Designed to break your heart

10 things worth sharing this week

“Ambition,” newspaper + marker, 2025

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” That’s the opening of “The Green Fields of the Mind,” collected in the slim, wonderful volume A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti. Recommended if you like thinking about America, baseball, and The Odyssey. (“Baseball is about going home, and how hard it is to get there and how driven is our need. It tells us how good home is.”)
   
   

2. Sports documentary: I learned about Giamatti — actor Paul Giamatti’s dad! — and his writing from the ending of the Netflix documentary series, The Clubhouse: A Year With the Red Sox, which follows the team throughout their 2024 season. I was particularly taken with the quirkiness of Triston Casas and the brutal perfectionism of Jarren Duran. (Here’s a funny scene of them dealing with car trouble.)
   
   

3. Music documentary: A few days after we finished The Clubhouse, I convinced the OG Lilith Fair attendee in our house to watch Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, a film I learned about from executive producer and critic Jessica Hopper. A great example of how 1 + 1 = 3 when it comes to watching stuff — if you chase a sports documentary about men performing together with a music documentary about women performing together, it makes for interesting comparisons and contrasts. (One of the most poignant sequences is when Sheryl Crow takes a break from Lilith to participate in the fiasco of Woodstock ‘99 — lo and behold, there’s Fred Durst spitting nonsense in a backwards Yankees hat.)
   
   

4. “Online, big work gets smaller, while smaller work stays the same or gets bigger.” Some notes on art and scale.
   
   

5. Ear candy: I made a mixtape for the miserable, hot, dusty October Country that is Texas at the moment: No Fun!

   

   Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube

   For 8 more hours of pure and impure moods, check out all the monthly mixtapes I’ve made this year.

   
   

6. I got to catch up with writer Oliver Burkeman on the Austin, TX stop of his US tour celebrating the paperback release of Meditations for Mortals. The last time we talked was 3 years ago in a Zoom chat about his book Four Thousand Weeks. Great guy, great writer. (His newsletter The Imperfectionist is one of my favorites.)
   
   

7. RIP writer Kaleb Horton. I didn’t know him, but his work and friendship meant a lot to people I admire. (Anyone who’s as big a fan of Charles Portis as I am is probably somebody I’d be down to hang with.)

   
   

8. “The book is a vessel for all my weird things that get me excited.” Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway came to the Paramount here in Austin to talk about her new cookbook, Good Things. In particular, I enjoyed hearing about her literary influences: she shouted out Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, friend of the newsletter Ross Gay, Joy Harjo’s poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” and Raymond Carver’s short story “A Small, Good Thing,” which is where she got the title of the book. (“You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.”)
   

   

   Some drawn-in-the-dark doodles

   
   

9. RIP Jane Goodall. My favorite story about her is the time Gary Larson goofed on her and she wound up writing an intro to a Far Side collection.
   
   

10. Everything I know about the art of writing a newsletter.
    

Thanks for reading. This hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To keep Friday free for everyone, buy me time to do fun stuff like typewriter interviews and mixtapes, and get an extra exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin