Friday Inspiration, Vol. 230

“What uncontrollable situation could we swirl around him? What if we made a fake corporation, with a series of fake emails, and put him at the center of a plot, with a very bad man pulling the strings of a very bad plan? Like a mafia movie, with him as the unwitting participant in the insane mob plot gone horribly wrong?”
—Dan Riordan, on planning his friend Brian Rosso’s bachelor party, and of course making the whole thing into a five-part video series (video)

https://vimeo.com/406331494

If you missed DJ Premier and RZA spinning records in their living rooms on a split screen on Instagram Live last Saturday, thankfully, someone recorded it and put it on YouTube (video)

Love this Humans of New York story: “I decided: ‘That’s it. I’m not going to drink. Or smoke. Or do anything else—until I get into Harvard.’ I didn’t tell any of the guys. None of them knew that I was taking classes on weekends to get my bachelors. Or that I was studying for the GRE all summer. Or that I’d applied to The Kennedy School of Government. It’s been three long years, and the decision finally arrived a couple weeks ago …”

I can’t believe that I just now discovered that Eater has a series called “The United States of Mexican Food,” but it’s true, and if you start anywhere, I recommend this story about totchos, in which you will learn the history of both nachos and tater tots.

I encourage you to read this story, as two friends did for me, in which the writer calls Weird Al Yankovic “a spiritual technician doing important work down in the engine room of the American soul” and “one of America’s great renewable resources.”

When I started putting together my list of people I wanted to interview on our Off the Couch running podcast in 2020, I thought it would be fun to interview UltrarunnerPodcast’s Eric Schranz—I was not disappointed, especially because we got to talk about heist movies during the interview. (podcast)

Jessica Salfia composed a poem called “The First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining”

A list: Living Through a Pandemic or Potty Training a Toddler?

—Brendan


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