Weekend Reads (May 16): Chocolate, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Unwed Sailor, Clavicular
Recommended weekend reading material for May 16, 2026.
Due to some upcoming family events, there will be no “Weekend Reads” newsletter next week for May 23, 2026. Which means you can expect an extra long edition the following week, on May 30.
An Italian chocolate laboratory is developing an international standard for assessing and grading cacao, with the goal of improving the industry and helping those who farm and produce cacao beans.
Every cacao is different. “Cacao has an incredible amount of genetic variety,” says Simonis. But for a long time, there wasn’t a standard way of comparing the dizzying array of beans produced on farms across the tropics. This is unlike wine with its sommeliers or coffee with its Q graders — people who taste and systematically compare and rate those products using an internationally agreed-upon rubric.
But there were those in the chocolate biz who wanted to raise the bar. And so, in 2009, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, a sustainable agriculture nonprofit headquartered in Rome, started a program called Cacao of Excellence. And they asked Simonis — a chocolate scientist who now serves as program manager — to help them develop a standardized way of preparing and evaluating cacao.
Forget about web development. I want to get hired at a chocolate laboratory.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers recently sold their entire music catalog to Warner Music Group for $300 million.
The deal includes all of the band’s recorded output, including their 13 studio albums, which reportedly generate around $26 million annually. Although the band owned their recorded catalog independently for the past year, during which they were allegedly seeking $350 million for the package, Warner is a logical buyer to foot the bill, as the label originally released Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Californication.
Other artists who’ve sold their music catalogs include Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Kiss, Shakira, and Stevie Nicks. Such sales became increasingly popular during COVID, when artists weren’t able to tour. However, there are other lucrative reasons for these sales, including tax benefits and fending off future risks and market trends.
Streaming was already a less-than-lucrative proposition for musicians, many of whom earn a pittance from platforms like Spotify. And now, they have to worry about fraudsters pumping out AI-generated imitations of their music and taking money away from them.
Last October, NPR reported that the indie rock musicians Luke Temple and Uncle Tupelo had had their accounts hijacked by AI, as had the now deceased electro-pop artist Sophie and country music singer Blaze Foley. In a bizarre situation in December, the Australian psych-rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard removed their music from Spotify, only to see an AI impersonator called King Lizard Wizard fill the void with identical song titles and poorly imitated AI artwork.
Morgan Hayduk, a co-CEO of Beatdapp, which offers fraud detection specifically for music streaming, said that the problem isn’t isolated to Spotify; it also happens on Apple Music, YouTube and various other streaming platforms. His company estimates that 5% to 10% of all streams across the industry are fraudulent, which breaks down to a value of $1bn to $2bn per year.
Pitchfork asked 240 musicians, actors, and other creatives to pick their “perfect 10” albums. The artists featured include Air, Alan Sparhawk, American Football, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Japanese Breakfast, John C. Reilly, Matt Smith, and Teyana Taylor.
Unwed Sailor has been a longtime fave here at Opus HQ, ever since I bought a copy of the Firecracker EP at the 1999 Cornerstone Festival. They just released their eleventh album, High Remembrance, and Damien Joyce interviewed bandleader Johnathon Ford about his prolific recording output.
I had a realization around 2018 that I’ve been a musician for close to 30 years, putting out records, touring, and recording. I was on tour, and I met with a friend who also puts out records and is in a band. He said he wanted to set a goal for himself to put out a record every year. There was something about that that really intrigued me. I thought, well, ok, I’ve done this for this long, I feel like I should fully commit. This is what I do, it’s my life, it’s what I love, so why am I not doing that? Starting in 2019, I decided to put out a record every year, and I’ve managed to accomplish it up to 2026. Actually, I just finished the bass and drum demos for the 2027 album, so we’re on track for another album in 2027!
I’ve developed a kind of schedule throughout the year where I’ll start recording demos for the next record, then set aside time for studio recording, mixing, mastering, and manufacturing. I’ve got a timeline throughout the year where I put all those objectives into place. Then, we set up the release cycle for the album the following year. So, yes, it’s what I’ve been doing for seven years now, I guess.
Japanese horror novelist Kōji Suzuki, best known for creating The Ring, died last week at the age of 68.
Suzuki became the first Japanese author to win the Best Novel prize at the Shirley Jackson Awards for his novel Edge in 2013. His other awards include the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize for New Writers in 1996 and the 2021 Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. His works were also nominated for the Naoki Prize, the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, and the Japanese SF Award.
The Ring was turned into a series of popular horror movies, including a 2002 English adaptation by Gore Verbinski that starred Naomi Watts and Brian Cox.
Related: I wasn’t a big fan of the original Ring movie by Hideo Nakata. I did, however, enjoy Dark Water, which was also directed by Nakata and based on Suzuki’s “Floating Water” short story.
With its emphasis on nostalgic vibes, Mixtape has become one of 2026’s most acclaimed video games. But that success has also come with a lot of heated discussion concerning the game’s storytelling, its race and class-based aesthetics, the politics involved, and even the current state of video game criticism.
Drive-by arguments around the game and the ills it supposedly represents have given rise to posts and videos with millions of views. Mixtape is, against all odds — given that it’s an indie-coded game that aspires more to vibes than groundbreaking mechanics or any sort of genre-redefining experience — the talk of the town. But today’s internet is more fragmented than ever, so the Mixtape discourse is really more like dozens of towns, each with their own dialects steeped in unspoken histories, screaming past each other in an attempt to finally pin down Where It All Went Wrong. In other words, it’s another week in the video game industry.
Sarah Welch-Larson, one of my favorite movie critics, writes about two classic westerns that were released 50 years ago — The Outlaw Josey Wales and Keoma — and what they say about America and its mythology.
America is a land of contradictions: the self-professed land of the free built on the institutions of slavery and genocide. We tell ourselves we’re individuals, beholden to no one, even as we’re shaped by our circumstances. We think of ourselves as the main character. We print the legend. Josey and Keoma embody that sense of individualism — and, intentionally or not, their respective movies bear the weight of the contradiction at the heart of being an American. One sits too close to the American experiment, its perspective warped by its own noxious political ideals. The other sits too far away, a portrait of Americanness from the outside. Push the two together and the image comes into focus, an approximation of the real thing in the negative spaces both movies leave behind.
The algorithms led me to this little nugget of nostalgia: During the ’70s and ’80s, Moby Books released abridged and illustrated editions of classic novels like Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, War of the Worlds, and The Count of Monte Cristo.
For me, the emblem of my childhood is a set of mini-books called “Moby Books Illustrated Classic Editions.” These were a series of small (5 1/2 x 4″) editions of classic novels published in the 1970’s and 80’s which had been abridged and simplified so that a young reader could grasp the story and encounter key sections of the original dialogue and narration of a classic work of literature. One of the most notable features for me, as a young reader, was the comic-style illustrations that accompanied each page of the narrative, as well as the vividly-depicted covers, which had a simple, Van Gogh-like beauty in their coloring and style.
My parents bought several of these for me when I was growing up, and I loved every single one of them. However, it didn’t occur to me until I was much older that these were abridged editions, and I definitely remember feeling very learned and erudite as I bragged to my classmates that I’d read these great works of literature. 😂
Related: My other great literary love as a child were Choose Your Own Adventure books. During COVID, I bought several of them on a whim, and discovered they were just as delightful as I remembered. “I’m pretty sure you could write an entire college thesis on how the CYOA books’ interactive, non-linear nature — which strongly encourages you to keep multiple pages bookmarked as you jump back and forth between storylines or even read multiple storylines in parallel — primed an entire generation for the interactive, non-linear nature of the World Wide Web.”
Adam Kinzinger calls out streamers like “Chud the Builder” and “Clavicular” who specialize in posting purposefully offensive content, and in particular, their effect on thousands of young men who watch their crap.
The shape is this: you go out in public, you do something deliberately humiliating or threatening or dehumanizing to another person, you film it, and then you use the legal and police systems — the very systems this movement claims to despise — as a shield the moment your target shows the slightest bit of human reaction. The provocateur gets to play the victim. The actual victim gets a cop called on them, or a lawsuit filed against them, or both. And tens of thousands of teenage boys watch it happen and learn a lesson that will deform them for the rest of their lives.
The lesson is: cruelty is funny, women are targets, minorities are punchlines, and if anybody objects, you have the state on your side.
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