Justin Stach

Learn to union—

We may have our differences, but at the end of the day when we take off our pillow cases we all have upsettingly yellow pillows

Car people man, they’re fucking nuts. American car people are a whole other level of fucking nuts though.

Happy 30th to the first Ben Folds Five album. Wrote you some thoughts on it from tour bus, as i listened to it all the wau theoigh for first time in 3 decades www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=...

There’s a subset dude-writers who I have always described as “40-year-old Holden Caulfields,” and it just occurred to me that they are uniformly killing it on substack.

Algorithmically, Substack really seems to appreciate grown-ass men whining about how everyone else is a huge phony.

📌

Urgh, so sorry. That’s a whole world of insurance I thankfully don’t have to think about.

I feel farmed.

It really needs to calm down.

I have measure my life in coffee spoons and insurance renewal letters.

Fuck me, a 50% increase in home insurance. Aside from the huge dollop of pisstake, what’s driving that sort of raise?

@garyseconomics.bsky.social On the interview on Leading you mentioned a book written in London slang. I can’t seem to find it again, would you point me in the right direction?

One weird dude maybe, but the context was a general public freaking-out about ‘video nasties’ and the BBFC not yet classifying them, as well as the causal availability of things like throwing stars and nunchucks.

I mean look at this, it’s even featuring the 1980s Milk Tray packaging.

Would love that. When I was young my folks had this book on Colour which I was obsessed with and almost entirely responsible for where I ended up in life. I’ve recently bought a copy again for myself and it’s still great.

www.abebooks.co.uk/978095079011...

Weird that the ‘start with user needs’ gang, right in the heart of government, never managed this.

Such a great album.

Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago Neanderthals intensively processed a minimum of 172 large mammals for grease and marrow fat, 125,000 years ago.

So they found a 125,000 yr old Neanderthal fat rendering plant & I have thoughts.

Knowing that they loved saturated fat SO MUCH that they industrialized to get as much of it as humanly possible?

Makes me feel seen, heard, supported, etc www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Forest with Chains

Forest with Chains https://www.wikiart.org/en/graham-sutherland/forest-with-chains-1973

Trump acknowledges ‘real starvation’ in Gaza and tells Israel to let in ‘every ounce of food’ Starmer said to have pressed US president on humanitarian crisis during talks at Turnberry golf resort in Scotland

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
I’ll take that as a win and I don’t care how much grovelling Starmer had to do to get it. Nothing was more important and to get those words from Trump.

But I also do think it’s a book about something, it’s asking the reader to think about collective trauma and how we as groups process that.

I think that bewilderment is very intentional. The narrator for example is temporally undefined; the characters’ retold (retold) narratives seem to let the reader drift and then catch something more substantial. It’s wonderfully written.

I don’t think it is specifically, that’s just where I first went with it. I’d say it’s more universal and about that very human need to forget and also to emember being in tension.

Yes, I think that processing of how it made me feel and what it made me think about was part of what made reading it so satisfying. @hassinator.bsky.social may have primed me with the idea of Brexit but it made me think first about the Balkan conflict.

The experience of reading it you mean? I did notice that at several times it was almost as if the author was trying to trip my memory up, although I can’t be sure that’s not just me being a less fastidious reader than I once was.

Got its hooks in me around part 2 at which point I was sneaking away from the pool to snatch a few more chapters.

There’s definitely something of Brexit in it, or maybe that Brexit is just our most recent act of collective amnesia (COVID though?).

I suspect this one’s going to live with me for a long time.

Just finished. Heartbreaking and wonderfully provocative. Thank you.

Love that.