Midweek Quick Hits 2/18/26

From Brian

Eat: We’re big soupers over here in the Henderson household. The second the air turns a bit crisp in November, we rub our grubby little hands together like Dickensian street urchins and pull out the old stock pot. For the next few months our weekly routine becomes making a giant batch of soup on Sunday night and eating off it for the rest of the week. Do we get sick of it by Thursday? Yes. But do we still say, “Pease sir, may I have another? Hell yes. After cycling through our normal lineup of white bean/brothy/chicken vegetable soups, I finally tried this Tomato Lentil Soup from the NYT recipe section and it was a hit. I doubled it, added a hefty spoon of minced garlic, some tomato paste, chopped basil, and most importantly - a pound of bulk chicken sausage. Not to toot my own tooter, but my modifications kicked serious butt.

Read: Growing up as a teen the 90’s, I followed the grunge scene in Seattle the way people keep up with the Kardashians these days. In 1993, all I wanted to know was what was going through Eddie Vedder’s head, what was Chris Cornell wearing, who was the real Kurt Cobain? All those questions are answered in searing detail in the book Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarm. Because it’s all direct quotes from the people who were there, it reads like a personal journal from the scene as a whole, but with a driving narrative that is full of heartbreak and thrills as all these young kids get swept up into a music scene that became the reluctant symbol of a generation. The crazy stories about Courtney Love are worth it alone.

Listen/Watch: Speaking of growing up in the 90’s, I feel like an old fart when it comes to new music. Like, how do you people stay up to date with what’s cool these days? It feels like everyone else has a hipster music-sommelier tucked in their closet who looks like Finn Wolfhard and shuffles out to give them the insider scoop on all the hip new bands. How come my closet didn’t come with a Finn Wolfhard? Maybe ‘cause I still use the word ‘hip’? Whatever the case, I’d been hearing little rumblings about the band Geese for a while. Though I was a bit confused if it was Goose or Geese. And a quick google search didn’t help, both words are popular bands! The image search helped, one band was decidedly more ‘Brooklyn Hipster’ and had just performed on NPR’s Tiny Desk series. Which I really loved. I’ve since gotten into their new album, which is deep and twisty and ethereal. But for any old farts like me, this is a good place to start. And why not kick NPR a few bucks while you’re there?

From Em

Watch: I want to talk about the two romance movies Brian and I watched this weekend. We aren’t huge valentines day folk (out of laziness, not a love for the made-up holiday) so without a sitter we took the kids to the theater and they saw GOAT (the Stephen Curry animated film) and we saw Wuthering Heights (the Jacob Elordi, Margo Robbie film by Emerald Fennell). Brian and I had very different experiences of it. I enjoyed the hell out of watching it. The art direction, the costumes, THE CHEMISTRY. I was so entertained, enthralled and my goodness those two together were hard to look away. Did I think some of it was try hard? Sure. Did I love the darker moments? No. But overall, I would absolutely tell people to go see it in the theatre. Brian, meanwhile, came out and said ‘I wish they both had died at the end’ which isn’t a spoiler, but tells you how different he felt. We have been batting a zero when it comes to cozy date night movies (our last one was Hamnet and neither of us had ever sobbed so much publicly before). I just don’t think they make them anymore, TBH (outside of all the holiday movies).

The next night we watched Eternity, with Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner and Miles Teller (also an A24 film) and while it was kinda cute and I finished it, the tone of it was way too goofy and it felt like a total missed opportunity to me. Its a love triangle, where Elizabeth’s character has to choose between spending eternity with her first husband how died shortly after marriage and her second who she had a long but perhaps mundane life with. It could have been a ‘The Notebook’ esque retelling of each, but instead you are stuck in these goofy vignettes that felt like a sitcom set. At the same time Caitlin (on my team at EHD) LOVED it (she also loved Anora and I hated it so I think we just don’t align on our romance movies). Anyway, See Wuthering Heights in the theater (it’s extremely hot if nothing else) and if you are bored check out Eternity.

Meanwhile this new season of Love Is Blind is EXCELLENT thus far. Last season was remarkably bad (not even one marriage!!) and this time we have 8 couples leaving the pods, with two that I’m genuinely invested in, that seem like a great match. Neflix! Get on it.