The 10 Best Things on the Internet This Week
Celebrity profiles, viral videos, and a handful of stories you'll have to read to believe. This is the best the internet had to offer this week.
What’s up party people!
It’s been a crazy week for yours truly. After running around town talking to folks and tracking all the drama surrounding Los Angeles County’s reinstated indoor mask mandate, my name ended up in the New York Times twice, including the above byline on the front page of the entire newspaper. It’s really still pretty hard for me to believe that happened.
When I saw how collaborative and proficient the teams are behind the scenes on these types of stories, it made more sense to me why the NYT is “the paper of record.”
If you’re curious about the specific stories: I contributed reporting to a story Thursday about rising Covid case rates nationwide due to the Delta variant, got onto the front page for a report on the state of California’s plan to fight vaccine and mask resistance, and then was the lead writer on a story Sunday recapping the first day of the new mask mandate in L.A. County, an effort I’m particularly proud of. If you’re reading this and live in Los Angeles, I think there’s a lot of useful information in that last one you’ll find interesting as we all adjust to the new (old) normal.
In my free time, I found a bunch of really cool stuff to read and watch out there on the interwebs. As always, I wanted to share it with you all.
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.
Back in 2018, a baggage handler at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport quite literally stole a plane and took it for a joyride, at one point doing a full-on barrel roll. It’s an incredible and complicated story that’s far stranger than any fiction could ever imagine. Why did he do it? And more importantly, how was he able to do it so easily? The storytelling here is fantastic. It’s the type of narrative feature I’d kill to tell at some point in my career, for a magazine like Rolling Stone. Putting that out into the universe.
A sin of omission: My good friend Justin Birnbaum wrote this great story last week about Shohei Ohtani’s incredible endorsement potential after blasting 30+ home runs in the first half of the MLB season. I forgot to include it last week, but it’s absolutely worth reading about the man who is poised to become the face of baseball for years to come.
Here’s a video you’re going to rewatch 10+ times, of a guy turning himself into inanimate objects. Seriously.
Commercial space travel is coming, and quickly. Billionaire Richard Branson went on a joyride into outer space on his Virgin Galactic ship last week, beating Jeff Bezos to the feat by almost two weeks. Right now, tickets are going to run you about $200,000 a pop, and even then, if your name is Ashton Kutcher, you may have to back out at the last second because your wife (Mila Kunis) thinks going on an untested flight to space is “not a smart family decision.”
Any time I listen to another one of my good friends, Lance Brozdowski, talk about baseball…it’s like a scene out of A Beautiful Mind, or maybe the blackjack scene from The Hangover. Dude is a savant. This week he wrote about the contrasting styles of two of the Chicago Cubs’ top pitching prospects, and it’s fascinating. One is all about the numbers, the other is super old school. Which approach is better? (You can also tell my guy has been hitting the gym, because in the video above the story he’s unbuttoned a few buttons for the ladies…)
So a lot of my reporting for the New York Times this past week has involved me walking up to total strangers and getting them to talk to me. I promise it’s just as uncomfortable as you think it would be. But I found this awesome guide to talking to strangers that feels like a big time life hack.
A 10-hour documentary apparently enough time to uncover every legendary story of Michael Jordan being petty and vengeful to anyone who questioned his supremacy.
“Ted Lasso” Season 2 is set to drop at the end of this month. Everyone can’t get enough of the show’s optimistic main character, or the actor behind him — Jason Sudeikis. This week in GQ, Sudeikis got profiled by Zach Baron, who I think is the greatest celebrity profiler on the planet (sorry Caity Weaver, close second). Must read for all fans of the show, or of Sukeikis from SNL and his other movies.
There’s a 33-year-old in Canada who makes a living by “speedrunning,” recently setting a recent world record for beating the entire Super Mario Bros. video game in an hour. And apparently, scientists say the repeated exercise of complex memory pathways is actually making his brain larger. To think my mom always said video games made me dumber….
The upcoming Olympics are a total mess. Prominent American athletes are dropping out of the Games like flies with positive Covid tests, prominent members of the team putting on the Games are resigning (including one guy who apparently as a kid forced a mentally disabled boy to eat his own feces?), and to top it all off, Tokyo Bay, where triathlon athletes are set to swim 1,500 meters, is so polluted it smells like a toilet.
Happy reading! I’ll be back Friday with reviews of Nicholas Cage’s Pig, the Anthony Bourdain documentary and yes, of course, Space Jam: A New Legacy.