Friday, January 9, 2026

Good morning. I've prepared for you a newsletter. I make no promises about quality.

Item 1: a link

This website recreates the MTV experience as it used to be – or at least as we imagine it used to be. You can pick a decade, or a genre, or just put the entire history of music videos on random. You can also replay the full first day of MTV's music videos, which appears to include a Johnny Cash Sesame Street appearance for some reason. No likes, no Share to Threads, no modern ads (but I did catch one or two vintage commercials).

Enjoy it before the corporate fat cats take it down (I wrote this on Tuesday, so hopefully it's not too late yet as you read this).

Item 2: a list

Things I expect to happen in 2026:

• Reeses Peanut Butter Cup Oreos
• Teens on TikTok discover a hot new travel destination: the Durrat Al Arus beach resort just outside Jeddah
• Police Academy reboot
• AI-enabled state fair funnel cakes
• Mashup music revival
• Amazon merges with Facebook and X, forming new ultracorporation “HellFortress”. Co-CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Barron Trump explain the name is “from some Lord of the Rings erotic fan-fiction Grok wrote”.
• Pantone color of the year: fuchsia 
• Bluesky rebrands as Friendster Mobile
• “Freedom Coffee” (hope you like chicory)
• Kids will start carrying around Allen wrenches
• Taylor Swift will finally make that throwback country album (about calling off her engagement)
• McRib installed on the McDonalds permanent menu
• Andor holiday special
• We’re finally saying “flapjacks” again
• AAAAA batteries (HellFortress offers free shipping to the wrong address)

Hoping for fourth wave ska in ’27.

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: word of the week

Voluble

He had a reputation as a withdrawn, quiet soul, but when you got Dr. Richard Postlethwaite, PHD, talking about his academic ambit he was downright voluble.

Item 5: an image

See ya!

Thanks for reading. See you next week.