Cyberattacks, Caitlin Clark, and Conan's Hot Ones inferno
These are the best things I found on the internet this week!
Hello new friends!
We got another wave of sign-ups this past week, and I wanted to start by saying welcome to the community and letting you know what you can expect. We live in a world of overwhelming media, and every day feels like playing catchup to all the articles we’re supposed to read, movies and shows we’re supposed to watch, and oh have you seen that viral clip that’s been going around?
I think the value add of this newsletter is being something like an investment advisor for your free time. You only have so much of it, don’t you want to maximize it with the best, most interesting, and most entertaining stuff?
On Tuesdays, that looks like an internet roundup of the best stories, videos, podcasts I found in the past week. And on Fridays it’s movies (and some shows), in-depth on new releases and what they means for the broader landscape, and some suggestions for older stuff to stream that you maybe haven’t heard of or considered before.
My hope is that over time, this becomes more of a collaborative effort. To that end, I love hearing from you all. Like this week, I received this awesome response to my recommendation of 12 Angry Men from reader Mike:
Years ago I was at management conference/workshop. There were over one hundred of us in a banquet hall at a large hotel sitting at tables of eight. The leader of the workshop passed out a picture of the jury room with all the seated jurors. Our task was to watch the first several minutes or so of the movie and then individually write down our guess of the order in which the jurors change their minds. After doing this he gave us the same task of predicting the correct order but this time working as a group.
He told us that in many years of doing this exercise no individual ever scored higher than their group. That was true for my group and for the entire workshop. I think I may have predicted 4 or 5 correctly, while my group scored 8 of 12. Several groups in the room scored a perfect 12. The point of the exercise is that group collaboration will produce better decisions. After the exercise was over we prevailed upon him to show the rest of the movie - he said that was also a common occurrence.
What a story! Thanks for writing in and for everyone else, please share any similar stories by replying to this email or commenting on the post online. Otherwise, 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!
Imagine going on Spotify and hearing a song about yourself. Creepy…or cool? That’s what happened to one journalist who found out he wasn’t alone. One songwriter had made a career (and $200k last year) writing more than 20,000 individual songs about almost everything, from asking specific girls to prom to kids going to the bathroom.
ESPN’s Wright Thompson, for my money the greatest sports feature writer of the modern era, did a longform profile of Caitlin Clark. If ever there were a must-read version of our Long Read of the Week, this is it.
There’s a $1.6 billion plan to build America’s tallest skyscraper in…Oklahoma City. The Wall Street Journal asks, is it a good idea to put a massive building “where the wind comes sweeping down the plane?” Locals are already calling it The Redneck Burj Khalifa.
As an avid watcher of every episode of “Hot Ones,” the celebrity interview show where host Sean Evans asks questions over a set of increasingly spicy chicken wings, I can tell you without a doubt that Conan O’Brien’s unhinged performance on the show last week is not only its best episode ever but maybe the hardest I’ve laughed in years. I was in tears. Truly legendary stuff.
It’s incredible to think that a massive cyberattack, years in the making, that could’ve victimized hundreds of millions of people was stopped inadvertently by a single, soft-spoken software engineer who just happened to spot the errant code during a routine check.
Gee, we at Forbes sure do love it when every other outlet aggregates our reporting. But yes, it’s true — every single billionaire in the world under the age of 30 inherited their wealth. These are the jackpot winners of a much broader Great Wealth Transfer that will be happening as the Boomers die off.
Secularization is old news. By now, we know that more and more Americans are swearing off organized religion. Personal beliefs aside (I’m a Christian, but the author of this story Derek Thompson is an agnostic), this line from The Atlantic raises an interesting point: “Many people, having lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.”
Headlines That Require No Context: Glasses aren't just good for your eyes. They can be a boon to income, too. A cool little audio segment from NPR.
John Stewart’s monologue about the ridiculously breathless coverage of Donald Trump’s trial, particularly his physical appearance and mannerisms, is both really funny and makes an important point about the “boy who cried wolf” danger of this kind of media attention.
Thanks for reading and sharing! On Friday we’re talking all things Guy Ritchie, including his new movie The Ministry of Ungentlemenly Warfare.
Thanks for the shout out!