My listening history, a magnetic roadside symbol of America’s “rot,” and a pie recipe that won’t make your fillings hurt.

1. I had a blast going on KUOW’s “Sound Politics” podcast, hosted by Scott Greenstone, with my “Seattle Nice” cohost Sandeep Kaushik, but we went on so long talking about Tammy Morales and Dow Constantine that a critical part of our conversation got cut for time.

The missing segment, as you’ve no doubt guessed, was the part where we talked about our Spotify Wrapped lists for this year—or, in Sandeep’s case, about listening to Ween. (Sandeep, there are so many better sad dad bands!) My Wrapped surprised me a bit, since it feels like my heavy-rotation albums this year were by Jason Isbell, the Flaming Lips, and Deeper; in reality, the AI tells me, my top songs were by Stars, Chvrches (No. 2 and 3!) Janelle Monae, and Charli xcx. (This is my non-algorithmically determined song of the year.)

My basic sense of self was restored once I saw Wilco in my most-listened artists (No. 3)—high enough that the AI sent me a (presumably not AI) video of Jeff Tweedy, looking about as uncomfortable as you’d expect Jeff Tweedy to look while recording a video for Spotify. I was confused to see Steve Earle in the mix until I remembered that I spent several days this year listening through many of the 21 studio albums he produced between 1986 and 2023, which are not all to my taste. You can’t deny “Galway Girl,” though—or, for that matter, “Telephone Road.”

Spotify’s marketing department has done a great job—case in point: Me, here, sharing their marketing tool with you—and I honestly can’t begrudge them too much. Say what you will about the brutal economics of streaming music (or read Stephen Witt’s great book, How Music Got Free), but they’re doing a good job making customers feel invested in their model. Now where are my fellow Goth Synthesizer Post Punk girlies at?

2. It’s the holidays, and in my household, that means forking over at least one hundred American dollars for a farm-grown fir and ladening it with ornaments that span the decades, from the Hallmark ornaments I collected when I worked there in high school to a heavy white disk bearing the image of the grinning, slightly demonic mascot of the Buc-ee’s convenience store chain.

Buc-ee’s, as I’ve mentioned in this column before, became ubiquitous in Texas after I left the state, so there’s no nostalgia there for me.  Nonetheless, whenever I’m back in Texas, I feel the siren call of its clean restrooms, mix-and-match soda fountains, and branded merch like my ceramic Buc-ee ornament.

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I write a lot about land use, and Buc-ee’s—with its acres of gas pumps and stores that are larger than a typical Seattle grocery store—is a prime symbol and symptom of Sun Belt sprawl. Jalopnik, one of my favorite non-political websites, had a fun little piece last month that captured the perverse experience of patronizing Buc-ee’s, a place that “almost certainly shouldn’t exist, and we are worse as a culture for having had it, but goddamn does it flip the right switches in our collective brain.” I’m overdue for a visit to Lafayette, where Axios reports the chain is building one of its biggest stores yet, bringing a “beach theme” to the decidedly landlocked corner of I-10 and Louisiana Ave.

3. Bookmark this one for next Thanksgiving: The New York Times’ pecan slab tart, which I adapted to fit a regular pie plate because I need a lot of “extra” pie dough to make most pie recipes work. (Rolling is hard, y’all.). I love regular pecan pie, but it tends to be cloyingly sweet, because the base is mostly Karo syrup; this recipe swaps out demerara sugar for the corn syrup and includes brown butter and toasted, finely ground pecans, creating a filling that holds together (and up) under a roof of toasted pecans but won’t make your teeth hurt.