Your Mid-Week Experiment

Sorry, took the weekend off to go to... (checks notes)... Minneapolis?

Last weekend Team Van Stanford converged on Minneapolis to celebrate H2 the Younger’s 20th birthday with Ethiopian food, take in our first Orioles game together since 2015, and visit Brainerd where H1 the Elder is a park ranger for the Army Corps of Engineers. Amid all that politeness and caloric overload, there was no time to write you, and for that I am sorry. But conversations were had that inform something that has been bugging me, so check in next weekend to see what comes of all that rumination.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t get a mid-weeker, so let’s get to it:

Wondering whether you need to get on Threads, the new Twitter competitor that has Elon Musk challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a literal dick-measuring contest? Our friend Josh Berthume has some smart advice. (Swash Labs)

This is the worst unsolicited political advice from a (checks notes) media columnist I’ve ever read — and it’s not the first time this writer has deigned to give politicians his (un)learned counsel. (Jack Shafer)

So smart—> “We all know what imho means. It is a set of letters that can introduce friendly advice, a stern caesura, or a joke. In other words, imho is a word. It joins the many other initialisms that have been ratified into ordinary words: snafu, radar, laser, zip code. Specifically, imho is a discourse marker—a word or phrase like however, well, or anyway that acts as glue in a piece of writing. Imho specifies that a certain phrase is a statement of belief.” (Robinson Meyer)

Help me out: This piece — “Things I No Longer Have Room for as a Mother” — is categorized as humor. Is it funny, though? Is it actually comedy, or just rueful? (The New Yorker)

Apparently Greta Gerwig made the Forget the Alamo about Barbie: “The story of Barbie is the fight that’s been going on about Barbie.” (The New York Times Magazine)

A long time ago, a friend strongly recommended Black Mirror, saying emphatically that I would especially love it, that it was perfect for me. Then I saw the pilot where the British prime minister is blackmailed into publicly having sex with a pig, and I wondered how my friend saw me. Lately, though, I’ve been getting into it. Especially liked S5E3, “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” starring Miley Cyrus. And I like Cyrus’ version of “Head Like a Hole” better than Nine Inch Nails’ original. /ducks/

When he was a little boy, Adley Rutchman would beg his dad to throw him batting practice when he’d practice hitting to all fields from both sides of the plate. You see, his dad was a proper baseball coach, and he taught his son to learn plate discipline and to take a mature approach to the plate. At the end, after they had emptied three buckets, Adley would ask his dad if they could do “home run contest” when he’d be allowed to swing for the fences. When Adley was chosen for the home run contest at the All-Star game, he asked his dad to pitch for him. The results were magical.

I appreciated how they landed the plane for Indy, and Phoebe Waller Bridge was a welcome compliment to the canon.

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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 how I have fun.

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!