Why the penny symbolizes what's wrong with America
These are the best things I found on the internet this week!
What’s shakin’ party people,
Hope your weeks are off to a great start! It’s been sports-sports-sports for me these past few days, with the NFL season starting and Americans in both the men’s and women’s finals of the US Open tennis tournament. Keep your eyes peeled for two stories I have coming out on Forbes this week, one Thursday and one Friday (of course I’ll be mentioning them next Tuesday here).
It’s a smaller batch this week but I think some real gems among my “conversation starters,” a roundup of the best, most interesting and most entertaining content on the internet in the past week. 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!
There are very few writers I admire more than Caity Weaver (the former king of celebrity profiles, before Zach Baron came around). Her latest dispatch is a meaty, mind-blowing 7,000 essay on the “tyranny of the penny.” She doesn’t pull any punches, saying of the penny “few things symbolize our national dysfunction more than the inability to stop minting this worthless currency.” Of course it’s our (very) Long Read of the Week.
Shoutout to my friend Garrett for sharing with me this hilarious example of just how ridiculous home prices have gotten in California. A home in Monrovia, CA that was destroyed when a giant tree fell and split it in two is being sold for half a million dollars.
If you watched any NFL action this weekend, perhaps you noticed that Tom Brady, making his TV debut on that wild $37.5 million contract with FOX, wasn’t very good at color commentary. The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay breaks down Brady’s performance piece by piece, in the kind of detail you might expect from his playing days.
How money money do you think you’d need to consider yourself “rich”? Charles Schwab has been asking this question to a wide swatch of Americans for the past several years, as well as how much you think you’d need to live comfortably. Before you look at the totals from the survey, come up with an answer for yourself to compare.
For someone who admittedly doesn’t listen to a lot of rap music or count himself as a fan of either Drake or Kendrick Lamar, I sure have read a lot of great writing about the fallout from their feud. This might be the best of the best, from the New Yorker, about how Drake “lost the plot” in his career by distancing himself from what made him special in his early years.
This isn’t a new piece of content but I only discovered this week a video of one of my favorite musical artists, Lizzy McAlpine, singing a slow, soulful cover of ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All.” Not exaggerating when I say this altered my brain chemistry and for the next week, as the kids would say, this is my Roman Empire.
Thanks for reading and sharing! On Friday we’re back talking movies, particularly the super indies of 2024 like Didi.