Mentioned this week: the most unbelievable "bruh" ever recorded
Plus: a plastic bag balaclava, thornless honeylocusts, the grasp of the sublime, and the pursuit of a Godly woman
Last week I spent some time on the water and in the sand. I drove my mother to a motel on Maine’s midcoast, where she lived for six years four decades ago. We explored the region’s tentacular peninsulas: scrying tidepools at the tip of Harpswell, scrambling over the quartz-flecked rock formation called Giant’s Stairs, sharing a lobster roll on gluten-free bread upon a shaded wharf as we enjoyed the out-of-tune stylings of a cover band called Dysfunction Junction. On a boat tour of Casco Bay steered by employees of the local maritime museum, I learned that I’d been misusing the word “brackish,” which does not describe water that is dirty, but instead describes water that is salty but not too salty, as where a river meets the sea.
This week’s Mentions spend time under the water and in the mud. Read on for a plastic bag balaclava, thornless honeylocusts, Inner Mongolia, the grasp of the sublime, and the pursuit of a Godly woman.
— Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, Mentions Editor
“The Blindboy Podcast”
AUDIO
The Irish writer who goes by Blindboy Boatclub curates an extended universe for fellow obsessive iconoclasts; that he wears a plastic bag balaclava is the least interesting thing about this national treasure. He’s published three collections of satirical short stories — most recently Topographia Hibernica — and was named Best Documentary Presenter at the 2025 Grierson Documentary Awards for Blindboy: The Land of Slaves and Scholars, an LSD trip into early Irish Christianity. (The country’s monks invented spaces between words.) But it’s the podcast, which has run weekly for eight years, that best showcases Blindboy’s range. Subjects vary from a vulnerable dissection of his mid-thirties autism diagnosis (“Intrapersonally Speaking”) to audio essays like “The miserable blood drenched history of Jaffa cakes” (one installment of what The Guardian called “some of the best food writing being published anywhere”) and creative nonfiction like “Why I want to fuck Captain Planet.” He has also interviewed no fewer than two Irish presidents.
Elizabeth R. Blackburn
Message from the Mud
ART
The grass at Storm King Art Center looks lush and well-kept until you arrive at Anicka Yi’s newly installed excavation. In a circle of bare dirt, glowing acrylic columns filled with soil and pondwater emerge from a kidney-shaped pool. The deep black soil blooms with lurid green algae, gesso-like white areas, and ochre stains of bacterial growth. The work could be a Clyfford Still abstraction, or marble from an alien planet; it is unmistakably alive and slowly bubbling. Although Yi’s disruption of the Minimalist surrounding scenery — the landscaped trees, Alexander Liberman’s tubular sculptures nearby, and the impressive ionic columns at the top of the hill — is genuinely jarring, the effect is ultimately serene. Whatever message the mud has for us, the mud will speak it slowly.
Caroline Magavern
Ghostbox Cowboy
FILM
Documentarian-turned-feature-director John Maringouin’s criminally under-watched 2018 movie starts off as if Midnight Cowboy took place in contemporary Shenzhen, but slowly morphs into a Kratom-infused Apocalypse Now, set against the global commodity supercycle instead of the Vietnam War. Our protagonist, Jimmy Van Horn, ventures deep into Inner Mongolia in search of the elusive Johnny Mai Thai, an underworld figure who eventually utters the most unbelievable “bruh” ever recorded. It’s the only film I know of that scratches a similar itch as that A.I. video of Biden and Trump performing a duet of “Yi Jian Mei,” and, like all great cinema, it’s streaming for free on Tubi.
Owen Harrington
Ghost Ships Festival
ARTIFACTS
Scores of septuagenarians gathered in Manitowoc, Wisconsin on a gusty March day for this annual community event hosted by the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association (woo-ah for short). Via slide decks and Ken Burns-esque voice-overs, underwater archaeologists, divers, and maritime historians reported on the latest Great Lakes shipwreck discoveries, including the Lac La Belle, a steamship seated at the bottom of Lake Michigan since 1872. The audience leaned in, grasping for the sublime, as the two divers on screen plodded their way through the freighter’s remarkably well-preserved hull — and groaned when the footage confirmed that no whisky barrels had survived. By the end of WUAA’s program, a more pressing message had been communicated: quagga mussels are plotting world domination.
Lukasz Grabowski
The Raw Milk Kid
SOCIAL MEDIA
You can get a good grasp of this manosphere influencer’s deal from his Instagram “highlights” collections, which include “Gym,” “Meals,” “God is good,” and “Proof I’m 19.” It’s the last topic that separates purported 19-year-old Liberty University student Owen Stubblebine from the hundreds of other influencers promoting a mostly beef diet, calorie-tracking apps, and the pursuit of a Godly woman. The dissonance between the Raw Milk Kid’s image — with his pubescent face and voice like Pamela Adlon’s — and his manosphere message is obvious, though perhaps that’s the point. His fans call him “Precum.”