Happy Thanksgiving 2024!

Plus, how to escape.

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. You get the community and warmth and culinary indulgence of Christmas, but in a secular package that everyone can get hip to. Yes, there’s the genocide and the ethical dubiousness of industrial animal agriculture. But there’s also football and family and a lot of food, and besides all that Thanksgiving might just be the last remaining bastion of togetherness in an increasingly fragile and fragmented culture.

Still and all, the fellowship will inevitably get old. The Cowboys—picking up where the Detroit Lions left off—will likely lose. And you may need to escape from the pressures of family and friends. Here are a couple of great ways to do that.

First, put on a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort Ultra headphones (or similar quality noise canceling) and listen to—in its entirety—the 1961 live jazz classic Charlie Byrd at the Village Vanguard, a master class on guitar improvisation from a bona fide craftsman of the genre. This is good for 45 minutes of escape. The final track is a twenty-minute fantasia on the old labor tune “Which Side Are You On?” Byrd, a jazz and classically-trained guitarist, played this trio set at NYC’s famed Village Vanguard right before leaving on a US State Department cultural trip to South America in the spring of 1961. While traveling in Brazil, he discovered bossa nova, brought it back home with him, and then teamed up with Stan Getz in 1962 to record Jazz Samba—the album that sparked a decade-long American love affair with Brazilian music.

Then, for a measly sixteen bucks you can subscribe to Disney+ and screen Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back. This eight-hour masterpiece begins as the band is rehearsing at Twickenham Studios for what is at first meant to be a television special about the recording of their next album leading up to a live show (the difficult sessions would result in Let It Be). Jackson’s “documentary about a documentary” apparently combines hours upon hours of raw studio footage of the band cutting each other down, arguing, walking out in anger, and, presumably, making music. I haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t comment further on its quality, but I do recommend this comprehensive review from Slate. I just remember missing this during the pandemic when it debuted, and Thanksgiving seems like the perfect time to fire this up with family (or alone, if you prefer). You can subscribe to Disney+ for $16 right now and also get Hulu and ESPN+ (with ads, naturally). Still probably worth the 16 bucks just to see The Beatles: Get Back.

I’m also reading Jerusalem Demsas’s On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy, a recent anthology of relevant reporting on why no one in America can afford a house anymore. Demsas blames hyper-responsive local governments around the country that exert outsized control over zoning, variances, and what types of homes can be built. On the face of it, one might think that local government—cities, counties, and the boards of historic districts—make a lot of sense as the ultimate arbiters of what homes can be built and where, but Demsas shows how a few loudmouthed NIMBYs and well-connected citizen complainers can totally demolish plans for new housing projects, often on nothing so sturdy as a vague sense that new construction (and the people they bring) equals declining property values. Demsas’s analysis is fresh, knowledgeable, and expertly-researched; America desperately needs more housing of every kind and at every price point—everywhere. The only way out of this multi-layered and years-in-the-making housing crisis is to build our way out. But as long as cost-shy and risk-averse developers buckle under the slightest bit of pressure from NIMBY groups and other local activists, this massive crisis will continue to fester. And, Demsas argues, it’s a bipartisan issue—one that bedevils blue as well as red cities. As she puts it:

Across metro areas, in states led by Democrats and Republicans alike, the same pattern emerges: Local governments decide what gets built and where, and they use that power to ban multifamily housing, entrench economic segregation, and perpetuate a national affordability crisis.

Deporting nearly 25% of the construction trades workforce, as president-elect Trump has promised to do, will also, in the words of one Texas builder, “devastate our industry.”

Finally, y’all might not know this, but law enforcement calls the day before Thanksgiving “Blackout Wednesday” because it marks the beginning of their annual DUI crackdown period, which runs from today until New Years Day. If you imbibe over the holidays, don’t drink and drive. It’s that simple. If you need some encouragement, head over to reddit.com/r/dui and read some of the horrors people have done (and endured) because they had a few drinks and didn’t call an Uber. Regardless of the legal limit in your locality, if they want to bust you for DUI or DWI, they usually can. And that goes for prescription meds, too.

This has been a public service announcement provided by your friends at The Highlight Zone, in association with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (Just kidding. The CPB has nothing to do with this, but it did make me think of a rather funny tweet I saw this week.)

Happy Thanksgiving!