Every month I pull together the things worth your time across newsletters, podcasts, books, film, and the occasional detour. No fluff. No affiliate deals. Just stuff I’ve actually consumed and think you should too.
Media Business News: The Bulwark
Cast your mind back to late 2018. The Weekly Standard, one of America’s most respected conservative magazines, gets killed off by its owner for being insufficiently pro-Trump. Staff out of work, weeks before Christmas.
Into that mess stepped Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who’d already had enough of watching her party fold, and who’d been quietly building a little news aggregator on the side. She called it The Bulwark. Nobody gave it much chance. In the beginning they didn’t even ask for money. Readers just started sending it anyway, unsolicited, because they could see what was being built and wanted to be part of it.
Seven years on, The Bulwark has crossed one million subscribers, a newsroom of more than 40 people, chart-topping podcasts, and live events across the US and Canada.
“Independent media doesn’t need a corporate parent or a venture cheque. It needs a point of view, the courage to hold it, and an audience that believes you mean it.”
Podcast: Substack Presents Open Tab
Part of a new series Substack are running where they interview newsletter founders. It’s shot in a bar, with the kind of cinematography that makes it feel more like a late-night TV interview than a podcast. The first episode features Emily Sundberg from the Feed Me newsletter. It’s a solid conversation about what it actually takes to put out a daily newsletter, and how backing yourself and just running with an idea is sometimes all it takes.
Book: Small Things Like These
Weird thing about this recommendation: I kept seeing it suggested everywhere, went and bought it, got a couple of pages in, and realised I’d already read it. Anyway. It’s a quick read and worth doing again.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is barely 120 pages, and it will quietly wreck you. Set in a small Irish town in 1985, it follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant who stumbles across something he can’t unsee at the local convent. It’s about conscience. About the cost of decency in a place where silence is the easier option. About how the small things you do, or don’t do, end up being the measure of you.
Documentary: Martin Short: Life Is Short
There have been quite a few documentaries on comics lately, and if you’re a comedy nerd like me you’ve probably watched all of them. What makes this one different is that Marty Short isn’t a tragic figure like Chevy Chase, Gary Shandling, or George Carlin. He’s a guy who has sure known tragedy. But the film isn’t built around it.
It’s also just refreshing to watch a documentary about somebody who is, well, nice. It’s sometimes said you can tell the quality of a person by the people around them. If that’s true, Marty Short’s a hell of a guy.
Warning: if you haven’t gotten over Catherine O’Hara’s death, you’re probably in for a shock.
Moment of Zen
If you know me, you know I’m a fan of Rich Roll. This one’s mostly a message to myself. Sometimes when I see other people’s projects growing, I catch myself getting a bit jealous, and I need to keep this front of mind.
“The hare always loses.”
Try this: Next time you catch yourself measuring your progress against someone else’s highlight reel, come back to this.
Travel: From Our Foreign Correspondent (aka my daughter, in London)
Natural History Museum
Today I took my role as the mate who’s never had a 9-5 and somehow has a “little break” from 9am to 3pm very seriously, and decided to experience some of London’s culture. Apparently culture here extends beyond drinking a pint on the street in the middle of the day.
After a couple of inevitable delays (someone had trespassed on the railway tracks), I arrived at the Natural History Museum. A seemingly large building, though not heaps bigger than the Auckland Museum. Do I really care for museums? Not particularly. It’s kind of like travelling and going to churches: you just do it to do it.
Then I saw the sign for Earthquakes and Volcanoes and immediately had to check if they had a volcano house (if you know, you know). Going through the displays, many of them featuring the 2011 earthquake in Japan, I found myself thinking back to that whole period: Pike River, November 2010. The Christchurch earthquake three months later. Then the devastating earthquake in Japan the month after that. It genuinely felt like the world had entered its rough patch era. Looking back now it almost feels like a weird trailer for 2020, when the world actually did shut down.
Then, to lighten the mood, I remembered I once hosted a bake sale for Christchurch earthquake victims. I think that still qualifies as my peak humanitarian work. (I was 10.)
The earthquake simulator sign is ahead of me - it’s supposed to imitate what it would have been like in a Japanese corner shop (dairy) during that earthquake. The sign says it’s down for maintenance.
I realise there are disruptions on my train line to get home and like most 25-year-olds in London the option to eat lunch out in South Kensington would require taking out a small loan, so I race to the train, hop on the district line and start the journey.
Overall no I wouldn’t rate the London Natural History Museum over the Auckland Museum but will say that is absolutely because of the lack of Volcano simulator. I’ll return one day for a fairer review, likely on another weekday while everyone with actual jobs is in meetings.
That said, there was an extremely cool elevator (photo inserted) which honestly carried the experience.
Your 25-year-old mate who’s never had a normal job “mind the gap between the train and the platform”
That’s a wrap.
That’s it for this month’s recommendations. As always, if you’ve got anything worth sharing, send it my way.
Excellent foreign correspondent segment.