Are 'Elf' and 'Love Actually' the last Christmas classics we’ll ever get?
These are the best things I found on the internet this week!
Hello friends,
Hope your Christmas shopping is in good order after Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you’re looking for something small for the movie lover in your life, I’m extending my 20% off sale of my Cinephile Bucket List for one extra day (ends now midnight tonight, 11/28!).
As for our regularly scheduled programming, these are my weekly “conversation starters,” the best, most interesting and most entertaining content on the internet. We’re getting into the Christmas spirit with a couple of them. The most wonderful time of the year! Enjoy.
What’s the coolest story or thing you found on the internet this week? Reply to this email and shoot me a link. Would love to hear from you!
Now that Thanksgiving is behind us, it’s officially Christmas season, which means…Christmas movies. But the New York Times asks a great question: “Are Elf and Love Actually the last Holiday Classics We’ll Ever Get?” The answer is almost definitely no, but since their release in 2003 the genre has trended toward smaller, streamer-first movies that don’t feel as significant.
On that topic, I was hanging on every word of this hilarious, entirely made-up pitch for a new Hallmark movie, which makes fun of the stereotypes but actually also kind of sounds amazing??
Our Long Read of the Week is a wild story about government red tape. A doctor who was born, raised and practiced for more than 30 years in the United States sent in his paperwork for passport renewal and instead had his citizenship stripped.
One thing about shopping that has always fascinated me is “reverse logistics,” or what happens to the more than $300 billion (with a b) worth of products that are returned in the United States each year, about 16.5% of all purchases. If done well, that money can stay within a company’s ecosystem, according to experiments done by Harvard Business Review, because consumers “treat refunds as money already lost, so spending these funds on another purchase feels less painful.”
A school in Louisiana will sell you a high school diploma for $456, no classes required ($130 discount if you don’t want to walk in cap and gown!). Attendance of these “unapproved” schools has doubled in the state (and elsewhere in the country, especially ‘red states’) since the pandemic.
I highlighted Elle Cordova for her specific brand of book worm comedy a few weeks ago, but this is something entire different — a stoic-esque thought experiment that will change the way you think about the little moments that make up each day. Some powerful brain chemistry stuff!
As long as we’re repeating frequent favorites, the best explanation of what happened at OpenAI in the past week — a corporate scuffle that could affect the fate of humanity, or just the net worths of a handful of rich tech dudes — comes from Good Work’s Dan Toomey. Ditto for this week’s Binance scandal.
Why do we keep tabs on people we can’t stand? Vox has been doing great work in the social science space recently, and this diagnosis of a “hate-stalking” addiction and how to treat it is as interesting to read from the outside as it is helpful to those who are susceptible to it.
Thanks for reading and sharing! We’ll be talking about The Boy and the Heron on Friday’s movie edition, woop woop!