Kevin Hyde

I've got a short story up at @clereviewbooks.bsky.social about a cable home renovation show and how it causes a small town to fall, rise, and then permanently fall. Big thanks to Caren Beilin for her wonderful edits on this.

I've got a short story up at @clereviewbooks.bsky.social about a cable home renovation show and how it causes a small town to fall, rise, and then permanently fall. Big thanks to Caren Beilin for her wonderful edits on this.

Townville, Cityton, Burgborough, Townburgh - Cleveland Review of Books And it worked. Neighbor helping neighbor. Neighbor chopping it up with neighbor. Saying hey. Crossing the street to ask how the kids were.

When the cable renovation show announced it was going to take over a different town for its mass renovation special, the town council called for an emergency town meeting right after the regular one.

@molars.bsky.social,Townville, Cityton, Burgborough, Townburgh
clereviewofbooks.com/townville-ci...

City of Blights Visiting Paris with Balzac – Michael Robbins

Reading Balzac in Paris for @bookforum.bsky.social

www.bookforum.com/print/3203/c...

Benito Bowl Wasn’t About Them—It Was About Us How Bad Bunny triumphed on the Super Bowl stage.

On the biggest U.S. stage, Bad Bunny showed why he is so massive, and why his Grammy-winning love letter to his homeland, 𝘋𝘦𝘣𝘪́ 𝘛𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘳 𝘔𝘢𝘴 𝘍𝘰𝘵𝘰𝘴, resonates across the world—from Latin America to Palestine to China to Switzerland

Hearing Things Independent music journalism. No algorithms. We promise.

if u want to subscribe to an independent, worker-owned music and culture pub w/great criticism (and features, interviews, blogs etc) from five ppl you know and love, hearing things launched in october 2024 in the wake of conde nast's pitchfork layoffs :)

www.hearingthings.co

THE FOOD SCENE HELEN, HELP ME: ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF CHEESEBURGERS A New Yorker food critic answers questions about burger toppings, beef tallow, and the subjectivity of memory. By Helen Rosner January 18, 2026

How do you approach the sweetness of pickle relish on a cheeseburger? Does it complement or compete with ketchup? There was a legendary place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that used to do mustard, relish, and ketchup, and I can't for the life of me decide if I loved it, or if I just loved being there in the middle of the night eating it. — Brian K., N.Y. C. Honestly, I've never really considered pickle relish to be one of the hamburger's totemic toppings. Sliced pickle rounds, certainly; spears on the side, without a doubt. But relish, that finely chopped, neon-hued, marmalade-textured stuff? To me, that's a hot-dog thing-which I mention here not to issue judgment but rather to illustrate how distinct my own personal associations are from your own. Herein, I think, lies the answer to your real question, which is not actually about the sweetness of the relish. The question of what toppings make a burger great, while we're eating it, is both technical and trivial, having to do with the nature of the patty and the bun, the mood of the establishment serving it, the sensibilities of the person eating it, even the time of day or night or life.

Regarding the substance of the burger itself, the same accoutrements that might show a slim, lacey-edged smash patty in its best light—a little slick of mustard, a few circles of raw onion, and a melty cap of American cheese, say-might be too flimsy against the brawny heft of a half-pound bar burger that can sustain degrees of sweetness, richness, and piquancy (your barbecue sauces, your secondary meats, your nontraditional cheeses) that would suffocate a smaller patty. But what you're really asking, I think, is what makes a burger great not as it's being eaten but as it lives on in memory. Or, more to the point, how can we know that our memories of happiness are true? I spend an inordinate portion of my professional life creeping around in my own psyche, untangling knots of nostalgia and pleasure and, god, so many emotions, not least self-love and self-loathing, all of them unavoidable colorants of any bite I take. I give myself the task of locating some sort of unassailable, uncontaminated truth: that this dish of dumplings, or that cocktail, or such-and-such restaurant is actually, inarguably, wonderful. It's impossible, of course, and more than a little absurd, but it's so irresistible, isn't it, to attempt to discharge the burden of our own experience?

Was that burger you ate from the Tasty, in Harvard Square? I think it must have been, and it's been nearly thirty years since that perfect little sandwich shop closed forever. I imagine it was a simple construction: a bun, a patty, a slice of cheese, ketchup, mustard, relish. But you created it, just as much as the white-capped guy standing at the grill did. The mouth and brain and cascade of sensations were yours. There is no true burger per se, lurking behind your experience of it; it didn't become the burger you ate until you ate it. It's a ludicrous idea, this notion of an objective culinary truth, but it's even more ludicrous that we're so quick to doubt our own taste in pursuit of it. Just as I go looking for proof that my rapture— or, at times, misery—at a given meal has nothing at all to do with me, here you are wondering whether you should append an asterisk to your reminiscence of a long-ago cheeseburger, one that you could never eat again, even if the Tasty were still up and running. Why question a recollection of sweetness, even of the pickle variety? You did love the relish. And you love the person you see in your memory: a young man, awake in the middle of the night, a burger topped with relish in his hands.

Sometimes someone writes to my intermittent @newyorker.com advice column and sets me up in a manner resembling Payton alley-ooping Kent www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Such a good read!

Great story from @nickarvin.bsky.social, who's gonna publish a story a week through his newsletter.

An Intro Forthcoming: a new novel and 52 fictions

Starting 2026 with a couple of announcements:

1. I have a new book coming in spring of '27 via @europaeditions.bsky.social.

2. I'm going to do an insane thing and attempt to send out a story a week for the next year.

Check it out at the link and subscribe!

The Nimbus: A Novel A Novel

Today‘s the first half-birthday of THE NIMBUS! As good as any time to suggest that it would make an excellent holiday gift for the discerning fiction reader in your life. Order here or at your local indie, and DM me if you’d like a personalized bookplate to go with it:

bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

The Guitar-Bass Hybrid That Gives Tortoise Its Lonesome Sound Bassist and multi-instrumentalist Douglas McCombs has made the cult-favorite Bass VI a staple of the post-rock legends’ palette.

"I don’t know why, but there is something about that instrument that makes you want to play slow, melancholic music on it."

Such a treat to find THE NIMBUS on WaPo’s list of the best fiction of the year! www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/1...

Ping, You've Got Whale - bioGraphic A new artificial intelligence-powered detection system is giving ship captains real-time alerts when a whale is in their path.

Ping, You’ve Got Whale

A new artificial intelligence-powered detection system is giving ship captains real-time alerts when a whale is in their path.

by @ashleybraun.bsky.social

www.biographic.com/ping-youve-g...

The Nimbus - A Novel

Hi Bluesky friends, I’m giving out a handful of free Audible audiobook versions of my novel, THE NIMBUS. If you’d like a copy, DM me your name and email address. The offer’s good till they’re gone. Learn more about the book here: robertpbaird.com/nimbus/

“Driver” by Mattia Fillice — The Dial An excerpt.

Nightmares, passing the test, trial period, route assignments—

An excerpt from Mattia Filice's Driver, translated by Jacques Houis, is available at @thedialmag.bsky.social

Like J Dilla Zooted Off a Few Lines of Pixy Stix Powder Plus the catchiest song Dry Cleaning have ever made, a grown-and-sexy house-pop situation, and more.

I considered writing a treatise on a certain pop vortex’s song that details her man’s dick with the facepalm yucks of a B-level stand-up from the mid-’80s, but I decided instead to take advice, of sorts, from singer and rapper Shelailai: Don’t need it!

A book of my Creased Comics is coming this spring from NYRC.

Glad I can't actually watch it, haha. Looking at the score is bad enough

Really bad

Joel Calahan - The Bees — Verge Books

The publisher has only five copies left of my translation of Book IV of Vergil's Georgics, titled The Bees.

It's a beautifully designed little chapbook, with the classic drawing by Breughel on the cover, and typesetting by the designer Ken Botnick.

Get a copy for $10 before they're gone!

Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen Talks Old Scenes And A New Tour | Defector The last few years have seen the revival of many dormant musical acts. Oasis is well over halfway through a reunion tour that, for decades, had been the stuff of rumor. Radiohead is set to go on the…

Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen talks old scenes and a new tour: defector.com/grizzly-bear...

Tortoise spoke with @theguardian.com about their Chicago roots; the making of their new album, ‘𝐓𝐨𝐮𝐜𝐡,’ out next month; and the special shows they’re performing to celebrate the release of the album, their first in nine years 🦂✨
READ MORE: tinyurl.com/mr46fc7k

Photo: Heather Cantrell

Read Anna Gaca’s essay in LARB Quarterly no. 46, where she recounts her journey learning French and immersing herself in the language. “What trust is lost, what intimate connections with language, with culture, with auditory experience itself?” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/vous-ecoutez-rfi/

Special Areas; Roadless Area Conservation; National Forest System Lands The U.S. Department of Agriculture is initiating an environmental impact statement (EIS) and rulemaking concerning management of inventoried roadless areas on approximately 44.7 million acres of Natio...

TODAY is the deadline to submit public comment on Trump’s proposal to rescind the Roadless Rule, which would expose 45 million acres of national forest to permanent roads and their attendant environmental ills. Register your disapproval here:

www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

#roadecology

"This will never work": PARCHMENT (@parchmentmag.bsky.social), a literary journal devoted to contemporary Canadian Jewish writing, is returning to print.

I joined the editorial board because I don't feel "Jewish writing" needs to mean what it usually means, especially lately. 1/5

Unmasking the Sea Star Killer After a decade of carnage, we finally know what’s devastating sea stars along North America’s West Coast. Does that mean scientists can save them?

"To raise sunflower stars in captivity and release them to the Pacific, however, scientists must first learn how to keep stars from dying. And for that, they must know what’s killing them in the first place."

@craigwelch.bsky.social for @biographic.bsky.social: www.biographic.com/unmasking-th...

My new piece Untitled/Dreamweapon is out today on Bandcamp. Its based off a recording originally performed by Angus MacLise & Tony Conrad in NYC, 1968, my own take on "Untitled" from the Dreamweapon recordings. Ive been trying to think of ways to make more work with explicit Antifascist intentions…

Coffin Butte Landfill expansion denied by Benton County Planning Commission Republic Services can appeal the planning commission’s decision to the Benton County Board of Commissioners.

Happy to see this article in the Statesman Journal that says the Benton County Planning Commission voted to deny the landfill's expansion permit: www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/2...

Where the garbage goes - High Country News Amid massive rollbacks of federal environmental protections, a community battling the expansion of a local landfill seeks to safeguard its own backyard – and everyone else’s.

Incredible article by Jaclyn Moyer in the June issue of @highcountrynews.org about a community in rural Oregon fighting against the expansion of an already colossal landfill:

Where the garbage goes - High Country News share.google/bM92q4RqRm8t...