Your Mid-Week Experiment
Yay! BookPeople is having us for an in-person paperback release!
For all the luck and joy of the rollout last year of Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, a genuine bummer was that the pandemic prevented any in-person bookstore events, including here in Austin at BookPeople where I had seen so many of my friends talk about their books. Now the paperback is coming out amid middling COVID-19 numbers, and Book People feels safe enough to have us in person for an event on June 13. Register here for this free event.
Now, let’s get to the good stuff below.
My friend Elise Hu is hosting It’s Been a Minute through the end of the month and needs “a little joy and levity from your world.” Record a voice mail of the best thing that’s happened to you recently, email it to ibam@npr.org, and you might hear it on the show.
Make this corn and tomato shrimp scampi for real though.
“Since the time of Sophists, academics have, for whatever petty reason, used their considerable brains to muddy the waters rather than clear them.” And this: “Nihilism is for losers.” (Courage is Calling)
Thank you to everyone who voted for Forget the Alamo in Best of Austin 2022, and thanks especially to experimenter Suzanne Newell for her great quote.
Skip Hollandsworth is a writer’s writer and deserves this award even though he lives in Dallas.
Speaking of other cities, Austin lives rent-free in the heads of seemingly everyone in San Antonio, including the owner of the Spurs, who recently wrote, “yes, WE do have the best tacos.” People, No One Ever Said Austin Had Better Tacos.
Speaking of which, I achieved a career milestone recently by appearing on Jose Relát’s podcast 10,000 Tacos to talk about the Great Breakfast Taco War and about Forget the Alamo. If you don’t know who Relát is, do you even taco, bro?
I talked to Texas Monthly about Mike Collier, who I like and am voting for but wish he’d get back to what makes him special instead of sounding like every other Democrat running for anything.
This is wild—> “…people 25 and younger say they almost never dream in black and white. But people over 55 who grew up with little access to color television reported dreaming in black and white about a quarter of the time.” (New York Times)
“People actually have strong associations between the concept of creativity and other negative associations like vomit and poison. Agony was another one.” (NYT)
Might write about this over the weekend. What do you think?
S was out of town last week, so I got to watch a lot of things. Buckle up:
I did not like this season of A Very British Scandal as much as the first, but I did appreciate Claire Foy’s portrayal of an unapologetic woman.
Oh, I did so love C’mon C’mon.
Really digging The Comedy Store docuseries on Showtime.
If you like this newsletter, you’ll probably dig After Yang.
Is Operation Mincemeat good? Who, in fact, is to say? But you’ve got Jason Isaacs doing Jason Isaacs things, like ineffectually castigating Colin Firth, which I’m sure qualifies as someone’s kink, and Johnny Flynn, whom we love, playing a wartime Ian Fleming. And it has Churchill saying things like, '“I applaud the fantastic. It has many advantages over the mundane. But the more fantastic, the more foolproof the plan must be.” But is Operation Mincemeat good? Oh, who cares.
Was not prepared to see Kiefer Sutherland as FDR. Tons of great performances in here, as well as insights.
And last, a little-known fact about me is that I’m part Hawaiian. Here’s a video about my cousin, a traditional tattoo artists on Oahu. “I don’t want to teach my kids about their culture from a museum.”
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 this June!