Welcome to all our new subscribers from The Sunday Long Read crowd. Happy to have you here. We are Three Point Four Media, an editorial studio based in Brooklyn and Ann Arbor. We use the skills we developed in our previous lives as freelance magazine writers to help brands big and small tell their stories. For the uninitiated, I’m Bill Bradley and I started Three Point Four with Noah Davis back in 2017. We take turns writing this twice-monthly newsletter. Some of our newsletter’s greatest hits to get you up to speed: Here’s some money from my wallet, Where’d all the time go?, I screwed up our taxes, Five years on, and Do you have the bandwidth?
Hope you enjoy our musings and vibes-based reports from the small business world every other Saturday morning. Onto the links.
An Article
The news cycle moves fast and it’s easy to forget* that in the middle of a global pandemic, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was at the center of a kidnapping plot. She handled it with grace. And beyond just the kidnapping saga she has a sense of humor. She’s relatable. She’s good at her job. She has an accent just like me! Benjamin Wallace-Wells captured why she’s popular (among Democrats!) here in Michigan in this profile from June that I somehow did not read til this week—ope, my bad.
*for the greater public, obviously not for Whitmer.
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A Recipe
Made Molly Baz’s grilled buffalo wings last week. Very simple, very good. A real crowd pleaser. Brining the wings in buttermilk? Game changer.
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A Project
More work for Dropbox, a customer success story about how Figma’s creative team uses Dropbox’s suite of products.
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A Movie
The Michigan Theater in downtown Ann Arbor is doing a big Scorsese retrospective in advance of Killers of the Flower Moon, Marty’s new film out next month. While it was wonderful to see Mean Streets and Taxi Driver on the big screen—it’s always a treat to see old movies in theaters, instead of at home—I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention they also screened The Big Lebowski, which has nothing to do with Scorsese but remains endlessly fascinating to me as a film and cultural touchstone. Sometimes when I’m reading through client feedback I get wound up like Walter—I need to be more like The Dude in these types of situations.
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A Book
Speaking of Scorsese, I picked up David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Tried to check it out from the library, but approximately 92 people had the same idea after they saw the trailer for the new Scorsese movie so I broke down and bought it. Very good, highly recommend. Wish I’d read the book before the trailer came out because it was hard to escape the image of Leo and De Niro.
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A Concert
Like many creative class white guys between the age of 36 and 54, I saw Pavement in Brooklyn this week. Lead singer Stephen Malkmus has always had a reputation for, shall we say, being totally over it. (Trying very hard to not say “slacker” here.) When I saw the first reunion tour at Central Park back in 2010, Malkmus’s on-stage energy seemed like his financial advisor told him he had to get Pavement back together. Aloof, disinterested, going through the motions. This time around, he seemed to be having a much better time—he had just the right amount of irony and detachment in his voice. They were very loud and everyone in the crowd seemed very happy. Here’s a playlist I made of the setlist from Tuesday’s show. (Bonus article: An old Chuck Klosterman Pavement profile for GQ.)
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A Run
Whenever I visit New York I most look forward to running with Noah. (It is, as clients and longtime readers know, how we started Three Point Four.) A 6-mile run for us is the equivalent of an insufferable two-day leadership summit at some giant corporation. Plus, it’s way more fun and we don’t have to say “leadership summit.” Anyway, I had to run by myself this week because Noah is on the injured list. The new lanes in Prospect Park are nice, though.
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Noah will be back in the rotation two weeks from now.