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Welcome to the penultimate Friday of 2024. If you need a last-minute gift, my 20% off subscriptions sale runs until Dec. 25th:
Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
“Dead week” is the no-man’s land between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. I used to dread this time of year, but now I look forward to it as a time when nobody really expects much of you and nothing you do really matters that much. It’s a great time to rest, recover, and relax.
“I do some of my best music listening early in the year when I'm all stocked up on everyone's favorites from the year before,” writes my friend Mark Larson. “You can let a lot of quality into your life by not keeping up!” I love this catching up, too, with year-end lists from critics like Carl Wilson, and I also love a good late-year surprise, like Kendrick Lamar’s GNX or Aphex Twin’s Music from The Merch Desk.
“Once you learn how to learn, you have only to discover what is worth learning.” I thought I had zero interest in tennis, but I loved W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis. Spoiler alert: it’s about much more than tennis. (Thanks to Neil for bringing it top of mind.) I do some of my best reading this time of year, when I ease up, stop reading what I think I should be reading and start reading at whim, sticking with what’s making me turn pages. I trust the turning of pages!
“Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.” I thought Conclave was great. It’s the rare movie for adults that’s also rated PG, which means it’d be a good one to put on over the holidays. Speaking of, I am craving comfort viewing right now: movies like Moonstruck, Barry Lyndon, Master and Commander, Phantom Thread, etc. (For some reason, I associate The Lord of the Rings trilogy with Christmastime?) Once upon a time I made a little Tumblr with a friend of Christmas movies and movies to watch on Christmas Day. Some really good stuff in there, and much of it I still haven’t seen…
“Children are the only thing we remove from the human body and keep.” I laughed so hard at Jim Gaffigan’s The Skinny.
Some of my favorite TV has come to an end: Somebody Somewhere and What We Do in the Shadows had their series finales this week, and Meg and I finished binging the only two seasons of Detroiters. (I’m consoling myself with the thought of Parker Posey and Walt Goggins starring in season 3 of The White Lotus.)
Advertisements for myself: actor Jason Segel shouted out Steal Like an Artist in his breakdown of his most iconic characters (I am a gigantic fan of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and I really like his current show, Shrinking) and someone posted a funny video of Colet, member of the Filipino girl group BINI, spending most of their holiday gift exchange reading a gifted copy of Show Your Work! (Now who will be the celebrity spokesperson for Keep Going?)
I finished up my monthly mixtapes project with what I joked was a “sad dad bad had” mix featuring songs by Wilco, Low, Springsteen, Van Halen, and Kenneth Patchen reading over an Earl Sweatshirt track. You can listen to the mix on Spotify or Apple Music. (If you need some holiday tunes, try Walter Martin’s Christmas episode, the playlist I made for