Your Mid-Week Experiment
It’s Girl Scout cookie season! Do you have young women selling cookies? Shoot me links, and I’ll share them in future Mid-Weeks.
Sorry this is a day late. I just got back last night from a conference in Austin. The cold snap shut the city down, and I had to rent the biggest SUV I could find to make it home to Dallas. The normally three-hour trip took five, but it could have been much worse. They shut the freeway down just as I was making my escape, forcing me to do a little off-roading to circumvent the state troopers. The following is an unpaid endorsement; the Ford Edge is two and a half tons of fun.
Thanks for the positive feedback on last weekend’s essay about Tyre Nichols— and a big hello to all the new subscribers, including TED Talks Daily host and host-at-large for NPR Elise Hu, whose first book, Flawless, is coming out in May. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “nuanced, wide-ranging, and fluidly written.” You can call it yours if you pre-order it now.
Embarrassingly hilarious—> “What does your favorite sad dad band say about you?” (McSweeny’s)
This is nuts, and not in a good way, not in the slightest. (Understandably by Bill Murphy Jr.)
This is nuts, and in a hilarious way. You are not going to believe this story, and it’s about my dad when he worked for a private detective agency in Miami.
Never noticed this line in my favorite poem: “…anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” (Jack Gilbert)
Between the buildup and the payoff: “I don’t mean to be so withholding. I don’t mean to drag the carrot, to hint at treat. I’ll get to it.” (Adele Elise Williams)
Speaking of great lines: “Taxing current income at higher rates than capital gains is theft from younger people, who make money from sweat, not investments. We have immense wealth in the U.S. — what we lack is progress.” (Prof G)
Or this one! “Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.” h/t SCG (Jonathan Haidt)
James Madison was wrong about a whole lot of things, but he was sadly prescient about this: “Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.” (Federalist Papers No. 10)
Made this —> Spicy sheet-pan chicken with sweet potatoes and kale (New York Times)
This one tweet changed my chili game for good:
“The media is blowing Biden’s documents ‘scandal’ out of proportion” (Margaret Sullivan)
We cannot love Poker Face more. Episode 2, in particular, was shockingly good. It’s the kind of show that TV critics fawn over, especially because actors like Natasha Lyonne are very much in fashion, but she is good-good in this, and the show has a timeless quality about it. Poker Face is the equivalent of a Tom Hanks movie, universally accessible and reliably good.
Thanks to Noom, I lost 40 pounds over 2020-21 and have kept it off since then. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works. No, this isn’t an ad. Yes, I really lost all that weight with Noom.
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.
We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some
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. Out in paperback now!