Archive • One Dollar Bets • Buttondown

2025 NBA Playoffs: A Look At The Celtics, Possible First-Round Match-Ups, and Milk

April 3, 2025

The Boston Celtics seek to go back-to-back as NBA Champions. As of April 3rd, 2025, their most likely opponents in the first round of the playoffs are the...

Detective Father Eduardo Benito Does It Again

January 27, 2025

Detective Father Eduardo Benito stood underneath the Sistine Chapel and looked up. TICKLE TICKLE, it said. TICKLE TICKLE. The graffiti’d words repeated...

Dubbed Late Night (January 24th, 2025)

January 24, 2025

Cigarettes Under The Fig Tree

January 20, 2025

via / tip “The quieter I stay online, the saner I feel. Do you know what I mean?” Detective Menendez shrugged. “And?” Detective Nguyen shrugged back. “And...

Dubbed Late Night (January 17th, 2025)

January 17, 2025

You Have Always Been The Detective

January 13, 2025

via/tip You don’t like nostalgia. You don’t like regret. And yet you work homicide in a post-industrial town, which, whoops. Aren’t you cheeky? Gently...

Door to Door

January 6, 2025

via. While I let the team detail the scene — what was the Judge wearing? What was in his pockets? His wallet? — I stepped outside and joined uniform going...

Down the Hatch

December 30, 2024

via. “Is forensics here?” I said as I climbed the ladder of the ship. “They’re inside,” Shelby called out from above, our feet gently clanging on the...

Dispatch

December 23, 2024

via. Hi, there, Evan, I am a public relations officer for the Greater Los Angeles County Regional Police Department. I’m writing because I have been made...

You Are The Detective

December 16, 2024

via. Being a detective isn’t just about investigating the body; it’s about investigating the material culture of which the body was — is — a part. You are...

The Conjugation Detective Asks You About Your Day

December 9, 2024

via. You have already met The Conjugation Detective. They smile and say it’s good to see you again and ask what you thought of Tokyo, Los Angeles, and...

The Shimmering Pale

December 6, 2024

via In Disco Elysium, ‘The Pale.’ In The Gone World, ‘The Shimmer.’ In one, it’s “a nervous shadow cast into the world … eating away at reality”; in the...

A Question of Business

December 2, 2024

via/tip “Have you ever heard of the film The Wizard of Australia, Sergeant?” The crunch of the gravel. The hunched arboreal predawn light. “Do you mean The...

Beyond Here Lies Black Magic Woman (Mashup)

November 30, 2024

Happy Saturday, folks. Here’s a mash-up of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” (original here) with “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” by Bob Dylan (original here.) Hope...

Tail the Tailer

November 25, 2024

via. / Tip? One could always tail the tail. Almost sounded like a riddle when you ran the words together like that — tail the tail. Like a betting rule in...

Friday Links

November 22, 2024

If you want to support this newsletter for $1/month, you can do so here.Carbon MapperGermany’s Enemy Within.“Between April 2023 and August 2024, more than...

Blue Ridge Nights

November 18, 2024

via. EMPIRE IS THE PRIVILEGE OF NOT HAVING TO THINK,OF NOT HAVING TO WORRY,OF UNDERSTANDING THAT — IN SOME FUNDAMENTAL WAY — NONE OF THIS MATTERS. I’d never...

Friday Links.

November 15, 2024

An essay from Alisha Mughal: “Silence As Salvation: The Quiet Femmes of Modern Horror.”Pre-orders are available for Denise S. Robbins’s debut novel, The...

Voter Education (pt 2)

November 13, 2024

A few notes on the proposed ‘Department of Government Efficiency’: The first is that a ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ already exists — it’s called the...

A Murder at Sea

November 11, 2024

photo via. A Navy cadet with the face of a hammer and a name that sounded like a question found me over at JP’s on S Bouldin St watching Lamar and Derrick...

Voter Education (pt 1)

November 6, 2024

While we we have a lot of data as to who the voters were, it’s also possible to categorize the voting public into three broad groups: (1) those who knew what...

The Glitter and The Grit

November 4, 2024

via: https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/ovj7i2/washington_street_boston_1985/ I used to be the bodyguard for Robert F. Kennedy. I don’t like to brag...

Friday, I'm in Links

November 1, 2024

A reminder from the ACLU on your voting rights. If you’re concerned about your vote, whether due to intimidation, harassment, or something else, “call or...

The Conjugation Detective

October 28, 2024

photo via: https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/James_Madrox_(Earth-616) You have already met The Conjugation Detective. A Conjugation Detective is both verb and...

You Know, Someone Once Told Me There Were Only Seven Links On The Internet; I Don't Know About You, But I Feel A Little Bit Lied To

October 25, 2024

“How to design architecture for wildlife.” (featuring the work of Joyce Hwang.)“Ordinary spaces can facilitate extraordinary events.”ICYMI: “A Few Thoughts...

A Few Thoughts On The Opening Of The 2024-2025 NBA Season

October 23, 2024

The great thing about this iteration of the Boston Celtics is that they don’t have a mind-bending otherworldly talent like Prime LeBron, which is both...

Detective Rhinestone

October 21, 2024

image via: https://www.flickr.com/photos/torstenreimer/8246856744 Detective Edgar Rhinestone had to be the dumbest detective that I’d ever encountered in my...

The Internet Must Be A Perpetual Glissando Tied To Every Other Glissando That Has Ever Been or Will Be

October 9, 2024

How Wong Kar Wai Made Chungking Express With $0In our continuing interest in the rumored existence of ‘an indie’ internet, may we present: Printernet — a...

Celebrity Status

September 24, 2024

Is it just me, or is it … weird to have a national magazine profile accompany your courageous moral stance gleaned from a ten-day trip? It feels a little bit...

Unaccountability Machines

September 8, 2024

The CDC has repeatedly changed the way in which it’s color-coded what constitutes high-levels of Covid on their maps. The New York Times, Politico, and...

Acknowledging the existence of Palestinians is not anti-semitic. Acknowledging the brutal suffering of Palestinians is not anti-semitic. Objecting to...

Surprise Links

April 13, 2024

who knows! / your guess is as good as mine! / it could be this / or this / it’s certainly not this / though maybe it’s this / or this / maybe? / maybe not! /...

Friendly Reminder.

April 5, 2024

I recently went to go see the poet Ada Limon talk about about her new book, The Hurting Kind. And while there certainly were interesting bits over the course...

A Claymation Fox Growing Flowers in Its Garden

February 22, 2024

This is basically the sequel to the National Review cruise essay Joe Hagan wrote for New York Magazine in 2012.Song: “1000 Times” by Big Blood.I’ve been...

Are Newsletters Newsletters? Are Publications Publications? We Turn To An Expert To Hear More, See More, Be More, Be Less, To Float Upon the Wind (& More.)

February 9, 2024

“How To Build A Small Solar-Powered System.”“A History of Chuck E. Cheese, via Last Week Tonight.” Being walked through this particular history also serves...

Thinking Out Loud

January 19, 2024

Substack still seems perfectly comfortable making money off Nazis. People still seem perfectly comfortable making excuses for Nazis. Platformer has left...

Something I Noticed

December 24, 2023

A quick video I put together after noticing something about the beginning of Beverly Hills Cop. Thanks for reading this year. Whether it was “The Rib and The...

Repetition.

December 14, 2023

It feels like Blindboy and Emily Hilliard are both trying to get at the same thing through two different angles with their most recent work. Hilliard —...

A Chat with Nicole Graev Lipson

November 21, 2023

The beginning of “As They Like It.” Here’s what I know: as a classmate, Nicole Graev Lipson made grad school worthwhile; as a fellow writer, I will be...

Steven Spielberg interviews Martin Scorsese (2023)

November 19, 2023

The Israel-Hamas War, ctd.

November 13, 2023

The complicating, nuanced thing about speech is that — amongst many other things — speech is a community act. Hamas’s founding charter is as absurd as it is...

re: Berman

October 30, 2023

For those of you who haven’t read it yet and are currently looking for something to read, I want to recommend this cluster of essays about the late David...

Creative Scabbing

October 29, 2023

I wonder if it might be appropriate to frame The New Yorker profile of Hasan Minhaj as a kind of creative scabbing. To explain (and, let me be clear: this...

Thematically Grouped Words

October 21, 2023

Let’s try taking news stories regarding relatively contemporary events and put them into thematic clusters. It should go without saying that this is an...

Words, words, words.

October 13, 2023

I was at the Boston Marathon bombing. I was walking through an alley towards the finish line with a large crowd when I heard a distant thump, a fact that...

On and On and On And On

October 10, 2023

Years ago, spurred on by the creation of the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive, I found myself trying to figure out how the golden age of hip-hop aging would...

Remix: Questions.

September 25, 2023

Question: Who are some of the people you’re currently thinking of when it comes to thinking about things at the level of the sentence … and, why? Answer:...

Remix: Place.

September 19, 2023

The number of rabbits that emerge in the night in Providence, Rhode Island hints at the existence of a magic trick that exists somewhere at the intersection...

Remix: Music.

September 17, 2023

A Willie Nelson song and a car slipping into the approaching dusk like someone straightening their tie. Half-jokingly describing the surrounding mountains as...