Something For the Weekend #34
Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, California Stars, and MediCrunch: selections from the wonderful and the weird for the week ending Feb. 13, 2026
Happy Friday team,
What a week this was! So much to share, so little time.
Enjoy this week’s selections.
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Benj
Top 5 this week from the Daily Active User:
When my much better half and I were first dating, we decided to exchange books that meant a lot to us—our music tastes were mostly incompatible, and the same went for television and movies, though ironically, she did seem to like the band I was in. Her choice for me was James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Heathen that I was at the time, it was my first Baldwin, and I absolutely loved it. So maybe she does have impeccable taste, and it’s mine we should worry about? My book for her was The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso. I’ve come back to this book endlessly—a re-telling of the Greek and Roman myths in such beautiful language. This one has never been far from my side, no matter where I’ve been in the world. My second reading was on a Greek island many years ago—quite the setting for such an epic. Calasso places you directly in some of these famous scenes, but because he’s gone through all the sources, he also reveals the differences over time, translation, and culture. Myths we might know so well, when told from different angles can sit strangely against our memories, and it’s wonderful to be given multiple vantage points on our strange shared past. I love his other books too—The Ruin of Kasch, a wonderfully eclectic romp through the court of Napoleon (focusing on the mercurial Talleyrand), and Ka, another major feat in the style of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony—though they’re not as moving to me. You needn’t read this in one great chomp, but can continually pick at it. Each look will reveal a little more. Enjoy.
"California Stars," the fantastic song resulting from the collaboration between Billy Bragg and Wilco that brought Woody Guthrie's unreleased songs to life on Mermaid Avenue, remains my favorite song on the record. A beautiful recording with glorious production, "California Stars" stands out for me, along with "Walt Whitman's Niece," “At My Window, Sad and Lonely,” and "Eisler on the Go." There's a great documentary, Man in the Sand, about the making of this record that captures the passion Bragg brought to the process. Guthrie's songs sound absolutely incredible—just the imagery when you listen to "California Stars," with its amazing lyrics and wonderful arrangements, brought together by superb musicians, is breathtaking. While the second volume didn't do as much for me, many more recordings have emerged since then. The first record is really well worth a re-listen in high resolution if it's been a while. And if it's your first time, get to it.
Our dog Mochi has epilepsy, and we've been managing it with expert help from our vets and the hospital. Mochi is now on a decent number of pills every day that keep her seizures under control, and we've tried every method of getting these pills into her and found most of them wanting. Medi-Crunch solved it. These little beauties are like mini ice cream cones filled with peanut butter for dogs, and she absolutely loves them. With regular peanut butter or other products recommended by the vet, we found she would spit up the pills or lick around them. But for the three pills she has to take morning and night, MediCrunch hasn’t let us down. It seems like a family business worth supporting, too.
Mokkiri-zake:
“above all change, betrayals of falling suns, and this season lasted one moment, like the pause between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace, but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.” - The Season of Phantasmal Peace via If Birds Ran the World - Maria Popova - Derek Walcott
“As the 2000s turned into the 2010s, I noticed that my fellow liberals had stopped using the word ‘liberal’, and begun to use ‘progressive’ instead. At first I thought this was a defensive response to taunting from Fox News talk show hosts who had made ‘liberal’ a dirty word. As late as 2013, I saw little difference between the values of Barack Obama and the ideals I had grown up with. But beginning in the mid-2010s, I began to understand that my political ‘side’ had evolved beyond the goals and beliefs of the late 20th century.” - Where does a liberal go from here? - Noah Smith
“I’m not naive. Music won’t fix everything. But it can have much, much more power. I choose all of us. I choose to believe that music will create jobs, fight poverty, enshrine democratic principles, improve healthcare, fight the climate emergency and, in doing so, weaponize it as a force for good.I’m asking you to join me—not just as a fan of the music you love, but as a believer in the potential of music as a collective force. Let’s stop letting algorithms drive our outrage and start letting human-made art drive our empathy.” - Making Places Better Is Changing: My Plan For 2026 - Shain Shapiro, PhD
“RIP John CareyThe literary critic John Carey died before Christmas. Carey was one of the greatest critics of the post war era and one of my heroes: cantankerous, enjoyably anti-elitist and beautifully insightful about poetry. This passage from his book What Good Are the Arts? is one of my all time favourite passages of literary criticism. Carey is making the argument that literature is the greatest artform partly because it can acheive the quality of “imagination-stirring indistinctness”. And it is this genius for indistinctness, he says, that can help us to understand why Shakespeare was a better writer than his rival Christopher Marlowe:” - The elite student disability epidemic, why classical statues weren’t as ugly as you think, semantic leakage, the secret of Shakespeare’s genius - James Marriott
“I’m sure therapy helps many young people. But when we find ourselves paying a stranger to tell us they are proud, logging into Zoom to be listened to, needing experts to assure us we are enough, we should wonder what we are really looking for, who we really needed to hear this from. We might not be paying for therapists. We might be paying for parents.” - Therapists Are Not Parents - Girls - Freya India
“This post provides a downpayment on what it might mean to think of AI as a social technology in particular. It suggests that AI is another social shock in the long series of shocks that are the Long Industrial Revolution. When we look at the Industrial Revolution, we tend to overemphasize the technologies themselves, and underestimate the social, economic, political and organizational changes that went along with them. That is likely a mistake.” - My favorite posts from 2025 - Henry Farrell
Can I have a few of those peanut butter pill cones? It’d make the propecia go down so smooth
Something for everybody here. From doggie tablet problem solutions to the reality that Woodie Guthrie was making sense for us way back then and that the ancients were not as oblique as we may have thought them. I like it a lot.
M