Dubious practices

10 things worth sharing this week

“Dubious practices,” newspaper + marker, 2025

Hey y’all,

On Tuesday night I joked, grimly, “Well, that was a long week!”

It’s finally Friday. Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. If you’d like to start a family movie night, I wrote about a dozen lessons we’ve learned from our favorite ritual. (A tip from the comments, that I co-sign: some kids will watch almost anything if you let them stay up late!)
   
   

2. The Slits’ Cut was one of my favorite new-to-me discoveries of 2025, so I began the year by reading guitarist Viv Albertine’s memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. I enjoyed the urgency of the present tense and learning about the band’s early days. (Their cover of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” was the first song they ever recorded in a studio?!?) But what really hit me is the second half of the book when Albertine comes back to music after being a mother and a housewife. In some ways, it’s the most “Punk” part of the book. She has to re-learn how to play the guitar and starts writing songs about her life and driving 3 hours so she can sing two of them at an open mic night in a dinky little pub. There’s no triumphant ending, just a woman doing what she feels like she was born to do, at no small cost.
   
   

3. “The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth. The holy sensibilities of genius — for all the sensibilities of genius are holy — keep their possessor essentially unhurt as long as animal spirits and the idea of being young last; but the perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth; when the world comes to them, not with the song of the siren, against which all books warn us, but as a wise old man counselling acquiescence in what is below them.” So wrote Elizabeth Peabody.
   
   

4. “My true nature–which I suppressed in order to function and succeed as an adult–is surfacing again.” Reading Albertine’s memoir reminded me of re-watching the 2003 documentary about Metallica, Some Kind of Monster, where they’re middle-aged (they were all younger than I am now, actually) and going to therapy and scheduling band practices around their kids’ school drop-offs and pick-ups. I remember watching it in my 20s and thinking it was pathetically not Metal, and now I think it’s one of the most Metal things they ever did.
   
   

5. Six music documentaries filmmaker Penny Lane loves. (Come to think of it, 2021 was a particularly good year for watching music movies!) Penny and I talked more about music and movies in a delightful live chat that you should watch if you haven’t.
   
   

6. A list of books, movies, art, and music that enter the public domain in 2026. One of them is Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop, which I meant to read a few years ago when I was in New Mexico.
   
   

7. I polled y’all about your favorite reads of 2025, and I was delighted by how many folks enjoyed Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, which was one of my favorite reads of 2024. A book I’ve put in my queue thanks to your recommendations: Fredrik Backman’s My Friends. If it’s half as good as this speech, it will be very good. (I need to stop reading Sherlock Holmes stories and Montaigne essays first. Might be a while.)
   
   

8. “Rip it up and start again.” (The only one of these writing practices I endorse is re-typing your drafts.)
   
   

9. “They haven’t got me yet, baby.” We re-watched Billy Wilder’s The Apartment last week, and it was even better than I remembered. Could it be the ultimate dead week movie? The only competition, in my opinion, is The Thin Man, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s marathon lineup would make a solid week of viewing, too:

   

   (One time someone asked PTA in a Q&A to name a great movie he loves that nobody’s seen and he replied, “I like watching movies that lots of people have seen.” I love that.)
   
   

10. In case you missed it last week, here’s my big list of 100 things that made my 2025.

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xoxo,

Austin