Things I Liked and Didn’t Like This Week: February 2, 2020
Hey, we made it two weeks in a row on this column. Where’s my parade? Since I’ve done it for two weeks, you can all admit that I, not Zach Lowe, have invented this format.
The City Of New York
Once, I was at a work function and one of my bosses, who had just come back from visiting New York, was telling the room about their recent trip there. She told a story about how as a kid, there was this one specific food her grandmother made that you can’t find anywhere in Chicago. In New York, though, there are entire restaurants dedicated to the specialty. The ability to get anything, to her, made New York special.
It’s a beautiful story, but it’s predicated on a fundamental falsehood: New York is actually bad.
There is too much there. There is too much and there is no room for it, so it spills everywhere. It spills out into the boroughs and kicks what was once there out one block at a time. It spills, literally, out to the streets in the form of the omnipresent garbage bags covered in rats. It spills everywhere, because New York is too big to be contained, and they decided to cram it into a small little peninsula on the eastern seaboard.
New York’s charm is that everything is within reach. Making a city where everything is within reach would make Icarus blush.
Music In A Language You Don’t Speak
I’ve decided to get big into Japanese alt music just because, which is normal.
I do not know anything about what I am listening to. I do not know what the songs are about, whether the song is happy or sad, but the licks are tasty, so the song is good. It’s weirdly liberating to not have to worry about the lyrics, something 15-year old Ben who almost exclusively listened to 1960s singer-songwriters is cringing about today. It’s purer, almost.
Anyway, Ayano Kaneko slaps, listen to her music.
Northwestern Men’s Basketball
I think it’s cool that Northwestern sucks, actually. It’s fun to watch a basketball team that was at the mountaintop three years ago and feel like losing by “just a little bit” is a moral victory. It rocks when you have players who should be good who aren’t and the only players who are any good absolutely should not be. It’s fun to watch Pete Nance, a springy athlete with a too-long 6-10 frame, look like he is uninterested in playing basketball.
Above all, it’s cool that the coach of this team sucks at his job, is under contract for another 5 years, and is also a giant freak.
Northwestern, the worst team in the Big Ten, does not look like a program anywhere close to figuring itself out. Good thing it offered itself no outs by locking up its weirdo coach for a decade after his first, and to date only, decent season.
They blew another big second-half lead on Saturday to Purdue, and no one was surprised. Chris Collins has no idea how to coach an offense that hunts high percentage looks, has no track record in developing non-centers, and can’t find a true point guard. Oh, and his defenses have regressed since Pat Baldwin scored a head coaching job. Chris Collins hit one recruiting class, took it to one NCAA Tournament (when he should have taken it to two), cashed out on a 10-year deal, and has done zero since.
There is nothing that suggests that he is a good basketball coach. He should be fired. If you want to read nuanced takes, visit Josh Rosenblat’s excellent Blame the Phones newsletter.
V-Moda Crossfade Wireless Headphones
This isn’t sponcon, or all that interesting, but these headphones are good and I recommend getting them if you need them and they go on sale (they often do)! Look at me, the audio influencer.
Afternoon Coffee
Afternoon coffee rocks.
The morning coffee experience is going into a too-crowded café half-dead, jostling for position with other people similarly zonked and unpleasant. It’s a trip of necessity, not a trip that’s relaxing or fun in any way, shape, or, form.
The 2 PM coffee is elite.
The cafe is quiet, the baristas are in a better mode after surviving the hordes in the morning. The coffee tastes better. It’s a slow sipping brew that gets you over the hump of the late afternoon doldrums and gives you a little extra juice in the early evening. Give me that afternoon mud.
Good Culture Writers Doing Bad Politics Writing
The following is mostly about Drew Magary, but it can also be ported over to one of, I don’t know, let’s say a thousand different writers.
Culture Writing, which is some dumb umbrella term that encompasses just about any blog you can imagine (like this one!) isn’t hard to do. It’s ultimately a game of who can write in a style that makes the reader think they’re having a conversation with the writer. That is, of course, not easy, but it’s a lot easier than doing Real Writing.
It’s also easier because it has precisely zero stakes.
Do you think Lizzo deserved to win Best Artist at the Grammys? Cool, there are zero stakes to that argument, so feel free to say whatever you want. Go overboard, enforce hyperbole, that makes it funnier and more #relatable. Writing about frivolous stuff is a breeze, and I don’t think anyone would really disagree.
The problem is that lots of folks who are super successful at writing about things that don’t matter end up being asked to write about things that do, and it all goes awry. Politics has stakes. Policy kills people every day. Writing about it in the glib or flippant way that you write about a chili recipe makes your takes easier to read, but it also makes them empty calories. Your trivialization of monstrous failures in environmental, health care, and infrastructure policies is not solving anything. It actually makes the problem worse.
If I have to read another epic politics post that begins with like eight hyperbolic graphs with some funny metaphors, then reluctantly pivots to a “but seriously folks, we need to do something about X” graf before finishing on another half joke about The Mandalorian, or something, I’m going to stick my head into a microwave.
Good thing there’s nothing important happening in the political sphere or global health this week!
