An Announcement, On Growing Older, Things to Ask Yourself, etc.
In which an individual human existence should be like a river...
👋 Hello, friends.
💌 For just over two years, I’ve shared 124 newsletters of links and thinks on film, music, literature, art, productivity, trying to be a better person and the intersection of those and all things.
I’ll continue that work free of charge in 2026. But I’m also adding something new: a weekly, full-length essay that explores those same themes in greater depth.
Beginning March 2 (which also happens to be my birthday), those weekly essays will be available exclusively to paid subscribers. Until then, the essays are free, and annual subscriptions are on sale for only $30.
Read, enjoy, and decide whether you’d like to keep going. And if you feel inclined, please forward these emails to everyone you’ve ever met in your entire life.
Thank you in advance.
🎧 (50/50) The Microphones, The Glow, Pt. 2: A fragile monument to impermanence, recorded like a diary left open to weather. Phil Elverum turns fractured folk, hiss, clipping and sudden quiet into emotional grammar, where joy and dread coexist without hierarchy. Songs sprawl, collapse, and reassemble, mirroring the nonlinear logic of grief. Acoustic, channel-alternating strums bloom into distorted storms; then everything falls away to breath and heart beats and room tone. The record feels handmade and haunted, obsessed with nature, death and self-erasure, yet stubbornly feels alive. Not sure if it’s my favorite album, but it’s the one I’ve connected to the most.
And that’s that. Not necessarily a top 50, but something like it.
🎶 I have no new music recommendations (my buddy Eric says I am firmly in my “jazz era,” and he’s kinda/sorta not wrong), but a lot of other people do and I love reading through lists and cherry picking what sounds good to me. Pitchfork has a top 50. Steven Hyden has some great recommendations on a dumpster-fire of a website; on Water From Your Eyes’ It’s A Beautiful Place, he writes: “Sounds like someone got super stoned and melted every Ween CD into one super Ween CD.” I’m in. And if you want to read a really long list with zero context, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth has a top 300.
📚 “This extraordinary story never goes out of fashion.” Thirty authors on the books they give to everyone.
💻 I’ve seen none of these: the best video essays of 2025.
🍽️ For the Michiganders: ten restaurants opening in Detroit.
🔥 My friend Jen recommended Fat Baby Hot Sauce and this is me paying it forward.
👤 Ten cultural icons on the art of growing older. “Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”
🤔 I’m not a New Year’s Resolutions kinda-guy, in part because January is a great time to relax and reflex and plan. I tend to lean into things more around my birthday. With that said, this is a great list of 40 things to ask yourself, whether now or on your own date-of-birth.
“What would you like to have next year that you lacked this year?
What date(s) from this year will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
What was your biggest achievement of the year?
What was your biggest failure?
Whose behavior merited celebration?
Whose behavior made you appalled?
Who did you miss?
What valuable life lesson did you learn this year?”
❤️ And did you keep the Hoping Machine running?
Happy New Year.
Love,
Luke
