TLP Weekend Edition (March 14-15, 2026)

What we're reading and checking out.

We have three Irish picks for you at the start of the long St. Patrick’s Day celebration period, including Dublin’s finest My Bloody Valentine, playing a loud hometown concert last fall. (Image: Isaac Watson)

🇺🇸 “Freedom Plane National Tour: Documents That Forged a Nation.” If you have never seen America’s seminal founding documents, now may be your best chance. In celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday, the National Archives is bringing nine of these documents to eight cities across the country. They will travel aboard a Boeing 737 in a commemorative “Freedom Plane.” The documents include:

• William Stone’s engraving of the Declaration of Independence (1823)

• Articles of Association (1774)

• George Washington’s, Alexander Hamilton’s, and Aaron Burr’s Oaths of Allegiance (1778)

• The Treaty of Paris (1783)

• David Brearley’s Secret Printing of the Constitution (1787)

• State delegate votes approving the Constitution (1787)

• The Senate markup of the Bill of Rights (1789)

The tour began last week, making its first stop in Kansas City, Missouri, at the National World War I Museum. It will then proceed to seven more cities: Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, Miami, Dearborn, and Seattle.

📚 The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, by Jason Burke. You think we’ve got left-wing crazy today? Burke’s book takes us back to an era when many left-wing revolutionaries thought it was completely right on to hijack airplanes as part of the “international anti-imperialist struggle.” And eerily a great deal of it was bound up with supporting the Palestinian cause, which has once again become a cause célèbre for today’s left. Let’s hope they don’t emulate their predecessors from the 1970s.

In the 1970s, an unprecedented wave of international terrorism broke out around the world. More ambitious, networked and far-reaching than ever before, new armed groups terrorized the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage missions, leaving governments scrambling to cope. Their motives were as diverse as their methods. Some sought to champion Palestinian liberation, others to topple Western imperialism or battle capitalism; a few simply sought adventure or power. Among them were the unflappable young Leila Khaled, sporting jewelry made from AK-47 ammunition; the maverick Carlos the Jackal with his taste for cigars, fine dining, and designer suits; and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Japanese Red Army. Their attacks forged a lawless new battlefield thirty thousand feet in the air, evading the reach of security agencies, policymakers, and spies alike. Their operations rallied activist and networks in places where few had suspected their existence, leaving a trail of chaos from Bangkok to Paris to London to Washington, D.C.

Veteran foreign correspondent Jason Burke provides a thrilling account of this era of spectacular violence. Drawing on decades of research, recently declassified government files, still secret documents, and original interviews with hijackers, double agents, and victims still grieving their loved ones, The Revolutionists provides an unprecedented account of a period which definitively shaped today’s world and probes the complex relationship between violence, terrorism, and revolution. From the deserts of Jordan and the Munich Olympics to the Iranian Embassy Siege in London and the Beirut bombings of the early 1980s, Burke invites us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of these attacks, as well as the government agents and top officials who sought to foil them. Charting, too, such shattering events as the Iranian Revolution and the Lebanese civil war, he shows how, by the early 1980s, a campaign for radical change led by secular, leftist revolutionaries had given way to a far more lethal movement of conservative religious fanaticism that would dominate the decades to come.

It’s an incredible tale and we’re still living with the fallout today.

Bonus: Watch Olivier Assayas’ epic five-and-a-half hour movie, Carlos, for a stunning dramatization of that era and the scarcely-believable life of Carlos the Jackal.

🏉 Ireland vs. Scotland, Six Nations Rugby, Aviva Stadium, Dublin. We have three Irish picks for you in honor of the St. Patrick’s Day festivities, starting off with a massive rugby match on the final day of the 2026 Six Nations tournament. France, Scotland, and Ireland all have chances to win on “Super Saturday,” with this matchup between the Irish and Scots happening just prior to the France and England match later that evening.

All matches will stream on Peacock in the USA.

🇮🇪 Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray. Next up is one of our favorite recent-ish Irish novels, Skippy Dies. Murray’s charming and hilarious coming-of-age book takes place over four months at a Dublin school. As the NYT review describes:

The extravagantly entertaining Skippy Dies chronicles a single catastrophic autumn at Seabrook from a good 20 different perspectives: students, teachers, administrators, priests, girlfriends, doughnut shop managers. At the center of it all is Daniel Juster, known as Skippy, whose death—on the floor of Ed’s Doughnut House, just after writing his beloved’s name on the floor in raspberry filling—opens the novel. Skippy Dies then flashes back to the months preceding, months in which the gloomy, doomed 14-year-old falls in love, wins a fight, keeps a secret and attracts the attention of members of the faculty who do not have his best interests at heart.

Along the way we get to know Skippy’s friends and tormentors, each drawn with great affection: Ruprecht, Skippy’s doughy genius roommate, who pursues experiments in string theory despite spending much of his time head-down in the toilet; Dennis, “an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic”; Carl, Skippy’s romantic rival and a budding psychopath; Lori, the possibly unworthy object of Skippy’s affections, who’s obsessed with a ­Britney-like pop tart and who keeps her diet pills hidden in her teddy bear’s tummy.

And Mario, sweet, stupid Mario, son of an Italian diplomat, whose obsession with sex would become tiresome if it weren’t a source of so many richly comic dorm-room conversations:

“He flips open his wallet. ‘Read it and weep, boys. It is my lucky condom, which never fails.’

“A silence, as Mario smugly returns his wallet to his pocket, and then, clearing his throat, Dennis says, ‘Uh, Mario, in what way exactly is there anything lucky about that condom?’

“ ‘Never fails,’ Mario repeats, a little defensively.

“ ‘But — ’ Dennis pinches his fingers to his nose, brow furrowed ‘ — I mean, if it was really a lucky condom, wouldn’t you have used it by now?’

“ ‘How long have you had it in there, Mario?’ Geoff says.

“ ‘Three years,’ Mario says.”

🎧 Loveless, by My Bloody Valentine. Finally, kick your weekend celebrations into high gear with a spin of the greatest Irish indie record of all time. My Bloody Valentine formed in Dublin in 1983, and their second studio record, Loveless, released in 1991, basically defined the entire “shoegaze” era. The album offers MBV’s signature blend of guitar dissonance, pounding rhythm, and melodic vocals exemplified in the opening track, “Only Shallow.”