96: January 2025
Hello, welcome to Border Crossing issue #96, I hope you’re well, keeping warm and your year has got going nicely.
A very warm, grateful hello if you’re a new sub, thank you for joining us and supporting my writing. But also, thank you very much if you’ve been around for a while and you’ve made Border Crossing a small part of your life. It means so much to me that you’re here.
In 2025 Border Crossing will keep rolling to the same schedule: it will usually plop in your inbox on the first and third Sundays of each month. If I write an essay, I’ll include it. If not, you’ll still get the ‘gems’ and whatever other nonsense I feel like sharing.
If you’ve not seen it, in tandem I also write the irregular (short-form) sibling newsletter Double Chorus which will appear at random, whenever I’m moved to write anything about music.
I don’t write often for other places — sometimes The Quietus or Rock and The Beat Generation but hardly ever anywhere else. I’ll pretend it’s because I’m busy with long-form projects (and I am) but truthfully I’m just too complacent about even strong ideas, and plain awful at pitching. I’m okay with that, though. I have my two book proposals (finally!) ready to go this week, and a decent pile of creative ideas / projects incoming, so perhaps perhaps it’ll be a magical 2025 despite everything out there.
I hope you’re able to feel optimistic too, right now, whatever schmucks are mismanaging the world.
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I reviewed Franz Ferdinand’s new album The Human Fear for The Quietus. I did enjoy some of it.
gems
1
Justine Jordan interviews the great Alan Garner at ninety, for The Guardian.
2
Watching Nikki Glaser’s intro monologue for the Golden Globes led me back to her brilliant, basic, brutal-as-fuck set at The Roast of Tom Brady from last summer. It broke her to a new level of fame in the USA (Conan says it’s the greatest roast of all time) and I guess scored her the Golden Globes host gig. Obviously comedy is subjective, however if Glaser is your thing and you dig these two clips, here’s one more: after the GGs, Glaser went on Howard Stern to share the gags she wasn’t able to do and that was also very fun.
3
Yoga people: in May, the fantastic Wimbledon-based teacher Laila Bhunnoo hosts her first residential yoga retreat, at beautiful Florence House in Seaford, East Sussex. Details on her website, scroll down, or click ‘classes’ for more information. This isn’t a paid advert or anything, Laila is family and she didn’t even ask me to publicise it.
4
J. David McSwane’s extraordinary achievement: ‘Eat What You Kill’ is a vast, meticulously reported long read for Pro Publica, published last month, investigating a trail of suspicious deaths at a hospital in Montana.
5
This month I met in real life someone I only previously knew via a newsletter. Seb Merrick publishes the excellent My Teenage Diary 1984, which does what it says on the tin: it was his unexpurgated year of journaling, as a boy, forty years ago. It’s great, Seb’s fearless in sharing his youthful self. Of course it finished over Christmas and I didn’t realise, so the latest entries are the final bunch. I was taken aback meeting (by chance) the real man whose teenage adventures I’ve got so much from. It’s a wealth of treasure reading the whole thing. A successful experiment and a compelling read.
6
Adam Zeman’s new book The Shape Of Things Unseen unpacks the latest science on the human imagination and it’s highly readable. I’m finding it both reassuring and revelatory.
potato gems
NPR’s Planet Money podcast kicked off 2025 with a potato-themed episode on spuds being a key weird exception in the otherwise strict trade relationship between the USA and Mexico.
Also, just before Christmas, IFL Science magazine published this interesting explainer about all the air in crisp packets.
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get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey
always there
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Please look after yourself and your people.
All my love,
Christopher
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