Weekend Reads (April 4): Apple Turns 50, Weird Al, “Godsploitation” Films, Peanut Butter Cups
Recommended weekend reading material for April 4, 2026.
Apple turned 50 years old this week, sparking a bunch of tributes to the technology company, which began in Steve Jobs’ bedroom in his parents’ home and grew to become one of the world’s most powerful, iconic, and influential companies.
Antony Johnston explains how Apple’s Macintosh computer changed his life back in 1988.
I don’t know why my tutor showed off that Mac to me, of all people. But I was gobsmacked by the visual interface and the tangibility of its spatial permanence model. ‘This icon here is your file. This window represents the space inside a folder. If you move the file into the folder, it will still be there, in that same visually-defined place, when you look inside again later.’
I know that sounds like the simplest, most obvious thing now, but in the 1980s it really wasn’t. Crucially, unlike a command line, it made sense to me.
I had a very similar experience. I was familiar with computers — my family had a Commodore 64, and I’d used Apple II computers in junior high — but when I finally got to work on a Mac in high school, it was life-changing. My earliest forays into graphic design and desktop publishing were pretty hilarious, but they laid the foundation for much of what I do today.
Related: Back in 2011, I penned a tribute to Apple founder Steve Jobs, who died on October 5. “When Jobs resigned as Apple’s CEO back in August, I think we all knew that it was only a matter of time before the end came. But if I had to give a name to my primary emotion upon hearing the news, it’d probably be gratitude.”
The Polygon staff highlights ten TV shows that should’ve just had one season.
That isn’t to say the shows below — our personal nominees for series that should have stopped with season 1 — never had a single good episode or storyline in subsequent seasons. Plenty of them had great storylines or scattered flashes of brilliance later in their run. But none of them lived up to the potential of their opening seasons, and we felt like we lost something powerful and enjoyable when they moved into season 2 and beyond.
As much as I enjoyed the entire series overall, I can’t really fault their inclusion of Stranger Things. That first season was just so perfectly realized.
Mike Monteiro offers some recommendations for the burgeoning vinyl aficionado, as well as an apology.
I tried to talk everyone out of buying vinyl not too long ago. It’s expensive. It’s a pain in the ass if you move. It takes up way too much space in your home. It warps in the heat. You’ll forget you already have something and buy it multiple times. People write about it when they’re trying to avoid writing about all the terrible things happening in the world. Worst of all, it introduces terrible people into your life: audiophiles. We covered all of these things. And yet, you did it anyway.
Congrats. I’m sorry.
Via Piccalilli.
My 16yo recently began collecting vinyl, and though I’ve given plenty of recommendations, it’s been fun to see them develop their own personal taste. Which, as it turns out, is far more eclectic — e.g., Beach Boys, Black Sabbath, Genesis, Tears for Fears — than my taste when I was 16.
“Weird Al” Yankovic has written plenty of bangers in his time, including “Eat It,” “Like a Surgeon,” and “Smells Like Nirvana,” but for my money, “White & Nerdy” might be his legitimate masterpiece. The parody of Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’” was Yankovic’s first platinum single and his first song to crack the top 10 in the US Billboard Hot 100.
Yankovic reflected on “White & Nerdy”’s success in a recent interview, as well as the effect of YouTube on music videos and the transition from physical media to streaming.
In my mind it was conceptually very similar to a song I’d done a decade earlier called “It’s All about the Pentiums” — a very nerdy, computer geek kind of song, which I thought was really good, but it didn’t set the world on fire when it came out in 1999. So I thought, “Well, this is sort of like another version of that, and I’m sure it’ll do fine.” But I didn’t realize it was going to be my highest charting and biggest selling single. So I was very, very happy that happened.
I’ve watched the video for “White & Nerdy” countless times now, and it never fails to put a smile on my face. And yes, that is indeed Key and Peele pulling up in the lowrider.
Nicholas McDonald offers up some observations of “Christian” films and the “Godsploitation” genre.
The apparent belief of the Godsploitation complex is this: conversion is the only possible good in this world. There is no good reason to celebrate food or love or friendship or to lament injustice or to celebrate a brilliant mind for being brilliant. There is no point in writing a film about the complex intricacies of family or the celebration of a place. There is no reason, even, to create an original plot: let’s use someone else’s original idea (Night at the Museum) and just attach our ideas to it like a parasite to its host. Why put something originally beautiful into the world, if the only possible good is Christian conversion?
Related: Back in 2002, GQ editor Walter Kirn wrote a brilliant essay about “the sell-contained parallel universe of American Christian pop culture,” which he described as “a bad Xerox of the mainstream.”
The Verge’s Gaby Del Valle ponders why notable woman on the right, including Second Lady Usha Vance and Stephen Miller’s wife Katie Miller, have started launching podcasts.
“There isn’t a place for conservative women to gather online,” Miller said when announcing her podcast in 2025. Except, as The New York Times pointed out at the time, there is a thriving right-wing “womanosphere” as embodied by magazines like Evie and The Conservateur and a litany of podcasts including The Brett Cooper Show, Alex Clark’s Culture Apothecary, and Allie Beth Stuckey’s Relatable. But right-wing media relies on the illusion of rejection and transgression — Miller needs to position herself as a conservative lighthouse in a sea of liberal lifestyle content, because she has nothing else to differentiate her from the crowd. Similarly, Vance’s podcast is just the latest among many storytime podcasts, some of which are overtly political.
The Backyard Movie Critic lists ten comedies that screwed up Generation Xers such as myself.
I know these are beloved comedies, and I hear your laments. Today’s movies are too sanitized! Kids should be exposed to some of these things. I think sometimes Gen X is trauma bonded to the movies we grew up with. It’s one thing to watch The Matrix or Die Hard, a movie that is, I don’t know, almost hyper-realistic yet could never happen. A lot of kids get and understand that. A fifth grader doesn’t know that the kids in Porky’s are supposed to be outlandish. Some think that’s what you’re supposed to act like when you grow up.
Gen X, this did happen to us. Hollywood took the gloves off and would do anything at the box office to earn a buck. As kids, we were exposed to these movies way too young. Most of them are rated R, and no one cared. We have to sit with that.
Several of the movies on his list often played on the local TV station on Saturday afternoons when I was growing up, albeit in obviously censored forms. It wasn’t until after college that I finally watched the uncut and uncensored version of Revenge of the Nerds. As a kid, I always knew it was raunchier than what I was seeing on TV, but seeing the original film was something else, entirely. The sheer amount of creepy, misogynistic behavior by the nerds — who, mind you, are the film’s heroes — was rather mind-blowing.
Finally, back in February, I wrote about the confectionary controversy surrounding allegations that Hershey was skimping on the chocolate in some of their Reese’s products. But now the candy giant has announced that it’s changing course and returning to real chocolate.
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups have been made with the same ingredients since 1928 — milk chocolate and peanut butter.
Starting next year, [Hershey CEO Kirk Tanner] said candies inspired by the originals like the “mini Reese’s cups and shapes” as well as the Reese’s Fast Break candy bar will also be made with real milk chocolate instead of a chocolate compound coating.
In addition, all the classic Hershey’s chocolate bars will also be made with “pure milk and dark chocolate,” he said. And Hershey is “enhancing” the Kit Kat candy bar “for a creamier taste and texture.”
I’ll believe our national nightmare is over when I can taste the changes for myself… after extensive testing, of course.
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