happy valentine's day | 2/14/25

Welcome to make you think, a newsletter about being alive in the endtimes. If you just signed up, welcome! You can find previous editions of the newsletter right here. If you know someone who might like this, click that little forward button and pass it along! Happy Valentine's Day if you're celebrating and happy Friday otherwise.

kendrick lamar is the first person to ever beat a dead horse correctly. he has done it over and over and over again and every time he makes the horse more dead. inventing new ways to end a life.

this was the first super bowl in a long time that i watched with other people – i was at elbow room in hollywood with some friends who were in town for the split fiction event. to sit in that space (with other black people!), to sit in awe at kenny's breath control, to shout A MINORRRRR, to nearly knock over a glass when serena cripwalked on drake's body – was a joy and delight. i do not want it to go unnoticed that these moments are uniquely suited to happen off of the back of sports which are a uniquely congregational experience. if you sit at your desk or sit in the bar and utter the word sportsball as a way to denigrate the activity, know that you are voluntarily ignoring one of the few active pillars of community we have left (as flawed and garish as it can be).

for years i have been chasing one thing: the experience of having a mall pretzel at home.

as you read this you may be saying "but niki. what of the superpretzel in the black box in the freezer aisle?" those are stadium style pretzels. they are characterized by a firm, dry texture and larger salt crystals. they are inferior to the mall pretzel in my eyes. the mall pretzel is an object that delivers butter unto the human body via bread. the salt (or cinnamon sugar, or cheese, or pepperoni, or) is an accent to the butter. it is something that can only be created inside a mall, and not in a factory. someone has to twist those pretzels out on a table before putting them in an oven (and subsequently a hot box).

because of this, my dream is incredibly difficult to achieve. packaging butter for transit in a baked good that has any type of shelf stability is hard. using margarine doesn't work either because margarine fucking blows. so you either have to make the pretzel at home (i don't want to do this) or go without a pretzel. in the last couple of weeks though, i have come across two different products that bring us a bit closer to making my dream a reality. the first are these soft pretzel twists from trader joe's, and the other are these pretzel bites from imperfect foods/misfit market. they both require some prep, though. before you follow the reheating instructions on the package, poke holes in the pretzels with a fork, and then pour melted butter into the pretzels, making sure that it seeps into the bread. then put it in the oven. if you want to put together some cinnamon sugar while you wait, you can do that. sometimes i like to toss some of the pretzel salt into the cinnamon sugar so you get a salty and sweet situation. this process gets you about 80% of the way to a mall pretzel, which is better than where we used to be at, which was like, 30%. if you indulge in this treat please leave a comment or reply to this. let me know what you think about pretzels.

i leave you with this video i took at the pool over the weekend of my favorite john cougar mellencamp song. i'll leave it up to you to guess which of his many tracks that is.

have a good one, talk soon, and go birds.

niki