The Saturday List - August 2, 2025
What I'm Watching, Reading, Listening To, and Rediscovering
Back with another edition: a few things that are bouncing around in my head from the world of business, pop culture, music, and television.
Watching: Margin Call (And That One Scene)
Margin Call remains one of my all-time favorite movies; part of it is due to the fact that it’s set in a (roughly) 36-hour period where a firm finds itself as the catalyst of a financial crisis. (Or…THE CATALYST of THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS.)
With an ensemble cast that brings its A-game, even if you’re not a fan of financial movies and don’t want to revisit the GFC — which was so bad that it is only known by initials “GFC” — the sheer psychological drama is well worth your time.
As for That One Scene: if you know nothing about the players and what is going on, you can enjoy this scene for its sheer brilliance. You can pretty much figure out who is in charge and who is doing what after this scene.
(Also steal this meme if you’d like.)
(Note that I have written about this movie before, both here on Substack and on my blog, Area 224.)
Reading: This Old Man, by Roger Angell
When I grow up, I want to write like Roger Angell.
The author, editor, essayist, baseball enthusiast, and just all-around neato dude died in 2022 at the age of 101; his essay called This Old Man was published in February 2014. He was ninety-three when he wrote it. It is tragic, comic, brilliant, joyful, and gets revisited by me often enough on The New Yorker’s web page that I just said heck with it and bought his book of essays. (This Old Man: All In Pieces.)
Quoting from it wouldn’t do it justice; it just leaves me wondering, actually, what the late great Mr. Angell would think of baseball’s pitch clock or the expansion of the playoffs to 12 teams or whether the 2025 Rockies are worse than the 2024 White Sox. And the fact that we have a Pope — okay, I’m guessing you were an East Coast WASPy guy more than a Midwest Catholic — who was at a World Series game.
Listening To: All Of The Greatest Songs Ever (I’ll Explain)
In the Fall of 2021, Rolling Stone came out with its list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. “Respect” by Aretha Franklin was number 1.
I assembled a squad and we each posted our own Top Ten and it was fun; the recent death of Brian Wilson got me to take another look at the list.
Here’s the original post on the Area 224 site.
Rediscovering: The Americans
I’m of the opinion that The Americans — not The Sopranos, not Breaking Bad — is the greatest drama ever aired on television.
I do realize that I am Gen-X and there’s a certain Gen-X sensibility to it; unless you were witness to the Cold War and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union, you may not “get” the show.
I share the trailer because, well, the entire show weaves A TON into 75 episodes — Hey, THE COLD WAR was a thing, and the main characters WERE SOVIET SPIES — but we’re all in on the ruse and the statecraft contained therein is something to behold.
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