What if Dr. James Naismith didn’t invent basketball??
Here's the best things I found on the internet this week
Hey party people,
Well I’ve never been to heaven…but I’ve been to Oklahoma! The OKC Thunder just won the NBA title, making little ol’ Oklahoma the home of a professional sports world championship. I’ve been on cloud nine ever since Sunday night just thinking about that.
Unfortunately, that puts us into a kind of sports dead zone, leaving me plenty of time to catch up on TV shows (“Dept. Q,” and the final season of “The Bear” coming soon!), as well as my summer-long trek through Harry Potter for the first time (book/movie No. 3 hot take coming Friday).
I should also get much sharper on my weekly “conversation starters,” the best, most interesting and most entertaining content on the internet in the past week. Here’s what I found in the past few days. Hope you enjoy and share!!
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!
The two most powerful symbols of Oklahoma City are the OKC bombing memorial, and the OKC Thunder. After the team won an NBA championship Sunday, one person left a Thunder shirt over one of the headstones with an incredibly sentimental note to his late father. Try to read this without crying.
I finally gave my Letterboxd profile a much needed refresh — including an updated Top 4 films of all time and…debuting for the first time…my running rankings of all the 2025 releases I’ve watched this year. No. 2 is a bit of a spoiler for Friday’s movie newsletter!
Give me a follow on there and I’ll follow back, trying to build up some community on what is truly one of the last good social media spaces.
For my entire life, the origin story of basketball was sacred text — but what if Dr. James Naismith didn’t invent the game at a Y.M.C.A. in Springfield, and instead basketball was created a year earlier in upstate New York? This New York Times deep dive unearths some pretty convincing evidence.
Scientists are dropping live mosquitoes out of drones in Hawaii. And it’s actually a genius biological solution to a malaria problem that is causing species to go extinct. Science!!
Think flights are too expensive this summer? Here’s a solution — one man posed as a flight attendant and scored more than 120 free flights…until he got arrested for fraud. (The TSA’s response: we didn’t anybody!)
The “Make America Healthy Again” movement spearheaded by RFK Jr. has taken a particular shining to the “chemicals” in U.S. foods, especially in comparison to Europe (the ol’ “why can I eat pasta and pizza in Italy and feel fine?” question). The Cut investigates these claims one by one and essentially finds that there’s not as much different between U.S. food and Europe as we think.
Thanks to the popularity of their Netflix show, which put a spotlight on the embarrassingly low salaries for NFL cheerleaders, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders got a 400% pay raise. Which we only found out through…season two of the Netflix show (welcome to modern media).
Thanks for reading and sharing! Can’t wait to talk to you all about 28 Years Later on Friday!