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Recent reads (3.24.26)

Recent reads (3.24.26)

Last updated on: March 24, 2026 at 7:00 am by Fred Clark

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Recent reads (3.24.26) 2026-03-24T02:05:02-04:00 Fred Clark

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• Michael Brown was a prolific, successful composer during the golden age of Broadway musicals, but his big-budget productions weren’t written for theaters. He wrote “industrial musicals” for corporate clients and corporate audiences:

Brown’s magnum opus would come with “Wonderful World of Chemistry”, a musical written for the Du Pont pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair. The 24-minute musical was performed some 40 times a day and was seen by an estimated five million people for nearly 17,000 performances.

But the story here isn’t about Brown or Broadway, it was about that time when he offered his Manhattan home to a young writer for a year, rent-free, because he thought she had a good book inside her if somebody just gave her time and space to write it.

• “They Just Wanted to Grow Food. Their Suburban Neighbors Declared War,” by Kate Brown for Mother Jones.

Why would anyone care whether or not their neighbors are growing tomatoes in their back yard? Why would a town council care? And why on earth would any of those neighbors or local elected officials seem determined to put a stop to that?

The busybodies and bureaucrats in this story are exasperating. Who hates gardening? What is wrong with these people?

• “A viral church ranking series is sending young Catholics to Mass in New York,” by Fiona Murphy for RNS.

Read this a while ago and I’m still pondering how this is and is not like theater criticism and the ways in which that may or may not be a Good Thing.

• Tahirah Walker on “Teaching Sinners.” This essay is a lovely, effusive, enthusiastic rush of words that isn’t so much a celebration or recommendation of the film as it is a declaration of how very much it gives us to talk about, to explore, and to unpack. Walker is all over the place, which is the point here — that there is so much to cover, and yet it’s all tied together. In a sense this is a sales pitch for the college course — a demonstration of how there is more than enough here to dive into over the course of a semester, and that we’re going to need at least that much time to cover it all.

This is also just terrific writing, such as this bit on Walker’s general avoidance of horror movies:

I didn’t know if I might find in these movies femicide, rape and stalking cavalierly used as a mere plot set up. A film might invite me into a world where the victimization of Black folks from reality was being presented as the prologue to the main action of the film. These movies might only feature a few Black characters who either did not seem to know they were Black or had no idea that their Blackness was not merely a proxy for magic, comic relief, or being “silly scared” rather than “smart scared.” I didn’t know if I would encounter plots eerily unaware of the fact that much of the slasher/torture trope meant to draw attention to social harms had nothing on the reality of the enslavement and torture which marked centuries of Black history in the U.S.

• Elias Isquith on “Deadwood and the community of spirits.” There is theory here, and big ideas that might seem ponderous. But it is in service of something beautiful, of ideas we don’t need to fully understand to participate in.

Deadwood, if you’ve never had the pleasure, was a western involving many real-world figures in that real-world town that was not yet a town. It Is a show filled with sordid violence and musical profanity — sometimes in iambic pentameter. But it was also a western, as Isquith writes, that did not build to a duel between good and evil men in center of town. It’s key moments, instead, involved a funeral presided over by a broken chaplain and a town council meeting where:

Instead of agreeing to organize a preemptive strike that would amount to a kind of murder-suicide, the leaders of Deadwood decide to publish a letter about the murder of an immigrant worker that none of them knew, nor especially cared to know. It feels right to them — or at least most of them — and yet it would be wrong to say that any of them entirely understand why that is or what they think its publication will do.

But this is an essential, pivotal moment. This is when, to go back to one of Milch’s earlier quotes, we see how a collection of individuals who “misunderstand [their] nature” can nevertheless, when embodied in the “organism” of society, find themselves in communion with a “community of spirits.”

• “It is a landscape pulsing with life, overflowing with lush greenery,” Colin Dickey writes for Atlas Obscura:

The old grid of streets is still visible, and there are still a handful of houses with carefully mowed lawns sitting in defiance. But everything else is the wild and vital province of nature. Turkeyfoot, broom-sedge, and switchgrass and silky dogwood. Young white oaks and linden trees push their way through this cacophony of life. Everywhere that’s not asphalt is a riot of green in every possible shade. And all of this is possible, at least in part, because the state and federal governments have forbidden any new human settlement, giving the wild and the lush and untrammeled room to grow.

The place Dickey is describing is Centralia, Pennsylvania — the infamous, abandoned burning town that served as the inspiration for Silent Hill. People can’t live there anymore, but life goes on, even as, beneath it all there remains “A fire that has raged out of control for sixty years, unending and older than most people you know.”

• Speaking of lush greenery and ruined landscapes: “Stuck in the Weeds: The Invasive Plant That Thrives on Bureaucracy.”

Fletcher Reveley goes long on America’s war on Arundo donax, the invasive weed that has followed humans all over the world, choking out river ecosystems and native plants. The piece takes a dim view of inter-agency squabbles and the difficulty of cooperation across competing jurisdictions, but the bottom line is that the weed is winning the war because it’s so tough and adaptable that nothing we’ve tried so far works very well.

Faced with a similar challenge, Hayley Sussman just tips her hat and writes almost in praise of Duckweed.

• “How Tennessee’s Speaker of the House Helped Keep a Payday Lender’s Struggling Sports Gambling Company Alive.”

Adam Friedman brings us this tale of a state government doing the opposite of anything a state government should do. Instead of regulating two predatory industries, Cameron Sexton decided to help them merge into some kind of hideous predatory Voltron.

Sexton helped his friends, Michael and Tina Hodges, suck poor people dry with “Flex Loans” — giving them access to quick cash that would put them on the hook at triple-digit interest rates. And then, to help them ensure a supply of desperate people desperately in need of this quick cash, he helped them with their other project — a sports gambling business:

In many states, regulators try to keep lending and betting separate; Virginia, for example, bans gambling operators from offering loans to customers. But in Tennessee, it’s different. A payday lender and a gambling company can have the same owners and operate out of the same storefronts.

What could go wrong? Besides everything.

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