I agree with the gist of this piece that the series is not good and the reclamation project for it is odd—especially for 3, can't grasp why that's the one people most vehemently go to bat for. Love the structural comparison to pornography. But I think 1 is pretty fun. Very much smacks of being a Morgan/Wong X-Files idea retrofitted into post-Scream teen horror. It has some of the best Rube Goldberg kill scenes.

Here, rice and polenta reign, as do hearty cold-weather dishes laced with pork, butter, and cheese. But if you do happen upon some pasta, it might be a dish called pizzoccheri: short buckwheat noodles served with potatoes, cabbage, and a melty Alpine cheese called Valtellina Casera. In other words: Good, stick-to-your-ribs mountain food built on cheap staples and local ingredients. Hop only a couple of countries eastward and you’re suddenly in Hungary, the center of Europe and home to many of my ancestors before they made their way to Ellis Island in 1921.

What drew my intial interest to Mad Men was the respect that the show paid to history. I knew that the creative team looked up weather records down to the hour to ensure that they were capturing the 1960s exactly. It wasn’t just about playing the right songs and giving the actresses big hair, there was a duty here to ensuring that what you saw onscreen was the 1960s and not a fantasy vision of the past.

Mindset Mastery is a free monthly newsletter about the psychology of small business ownership for freelance creatives from Jenni Gritters. If you’d like to support my work, I invite you to become a paid subscriber for $5/ month! Paid subscribers receive monthly journaling prompts, along with other perks. This is the last week to sign up for my new business coaching program for freelancers living with constraints. It’s called ADAPT and we start April 4th!

I bought the iPad Pro M1 chip in hopes of a lightweight, fast, multi-purpose device that I could also code on. It delivered in almost all areas. The #1 reason I started to consider buying an iPad a few years ago was for one thing, and one thing only: to read coding books. I have a kindle and I love it, but for coding books it is terrible. The large color screen especially comes in handy with code snippets as well as for color syntax highlighting.