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.
Before we dive in, a poll. I’ve been talking with some people about potentially launching a podcast, or multiple podcasts — based on this newsletter, or on Big Optimism, or maybe something else.
It might just be me reading some or all editions. Or, it could be more produced and professional.
Just out of curiosity … Do you listen to podcasts? How interested would you be in podcast versions of what I’ve done here? No timeline yet; I’m exploring!
The 37 Definitive Rules of Going to the Theater
Everything you need to know about seats, coats, eating, drinking, clapping, peeing, compliments, autographs and not being a jerk to those around you.
Even the most sporadic theatergoer already knows how to act. People come to see the show, not listen to their seatmate yammer on FaceTime or harmonize with every number.
Still, there are ways to optimize theatergoing for all involved. How do you pick a show that fits your fancy without going into debt? What’s the best way to snack without drowning out the dialogue? And do bathroom lines ever end? (Yes, but by then intermission is usually over.)
“I want theater to be a place where people feel comfortable and can be who they want to be,” says Chris Jennings, executive director of Manhattan Theatre Club, which oversees Broadway and off-Broadway venues. “But that’s juxtaposed with respecting people around you.”
Here is your cheat sheet for making the most of your time at the theater while not accidentally becoming the drama.
How 'A League of Their Own' Started a Feud Between Madonna and Evansville, Indiana
Honestly, this movie came up recently in a discussion, so I was probably primed to notice and read the article. Fun and weird story about a made-up scandal, long before we were all online!
EVANSVILLE, INDIANA, IS one of America's biggest small towns, sitting on a bend in the Ohio River with a population of around 120,000. Its residents are a proud people.
They're proud of their town's resilience during the Ohio River flood of 1937 that covered 500 city blocks. They're proud of the city's role in World War II as a major manufacturing hub for aircraft and naval vessels.
On Dec. 8, 1991, an estimated 300 people gathered in the parking lot of the town's Roberts Stadium, to create a human billboard. A helicopter with photographers aboard went into the southern Indiana sky around 1:30 p.m. to capture the message, which was intended for the Queen of Pop, Madonna.
The people who showed up for the gathering lay on their backs and held up large cards. Madonna's name was spelled out in white. Over it was a red circle with a line through it to show the crowd's disapproval.
The inspiration for the protest was a line from a TV Guide interview in which Madonna -- who spent 11½ weeks in Evansville making what would become the highest-grossing baseball film in history, "A League of Their Own" -- compared the city (derogatorily) to Prague.
Before the demonstration, Evansville was just the small town in Indiana that served as the backdrop for some of the most significant movie scenes in one of history's most popular sports films.
Afterward, it was thrust into the national spotlight, portrayed as the town that rebelled against one of the most famous people in the world.
How to Survive a Scandal: Life Lessons From Monica Lewinsky and Amanda Knox
They've endured global scandal, public shaming and decades of blistering media scrutiny. Now they're ready to reclaim their own stories. In their first joint interview the two friends reveal how they got their lives back, and how they teamed up to bring Knox’s twisted tale to the screen in a major new Hulu series.
When Amanda Knox walked into a lecture hall in 2017 to give her first-ever public talk, she was terrified. For years, her face had been splashed across tabloids, her words twisted into headlines, her silence filled in by strangers. Luckily for her, sharing the stage that day was a woman who’d been through the same media meat grinder — indeed, who’d become a household name before she was old enough to rent a car.
Knox begged the event organizers for a chance to meet Monica Lewinsky privately. So, Lewinsky later invited her up to her hotel room, made her a pot of tea and ended up sharing the kind of big-sister guidance that only a fellow scandal-press survivor could offer.
“She had a lot of advice about reclaiming your voice and your narrative,” Knox says. “That ended up being a turning point for me.
Knox took that advice about reclaiming her narrative literally. Which is how these two veterans of the 24-hour news cycle — and now friends — ended up co-producing The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox. The new eight-part Hulu limited series (out Aug. 20) dramatizes the brutal 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher and the media circus that followed — a case that saw Knox, then a 20-year-old American exchange student in Italy, relentlessly pursued by prosecutors, twice convicted and twice acquitted, all while being turned into shorthand for suspicion and scandal by a rabid global press machine.
‘Being Short is a Curse’: The Men Paying Thousands to Get Their Legs Broken – and Lengthened
I’m 5-foot-7. Sometimes I wish I were a bit taller, but I feel like I’m standing extra high today, realizing I would never in a million years think of doing something like this. Although I do agree with the woman quoted about height being the “last acceptable prejudice.”
It was on his honeymoon in Kuala Lumpur, looking out of his hotel window at the silvery points of the world’s tallest twin skyscrapers, that Frank decided it was time to become taller. He had recently confessed to his new wife how much his height had bothered him since he was a teenager. As a man dedicated to self-improvement, Frank wanted to take action. He picked up the phone, called a clinic in Turkey that specialises in leg lengthening surgery – and made a booking.
“I had a lot of second thoughts – at the end of the day, someone’s going to break your legs,” he says, propped up on a hotel bed in Istanbul, his legs splayed in front of him, bracketed by a brace on each thigh. His wife, Emilia, tends to him, fetching painkillers and ice packs for the wound sites where the braces puncture his legs. For the first two weeks after surgery, Frank needed her help to get on and off the toilet, but now, six weeks later, it’s largely only to get off the bed.
At 5ft 6in tall, slightly under the average male height worldwide, Frank, 38, feels he has lived life “as a short man”. But speak with any patient at the Wanna Be Taller clinic in Istanbul, and it becomes clear that shortness is relative.
Men over 6ft have had the procedure. A slim blond woman – a rare example of a female patient here – who was 5ft 3in before surgery, looks me square in the eyes.
Shortness is "the last acceptable prejudice in society,” she explains.
These Brain Implants Speak Your Mind — Even When You Don't Want to
This technology is fascinating, and comes with fascinating challenges. I don't know that my snippet here really captures everything, and frankly the article itself leaves a lot unanswered. But I sure found the idea interesting.
Surgically implanted devices that allow paralyzed people to speak can also eavesdrop on their inner monologue.
That's the conclusion of a study of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) in the journal Cell.
Solution: The team borrowed an approach used by virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri, which wake up only when they hear a specific phrase.
"We picked Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, because it doesn't occur too frequently in conversations and it's highly identifiable," Kunz says.
Nantucket’s Six-Figure Working Class Can’t Afford to Eat
Even $150,000 a year isn’t enough to buy groceries on America’s most exclusive island.
Sarah had $40 in her bank account and an impossible decision. A few years ago, the college-educated marketing professional stood in a Nantucket grocery store, forced to choose between dinner for herself or a birthday cake for her nine-year-old son. She chose the cake and went hungry for three nights. Mind you, this wasn’t happening in some cash-strapped small town—this was on a glittering island paradise where summer visitors drop $1,000 a night on hotel rooms while mega-yachts glisten in the harbor like floating mansions.
This was hardly an isolated incident for Sarah, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, and her husband, who worked as a personal trainer at the time. “I struggled with food expenses because I put my kids first,” she says. Between the astronomical cost of daycare, utilities, and rent for their two-bedroom apartment above a garage, there was little left for food at the end of the day—about $100 a week, she estimates.
“It’s not a fun feeling, working as hard as you can for a long period of time and not having enough to provide for your kids,” Sarah says. “It’s embarrassing telling people that you’re on WIC when they think that you’re so put together on the outside, when in fact, you’re scared for when you’re going to eat your next meal.”
It is hard for most to imagine that in the shadows of the multimillion-dollar seaside estates and boats that have become synonymous with the island of Nantucket, there’s something highly counterintuitive afoot: Some 21% of islanders, according to a local nonprofit, are struggling with food insecurity. Almost half of all local schoolchildren qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and every week at the Nantucket Food Pantry, manager Ruth Pitts says she’s feeding anywhere from 400 to 550 residents who call this place home all year long.
The Founders of This New Development Say You Must Be White to Live There
Housing rights experts say a community restricted to white residents is illegal, but the creators believe they could win a potential challenge in court in the current political climate.
In the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, nearly an hour from the closest city, a small group of homesteaders is building an exclusive community from scratch.
Applicants to the community are screened with an in-person interview, a criminal-background check, a questionnaire about ancestral heritage and sometimes even photographs of their relatives.
The community’s two architects say they must personally confirm that applicants are white before they can be welcomed in.
“Seeing someone who doesn’t present as white might lead us to, among other things, not admit that person,” said one founder, Eric Orwoll, who moonlights as a Platonic scholar on YouTube but is now focused on developing 160 acres in Ravenden, Ark., into a community strictly for white, heterosexual people called Return to the Land.
“You’ve got a smoking gun case of intentional discrimination,” said a civil rights lawyer. “I think they’re misguided when they say that they’re home free.”
But Return to the Land say they see an opening under a federal government that has pushed the boundaries of laws and norms, especially when it comes to race.
“Return to the Land needs to strike while the iron is hot,” Mr. Orwoll wrote on a fund-raising page for the group, which has raised nearly $90,000.
Instead of a podcast, why not just try going live once in a while. No commitment. You can just do it when you are moved to share something. I think you have enough on your plate, right? Keep the lives short. People have no attention spans.
I enjoy your piece each day. It's interesting, clean, easy to get through quickly, and thoughtful. A podcast is a different animal. The podcasts I listen to have teams of people dedicated to creating content. Do you have time for that. Do you have a "media voice"? I'm not poo-pooing your idea, just encouraging you to consider the effort needed to do this successfully.