawk Down” as his top pick. “Since then, I’ve seen it a couple of times, not a bunch of times, but I think it’s a masterwork, and one of the things I love so much about it is […] this is the only movie that actually goes completely for an ‘Apocalypse Now’ sense of purpose and visual effect and feeling, and I think it achieves it. It keeps up the intensity for 2 hours 45 minutes, or whatever it is, and I watched it again recently, my heart was going through the entire runtime of the movie; it had me and never let me go, and I hadn’t seen it in a while. The feat of direction is beyond extraordinary.”"
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Who is Satoshi?
New York Times - "My Quest to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery"
"So I decided to ask Mr. Back for the emails’ metadata. Metadata is to an email what an envelope, postmark and seal are to a physical letter: It shows where the email came from, when it was sent and whether it was altered. The copies of Mr. Back’s email exchanges with Satoshi made public during Mr. Wright’s London trial hadn’t included this information.
I didn’t have high hopes the metadata would tell me anything useful because Satoshi had used the Tokyo-registered anonymous email service, which would have masked his I.P. address. Not only that, Satoshi had probably used Tor to connect to the service to further insulate himself. I still wanted to see it, though, on the off chance I could glean some clue.
But when I emailed Mr. Back my request, he did not reply. I wasn’t sure if he was ghosting me or just busy and I didn’t want to spook him by immediately following up, so I waited eight days to send him another email. Again, radio silence.
I had clearly touched a nerve. But why? With the precautions Satoshi had taken, what was there to even hide? Unless Satoshi had made some sort of mistake?"
The Magic City Night That Never Happened
The Ringer - "A Magic City Night to Remember"
New York Times - "It Was Going to Be Magic City Night at the Atlanta Hawks. Then the Outrage Poured In."
Atlanta Hawks - "Hawks to Celebrate Atlanta's Iconic Cultural Institution ‘Magic City’ During the Team's “Magic City Monday” Game Against the Orlando Magic on Monday, March 16"
Sunday, March 8, 2026
The rise and fall of monoculture
WSJ - "The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture"
"Everyone my age remembers “Jurassic Park,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the early seasons of “The Simpsons.” My teenage son and his friends watch and listen and play different things, sometimes even when they’re in the same room. Whatever it one day means to have grown up in the 2020s, it won’t have much to do with pop culture."
...
"To understand how things have changed, consider the case of anime, the Japanese animation style that used to live in the remotest corners of video stores and is now one of the hottest businesses in Hollywood. There may not be a lot of anime fans, but they’re a passionate group who turn out to theaters for hits like “Demon Slayer” and all subscribe to Sony’s streaming service Crunchyroll, which caters specifically to them.
Anime fans were always willing to spend lots of money, it turns out. Before digital distribution, there wasn’t a way to market or deliver content specifically to them, so the business wasn’t viable.
Building a mass audience, meanwhile, is harder than ever, because Hollywood can no longer force content on the country by giving it the best time slot or the best position on the shelves of Best Buy."
The Mandalorian and Grogu
May 22, 2026
Written by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni
Directed by Jon Favreau
Starring Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White
Written by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni
Directed by Jon Favreau
Starring Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White
Sunday, February 15, 2026
The Adventures of Cliff Booth
Sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Written by Quentin Tarantino
Directed by David Fincher (Gone Girl, The Social Network, Zodiac, Fight Club, Seven)
Starring
Brad Pitt,
Scott Caan,
Elizabeth Debicki,
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II,
Carla Gugino,
Holt McCallany,
Corey Fogelmanis,
JB Tadena
The Rise of Bad Bunny and Producing a Super Bowl Halftime Show
The Atlantic - "How Bad Bunny Did It"
"At the center of Bad Bunny’s sound is the rhythm that has ruled Latin American pop for decades: reggaeton, which marries dancehall and rap in crisp, minimalist fashion. Inspiring partying often with just a drum machine and a vocalist, reggaeton first flourished as the sound of working-class urban life in Puerto Rico. “This is where I was born, and so was reggaeton, just so you know,” Bad Bunny boasts in Spanish in one song.
He also grew up as a highly online Millennial at a time when American pop culture was ruled by Fall Out Boy’s pop punk, Lady Gaga’s synth pop, and Drake’s rap blues. All of those touchstones now inform his maximalist take on reggaeton. In any given Bad Bunny song, the melodies roll and sway between emo dejection and childlike glee, the electronic beats call to mind Nintendo games, and the low end churns as ominously as a lava pit. Bad Bunny’s vocal tone is unique: husky and flat, peppered with gasps and grunts, and shimmering with digital effects. He sounds like a ringmaster in a futuristic circus, and you don’t need to know Spanish to feel that a thrilling story is unfolding."
New York Times - "Super Bowl Halftime Is the World’s Biggest Stage. He Designs It."
The Re-Rise of Bathhouses
Bloomberg - "Why We’re All Trading Happy Hours for the Bathhouse
By Madison Darbyshire and Eleanor Thornber
Previously,
The Sauna Lifestyle of Northern Minnesota (Jan. 25)
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