Journalism's most infamous liar will break your heart with his biggest lie ever
Here's the best things I found on the internet this week!
What’s up!
It’s Tuesday and you know what that means, a roundup of the best content from around the internet to help you improve your media diet.
But first, some shameless self promotion!
I had an exciting project of my own come out this past week. Along with my good friend and collaborator Justin Birnbaum, I got a chance to put together one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 lists in the “Games” category. If you’re interested, you can dive deeper with our two related stories — the trends we saw in the industry while putting together the list and our feature story on Kris “Swagg” Lamberson, a gaming content creator who is redefining popular youth culture.
Now to your regularly scheduled programming. 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.
I consider The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson to be one of the brightest minds in world on topics like the economy, politics, the future, and all those big ideas that are often too complicated for us mere mortals to understand. That’s why I LOVE Thompson’s new podcast, “Plain English,” where each episode he tackles one of these topics and puts it in terms idiots like me can understand. The first few episodes taught me about the metaverse, cryptocurrency, the supply chain, inflation, and political polarization.
The water cooler show of the moment is definitely “Succession,” which left viewers with a buzz-worthy cliff hanger this week leading into next Sunday’s season finale. Perhaps the most interesting character on a show full of them is Kendall Roy, the striving, sad sack prince-that-was-promised who was at the center of said cliff hanger. The New Yorker profiled actor Jeremy Strong in what is a must-read for fans of “Succession,” detailing Strong’s “method” acting style and the fact that he doesn’t understand the show to be a comedy.
Real-life Rom Coms: prepare to cry. This is one of the better magazine stories I’ve read in quite some time. We know Stephen Glass as the infamous journalist who fabricated stories for The New Republic in the 90s, immortalized in the movie Shattered Glass. It turns out there’s much much more to Glass’s story in the 20-odd years since, including his biggest (and most heart-breaking) lie of his life. Incredible story and powerfully told, wow (it looks like a paywall but if you enter an email you can read it for free).
In one of the more revealing examples of political hypocrisy in recent memory, check out this congresswoman’s vastly different takes on Covid-19 depending on whether she was appearing on Fox News or CNN.
Real-life Rom Coms: They say marriage is a transaction, but these college students got married literally only so they could land extra tuition assistance. It says a lot about the ridiculous price of higher education these days, and perhaps even more about marriage, which in this case (and many others) ruined a perfectly good friendship.
The New York Times acquired a leaked internal document that gives us new and never-before-seen details about the mythical Tik Tok algorithm. Pundits have always thought the Chinese social giant had “cracked the code,” but a peek under the hood makes the company look…ordinary. So is it a threat to national security or just another issue-riddled social media platform?
I don’t know how your holiday season is going, but I hope it’s better than these 900 employees who got fired weeks before Christmas on a mass Zoom call. To make things worse, the mass execution came just days after the company received a $750 million cash infusion from investors.
Devotees of Malcolm Gladwell’s work (life myself) will remember the town in Pennsylvania described in “Outliers” where everyone lived to be old and healthy and happy and no one could figure out why. Well, I’ll take that and raise you the village of Villagrande in Italy, where there are six centenarians in a town of 2,000 people and ten percent of people who are born there attain the age of 90 on average.
Another week, another powerful person gaining power by harnessing the evil in the world (or as “Succession” puts it “turned black bile into silver dollars”). This example is a yoga “guru” named Katie Griggs, who was peddling New Age wellness crap before riding a wave of controversy around her support of QAnon to even greater heights, all leading to her sudden “death.” Or did she fake that too?
Kind of a cool concept for a celebrity interview: Vanity Fair asks Billie Eilish the same set of questions every year on the same day. This is the fifth version, and we can see how a teen pop star’s perspective shifts over time.
Thanks for reading and sharing! We’ve got bangers only in this Friday’s movie edition, including The Power of the Dog and Licorice Pizza. See ya then!