If you ever click away from a YouTube video and think, “I’ll just listen to it,” let me just advise you to not do that this time, because the scenery in this film just keeps going and going and going. (Although Hillary Gerardi does drop some gems of wisdom in the interviews, so alternately, don’t watch it with the sound off.) (video)
Shea Serrano often says that The Sandlot is one of the best baseball movies ever made (along with A League of Their Own), which I think is hard to argue with. I kind of can’t believe it’s 30 years old, but it’s fun to have an occasion to talk about it again, and to read pieces like this one from The Athletic.
I remember the first time someone told me, “I don’t do small talk,” and how their view was that they had more important things to talk about, and I kind of agreed with them at the time, like Yeah, let’s get to the big topics, don’t waste my time. It sounded good, but I couldn’t manage to put it into practice, especially at my local grocery store, where I will talk about the weather, the size of these bulbs of garlic as of late, or these maple glazed cashews are you fucking kidding me do yourself a favor and don’t start buying/eating them because you’ll never stop, or whatever. This essay, “An Ode to Checkout Counter Small Talk,” nails it, and why, despite where it seems tech is pushing us, we should not live in a frictionless society.
In the past, I found a lot of fun stuff for this newsletter on Twitter, but I deleted my account a few weeks ago, and have been spending more time on Reddit. One of my recent favorite subreddits is r/satisfyingasfuck, and when I saw this post about a pizza menu in the shape of a pizza, I thought, “Hey, that’s perfect for my Friday newsletter.” But then I saw this post titled “Steve Aoki has Madden Accuracy Rating 100” and wow was it worth my 13 seconds. Who can throw an entire cake like that? Superhuman.
Speaking of baseball and satisfying things, there is something that just feels so good about this photo of the Philadelphia Phillies’ Bryson Stott and his bat that looks exactly like a No. 2 pencil.
I have eaten my share of brunost, Norway’s singularly lovely sweet brown cheese, but I never thought, “wow, I should figure out how to import this to my home country.” But thanks to Jeonmi Eom, Koreans can enjoy brunost in South Korea, and paragraphs like this one from this Atlas Obscura story can exist and make us drool on ourselves: “’We like to eat brunost and ice cream together. It’s savory and salty,’ says Irang Choi, who lives in Busan. ‘We eat it with croiffle too.’ The croiffle is a hybrid pastry made by pressing croissant dough into a waffle iron. Brunost is then shredded on top, which is the preferred way for Koreans to eat it.”
I read Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks last year, and it was such a refreshing take on how we view time and productivity. I feel like this short essay, “Energy Makes Time,” is much in the same vein, and deserves a lot more attention for the (quite understated) epiphany it delivers at the end. (via Kottke.org)