About You Simply Must

You Simply Must was a weekly comedy recommendation podcast made in Chicago. The format was a single sentence long: one thing a week, pushed without qualification, with the reason stated plainly enough that a listener could repeat it to somebody else the following day.

The subjects moved across films, music, food, games and whatever else had earned its way into the week. What held the show together was never the category. It was the argument that a recommendation is only worth making when the person making it is prepared to be wrong out loud, and that the polite, hedged, everybody-might-like-this version of the sentence is worth nothing at all.

The entries collected here continue that argument rather than the episode list. Each one takes a single part of the problem — how a tip travels, why a list of ten is useless, what a second listen exposes, how a cold season changes what people will sit still for — and works it through at the length it needs. They are written as a set and are meant to be read in any order.

The rules that ran the show still run the writing. One subject at a time. The reason has to fit in a sentence. Nothing appears here because a slot needed filling.