Your Mid-Week Experiment

1 longread, 1 bingeable novel, 1 article, 2 essays, 1 SXSW playlist, 1 new (to me) singer, 2 movies, 2 comedy specials, a new TV show, one charming video, and the most bonkers public comment ever

Welcome to your always free, reader-supported mid-week edition of The Experiment where we share great things to read, cook, listen to, and watch. If you’d like to support my work, buy my Alamo book, buy some Experiment merch, drop some coins in the PayPal fountain, or become a paid subscriber. But even if you don’t, this bugga free.

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Let’s get right to it:

This year, Road & Track sent a socialist to cover the F1 race in Austin. Shortly after it published her article on the website on March 1, it took it down, not because it was inaccurate but because it was honest. Luckily, the Internet never forgets. (Kate Wagner)

The kids are not alright. Twentysomethings in the states are going through their mid-life crisis. (Washington Post)

All hail Chad Swiatecki for making a playlist of all the bands that got press coverage at SXSW.

Is Kevin Hart funny? (Travis Andrews)

I devoured this book in two days and loved it so much was reluctant to start another because it felt like I was cheating on it. (Curtis Sittenfeld)

Thanks to my brother Zac for turning me onto Alex Cameron.

This profile of an Army veteran who stopped the Club Q shooter in Colorado is better, more moving, and more innovative in presentation than you can imagine. (Dan Zak)

Seven years ago, the most bonkers thing ever happened at an Austin city council meeting. Imagine working at the council meeting and watching this unfold.

This is so charming.

In the end, this got very silly, and I was howling.

I hope this gets to where it’s going, because they’re onto something.

I didn’t dig Jenny Slate’s material (I don’t think her audience is 54-year-old white dudes anyway), but I admired her performance. Does that make sense?

If Air were cooler and about tech, it would be Blackberry.

I love late-career Nicolas Cage, and this movie was inventive and weird, but it made me so sad.

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Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. The New York Times bestseller is 44% off and the same price as a paperback now!