Welcome to this week’s edition of Seen and Heard, in which I catalog the most interesting things I’ve seen, heard and read over the previous seven days:

Film: Saturday Night (2024) – This movie depicts the 90 minutes leading up to the debut of the TV show Saturday Night LIve on October 11, 1975. It’s chaotic, funny, and dramatic, although not entirely true to life according to reports. However, by casting actors who resembled their real life counterparts and capturing the look and feel of the mid-1970s – no computers, cell phones, short hair, or natural fabrics – it gives anyone who watched the show back then a “you are there” experience. If I watched Saturday Night Live during that first season when I was a senior in high school, I don’t recall. But by the second season which debuted in the fall of 1976, Saturday Night Live had become a cultural phenomenon and everyone seemed to be watching. By then, I was a dormitory-living freshman at Providence College and it seemed that no matter what people did on Saturday nights, they found a TV at 11:30 PM to catch the show, which was radical for TV at the time and therefore very entertaining to a young audience. The movie Saturday Night, which received a 77% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is streaming on Netflix. 

Book: Bread of Angels: A Memoir, by Patti Smith – Patti Smith, a singer-songwriter and poet, sometimes referred to as the “Godmother of Punk,” bridged the gap between the beat poetry generation of the 1960s and the punk movement of the 1970s. I confess that she was not on my radar until I read her 2010 memoir, Just Kids, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Smith has now written another memoir, Bread of Angels, a concisely written account of her life from her birth in 1946 up to the present. Along the way, she provides insightful sketches of pillars of post World War II American culture like William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. I was also amazed by the poverty she experienced growing up. Her father, a World War II veteran who seemed like a steady, straightforward man, worked in blue collar jobs but the family was relegated to dilapidated housing for years along with the families of other veterans until they could afford better housing. This sketch belies the prevailing assumption that returning veterans were rapidly boosted into the middle class by the GI Bill and other benefits. I’ve long known that those benefits were not equitably distributed on racial grounds, but this book suggests that unevenness was more widespread. 

Newspaper: “Skyscraper: Chara adds 33 to rafters with Bruins’ other legends,” Boston Globe, by Kevin Paul Dupont – On Thursday evening, January 15, 2026, the Boston Bruins “retired” number 33 which  was worn by Zdeno Chara from 2006 to 2020, including the Stanley Cup winning 2011 season. A native of Czechoslovakia and at 6 ‘9”, the tallest person to ever play in the National Hockey League, Chara was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2025. Although Chara accomplished great things for the Bruins, my affection for him began here in Lowell, where he played for the Lowell Lock Monsters in their inaugural 1998 season. He only played 23 games with the Lock Monsters before being elevated to the NHL’s New York Islanders. In addition to the Bruins and Islanders, he also played for the Ottawa Senators and the Washington Capitals. 

Podcast: “How private equity kills companies and communities” on Decoder with Nilay Patel – Many of the podcasts I listen to go on break at Christmas and replay a past episode or two. That was the case this week with Decoder, a show hosted by Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of The Verge, an online newspaper that focuses on business and technology. In this episode, Patel interviewed Megan Greenwell about her book, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. Greenwell argues that private equity firms prioritize extracting wealth over building sustainable businesses. While private equity firms contend they make the acquired companies more efficient, Greenwell demonstrates that PE firms load companies with debt and aggressively cut costs which leaves the acquired companies hollowed out while the PE firms profit from management fees and the sale of assets. Private equity has become ubiquitous in the American economy, scooping up established businesses in healthcare, local media, real estate, retail, and petcare. Private equity often operates below the radar so most people aren’t even aware of its involvement until after a long established store or hospital goes bankrupt and disappears. 

Television: Houston Texans v. New England Patriots on ABC/ESPN – How could this not be included? Although I write about sports frequently in Seen and Heard, I’m not a superfan. I’ll rarely stay up past 9pm to watch a game, and don’t bet or belong to fantasy leagues. Still, I enjoy watching a well-played game, no matter what the sport, and that includes the National Football League. I also lived through several decades of inept Patriots teams and truly did appreciate the amazing achievements earlier this century. Now, after an interlude of mediocrity or worse, the team is good, exciting to watch, and, with the news that the star quarterback of their next opponent broke his ankle and is out for the season, it seems that fate which so often bent towards the Patriots through their dominant time, again favors them. All that said, Sunday’s game was an ugly one. The ball must have been super slippery given all the turnovers committed by the two quarterbacks, but a win is a win. On to Denver!

YouTube: “CFP National Championship Highlights” on ESPN College Football Channel – I have access to all kinds of video content on my (relatively) big screen TV, but I constantly find myself scrolling through YouTube for things to watch. Because I’m on an “early to bed, early to rise” schedule, I rarely stay up to watch evening games on TV, so I’ve found watching highlight videos on YouTube the next day allows me to experience the game action with just a 24 hour delay. That’s how I consumed Monday night’s college football championship game between Miami and Indiana. Last week I wrote that I’d be cheering for Indiana and my loyalty was rewarded with the Hoosiers winning 27 to 21 in a very exciting game. The win marks an unbelievable turnaround for Indiana which is historically one of the worst programs in college football. That all changed in 2023 when the school hired Curt Cignetti as coach. I observed last week that I’d never seen Cignetti smile, but he finally did last night, broadly and joyously, after his team’s victory. The game’s iconic play took place with 9 minutes to go. Up 17 to 14, Indiana had the ball on the Miami 12 yard line. It was fourth down with about six yards to go for a first down. Cignetti sent the field goal team onto the field but then called a time out and replaced them with his offense. The play was a quarterback draw, a rarely used running play, and Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza not only made the first down as he was clobbered by Miami defenders, but then spun off those hits and dove into the end zone for a touchdown. There was plenty of time left and Miami was driving down field for what would have been the winning touchdown when Indiana intercepted a pass with 46 seconds left to seal the victory and the national championship.