Free for ALL Friday!
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
Could Ditching Helmets Save Tackle Football?
In 2006, a few years after college, former special teams football player Ryan DePaul recruited some guys from high school for a football league that resembled a backyard game—seven-on-seven, no kickers or kickoffs, no helmets or pads. Unlike flag football leagues, however, tackling was still very much encouraged. He called the league Town Beef and gave it a slogan: Football for the forgottens.
Town Beef took off. By 2010, there were 55 teams in eight states, stretching all the way to Florida. Guys piled into vans to travel to games for a chance to extend their glory days. Some never had glory days to begin with, they just liked tackling people.
in 2015, DePaul partnered with a childhood friend, Sener Korkusuz, to turn the league into a business. They crowdfunded $700,000, and rechristened the league the American 7s Football League.
The A7FL’s logic is that without helmets, football players tackle more like rugby players, with proper form that spares their heads from concussions and lowers the risk of debilitating long-term health problems like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which plagues many former NFL players. The A7FL advertises itself as a less risky alternative to helmeted football—and a more hardcore alternative to no-tackle flag football.
They Paid $3,500 for Apple’s Vision Pro. A Year Later, It Still Hurts.
The mixed-reality headset launched last year with great promise, but all these buyers got were dirty looks and sore necks; ‘I don’t need that’
Early adopters of Apple’s Vision Pro headsets have one thing to show for the year they’ve spent with their pricey purchases: regret.
“It’s just collecting dust,” Dustin Fox said about his mixed-reality headset, which looks like futuristic ski goggles. “I think I’ve probably used it four times in the last year.”
The $3,500 device sits in a bin with other gadgets he no longer picks up.
The Vision Pro launched in February 2024 with great promise. It was Apple’s first major product release in years! It’s the first device you look through and not at! Typing can be done in the air! But buyers who wore them in the wild say they got nothing but dirty looks and sore necks. Now, the devices are daily reminders of their misplaced bravado.
Cringe! How Millennials Became Uncool
They are mocked by gen Z for everything from their trainer socks to their mom jeans and selfie technique. A maligned millennial asks: how did we get here?
Her right to a naked ankle is, in the end, the hill Natalie Ormond is willing to die on. Ormond, a millennial, simply cannot – will not – get her head around gen Z’s fondness for a crew sock, pulled up over gym leggings or skimming bare legs, brazenly extending over the ankle towards the lower calf. “I stand by trainer socks and I won’t budge,” says the 43-year-old. “The more invisible the sock, the better.”
A proclivity for socks hidden within low-top trainers is just one reason why millennials – anyone born between 1981-1996 – are now considered achingly uncool by the generation that came next: gen Z, AKA the zoomers, or zillennials.
Millennials, typically self-deprecating, tend to join in, poking fun at themselves under the hashtags like #millennialsoftiktok.
I say this as an (uncool) millennial myself.
The Gen X Career Meltdown
Just when they should be at their peak, experienced workers in creative fields find that their skills are all but obsolete.
IN “GENERATION X,” the 1991 novel that defined the generation born in the 1960s and 1970s, Douglas Coupland chronicled a group of young adults who learn to reconcile themselves to “diminishing expectations of material wealth.” Lessness, Mr. Coupland called this philosophy.
For many of the Gen X-ers who embarked on creative careers in the years after the novel was published, lessness has come to define their professional lives.
If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.
“I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over,” said Chris Wilcha, a 53-year-old film and TV director in Los Angeles.
Talk with people in their late 40s and 50s who once imagined they would be able to achieve great heights — or at least a solid career while flexing their creative muscles — and you are likely to hear about the photographer whose work dried up, the designer who can’t get hired or the magazine journalist who isn’t doing much of anything.
How the Thirteen Colonies Tried—and Failed—to Convince Canada to Side With Them During the American Revolution
After peaceful attempts at alliance-building stalled, the Continental Army launched an ill-fated invasion of Quebec in June 1775.
The first governing document of the United States of America offered Canada a deal. Adopted by the Continental Congress in 1777, the Articles of Confederation stated that Canada—then a British colony—“shall be admitted into, and entitled to all the advantages of this union,” at any time, no questions asked. All other colonies that wished to join the nascent nation would have to get approval from 9 of the U.S.’s 13 states.
Canada, of course, never took the U.S. up on its offer. Still, the proposal was no whim of statecraft. Instead, it was part of a prolonged effort during and after the Revolutionary War to convince Canadians to buy into a future free from British dominion.
In 1775, two years before the Articles of Confederation offered Canada statehood, American persuasion took a more aggressive shape. After months of failing to peaceably convince Canadians to join the rebellion against the British, the Continental Army began the supposedly friendly invasion of Quebec.
As the 250th anniversary of the military campaign approaches, it’s worth pulling the history back out of the footnotes.
The Surgeon Who Used F1 Pitstop Techniques to Save Babies
Professor Martin Elliott reflects on how watching a Formula 1 race two decades ago led to an unlikely partnership with Ferrari that transformed practices at hospitals.
At the Dutch Grand Prix, among the sports stars and musicians who strolled around the Zandvoort paddock and filled the grid was a different kind of VIP, Professor Martin Elliott, who spent much of his career as a paediatric cardiothoracic surgeon — operating on children’s hearts and lungs — at Great Ormond Street Hospital.
There may seem no obvious connection to Formula 1, but Elliott was a guest of Ferrari, thanks to the relationship he has built with them for more than two decades after their respective fields of interest collided serendipitously one Sunday afternoon.
Marc de Laval — a Belgian surgeon who was Elliott’s predecessor — in his research into a field of work called “human factors” discovered there were several theories around how people interact with each other either positively or negatively to affect an outcome. An investigation into a crisis at Bristol Children’s Hospital had found that the journey from the operating room to the intensive care unit was, in itself, dangerous because people made it so, despite their best intentions.
This was where Formula 1 entered the story.
What Should I Sing? How to Pick the Perfect Karaoke Song
You're out with friends at karaoke. Your turn is next. But dang, you still don't know what song to sing, and you're not a great singer. What's more, someone just nailed "You Oughta Know" by Alanis Morissette! How can you top that?
If this scenario sounds familiar to you, karaoke enthusiasts have some advice. Karaoke isn't about being perfect. In fact, when people "awkwardly miss the lyrics, that makes other people feel comfortable to get up there and do it," says Jenny Lee, a member of a small karaoke club in Detroit who has been active in the hobby for more than two decades.
Still, if you have that burning desire to give it your all, here's how to pick a banger that'll bring down the house.
Great “7” today. The F1 story was simply outstanding and I’d only seen it here! The real brilliance was even thinking like this even though process is the key to anything replicable.
The F1 story looks interesting, but hit a paywall so I missed the rest of the story.