Something For the Weekend #36
Elvis Presley Blues, Dream Song 171, and Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: selections from the wonderful and the weird for the week ending Feb. 27, 2026
Happy Friday, team!
What a week, I’m so grateful you’re here. I want to thank Kelly Stonelake again for helping me launch the Daily Active User Podcast—Part 2 was posted earlier this week. I am currently lining up more guests, and can’t wait to share the next episode with you all.
Loving your work.
Benj
Top 5 this week from the Daily Active User:
My most listened to Gillian Welch song is the incredible "Look at Miss Ohio," which I've been singing to myself daily since it first came out in 2003. There are many artists in that category—Elliott Smith and Chris Whitley, to name two—but today I was inspired to share Welch’s "Elvis Presley Blues." It’s simply epic and deserves an immediate listen if you’ve never heard it (or it's been a while). I love the recording and her voice on this one in particular, and what a melody. Such great harmonies too. Not sure how the King would have felt about it, but it hits home for me. I don’t know much about the recording process for this track, but if it's as raw as it appears in the video here, I love it even more!
I got hooked on the glorious and tragic John Berryman when my uncle gave me The Dream Songs for Christmas sometime in the '90s. My mental capacity being what it is, I had to start at the beginning—I can't just dive in at any old place. Once I finished, I had to explore all of Berryman’s other works. There are so many lines I return to, but Dream Song 171 is the one that made me fall in love with the book. A sad life, indeed, and a sad ending. He made The Dream Songs a wonderful place to get lost—funny, touching, heartbreaking, and worth taking the time to get through from start to finish. I now permit myself to dive in at random, and encourage you to do the same. One other thing to share: one of his favorite quotes. Although I'm breaking the Something for the Weekend newsletter format, it's too wonderful to leave out, and of course, it tips its hat to Homer: "Ah then I mutter, 'forty-odd years past. Do I yet repine?' and go about your business, a fair wind and the honey lights of home being all I ask this wind-torn foreign evening." —Overseas Prayer, John Berryman
I read this when it came out and recall so much of it like it was yesterday. Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is a wonderful book—a love letter to New York City music history from 1973–77, written in piercing detail by Will Hermes. It will make you yearn to have been there. What I love is that it covers not just the well-known artists, but the more obscure and avant-garde ones too. From the heights of CBGB to sparsely attended loft shows and the birth of hip-hop, it's all in there, written about with love and admiration in vivid and captivating prose. I've lived in New York for a long time and lived through a scene or two, but nothing like what Hermes shares here. You really feel like you're going with him to these shows, transported into the New York of that time in all its ragged and filthy glory. I'm sure if an homage to my band's era was written in this style, it would be more captivating than the times I actually lived through. There's always a danger of too much nostalgia, but we did have some fun—and as is apparent from this book, so did they.
Mokkiri-zake:
“But just as alarming as what ICE has done in American cities in the first year of Trump’s second term is what the agency has in store for the next three — no matter the tide of public opinion. Last year Trump’s signature domestic policy law helped roughly triple the ICE budget, allocating $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers and hiring 10,000 new agents. One dispiriting lesson of the imperial boomerang is that, once bought and paid for, structures of intimidation and oppression tend to endure.” - ICE Is Waging War on Blue Cities - New York Times - David Wallace-Wells
“Reading the tea leaves, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google are racing to reassure customers before they think about migrating to independent European digital infrastructure — the so-called “Eurostack”. The US companies are offering European customers sovereign cloud solutions that promise data localisation and operational control.
Yet these offerings avoid the elephants in the room: the US Cloud Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The former, signed by Trump (probably with a Sharpie) in his first term, grants American authorities the power to force US companies to hand over data around the world. The latter gives US intelligence services significant powers, including access required for digital snooping.
Cybersecurity expert Fleur van Leusden likens tech company attempts to sell sovereignty as a service to vegan chicken breast; it cannot be both. Technology is either sovereign or it is foreign.” - Tech sovereignty should not be a subscription model - Financial Times - Marietje Schaake
“Here is the emblematic inner struggle of our age: to preserve the ability to be shocked. “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” Dostoyevsky wrote. A blessing that is also a curse.” - The Triumph of Indecency - The Atlantic - Jeffrey Goldberg
“I saw my people lean— not toward hope but toward each other.” - Psalm for the Slightly Tilted - The New Yorker - Ilya Kaminsky
“Ancient peoples used to build huge temples to the gods they wanted to please and appease, to make them sacrifices and offerings. In the process they created architecture. We are somehow going the opposite way, creating the gods that could destroy us while housing them in the most nondescript, generic buildings imaginable.” - Welcome to a post-human world: the vast anonymity of the data centre - The Financial Times - Edwin Heathcote
“one in five Americans believe they may have to resort to violence to get their country back on track. The internet has made it feel like each of our tribes inhabits different, irreconcilable realities. And yet somehow, on Wikipedia, people manage to reach a consensus every day. How did that happen?” Wikipedia may be the largest compendium of human knowledge ever created, but can it survive? - Darren Loucaides