Adjacent Weekend

This week: what David Attenborough's centenary reveals about our relationship with the natural world, the case for fish dying well, a fresh profile of Barack Obama in the Trump years, how uniform rental contracts became a window into American monopoly power, and the cult film that accidentally mapped our geopolitical present.

A Century of David Attenborough

He turned 100 this week, and The New Yorker's letter from the UK reads less as a birthday tribute than a genuine attempt to explain what Attenborough actually did — how one man's voice became the medium through which most of the world first understood the natural world as something alive and urgent. It treats his effect as the story, not his longevity.

The New Yorker · 12 min

Barack Obama on What His Role Is Now

Nine years out of the White House, Obama is still working out in public what a former president does when the country moves in a direction he finds alarming — but when speaking too loudly risks making things worse. This New Yorker profile doesn't let him off easy, and it's more interesting for it. What emerges is a portrait of a man genuinely wrestling with the limits of institutional faith.

The New Yorker · 20 min

Fine Print: How Uniform Rental Contracts Explain the U.S. Economy

The humble uniform rental agreement — the thing a small business signs when they need work shirts — turns out to be a clear example of how monopoly power hides in plain sight. Matt Stoller traces how buried contract clauses lock businesses into indefinite arrangements they never meaningfully agreed to, and uses it to explain how American commerce actually works at the ground level.

The Big Newsletter · 15 min

The Perfect Way to Kill a Fish

A GQ piece about the ethics and technique of killing fish sounds like it might be precious, but it isn't — it's a strange and absorbing investigation into consciousness, pain, and what we owe to creatures we eat. The person at its center has spent years trying to answer a question most people don't want to ask, and his obsessiveness drives the whole thing.

GQ · 18 min

“For generations of television viewers in the United Kingdom and around the world, David Attenborough has performed a kind of secular miracle: transporting the vast natural world in all its glimmering, nearly absurd abundance directly into our quietest, most familiar spaces.” — The New Yorker

The 2006 Film That Predicted the Strait of Hormuz Blockade

Richard Kelly's Southland Tales was dismissed on arrival as a bloated mess — booed at Cannes, barely released, quickly forgotten. This interview, pegged to a moment when the film's geopolitical fever dreams look less like paranoia and more like a rough draft, lets Kelly reflect on what he was actually trying to make. Whether you've seen the film or not, it's a fascinating conversation about the gap between intention and reception, and about what happens when satire outruns its moment.

GQ · 14 min

Do Billionaires Earn Their Money?

Noah Smith takes a question that usually generates more heat than light and actually tries to answer it — breaking apart the different mechanisms by which enormous wealth accumulates and asking which ones are defensible on their own terms. The conclusion is less interesting than the framework: the distinction between billionaires who built something and those who extracted something is less clean than either side of the political debate tends to admit.

Noahpinion · 15 min

Become A Better Graphic Designer by Thinking Like a Sign-Painter

Six weeks into a traditional sign-painting course, a working graphic designer reflects on what the slower, more physical discipline is teaching her about the digital work she does every day. The constraints of a brush and a flat surface reveal things about letterforms and composition that software actively hides from you, and this piece makes the practical argument for why that matters.

Beth Mathews · 8 min