Your Mid-Week Experiment
Welcome to your always free, reader-supported edition of The Experiment where we share great things to read, cook, listen to, and watch. As always, this bugga free.
Let’s get right to it:
“The darkness of this timeline (Trump 1, Covid, Trump 2) activated our deepest lizard brain’s tendency to confuse panic with planning and doomsaying with realism.” -Ana Marie Cox (free link)
“I think it’s alright for folks who are deeply critical of Trump and his neo-mercantalist policies to allow for a bit of curiosity and humility here. Disaster was predicted. Disaster isn’t here. Not yet, at least. So, how do we explain the US economy’s resilience if Trump’s economic ideas are as bad as economists say they are?” -Derek Thompson, being super smart (free link)
If you ever end up with too much extra bread, making ham and cheese bread pudding is surprisingly easy. (recipe)
Speaking of food… “Respect means owning up to your own lack of experience, giving credit where it is due, letting go of judgment and being transparent about your motivations.” -Joe Yonan, writing about food, if you can believe it, and well at that (gift link)
“Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the furthest thing from it.” -Stephen Colbert
Skip ahead to the 7-minute mark for Ichiro Suziki’s Hall of Fame gracious, elegant, and funny speech.
One of the most-surprising, oddest, most-vulnerable, sweetest, and reality-bending television shows I’ve ever seen. This show makes me want to have a conversation with Pete Davidson, a person I had not been that interested in before. To the extent that he did this show as a form of exploratory therapy, I’m thrilled for him that he didn’t think he needed to do a second season.
This is the weirdest good movie I’ve ever seen and perhaps the best weird movie I’ve ever seen.
Liked this movie a lot until I loved it.
If you’re like me and there’s only so much Black Mirror you can take in one sitting, make a point of seeing S7E5, “Eulogy.” It has none of that repulsiveness that bedevils so much of the series.
We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment.
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.