I love long reads. I remember a time when the web was nothing but long articles, and I wasted a lot of time reading them. I’m finding now that this wasn’t really time wasted, and I’m forcing myself to find more long articles that interest me, which is harder than it sounds.
Anyway, here’s ten articles that crossed my browser recently. Feel free to send me yours. Maybe I should make this a thing.
- Norm Macdonald, Still in Search of the Perfect Joke – Norm has a new show coming out. Looking forward to this – I loved his podcast and his recent book.
- Sounds of Future Past: The Lyricon – I know I’m not supposed to like new age music, but I always had a soft spot for Chuck Greenberg’s work with the band Shadowfax. He was a pioneer of a very early and obscure wind synth called the Lyricon. Elkhart connection: they were made by Selmer for a while.
- Spotlight on: Angel Stadium’s Barney Lopas – Never thought an article on stadium groundskeeping would be interesting, but it is.
- Ronnie Rocket – The Screenplay – The great unproduced movie of David Lynch, which came up when I was reading the Room to Dream biography.
- William Langewiesche: Fighting ISIS With the B-2 Bomber – The Atlantic – an interesting read on using the billions-dollar stealth bomber to kill a bunch of dudes in tents in the desert half a world away.
- Table busser stacks up with best of ’em since 1964 – A Chicago guy who has worked the same minimum-wage job bussing tables for the last 54 years.
- How Football Fed Timothy McVeigh’s Despair – Wide Right was the reason McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma federal building? I know being a Bills fan is rough, but wow.
- Slacker Geography, 25 Years Later – I’ve already written about how obsessed I am with the movie Slacker. Here’s a deep dive on every filming location in Austin, and what it looks like now.
- A Tale of Two Airplanes – This is a LONG old-school web site about an RC-135 spy plane. I fell down a k-hole about Shemya, a tiny island in the Aleutians where the Air Force parked a bunch of radars pointed at the USSR back in the cold war. Here’s another site about Shemya.
- The Bay Is Brutal: A Love Letter To Concrete and Brutalism in the Bay Area – I love brutalist architecture, mostly because everyone hates it.
Shameless plug: I have a new book. Please check it out.
Leave a Reply