Adjacent Weekend

This week: a synchronized real-time archive of how 9/11 unfolded across TV, radio, and pagers; the sartorial richness of silent-era cinema; and Gloria Steinem's final essay on what it means to have lived a long, lucky life.

Waxy.org · 20 minutes

Grief, War, and Human Grace

The New Yorker's anniversary reflection sits with the ritual itself — the bell-tolling, the reading of names — and examines what twenty-five years of returning to the same grief has actually taught us. Meditative rather than newsy, more interested in mourning as a civic practice than in relitigating the day's politics.

The New Yorker · 12 minutes

The Sartorial Riches of the Silent-Film Era

Before sound, costume had to do the talking. This piece argues that silent film produced some of cinema's most expressive, exaggerated, and genuinely influential fashion. A useful corrective for anyone who assumes "old movies" means visually flat: silence forced clothes to become dialogue.

The New Yorker · 10 minutes

9/11 in Realtime" doesn't tell you what to feel — it just puts you back inside the confusion, pager by pager, before anyone knew how the story would end.

Gloria Steinem's final essay, posthumously published by the New Yorker

Steinem's last piece of writing is a short, plainspoken meditation on the privilege and strangeness of having lived a long life — what she noticed, what she'd tell her younger self, what she still didn't have answers for. It reads like a hand on your shoulder rather than a manifesto, which is its own kind of surprise from a woman who spent a career making arguments.

kottke.org · 8 minutes

Henry Farrell and Abe Newman on Weaponized Interdependence

Krugman sits down with the two political scientists who coined the term now shaping how policymakers think about sanctions, chip export controls, and SWIFT. The conversation is a clear-eyed tour of how global economic networks became instruments of coercion — useful background for understanding half the geopolitical headlines of the last five years.

Paul Krugman / Substack · 18 minutes

One Ring to Rule Them All

Scott Galloway turns his signature blend of self-deprecation and data into a meditation on what wearable health tracking reveals about how we've outsourced self-knowledge to devices — and what it costs to keep score of our own bodies. Funnier and more personal than his usual market analysis, with a sting at the end.

Scott Galloway · 11 minutes

Nothing is certain except death and robotaxis

FT Alphaville's characteristically dry look at the darker undercurrents of the robotaxi rollout — including the unsettling fact that some of these companies now field actual death threats, and what that says about public trust in autonomous systems. Sharp, funny, and more substantive than the headline suggests.

FT Alphaville · 9 minutes

I Was at Ground Zero — The Thing I Remember Most Is a Plate of Rigatoni

A small, specific memory — a plate of pasta amid the wreckage — becomes the entry point for a much larger essay about how trauma lodges in the senses rather than the facts. Narratively's appeal is exactly this kind of piece: unexpected, human-scaled, and more affecting than a straightforward retrospective.

Narratively · 13 minutes