The Saturday List — July 18, 2026

What I'm Watching, Reading, Listening to, and Rediscovering This Week

New here? Glad to have you! I’ve curated this list from the internet and beyond for (checks notes) 37 straight Saturdays, and next week we’ll celebrate one full year of TSL. (Well, minus one day, as the first Saturday of The Saturday List was July 26, 2025.)

Alas, time to dig in — after the button, of course — on what I’m Watching, Reading, Listening to, and Rediscovering this week.

Watching: The Sandlot

Did you see the tribute to America at the MLB All-Star Game with Ray Charles singing “America The Beautiful”? The throwback to The Sandlot was a sweet touch.

The Sandlot was more than just a movie that spawned a whole bunch of memes and the “You’re Killing Me, Smalls” phrase. It’s probably one of the best baseball films of all time. Trailer below, and you can watch now on Disney+ or Hulu.

Reading: The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm

Warning: This is not going to be for everyone.

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 reads like a World History textbook, probably because it’s…pretty much a World History textbook. (So if, like me, you were a US History minor in college, you might dig this quite a bit.)

Eric Hobsbawm passed away in 2012, but not until after he had become one of the pre-eminent historians of late 19th Century and 20th Century world history. (He wrote two other historical tomes: The Age of Capital (1848-1875) and The Age of Empire (1875-1914).

Beginning with “A Bird’s Eye View” of the century, Hobsbawm does a deep dive into just about everything from Franz Ferdinand to The Fall of the Soviet Union. You can’t digest this in a weekend — I’ve tried; it’s one of those books that takes a lot of time to get through — but it’s worth it for Hobsbawm’s analysis.

Listening to: Depeche Mode

On my personal list of favorite bands, Depeche Mode makes the Top 10. Why not throw back to some of their past hits, and share a couple recent songs, too? It’s Saturday, this may help put you in a good mood.

The band formed in 1980, with Dave Gahan singing lead and Martin Gore as guitarist and Andy Fletcher on keyboards and bass; those three were stalwarts of the band after original co-founder Vince Clarke left the band in 1981.

Gore took over as the songwriter and is one of the masters of the craft, IMHO. Fletcher died in 2022, and the band honored him with their most-recent album, Memento Mori. (More on that below…)

Violator, released in 1990, is one of the band’s best albums, and the track that put the band on the map is “Enjoy the Silence.” The song got as high as #8 on the Billboard Hot 100, and was #1 on the US Alternative chart.

My personal favorite song of DM’s is this one, “Precious,” written by Gore to his children after his divorce.

The 2023 album Memento Mori was a tribute to Andy Fletcher, and the song “Ghosts Again” is stirring as heck. And it showed that the band could still…produce a powerful tune.

Rediscovering: Victory

Sunday is the FIFA World Cup Final, featuring Argentina against Spain. May as well suggest checking out one of the most iconic soccer movies of all time: Victory. Released in 1981 under the title of Escape to Victory in some non-USA markets, Victory seemed to be a staple of early 1980s HBO.

Featuring Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, and Pele (YES, Pele), the movie was directed by the legendary John Huston and told the story of a group of POWs in World War II who were (1) good at soccer and (2) aimed to use an exhibition soccer game as a ruse to escape their camp.

The late Pele did all of the soccer “choreography” in the movie, including this crazy bicycle kick goal toward the end of the game — this doesn’t give away any plot points, so you can enjoy it even if you haven’t seen the movie — and I sorta forgot that Pele died in 2022.

Victory can be found on Sling as part of a subscription, or can be rented for $3.99 from a whole host of services.

Finally…

Yeah, the World Cup has been amazing, so we’ll leave you with a compilation of visitors sharing their stories about what makes this country so great.

We’ll see you next week…have a wonderful weekend!

Dave