The Saturday List — March 7, 2026

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

Hi there! Much to enjoy in the world, and here’s a little slice of mine. Stay positive, people!

Watching: The World Baseball Classic

Seriously. Right now. As I write this. There is baseball on, it is baseball’s answer to the FIFA World Cup — which the USA is co-hosting with Canada and Mexico — or Olympic Hockey — and we know how that turned out — and I am 1000% on board.

Japan and Korea? Sure, I’ll take it. From the Tokyo Dome? Why not. Live baseball as I drink my Saturday morning coffee? Konichiwa. (Japan just won, 8-6. The game finished at 7:14 Chicago time.)

This is the sixth edition of the WBC, and Japan won the first event in 2006. For a variety of reasons involving scheduling, player contracts, and the lack of muscle of an organization like FIFA or the IOC helming the event — you can read into that sentence any way you’d like but let’s get real, I’m not even aware of the NAME of baseball’s international governing body — there doesn’t appear to be a consistent schedule. Japan won again in 2009, the Dominican Republic won in 2013, the USA in 2017, and the most-recent event was 2023, also won by Japan.

2023 gave us this moment, possibly the greatest non-MLB moment in baseball history.

Flash forward to 2026.

Did you hear about Greatest Player in the World Shohei Ohtani’s Grand Slam on Friday, March 6? If not, enjoy THREE LANGUAGES of sportscasting excellence, English, Japanese, and Spanish, calling the amazing Tokyo moment.

Into. My. Veins.

Games are on FOX and its FS1 and FS2 networks in the USA. In the mission to make this as big and cool as the World Cup, baseball is doing its best.

Reading: The War on the West by Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray is a brilliant man, however controversial his views may be. Perhaps a less-polarizing political thinker than some others in the “Conservative” camp, the British author and speaker wrote a really thought-provoking book called The War on the West in 2022 and the book became a best-seller almost overnight.

The gist: Western ideals are, indeed, under attack.

Listening to: Talk Talk and Placebo (And Their Connection)

If you ask me to discribe a song that is 10/10, impeccably crafted, and absolutely pitch-perfect, one offering would be “Life’s What You Make It” by the band Talk Talk. It’s not their most popular song — don’t worry, I’ll feature that one below — but, IMHO, it’s their absolute best.

Lead singer Mark Hollis died a few years back, and this is his opus.

Their other more popular song is “It’s My Life,” which was co-opted by animal rights groups, thanks in part to its really cool video. Shown here:

Meanwhile, the band Placebo is…interesting. They’re connected to Talk Talk only in that they enjoy covering songs; Placebo is also British and has quite the random backstory.

Here’s Placebo’s cover of “Life’s What You Make It.” With a heck of a video that tells us A LOT about consumption, and the ways of the world. (Upshot: count your blessings.)

Placebo, to me, is best known for its “Pure Morning,” which follows below. “A friend in need is a friend in deed,” and so on…

(I’ve shared the official audio since the video itself comes with a warning.)

Rediscovering: Three Kings

We all have one of those movies. The ones we absolutely loved but that the rest of the world just didn’t seem to get.

For me, Three Kings was one of those. Released in 1999, I remember attending an advanced screening of the film — Connections? No. Chicago’s NATAS had a really good film-screening membership thing — and I left stunned. Same feeling I had after The Matrix and The Sixth Sense.

I thought it was brilliant: post-Gulf War 1, so set in the early 1990s, the premise is that three soldiers try to search for gold that was supposedly stolen. It’s part black comedy and part war movie — I remember an interview with one of the stars, George Clooney, who said, in effect, “If this works, it’s M*A*S*H.” I have long maintained that Ice Cube should have gotten an Oscar nomination. Mark Wahlberg is the other one of the three main characters.

The movie received critical acclaim and did well at the box office; but it was never got to the point where it was part of the regular rotation on the cable channels, so maybe it was just…the right movie at the wrong time?

Looks like it’s only available to rent on a whole bunch of platforms, but worth the $5.

Thanks, as always, for reading. Don’t forget to switch your clocks if you’re in the USA. And don’t forget to hit that Subscribe button.