I kind of wondered, “is it just me, or is this a really good 3.5-minute film about a guy who bike commutes in Oklahoma City?” It has 46,000 views on YouTube, so I feel like I’m not alone. (video)
This post from the Tales From Retail subreddit is about someone bringing an ADMIRABLE amount of coupons to a checkout, but it’s also possibly the most literary thing I’ve read on Reddit, and I am definitely saving it to maybe use in my writing course in the future.
At first I I thought this essay on Eater was a sign they were bringing back their wonderful “Life In Chains” department, in which writers put together wonderful personal stories about how a certain restaurant chain had played a big role in their lives (“Food Swamps of LA, McDonald’s Was Our Lifeboat,” “Buffalo Wild Wings Was My One-Man Gay Bar,” etc.). Alas, it appears this is a one-off essay, but it’s still a fun story about a couple meeting and falling in love at Taco Bell (and as it turns out more than one couple fell in love at that specific Taco Bell in a mall in Cambridge, Massachusetts).
I was just talking to a friend the other day about how you can get a way bigger following as a writer if you write about politics (I mean, write well about politics, or alternately, not necessarily write well, but write about things that make people anxious, like, well, *gestures at everything*), and that’s great for those people, but when I look for stuff to include in this newsletter, I look for writing like this McSweeney’s piece, Valentine’s Day Card Inscriptions Inspired By Submarine Disasters, because it’s more fun.
I know Mike Sowden put this up on his Substack as an open thread, in order to facilitate discussion in the comments (hence the title “What are your most helpful ideas for difficult times?”) but his list of eight ideas are great on their own. I think Mike introduced me to the idea of Hanlon’s Razor a few days before I read about it in Jono Hey’s book Big Ideas, Little Pictures, and it’s helped my perspective a lot in the past few months.
I am missing the book launch party for my friend Mark Sundeen’s newest collection of essays that came out last week, but I can’t wait to read it. From one of the blurbs, by Pulitzer Prize finalist Vauhini Vara: “Delusions and Grandeur is about what it means to be a man in the West–but if that conjures images of steely-eyed cowboys and oilmen, put those out of your mind. What struck me most is just how gorgeously tenderhearted, vulnerable, and emotionally engaged these essays and their characters are.”
I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was (naively) unaware that carb loading was actually still a thing, and that athletes do it before races. Well, I am probably going to eat an entire box of Annie’s Macaroni and Cheese the night before my upcoming 52K race, in hopes that it will help me avoid hitting a wall, but also sort of “pre-load” my sodium for what I assume will be a long warm day in the mountains. If you’re curious, this article from newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel and Hydration breaks it down (
I had to check the date, but I remember Danny MacAskill’s first trials bike riding YouTube video, which launched his career in 2009. It took a little bit into this latest video of him, still doing wild shit on a bike, for me to realize he was riding an ebike. I don’t know if that makes the stunts more impressive or less impressive (my gut is more, since the bike is 15 pounds heavier, and it looks like not much of the stuff he’s doing involves much pedal assist, but I am definitely not an ebike expert). Anyway, Danny MacAskill is almost 40, and is still amazing. [I don’t think the original video is on YouTube anymore but someone did upload it to PinkBike if you’d like to watch it]
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