The Seat of Loss Holiday Gift Guide

Personally, I like to avoid buying things. For the past few years, especially, I have derived significant fulfillment from cancelling subscriptions and eliminating costly habits. I do not spend much time reading gift guides and product recommendations because I have little personal use for them. When I saw Brian Merchant’s “How To Quit Spotify” explainer going around on Notes this past week, for example, I felt confused as to why anyone would bother shopping around for subscriptions to Tidal, Apple Music, or Qobuz when options like “hosting your own library with Jellyfin” or “using YouTube with an adblocker” exist. If I’m going to jump through any hoops, I want the reward to either be a delicious meal or liberation from the necessity of buying things at all. Instruction manuals that are supposed to teach you how to do a better job of buying things typically do not help me achieve either of those goals.

Nevertheless, I don’t operate under the presumption that what feels right to me would be good for anyone else. That’s why I don’t do record reviews, and it’s why this newsletter is generally more concerned with asking questions than detailing my own opinions. The fact that I don’t personally enjoy taste round-ups or gift guides doesn’t mean I look down on people who do. I have always liked that the Country Music Association’s top award, for example, goes to the “Entertainer of the Year” and not whoever wrote the best song or made the best album. I think it’s admirable for an artist to be at least as concerned with making people happy in the present as they are with creating something that will theoretically be revered long after they’re dead.

So, in that spirit, and as an exercise in writing things that aren’t just the big, sprawling essays that I personally find satisfying, here is an instruction manual for spending money.

I. Books

For anyone who enjoys this newsletter, there’s no better book recommendation I could make than Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age by University of Chicago history professor Adrian Johns. This thing is an absolute heater from cover to cover, tracing a narrative thread from the birth of radio to the sixties UK counterculture that will forever change how you feel about the internet, pop music, and every electronic mass media