Ahead on Differential

Here are ten things.

1. A weird one to start off: rediscovering the joy of eating eggs for breakfast. Shout out to eggs.
2. The nominations for the 95th Academy Awards dropped this week. Now, the Oscars may or may not matter, but the event itself is WrestleMania for cinephiles. How will the storylines resolve? Will the heel win over the beloved babyface? What swerves could there possibly be? My only real note here is that Cate Blanchett, as awesome as she was in Tár, already has two statuettes, so I'm all in on Michelle Yeoh and Team Everything Everywhere All at Once having a big night.
3. Sometimes you shitpost yourself into a hypothetical. Here's my all-time NHL All-Germany team: Draisaitl (will go down in history as the greatest German hockey player of all time, full stop; they're going to put his face on stamps one day), Sturm (Marco, to be clear; no shade to Nico, he can cry into his Stanley Cup ring about it if he likes), Hecht, Ehrhoff (just two solid dudes), Krupp (Avs legend, real heads know), Kölzig (now, this is a guy, Oli the Goalie, come on!).
4. Earworm of the week goes to this 11-year-old cover of “Nyan Cat” done in the style of prog-rock enfants terribles Emerson, Lake & Palmer, concocted by one Kobi LaCroix. It's shockingly good.
5. Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs runs down his pedal board. This is my version of ASMR.
6. Every now and again, the back catalogue of an artist I like will just appear unannounced on Spotify. This time around, the work of Tokyo math-funk weirdos Zazen Boys has arrived on the platform. Zazen Boys 4 is my suggested entry point (it features “Weekend,” whose immortal music video is how I found out about this band circa my time on Tumblr), but “Riff Man” from Zazen Boys III might be my favourite of their songs.
7. New music alert: the new White Reaper album Asking for a Ride kicks ass, all punk fury, glammy power pop, and Destroyer worship.
8. An intersection of relevant interests: John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats in the Criterion Closet.
9. 2022 catch-up: Charlotte Wells's moving, achingly 90s drama Aftersun and Todd Field's mesmerizing, patient character study Tár.
10. “There are no boring people in this world” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Boris Dralyuk (via Eileen Chengyin Chow):
    

    There are no boring people in this world.
    Each fate is like the history of a planet.
    And no two planets are alike at all.
    Each is distinct – you simply can’t compare it.
    
    If someone lived without attracting notice
    and made a friend of their obscurity –
    then their uniqueness was precisely this.
    Their very plainness made them interesting.
    
    Each person has a world that’s all their own.
    Each of those worlds must have its finest moment
    and each must have its hour of bitter torment –
    and yet, to us, both hours remain unknown.
    
    When people die, they do not die alone.
    They die along with their first kiss, first combat.
    They take away their first day in the snow …
    All gone, all gone – there’s just no way to stop it.
    
    There may be much that’s fated to remain,
    but something – something leaves us all the same.
    The rules are cruel, the game nightmarish –
    it isn’t people but whole worlds that perish.

#tenthings