No Expectations 106: #1 Best of All Time
A Taste Profile interview with Mamalarky’s Livvy Bennett and Noor Khan. Plus, a 15-song playlist and a stellar new album from the Convenience.
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Headline song: Mamalarky, “#1 Best of All Time”
Thanks for being here. In a couple of weeks, I’ll celebrate my one-year anniversary as the newsletter producer at WTTW News (PBS Chicago). Time flies! Before I got that job, I was a full-time freelancer working from home, writing this newsletter, and taking on every paid assignment I could to supplement the income from No Expectations’ generous paid subscribers. It was a lot of work but I could set my own schedule, and the convenience of writing out of my apartment allowed me to devote as much time to this writing project, no matter what was going on in my schedule.
Having a 9-to-5 this year has been such a joy—I’m not as stressed about money, I love the gig and my coworkers, and I have to get out of the house multiple times a week—but it’s also complicated the workflow of this newsletter. While I’m used to it now and think it’s been mostly smooth sailing, the one No Expectations franchise I haven’t done as much as I’d like is the Taste Profile interview series. As a work-from-home freelance writer, I could chat with an artist about the three formative things in their life and the three things they’re into now whenever they wanted to. Now, it’s gotta be on weekends or after 5:30 pm CST, which aren’t the most convenient time slots for most working musicians.
This year, I’m making a better effort to publish more interviews, and the artists I’ve chatted with have been more than accommodating for my schedule. Talking to people is the most fun, illuminating, and rewarding part of being a journalist in any capacity. You always learn a lot, have to think on your feet, and force yourself to ask questions that not only move the conversation along but also get someone you’ve likely never talked to before to open up. I’m a big fan of yapping with friendly, curious, and creative strangers. This interview with Mamalarky is the first of three Taste Profiles I have booked for the coming months (with hopefully more to add on to the docket). It was a total blast. Their enthusiasm and humor were so infectious, which matches their music perfectly.
If you’re new to No Expectations, here’s a short explainer of what you signed up for. Each week, you get a wildcard main essay (often new album recommendations), a 15-song playlist, as well as updates on what I’m listening to, watching, and reading. Sometimes you’ll get an interview with an artist I love, and other times it’ll be a deep dive into one band’s discography. Since I’m a Chicago-based writer, this newsletter is very Midwest-focused. So, if you live in this city too, you’ll also receive a curated roundup of upcoming local shows to check out.
As always, you can sign up for a paid subscription or tell a friend about a band you read about here. It’s still $5 a month—the cost of one Old Style plus tip at Rainbo Club. Every bit helps, keeps this project going, and allows it to stay paywall-free. It’s rough out there, so I’m grateful you’re still reading and supporting this writing project. Next Thursday, there’s a solid chance I'll take a week off from the newsletter. I’m traveling for a family wedding, and while it’s a short trip, I’m not sure I’ll have a decent enough window to dive into new releases or come up with an essay. That said, if you see a new No Expectations hit your inbox on May 1, forget I said anything.
Taste Profile: Mamalarky
Mamalarky is an adventurous and inventive indie rock band with members based in Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta (they prefer the term “tri-coastal”). The quartet has been one of the few acts I’ve been most excited about this decade, from their 2020 self-titled debut and 2022’s Pocket Fantasy (both out via Fire Talk) to this year’s Hex Key (their first with Epitaph). Though their sound has evolved from mathy and frantic guitar-based jams to a more holistic and atmospheric approach to pop (there are still a ton of mindblowing riffs on their new LP), they’ve never lost their playfulness and commitment to writing an undeniably memorable tune. Though I’ve been a loud supporter of this group for years, I’ve somehow never interviewed them. That changes today with this Taste Profile with singer and guitarist Livvy Bennett, along with bassist Noor Khan (If you’re a fan of Faye Webster, you might recognize Khan as part of her touring band).
Read on below for the three most formative things from their life and the three things they’re into now. Also, check out their tour dates, which include a gig at Chicago’s Schubas Tavern on Wednesday, April 30.
Livvy’s Formative Band: Animal Collective
Animal Collective were definitely a formative band when I was younger. I loved Feels and Merriweather Post Pavilion, but for whatever reason, I didn’t dig Strawberry Jam at that age.
Livvy: I love Strawberry Jam. That was my main squeeze.
I warmed up to it as I got older, but it might've been too heady for a dorky 15-year-old.
Livvy: It's very condensed. There's a lot happening, and it very much activated my brain to hear that many different textures and melodies in one band. I love Animal Collective, and I feel like there's still not a group like them out there.
Animal Collective probably has the most staying power out of a lot of their peers.
Livvy: Absolutely. They weren't trying to write singles. It feels like they were on their own journey. They were trying to get to some deeper plane. There's so much experimentation. It was a new frontier, basically. Even still, when I listen to their music, I don't know how they got there.
Talk to me about the first time you heard them.
Livvy: Well, I was a very druggy little high schooler. I was doing a lot. I was experimenting with things in my brain constantly. Not to get too deep into the specifics, but I remember listening and feeling the geometric-ness of the music. Listening to them, it's not really a smooth ride. Guide. At the time, my brain felt that way. Their songs aren't formulaic. It was really eye-opening to see what recorded music could be.
What else were you listening to around that time?
Livvy: MGMT. Still, I come back to that band all the time. I loved Justice, The White Stripes, and also a lot of old records like Sly & the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and lots of local bands in Austin, too, like the Strange Boys.
Noor’s Formative Movies: Bollywood
Whenever I get a chance to watch a Bollywood film, it’s always such a blast. Tell me about your relationship to these movies.
Noor: So much of my childhood was me, my sister, and my little cousin hanging out in my family's basement trying to learn Bollywood dances. If not, we'd be watching the same ones over and over and over again. The Bollywood movies that I've always really loved were just high-budget brown people musicals. I never considered myself a performer, an artist, or anything when I was a kid. But somehow it would bring that out of me. I think it did for any brown child. Everyone always wanted to learn all the dances, be able to sing the songs, whatever. They still feel very special to me. Every close friend of mine ends up sitting in a room with me at one point and watching YouTube videos of all of my favorite Bollywood numbers.
Livvy: I can confirm.
Noor: See? It always happens at some point. They never get old to me. As a Pakistani-American who doesn’t always feel close to my culture—I know most Bollywood films are from India—they still tickled that itch for me.
What were some early favorites?
Noor: Devdas for sure. I watch it once a year. Aśoka was the first movie to ever make me cry. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was it for me. It was so ‘90s and so cute. I wanted to be like the characters so bad. That one was so important for me.
Have you kept up with newer releases?
Noor: No, I still watch the classics. New Bollywood is very different. It’s still playful, but it doesn’t have the same flavor of playfulness as the ones I loved as a kid. I still have all the DVDs of the Bollywood movies I used to watch: I took them from my parents, and they’re mine now.
Livvy: Wait, Noor, you have a DVD player? We should watch these.
Noor: We should, absolutely. I think I made you watch Kuch Kuch Hota Hai with me recently.
Livvy’s Formative Game: Zoo Tycoon
I have a very clear memory of going to Staples with my dad and he’d pick up up one of the “tycoon” games for me. Railroad Tycoon and there was a skyscraper one too, if I remember correctly.
Livvy: First of all, Railroad Tycoon might be the one that I never played. I don't hear people talk about Railroad Tycoon.
Well, I played it.
Noor: I was a Rollercoaster Tycoon girl.
Livvy: OK, so Zoo Tycoon. My friends and I would gather around, hunched over the computer, making zoos together. My boom box would be playing, and we would be like, God, basically. That's the best part of it. Zoo Tycoon is basically Grand Theft Auto for babies. It's very it's wholesome. I don't know. I like games where you actually have to try, where the reward isn't super tangible, and you don't really like win levels of Zoo Tycoon. You show up every day, take care of your tigers and your elephants. I loved the sound design on computer games in general, too. The way they used to sound coming out of desktop speakers is really appealing to me. I don't know if you would consider that an RPG, but that was all I was into, like RuneScape, Whyville, Club Penguin, obviously, and a few more.
Noor: Oh my God. I had my Club Penguin membership for seven years straight.
Livvy: Wait, Noor, isn’t one of your picks Neopets?
Noor: Yes, I still play Neopets.
Livvy: You still play? I didn't know that was possible.
Noor: You need to use Firefox because that’s the only browser that works with Adobe Flash. I find it so funny you picked Zoo Tycoon because when I was a kid, whenever I’d get a new laptop, I’d pirate Rollercoaster Tycoon.
Livvy: You’d pirate a whole computer game as a kid? You knew how to do that? That’s crazy.
Noor: Yeah, it would fuck up my laptop every time.
Livvy: Rollercoaster Tycoon is more insidious to me, because I'm pretty sure you can send people off a ramp.
Noor: You can. You can delete tracks, but I never did that. I had a high-level, functioning amusement park. I had janitors everywhere—it was so clean.
Noor’s Formative Game: Neopets
So, Neopets. You still play?
Noor: I do. I have three older sisters. When I was a kid, I really looked up to my oldest sisters, especially because they were so cool and way older than me. One of them was playing Neopets from before I can even remember things. She got me on it. It has such good games on it. There are so many good Neopets games. I was such an online games head. I was hella on Miniclip. I was on Addicting Games. I loved a good little freaking game. And Neopets truly has the best ones. They have the best online Mahjong. Meerca Chase was so fun. They have a Battleship-type game that's basically like a snowball fight. I think it's literally called Snowball Fight. The reason I still play it is because they haven't changed it a crazy amount. There's new stuff, but all the original stuff is still there. I can probably still access my old shop from my locked-ass account from when I was seven. I still play Neopets. I feel like it's a more innocent online world game than, like, RuneScape. I was on RuneScape like, "Who wants to be my boyfriend?" With Neopets, you can't do shit like that. It’s passed the test of time.
Livvy: Is there any feature where your Neopets will say that you didn’t check on your Neopets for years?
Noor: Yes. They don't die, but they get hungry. I definitely have accidentally done some fucked up shit to Neopets. One time I found a potion somewhere and I gave my favorite Neopet the potion, and it turned it into this ugly ass bug.
Hate when that happens. So Livvy mentioned that Noor, you’re the gamer of the two. Did Neopets ignite a love for gaming?
Noor: No, I was more into other video games before Neopets, like, real video games. We had a Dreamcast, and I used to pirate hella Dreamcast games like Power Stone.
Livvy: Wait, you could pirate games on Dreamcast?
Noor: You would pirate the CDs. People would burn the games onto CDs. Sega made it too easy to do that, and that's why Dreamcast failed. We had a really thick binder with all the games.
Livvy’s Formative Activity: Journaling
When did journaling start for you?
Livvy: In second or third grade. I started writing in my journal very regularly. Maybe not every single day, but pretty constantly. So I have a very detailed log of basically my entire life. That's where I started getting into lyric writing and poetry and exploring things via writing. It's been a constant since then. Even now, it still has some mythical power over me somehow. When you're writing, there's almost like something else guiding you. I don't know, but it feels very comforting. As a kid, I was constantly writing stuff. I would pick a topic and go crazy. “Here's how I feel about love. Love makes me feel like this, etc.” I would write essays for myself sometimes.
Was the act of doing it more helpful? Or was it being able to go back and see where you were and how you were feeling?
Livvy: When I was in my adolescence, I actually was backtracking pretty regularly to feel like I was growing up. I would write letters to my older self a lot. I'd be like, "When I am 16. Here's what I hope to have happen. I hope you still make music...things like that."
That’s very cool.
Livvy: It is cool. I'm grateful I did it. I had a sense that it would be helpful in my life. And a lot of the things that were important to me when I was seven or eight are still exactly the same now. I have so many books of my journals. It's kind of ridiculous. Just getting it out is really helpful, even now. Before I write music, I can let the thoughts come out in a less precious medium.
I’ve always been jealous of people who journal. It’s not how I work, but I know it would’ve been helpful.
Livvy: But you’re a writer!
Yeah, I basically stress out about what I’m going to write. After I start to feel the deadline’s fire under my ass, I’ll make an outline and edit, but I never just freeform it and write just to write. I get really self-conscious even if it’s totally private. It’s probably not the way to do it.
Livvy: I've felt that before. You're observing what you're writing instead of simply being present with it. But I feel like that's what it's helpful for in terms of writing, for me getting in that mindset. Writing music and music writing, like what you do, are different. You are analyzing, and you are sort of deconstructing another form of writing. So it's definitely more analytical. I have to get myself out of the cage of my mind.
Noor’s Formative TV Show: SpongeBob SquarePants
This was a huge show. I think I was seven when it premiered, so I had a few great years of watching it. A classic. Those first few seasons are really incredibly funny.
Noor: They're so good. I always say I don't really trust people who didn't watch SpongeBob when they were a kid. Our generation is so funny and so much funnier in a goofier way than the generations around us because of SpongeBob.
Livvy: Yeah, I agree with that.
Noor: I think it instilled a little bit of raunchiness in everybody, in an appropriate and more palatable way. I would consider myself a funny person, and I think that a lot of my humor is shaped by SpongeBob. SpongeBob and my grandpa.
Livvy: As a generation, we have mannerisms from SpongeBob. Even facial expressions. There's a whole dialect within SpongeBob.
Noor: Nobody really let go of SpongeBob. It's not just me. People still use hella SpongeBob memes. Somebody brings up something from SpongeBob to me at least twice a week. Is that crazy to say? It happens to me a lot.
No, it happens to me a lot. My girlfriend is an encyclopedia of SpongeBob references.
Noor: My nephews told me they were not allowed to watch SpongeBob. And I was like, “In my house, you're allowed to watch SpongeBob.” And now, every time they come over, we watch so much SpongeBob.
Noor’s Recent Activity: Yo-yo
The first time I met you guys, you were both touring with Faye Webster. Noor, as someone who still tours with her, was her love for yo-yoing the reason you got into it, too?
Noor: For sure. She's the one who introduced me to yo-yo. That tour was a long time ago. I learned two basic things on that tour, and I didn't pick up a yo-yo for years. Then last summer, Faye and I went to the Yo-Yo Worlds in Cleveland. I had the best fucking day of my life. I left so happy, and I left with like, 20 yo-yo friends. I was in it now. One of the yo-yo homies gave me a yo-yo, and I have been obsessed with it since.
Livvy: It's crazy. On this last Mamalarky tour, almost every city we hit, there was more than one yo-yoer in the crowd. The yo-yo community is so strong, but Noor is showing up for the yo-yo community too.
Noor: This tour was an anomaly. We have a lot of yo-yo friends, but then the same day as our Portland show happened to be the Pacific Northwest Regional yo-yo competition. I went to the yo-yo competition because some of my friends were competing, and then a lot of them ended up coming to our show afterwards. They all hang out all day after the competitions. Truly, there are yo-yoers everywhere. They really show up for you. If you yo-yo and you like yo-yo and you're a nice person, which most people in the yo-yo community are, people will support you. It's really wholesome and sweet.
It is. How are you as a yo-yo player at this point?
Noor: I'm OK. I can do more than a beginner. I feel like the biggest learning curve I'm past. That doesn't mean I can compare to any professional yo-yoer or even anybody doing it since childhood. Every time I hang out with a yo-yoer, they teach me things. Anytime you learn a new trick, once you get it, you have it, but it takes a long time to get it. It's fun to hyper-fixate on something like this. I'm definitely not crazy good, but somebody who's never seen anyone yo-yo would be like, "Oh, that's so cool. You're such a good yo-yoer."
Livvy: She really is good, speaking from an amateur level. But it's also cool because there's a lot of music and yo-yo crossover. When they do routines during competitions, they're playing music.
Is it a mixed bag, or is there a “yo-yo” routine genre?
Noor: I've seen a lot of people do dubstep type shit. But a lot of people also use, like, Turnstile or Clairo. Our friend did a freestyle routine to a Mamalarky song once at Faye's Yo-Yo Invitational. It happens.
Livvy’s Recent Activity: Slime
Before we hopped on this call, I emailed your publicist asking what you meant by slime. I was like, “Is this a band?” Turns out, no, it’s literal slime.
Livvy: This is a very recent thing that has taken over the entire band.
Noor: Livvy, go get your slime.
Livvy: I’ll get it and show you. One second. Slime had a moment a long ass time ago, I don't even remember. Basically we were at a gas station recently, bored as hell, and I bought some slime. It was all we talked about for eight hours. Then I started throwing it around the van at Dylan [Hill, drummer], and I had to get new slime and I learned some lessons that day. In a similar way to yo-yo, I feel like it's helpful to have something to fixate on that's not a screen. It also warms up your fingers and makes you more dextrous to use a stress ball, a resistance-type thing, before a show. That's my new theory.
Noor: Livvy can also make the craziest fart sound with the slime and the slime jar.
Livvy: I'm actually having so much fun playing with it right now. Yeah, it's one of those tour things where it's you're going crazy and you have to introduce something new, especially when you're in a van, and you don't have enough sensory experiences.
Noor’s Recent Activity: Reading
I am reading more now than I have since maybe college. It's awesome. It's so much better to pick up a book than to scroll. What have you been reading recently, and why is reading, which is a classic activity, a recent favorite?
Noor: I have similar feelings of wanting to be on my phone less. I actually, really started reading a lot because my phone was fucking up. At one point, it would turn off randomly. I can't rely on this for stimulation. So I just started reading. If I had five minutes of free time, I would just read a few pages of my book. And I just got hooked on it. I've always loved reading, but last year, something clicked in me where I was always reading a book. I ended up reading 50 books last year, which was crazy because I'd never read that much in my whole life. It was all novels. I was really proud of myself and was reading so many incredible books. One of my sisters is a writer. She writes freaky cool fiction, so she and her friends are constantly reading, too. She is always giving me recommendations that are so, so awesome. I'll read like a regular degular story. But I love any fantasy and sci-fi. I don't really read much nonfiction, but I did read the Andre Agassi autobiography, Open. That's like the only work of nonfiction I've ever read. I love tennis so much, and that book was amazing.
That book rocks.
Noor: It made me an Andre Agassi fan. He’s so cool. I almost put that book as one of my current obsessions. Just that book, you can relate to him in anything you do. As a musician touring, etc. He has kind of has a complicated relationship with tennis. He loves it so much, is so competitive, but also hates it in a way, and it's destroying his body over time. I can relate to that. I tour constantly.
Livvy’s Recent Movie: Hereditary
Every time an artist brings up a horror movie, I always feel like such a scaredy-cat when I say I haven’t seen it. I’ll get around to this one, I swear.
Livvy: We watched it on this last tour in a really nowhere town in Kansas. We were at a really old 100-year-old house. We've been enjoying watching scary movies on tour, and that one came up. We love Ari Aster, and we'd seen all of his other films. This film instills dread. When the movie ended, it was quiet. Dylan, our drummer, didn't finish it.
Noor: He was like, “This is not relaxing to me.”
I feel that. I know Hereditary doesn’t have jump scares, but even still, it’s tough for me.
Livvy: I grew up on horror movies, so I really love them in whatever format they come in. I used to work somewhere that was constantly playing horror movies, and I loved it.
Noor’s Recent Artist: DannyLux
How did you discover this artist, and why did you pick them?
Noor: I had a heavy corridos phase, and I was obsessed with Eslabon Armado. I was listening to them so much, and then I started to realize that some of my favorite songs of theirs were the ones with DannyLux features. I had to dive into DannyLux. Now, Danny Lux has been my number one artist for two years straight. He will make pretty straightforward corridos shit but then he'll write something that's a little more indie pop. He also has house tracks that are really cool. I think these young ass Latin artists are making some really cool shit right now—he's like 22 or 21 or something. He's so talented. My fandom was a little bit solidified because I met him at Coachella last year. He ended up hanging out with the Faye Webster crew. He was so sweet. His music is amazing, and he's a legit kind-ass person.
I first heard him from the Tiny Desk Concert he did. It’s very good.
Noor: He has a Tiny Desk? I’m going to go watch that after this. Most of the time, when I’m talking to people, they have no idea who he is, but he’s huge.
Livvy’s Recent Album: Sugar & Spice by Red Sea
I didn’t know this record before you sent your picks. It’s really cool.
Livvy: Noor actually introduced me to their music years ago and I got back into them while we were making Hex Key. Their production is so innovative and cool and kind of like the 80s, and also very modern and strange. I can, I hear the influence on in Hex Key a lot. There are some songs on this album like "I'm You," which is the one I always come back to. This is just a well-written pop tune that's it's interspersed with these songs that are very strange and meant to question you or meant to challenge you. And they're from Atlanta too, right?
Noor: Yes. There was a 2015 to 2017 Atlanta era that featured some of my favorite local bands ever. Livvy, when we met, I was still really into them, and I showed you a lot of them, like Jake Tobin and Red Sea.
Livvy: We love Jake Tobin.
Noor: I’m so glad I showed you them.
Livvy: It's life changing, like a lot of the more also, like When we're on tour and have local openers, Noor is the one who finds them all. She's so fucking tapped into, like local music scenes. Here's a random small town, and Noor will be like, I know the person who should open for us
Noor: Not always, but I also do a lot of digging. I know the value of a good local opener.
Livvy: But yeah, a band like Red Sea, to me, sounds so unique, and so they have so much potential. Don't know the people in that band at all. Don't know what they're up to…
Noor: You’ll meet one of them in Atlanta.
Livvy: What?
Noor: Yeah, one of them is in Decker & Friends.
Livvy: No way. I was going to say that more people should be like you, Noor. If you live in Columbus, Ohio, go to Bandcamp.com and type in Columbus and go find some good music.
Go see Villagerrr. Go see Golomb. Go see Sink.
Livvy: Exactly.
What I listened to:
The No Expectations 106 Playlist: Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal
1. Greg Freeman, "Point and Shoot"
2. The Convenience, "Target Offer"
3. Friendship, "Resident Evil"
4. The Medium, "Gimme Some Gas"
5. Gold Dust, "Whatever's Left"
6. Moontype, "How I Used To Dance"
7. Mamalarky, "#1 Best of All Time"
8. Polite, "Heyday"
9. Maria Somerville, "Spring"
10. fantasy of a broken heart, "Star Inside the Earth"
11. Snuggle, "Woman Lake"
12. Hudson Freeman, "Dean"
13. First Rodeo, "Nothing"
14. Brown Horse, "Tombland"
15. Foxwarren, "Yvonne"
The Convenience, Like Cartoon Vampires
Over the past five years, I’ve been writing about a cluster of New Orleans indie rock bands like Lawn and Video Age. It’s a cool little scene: the former expertly melds jangle-pop and post-punk while the latter incorporates disco, yacht rock, and psychedelia into sleek and clever pop-rock tunes. The Convenience, the duo of Nick Corson and Duncan Troast, are both in Video Age, while Corson also plays in Lawn. On Like Cartoon Vampires, the band’s sophomore effort, they incorporate the knotty guitars of Wire, the effortless swagger of Spoon, and the menacing, off-kilter energy of the Fall. The LP opens up on a tear with three unassailable rippers in the alt-rock anthem “I Got Exactly What I Wanted,” the screeching, unpredictable guitar squalls in “Dub Vultures,” and how “Target Offer” dissolves into an explosive crescendo. This trio is everything I love about indie rock: surprising, thrilling, and smart. From there, the record gets weirder but no less exciting. There’s shuffling twang on “Western Pepsi Cola Town” and uneasy, dirgelike bassline on “Pray’r” and a slow-burning, 10-plus minute closer in “Fake the Feeling.” I could not have been more stoked to see Friends of the Substack Stereogum give this one Album of the Week: Chris DeVille’s review is great.
What I watched:
Bad Axe (Hulu, AMC+)
David Siev’s subtle and personal documentary Bad Axe is a portrait of his family and his hometown grappling with the 2020 pandemic. He’s the son of a Cambodian immigrant and a Mexican-American who both run a neighborhood restaurant in the small town of Bad Axe, Michigan. While that year is not a blast to revisit, Siev deftly blends his family’s history, their fragile emotions as they live through a world-changing pandemic, and their struggle to keep their restaurant open. They live in a deep-red county, which simmers with political tension as the George Floyd protests, a pre-vaccine virus, and the 2020 election rage in the background. All these factors collide for something messy and human: a totally enthralling exercise in empathy, immigrant stories, and what it means to be an American.
What I read:
Utopia For Realists (by Rutger Bregman)
Earlier in the week, my girlfriend and I started a PBS documentary called A Brief History of the Future. It’s been a fascinating and optimistic look at the many people, technologies, and organizations trying to make the world a better place. I’ve been reading a lot of political, economic, and social history books lately. While it’s been illuminating and oddly comforting to learn more about how the problems we face today aren’t exactly new, it can be a bummer. So, I decided to pick up a book that’s a little more hopeful and future-forward: Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. Here, he provides a breezy crash course in ideas like Universal Basic Income (and how in America, Republican Richard Nixon was very close to implementing it), a significantly shorter work week, and open borders. It’s a fun, lucid, and easy-to-digest intro to these concepts.
The Weekly Chicago Show Calendar:
The gig calendar lives on the WTTW News website now. You can also subscribe to the newsletter I produce there called Daily Chicagoan to get it in your inbox a day early.