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Snack as you please / Don't get ripped off

Academy Award winner Gene Hackman cuts cake on set of his new film, The Poseidon Adventure, at 20th Century Fox. Cast members who'd previously won Oscars join in celebration. From left are Red Buttons, Ronald Neame (director), Hackman, Shelley Winters and Ernest Borgnine. Hackman won an Oscar for role as a tough detective in The French Connection.
Bruce H. Cox, L.A. Times [CC BY 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons

Today: John Saward, a writer based in Chicago; and Hamilton Nolan, author of the newsletter How Things Work, and the book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.

Issue No. 67

Gene Hackman Has a Pie
John Saward

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Hamilton Nolan

Gene Hackman Has a Pie

by John Saward

A recent photo of Gene Hackman was going around last month. He’s exiting a Speedway in New Mexico, in an outfit you might describe as, “your dad coming to jump your car in the middle of the night”—unevenly faded Kirkland-grade sweatpants, shoes with a hefty rubber sole, flannel shirt and a fleece vest, knuckly hands, and some wisps of white hair hanging out from under a baseball hat. The precise mix of function and leisure. He’s carrying a cup of gas station coffee and an individually packaged piece of gas station apple pie. 

“Gene Hackman, 94, spotted in new photos wearing nearly identical outfit from weeks earlier,” said the New York Post headline. 

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Who gets to dress down? / Who owns the hoedown?

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Soothed by nature / Harassed by machines