Cats in Sweaters
☕📰 04.19.25 The Saturday Rundown
What’s broken isn’t the people—it’s the scaffolding. And that was this past week’s best through-line.
💭 This Week’s Big Ask:
SEND ME YOUR CAT PICS. Or dogs. Or your fish plotting to take over the world. Snakes in sweaters? Lizards on laptops? I want it all. No pets? I’ll take your best selfie with coffee—bonus points if you look like a character in a sad French film.
Downtown Dover Closing Doors
Harvey’s is gone. After 93 years and god knows how many trays of maple squares, the ovens are off, the “Gone Fishing Forever” sign taped to the door, and the family has taken the maple square recipe with them.
Why the U.S. Just Declared War on Penguins Part Two
This is Part Two of a four-part investigation into the Penguin Tariff, what it hides, and who it benefits:
This past week’s Monday Blueprint was the second in a four-part series of my own home-grown conspiracy theory as to why we’re tariffing penguins. You can read parts one here:
🎧 Screw the Scaffolding| A Playlist by Coffee with Steve
This week’s playlist (because the system is broken but the beat still works) is not safe white people NPR music—though it may lull you into believing that somewhere in the middle. This mixed tape starts with truth-tellers—Kendrick, Gambino, Missy—cracking the veneer. Public Enemy drops in like a steroidal syllabus, making space for Caskey Russell, the professor-poet, who quietly foreshadows what’s coming. Angel Olsen’s Appalachian grief spell reminds you: no one's coming to save you. Then the road trip hits—Perspective’s “Pepe Silvia” is the gas station snack run before escape. Sam Cooke haunts us with the question: did change really come? From there, we shift into reimagining—atheist gospel from Rising Appalachia, boundary-as-sacrament from Solange, and a near-seamless blend into Russell’s “Hine’s Song.” It all lands in Beyoncé’s feminist electronica discotech war cry, unapologetic and un-NPR-able.
💬 What’s the one song that has held you up while the world had been rebranded overnight—when you were holding together for someone else, only to realize you weren’t ready to let go either? Maybe that song is tender. Maybe delusional. Maybe the beat that keeps you sane while everything changes. Hit “Message Steve” and tell me.
Subscribe to the full Coffee with Steve experience here. Or don’t. It’s your inbox—you decide. Pick what you want, skip what you don’t, and keep me around as much (or as little) as you like. I promise, we’ll still be friends.