Newsletter Of The Week: Dirt

Thermae Romae Novae (Netflix)

This utterly unique streaming show throws together three things that aren’t often found together: Ancient Rome, anime, and time travel. It’s a sweet, relaxing half-hour series about Lucius Modestus, a designer of bathhouses. Lucius finds himself traveling to modern Japan (via underwater portals, of course), where he gets inspired by the latest bathing technology and brings it back to his own time. The atmosphere is perfect even if the narrative logic isn’t. — Kyle Chayka

@huxintingting, home chef (TikTok)

I get lots of cooking clips in my For You feed, but one day I encountered a video by @huxintingting and it stood out immediately. She wasn’t just cooking a single recipe, but showing how she made entire meals of four or five separate Chinese dishes for her family: steamed fish, pork rib soup, cabbage, eggplant, rice. The videos feel like how one actually cooks at home, reusing bits of leftovers and pulling stuff out of the freezer, juggling everything at once. — Kyle Chayka

Rustic Breakfast (YouTube)

I can’t really explain the hold that this 2015 clip from “The Mind of a Chef” of Francis Mallmann and Ed Lee making breakfast has on me, but I think about it often. The recipe is for “coffee-dyed ham and eggs on toast,” and involves dipping delicate slices of salty ham into a bowl of reduced coffee. The clip includes some classic Mallmann quotes like, “It’s very important to respect the place where the food falls.” — Daisy Alioto

Pistol (Hulu)

I’ve been looking for a show to fill the “Vinyl”-sized hole in my heart. “Pistol,” a biographical miniseries of The Sex Pistols, is worth watching for the Vivienne Westwood of it all. The show could only have been made by someone with a fetishistic interest in 1970s English gutter punks. Anson Boon as an appropriately twitchy Johnny Rotten is also a highlight. — Daisy Alioto

Chickens (Twitter)

Photographer Noah Kalina and designer Jacob Bijani have joined forces in this quirky project. Noah lives on a sprawling plot of land in upstate New York, keeping a bunch of chickens. He set up a motion-sensitive camera in the field, which triggers when the chickens wander past. The image is then minted as an NFT and posted to Twitter, with details about the weather and time of day. Delightfully, this system works for squirrels and deer too! — Daisy Alioto

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