Snapped through some fresh pull-tabs in a farewell tour of sorts to my area of St. Paul (Halftime Rec and Gabe’s, farewell for a while — I’ll be back).
Also: a fairly substantial update to the pull-tabs library.
Crazy this side operation out of Coudal Partners has been going on for 20 years, but Field Notes branded notebooks are still as joyful as they’ve been when Aaron Draplin first ideated the concept. Quality stuff.
Funny enough, during my recent move I unearthed a treasure trove of these things.
The new nearby Mexican spot is high on vibes (you know, one of those places with every chair and booth painted with a scene), and so-so on execution, but it’ll do. Al pastor tacos pair well enough with their habanero salsa.
“Anything that lasts 10 years, 20 years, it has to be new. And most of those are not received well at the start.”
This interview is funny because yes, Death Stranding 1 received mixed reviews upon release, but has since been held in very high regard as a completely new experience (albeit spiritual success to Metal Gear).
It’s okay for its sequel to be anticipated and even praised ahead of time — continued success is a good thing for a videogame studio, but I get what Kojima is after: he wants his art to be off-kilter to provide something fresh, which is hard to do. We can only hope Death Stranding 2 can be both experimentally wild (what a true fanbase is hoping for anyway), while simultaneously yielding blockbuster revenues.
Whenever I reload on Uber gift cards at either 20% or 25% off at Costco, it feels like a system hack. I don’t know how they arranged that deal, but it’s unfathomable free money (if you use Uber/Eats a lot).
Big move coming up. Am I one of the few who consider themselves moving enthusiasts? Yes. Organizing, packing, labeling, checklisting, and placing objects in optimal paths for trafficking this shit out of a house is high on my dopamine hits.
Love to see iA Writer get nominated for an Apple Design award after 15 years of existence. A testament to its integrity over time: longevity in usage, foresight on interface design, and reliability. Highly recommend if you haven’t already — buy once, use for… another 15 years.
Hell yeah, I have no notes on this cheeky piece by James Norton explaining why the eternal supper club Mancini’s is untouchable:
This is a place with no airs. It’s not trying to impress you[…] Mancini’s is a paleolithic Midwestern supper club that makes no apologies for being what it is. It also serves a hell of a good cannoli for dessert.
As a zipper enthusiast (😅), how can I not admire the comical designer brilliance of this Japanese-built boat echoing the shape of a zipper that, in turn, simulates the “unzipping” on the surface of the water via its wake?
Hydration two ways at Nico’s Tacos in St Anthony Park after a pitstop biking up and around Como Ave from Saint Paul. The bike lane all the way from the park is a joy to use.
A truly random, critical meta analysis of Sam Altman’s kitchen as he unconventionally fixes a meal for the Lunch with FT editorial series.
The Highs & Lows of Watching Professional Basketball ✱
I was never a sports fan, though in my youth I played sports and enjoyed watching them. And while living in Chicago, I made the rounds to see the Cubs and the White Sox, but never the Bears, and always preceded by a strong pregame of beer.
But last spring, when the Timberwolves were on their deepest NBA Playoffs run in decades, we took the bait and became season ticket holders after draining several perfectly-made Manhattans to the tune of them sweeping the Phoenix Suns in round one. The timing was perfect — we needed a new distraction, a new passion, a new activity. It was, in short, an epic bandwagoning event for us.
And so we watched them smash through a succeeding crazy seven-game series against the reigning Denver champions (a seventh game 20-points comeback in the fourth quarter that apparently has gone down in the annals of greatness), only to be crushed by [at the time] Luka Dončić’s Dallas Mavericks. But the high off stadium and fan energy, the players’ personas, and the stakes brought me into the fold in a way I wasn’t expecting.
Sure, making a financial decision in season-long tickets is an investment in the team, but it also helps that the Timberwolves have an enormously entertaining roster of characters (including one of the sport’s brightest young stars, Anthony Edwards), let alone the sport’s culture. We found basketball to be an uniquely pulsing constellation of music, apparel, thematic confidence, and weekly drama that echos a kind of reality television show. It has something for everyone, even if the officiating (as I’ve come to learn) is highly bureaucratic, and manipulatively biased at its worst.
And so we entered the 2024-2025 season with anxious excitement last fall, going to about 80% of the regular season games at Target Center, and making time to watch every single one broadcasted under the announcing by preeminent local Minnesotan sportscasters Michael Grady, Jim Petersen, and Katie Storm.
The Wolves had a disappointing first half of the season, beating great teams, losing to the worst teams, tallying a smattering of injuries, and most glaringly, suffering from misalignments with the restructured team (due to a wildly unprecedented trade of long-time Timberwolves star Karl-Anthony Towns for two New Yorkers right before the season start). Had we made a bad investment, or is this what sports fanaticism is like?
Suffice it to say, they turned it around in the new year, started to get healthy, started to gel, and came roaring into the Playoffs this spring to blast by the Lakers (who, according to the Lakers Industrial Media Complex, were supposed to destroy Minnesota in five, and ended up losing in five). We’re tied 1-1 with the Golden State Warriors, and having an absolute blast being part of the culture.
I guess the point of this is that, perhaps, a midlife crisis was to… tune into the most popular type of entertainment, and surprisingly, enjoy it? Banter, enthusiasm, and analysis for sports (or I’ll speak for Basketball, at the very least), can be as intelligent, introspective, and meta-conversational as any other art form. And that’s a rewarding thing to find out nearly four decades in.
Go Wolves.
Fascinating [re-]discovery of a rare plant “physically resembling arabica beans” that grew in the lowlands of Sierra Leone. This could be a solution to growing coffee in new geographies as climate change erases the ability to do so in the highland areas of today. ☕️
Nothing beats an impromptu decision to hit up Turf Club and find out you know the band playing the night-of. Papooz was whimsically entertaining and a near-perfect anecdote to another political hellscape of a week. We always sit at the bar — it’s a great view, and nearest proximity to the drinks.
Wonderfully sincere piece by Annie Mueller on reevaluating perspective:
Calcification occurs when you don’t pay attention. The tissues harden in place. Things get dry and brittle. Another word for calcification is death. Change is life. Be open, and don’t be afraid to ask others to be open, too.
For anyone seeking to ‘smartly’ augment doomscroll fatigue, I recommend giving Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire a shot. He’s been curating and distilling headlines for 25 years, and his site’s a very reliable, fairly unbiased source of sanity for political junkies and readers seeking truncated news.
Not sure exactly when this went live, but Monocle has a gorgeous new website layout — really pops in a desktop browser, echoing newspaper paradigms with a digital sheen that so many other publications swing and miss on.
A new, fast recipe search engine was released by Silvio Rizzi (maker of Reeder and Mela), called Foodle.
Search by title or ingredient, and it provides a variety of sourced recipes to view or ingest into Mela, his RSS-based recipe library app. I’ve been really enjoying using Mela these last several years, and find it’s simplicity (basically RSS-focused pulls from virtually any source, including some social media) worth the investment of time. It also prints beautiful recipe pages (my preferred way of cooking is referencing physical copy).
Great cinematic analysis by Allison Vincent across three films dealing with “time travel” —
Every new spiral downward has to dig deeper than the previous one to get us closer to the center of what makes us who we are and where we came from. But, if we dare to venture down in our timelines, we must be prepared to live with the consequences.
I wasn’t aware of the 12 Monkeys / Vertigo homages either, which is as good a reminder as any to watch both of these again.
George Packer in the latest Dispatches for The Atlantic:
Ritualized humiliation is essential to an authoritarian regime.
Moment of non-political distraction: Racket has a thoughtful piece on dive bars and glass block windows (ranking them, natch). Highlighting one of my faves in NE Minneapolis (Knight Cap):
Big glass block window? Yes. Nearly-as-big off-center sign? Sadly, also yes.
I’m not sure they’re entirely right about millennials only caring about authenticity here, but NYT’s sad ode to the middle-class restaurant industry morphs into a swan song for eating out socially in general. Counter-order fast casual may be the future, but at the expense of a beautiful legacy.
The comedy of this Economist article almost betrays the absolute serious imbecility that was just unleashed on the global trade markets.
I may be late to the party on this, but Robin Sloan’s Moonbound is a terrific read. It’s like he took several shelves of adventurous genres at a bookstore and whisked them into a cauldron to brew a remixed elixir of everything we love about high-spirited, whimsical, fantastical fiction.
Target’s timing for refocusing its food supply chains for in-house/private label nicely corresponds with consumer spending shifts (frozen foods) and its new ‘chef series’ partnership via the Good & Gather brand, kicking off first with Minneapolis' own Ann Kim (of Young Joni).