Here’s the best of what I read, watched, and listened to in August (and July!).
Reading
Blogs/articles/essays
Until footy definitively won my heart around 2020 (a game a night, even if they weren’t good, at least offered something to do), soccer was my main sport of interest. I’ve drifted away from the game, disillusioned by the financial inequality that makes long-term outcomes increasingly predictable. But some things keep me clinging on. One is the Football Cliches podcast. The other is the rich quality of analytically-influenced writing about the game. The nerds really have taken over. The way Grace Robertson blends numbers and heart on her substack, Grace On Football, was a direct inspiration for One Percenters. But sometimes you want slop. Enter: The Transfer Flow – the brainchild of Ted Knutson, founder of StatsBomb, and Kim McCauley, a US-based writer. It’s a (mostly, unless you really like the betting guides, which I don’t) free, daily newsletter all about the business of player movement. Except what it’s actually about is evaluating players who’ve changed clubs, or might be about to, and understanding how they can help their new team. Consider last Friday’s post, about closest-thing-I-have-to-a-Premier-League-team Tottenham’s signing of Dutch attacking midfielder, Xavi Simons. In just a few paragraphs and charts, Kim actually explains his attributes as a player, why she believes last season’s regression was a blip, and how his new club might benefit. Great stuff!
Angus Bylsma is too modest. The ANU economics/history student refers to his blog as “semi-coherent musings on economic history”. Not only are they totally coherent, they’re honest, curious explorations of some of the most famous and influential texts in the genre. Angus has written incisively about books on subjects as varied as central banking and the international monetary system, imperialism and state capacity, social development, and economic inequality. Those subjects won’t interest everyone. But I think it’s a treat to observe smart people grappling with important ideas and, in the process, coming to realisations about their own thoughts. If I had Angus’s discipline – and if I didn’t already have One Percenters – then I would like to have a blog like his.
The Singer Who Skewered America (Yascha Mounk, July 2025)
An underrated tragedy befell the world in May: Tom Lehrer died. He lived a better life than most: too young to serve in World War II, instead he went on to study mathematics at Harvard and, from there, carved out what, by all accounts, was an impressive career. But most of the world will remember Lehrer for his witty, wry, often painfully ironic songs. This piece captures most of what made Lehrer so special, and perhaps, why we won’t get someone like him again (I don’t think Bo Burnham counts). Make sure your reading is accompanied by listening to some of Lehrer’s most memorable songs: National Brotherhood Week, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, and – of course – We Will All Go Together When We Go.
Creating an xScore Model for Australian Rules Football (Café Tactiques, May 2025)
Ben Griffis is an American statistician and data scientist (confession: I thought he was Australian, given his interest in AFL!) who’s created several great web apps for both soccer and footy. His latest project was building an Expected Score (xScore) model for AFL. By now, you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with expected score: the statistically predicted outcome of a given shot, based on historical data about how often similar situations lead to goals/scores. You might be a nerd (non-pejorative) who weighs it almost as highly as the actual score. Or, like Max Gawn and Nathan Buckley, you might groan at its mere mention. Either way, xScore is impossible to ignore: it symbolises the beginning of the analytical turn in sports like soccer, and has been hugely influential in how the sports where it’s gained a foothold are discussed, analysed, and even played.
I’m recommending this piece because, despite not knowing enough data science to critique the quality of Ben’s model, I really enjoyed his explanation of how he actually made it: the dataset he had to wrangle, how he tagged each event, decisions about what to include/omit, and the regressions he applied to generate the output. Give it a read and make sure to follow Ben on social media, where – I’m happy to report – he’s been talking more about footy.
Watching
Stranger Things (re-watch)
The release of the official trailer for the final series of Stranger Things piqued my curiosity to re-watch it from the beginning. Given how long it’s been since the release of the most recent series, I was curious to see how the show has “aged”. It mostly holds up. Series 1 is still undoubtedly the highlight; it’s a beautiful coming-of-age/loss of innocence story wrapped in the aesthetics of the ‘80s (or Hollywood’s version of it) and creature horror. Winona Ryder’s grief and terror as a mother looking for her lost son is probably the strongest acting performance throughout the show’s entire run. Later series still contain some very moving depictions of the end of childhood, but suffer from the classic problems of trying to follow up lightning in a bottle: the constant quest for the bigger bad, bloated runtimes and production budgets, and diminishing emotional returns. But for my money, Stranger Things is still one of the very best Netflix Originals – and that opening theme still hits as hard as it did in… 2016.
Honey Don’t! (2025)
It’s interesting to see the two paths the Coen Brothers have walked down since their amicable decision to (at least temporarily) stop making movies together. Joel directed The Tragedy of Macbeth; a stately but, ironically, slightly bloodless adaptation of the Shakespeare text. Ethan, meanwhile, has been making zany lesbian thrillers with his wife. Honey Don’t! is the second entry in an unofficial “lesbian B-movie” trilogy, after Drive-Away Dolls. Like its predecessor, Honey Don’t! stars Margaret Qualley. But instead of playing half of a Thelma & Louise-style duo, this time she’s a private investigator looking into the mysterious death of a young woman with links to a local Pentecostal church. Aubrey Plaza plays a deadpan cop. I liked some things about Honey Don’t! – Qualley’s outfits, the exurban Californian setting, Chris Evans chewing the scenery as the hypocrite pastor, the 90-minute runtime – but ultimately it felt like a pastiche of a better Coen Brothers movie (especially The Big Lebowski). It’s definitely worth a tenner on a cheap movie night, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll walk away hoping the two brothers can reunite soon.
Listening
Kieran Hebden’s insanely-titled Spotify playlist [it’s impossible to type]
Once upon a time, my most prized possession was my iTunes library (may it rest in peace). Thousands of albums, all legally obtained of course, meticulously tagged and categorised. Genres and sub-genres scrutinised until they lost any semblance of meaning. Then the streaming revolution came along and, overnight, my iTunes library was obsolete. I’m still ambivalent about Spotify. Convenience, yes, but at what price? Streaming services have contributed to making it harder to carve out a career as a musician, the rise of AI-generated “music”, and have even been blamed for making popular music itself blander. But there are real gems if you know where to look. Perhaps the shiniest of them all is Kieran Hebden’s (you might know him better as the electronic music producer, Four Tet) curated and frequently updated playlist. Listening to this feels like crate digging from the couch. There’s lots of electronic music, including Hebden’s own material (fine with me, he’s one of my favourite artists). There’s also jazz, pop, grunge – almost anything you can name. But it’s almost all good. This playlist is worth about 1,000 of those generated by Spotify itself.
Addendum: if you’re interested in learning more about Spotify’s dastardly doings, music critic Liz Pelly wrote a book about them. I’ve not read it, but I heartily recommend her interview at the New York Public Library about it.
The Oscar Peterson Trio – In Tokyo (1964)
Oscar Peterson was a central figure of post-WWII jazz, bridging bebop with the accessibility of swing at a time when jazz was gaining truly global reach. This is one of his finest recordings and, in my resolutely neophyte opinion, one of the landmark live jazz albums. The music shimmers, swoons and swings. Accompanied by Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums, Peterson (the piano virtuoso) shines without ever overpowering. Over the course of an hour and a half, the trio move from bop and swing to tender ballads and even bossa nova (popular in jazz circles at the time – this album was recorded the same year as Stan Getz released “The Girl From Ipanema”), all delivered with impeccable style and grace. In Tokyo was one of the earliest high-profile live jazz recordings in Japan, and apparently did much to create the strong affinity many Japanese feel with jazz to this day. Just a brilliant work of art.
Playing
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2024)
The original plan for this section was for me to write about Donkey Kong: Bonanza. It’s a great platformer: deep, slick, inventive, and rewarding. But it’s also overwhelming. Every square inch of the screen is filled with colour and noise. I felt anxious if I didn’t get every collectible, despite there being thousands of them. So, after about a week I realised I wanted a different kind of gaming experience – something darker, more patient, more mature. In other words; I wanted to play Tears of the Kingdom again. I’m glad I did. The storyline might be an incoherent retcon of Breath of the Wild. And there were some quibbles with how new biomes and gameplay mechanics were implemented (the Depths: too empty, the Sky Islands: too scarce, the temples: meh, the new powers: too powerful). But despite those grumbles, Tears is spectacular. The developers struck the perfect balance between compulsion and contemplation: there are thousands of things to do, but you can do them at your own pace. Every corner of the fully-realised world of Tears yields something interesting. Your heart pounds when you take on a Lynel, or Gleeok, or the Gloom Hands, or Ganondorf himself. The depiction of a world balanced precariously on the edge of civilisation and calamity is arresting. And, on the Switch 2, it looks (and runs) perfectly. Sorry, DK.
Doing
Playing pickleball
I’m 34. My fitness, never great, has deteriorated further. I’ve only seldom found the willpower to commit to regular exercise and diet habits (nothing is so easy as the empty calories of scrolling). Part of the problem was that, while exercise can be satisfying, I rarely find it fun. So I’ve roped in some buddies and started playing pickleball. I’ve learnt two things about the game so far. The first is that pickleball and padel (the squash-like you might have seen at the Australian Open or on Drive to Survive) aren’t the same sport. The second is that doubles and singles are totally different. Doubles is played almost exclusively at the net – sorry, “in the kitchen” – and is a sedate endeavour. Singles, especially when you huff and puff like we do, is a good workout. But the biggest thing working in its favour is its accessibility. Sure, pickleball isn’t as sophisticated as tennis. But it’s easy enough to actually enjoy even if you’re not particularly good at it.
Attending a buck’s party
There are two types of buck’s parties – those with stereotypical “lad” entertainment, and those I attend. On Saturday, I attended (by definition) the latter. There was archery (of the competitive kind, where you shot at each other with modified arrows instead of at a target). There was Korean BBQ. There was whisky tasting. There was a video game bar (which meant there were intensely competitive games of Mario Kart 64 and GoldenEye). Before the weekend, the last buck’s party I attended was my own (which was superbly organised by my best man – shout out to him if he’s reading this). They are slightly odd rituals. But you can’t look at them like an anthropologist. Instead, treat them as what they are: joyous celebrations for a friend about to embark on an exciting life event.
My Sunday, in case you’re interested, was spent resting quietly.
What have you been enjoying, or at least trying to enjoy, lately? Let me know!