No Friday Files
Culture as company
No Friday Files this week.
Not because nothing happened, but because I reached that very specific point where being “plugged in” stopped feeling like awareness and started feeling like a personal form of torture. By Thursday night, I realized I had consumed an entire week of information without retaining a single thought I actually wanted to keep, which is usually my sign that it’s time to slide my chair away from the newsfeed and toward something that doesn’t refresh itself every twelve seconds.
This week, that meant culture. Not culture as escape, but culture as company. The kind that’s there while you’re chopping onions or staring out the window.
So instead of The Friday Files, here’s what’s been feeding me, amusing me, and keeping me company.
What I’m Watching
Pluribus
I’ve learned over time that I don’t always click with Apple TV shows, which I say with affection and a slight sense of betrayal because on paper they should be exactly my thing. They’re smart, well-crafted, prestigious in the way that suggests everyone involved read the entire script and drank water. And yet, I often find myself admiring them more than feeling them, like I’m touring a very impressive home that I wouldn’t actually want to live in.
Pluribus broke through that resistance almost immediately.
What pulled me in wasn’t the sci-fi premise so much as the emotional déjà vu. A global event reshapes society, everyone agrees to move forward together, and there’s an unspoken pressure to accept the terms of that progress, whether or not you’re ready. Watching it, I kept thinking about that strange stretch after the pandemic when “we’re all getting back to normal” became both a reassurance and a threat, and when expressing ongoing grief or confusion started to feel like you were holding up the line.
Watch the preview here:
What I’m Listening To
“Little Miss (TCTS Remix)” – GIRLSET & TCTS
I am once again here to report that pop music remains a perfectly valid emotional support system.
My friend Dominic sent me this track while I was driving. I put it on, and by the second chorus I knew it was a windows-down kind of song. The remix adds just enough edge to feel fresh without complicating things. I shared it immediately. Flat tire and all, it carried me through.
This bouncy pop song has become the underscore to my day. Easy, replayable, and quietly confident. It’s been on while I’ve been writing, cooking, and half-starting things.
Listen here, but please don’t email me if you end up looping it twelve times.
What I’m Reading
Soul of the Age by Jonathan Bate
I love Shakespeare, and I’m picky about how people write about him. What’s working for me here is the book’s insistence on treating him as a working artist rather than a fixed certainty. It keeps him inside the conditions that shaped the work: political volatility, censorship, plague, ambition, class anxiety, and the practical pressure of earning a living. I’ve been reading it slowly, mostly at night, and it rewards that pace.
This is slightly ironic, given that I do, in fact, have a bust of Shakespeare in my house, a gift from my college theatre professor, John Shout. He’d appreciate the distinction.
What I find comforting is the reminder that good work isn’t made by escaping the mess, but by noticing what’s happening while you’re still in it. That idea has stayed with me.
What I’m Loving
Ian McKellen – “Appeal to Humanity”
I’ve seen Ian McKellen perform Shakespeare live, including a King Lear that stayed with me for years. Watching him on Colbert brought that feeling back. Not because it was dramatic, but because of what he chose to say. He talked about immigration, fear, and dehumanization, then reached for Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More, sharing a speech written for a moment when people were being told to see their neighbors as threats.
He didn’t modernize it. He didn’t explain it. He trusted it. And in doing so, he trusted the audience. In a moment that rewards outrage and volume, that trust feels quietly radical.
Watch it here.
When Culture and Politics Collide
Lately, it’s become clear to me that some of the most important resistance isn’t happening in politics at all. It’s happening in culture. Artists and writers are shaping how people think and feel simply because audiences choose to engage with them.
Culture is where people are still figuring out what they believe and what they won’t accept, before those ideas turn into laws or norms. It doesn’t look dramatic, but it matters.
This Week’s Essay
The Empty Hall
This essay is about buildings, power, and the instinct to replace participation with permanence when authority feels unsettled. It’s about what happens when living culture withdraws quietly, and how quickly the response becomes control rather than curiosity.
Culture will still be here. I will too.
Loved Pluribus!