Pint-sized Picasso, a teenage darts millionaire and a Hollywood Ponzi scheme
These are the best things I found on the internet this week!
Happy Tuesday friends,
Hope your weeks are off to a great start. I’m always amazed by the degree to which pop culture is so fragmented these days. Nobody you know is watching the same shows and movies as you, listening to the same podcasts, reading the same articles. And yet, it also seems like these fandoms shape us perhaps more than ever before.
That’s one of the purposes of my weekly “conversation starters.” I hope that you take the best, most interesting and most entertaining content I found on the internet this past week and go create your own monoculture. Maybe there’s an article, video or tidbit here that you and your friends can all talk about. Or shoot I don’t know, make a new friend?!
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!
Some of my recent professional work! For Forbes, I wrote about Luke Littler, the 17-year-old phenom who isn’t old enough to buy a beer or drive a car, but he has scored millions of dollars in the world of professional darts—and minted millions of new fans. Also, I plugged it once and am not above plugging it again: my Forbes Talks video segment on the box office disappointment of Furiosa and what it means for the summer movie slate.
Woah. This Long Read of the Week is a doozy, recounting the largest Ponzi scheme in Hollywood history. An aspiring (and very bad) actor raised some $690 million, beginning with his closest friends and eventually from the 1-percenters, an incredibly intricate fraud scheme that only lasted 10 years thanks to the razzle dazzle of the movie business. What a story from The New Yorker.
A two-year-old boy in Germany is being hailed as a “pint-sized Picasso” after reportedly selling his paintings for around $7,000 each.
In what’s become a consistent topic in this newsletter, New York Mag interviewed the few remaining teenagers across the country who don’t have cellphones (more than 90% have them by age 14). They complain, but turns out they’re mostly…fine?! And I wonder if there was a follow up piece 10 years from now if they’re happier, more successful or less addicted?
This isn’t new this week, but I stumbled upon a viral video/short film from last fall that blew my mind, about growing up and finding purpose. It turns out, I wasn’t the only one impressed. Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, Requiem For A Dream) was so impressed he helped its 19-year-old creator Wesley Wang drop out of Harvard and become the youngest person ever to be hired to direct a studio feature film.
From the department of terrible jobs: local government employees in Houston go stand outside with no shirts on and no bug spray and see how many mosquitos bite them. If it’s above 30, they dispatch a pesticide truck. This summer is turning into a mosquito apocalypse down there, with 19 of the 21 dispatchers getting more than 30 bites after a recent windstorm.
Taco Bell is collaborating with Cheeze-It on menu items featuring a gigantic cheeze-it cracker (16x bigger than normal) — a tostada and a crunchwrap. Every time I see one of these crazy food perversions I think of the awesome New Yorker Story about the company’s innovation kitchen, which helped rebrand the entire chain as the home of wacky food inventions.
For the first time, it’s a YouTube video featured in Headlines That Require No Context: 100 Hours in the World’s Richest Country No One Knows Exists.
Thanks for reading and sharing! On Friday we’re talking about Richard Linklater’s new Netflix movie Hit Man starring Glen Powell!