Free for ALL Friday!
It's Free for All Friday!
Friends who offered to give feedback on the whole Bill Murphy Business Newsletters Idea: I now have close to 70 replies, which is awesome but also hard to manage!
Rather than risk too much time passing without me getting back to some people, I’m going to do 4 group video sessions next week (via Zoom, one each day: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday) to explain what I’m up to. I hope you’ll be able to join me for one of them!
I’ll send the dates/times in a separate email! Thank you again!
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.
How ‘Jaws’ Made a Template for the Modern Blockbuster
Much more than a mere creature feature, “Jaws” created a playbook that filmmakers have followed closely for 50 years.
Fifty years ago, Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” terrified moviegoers. Its shocks still reverberate. Its blueprint is now so recognizable that you have probably seen “Jaws” — even if you haven’t actually seen “Jaws.”
To capture how widely “Jaws” has influenced Hollywood, we watched over 50 films that include most or all of the nine plot points in the movie.
With this in mind, you can find “Jaws” DNA in countless other films: creature features, action movies, supernatural thrillers and even some of Mr. Spielberg’s later blockbusters. Here’s how it works.
The Quiet Unraveling of the Man Who Almost Killed Trump
I’ve wondered for a while if anyone would go back and do a deep dive on what motivated Thomas Cooks, the “nerdy engineering student” who attempted to kill then-former President Trump last summer.
The scene has been etched into American history. After a bullet grazed Mr. Trump’s ear, he lifted his blood-streaked face, pumped his fist and shouted the words: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Mr. Trump has said that God saved him in order to save America, and the White House recently unveiled a statue in the Oval Office commemorating the moment.
Now, nearly a year later, with Mr. Trump in his second presidential term, much of the world has forgotten about Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who set out to murder him. Mr. Crooks — who also killed a bystander and wounded two others before being shot dead by the Secret Service — had kept to himself and seemed to leave little behind. His motive was a mystery, and remains the source of many conspiracy theories.
A New York Times examination of the last years of the young man’s life found that he went through a gradual and largely hidden transformation, from a meek engineering student critical of political polarization to a focused killer who tried to build bombs.
This account offers the fullest picture yet of Mr. Crooks’s life.
Think Twice Before You Click ‘Unsubscribe’
That link at the bottom of your email might clean up your inbox—or make you a bigger target.
There are times when your inbox probably feels like it is under siege, with dozens of emails flooding in daily, offering everything from last-minute travel deals to questionable crypto advice. Nearly every email ends with the same invitation: Click here to unsubscribe.
Before you do, however, consider this: While we’ve long been told that “unsubscribe” is a simple and safe way to get off email lists we never signed up for or no longer care about, that isn’t always the case. In fact, cybersecurity experts now warn that in many instances, clicking that link might do more harm than good.
The Dads Getting Tattoos of Their Kids’ Drawings
Already got “Mom” tatted across your bicep? It might be time to get your daughter’s doodle of a unicorn on your calf.
David Weisberg struggles with severe seasonal depression. Four years ago, when he was 38, he was having a “bad week, month, whatever,” he recalls, so he asked his daughter, then eight, if she would draw him a sunrise. She did—and then he had it tattooed on his left forearm.
What to do with kids’ art is a controversial topic in many households. Should you trash your children’s drawings the instant they look away, or hoard their scribbles until they’re parents themselves? It turns out that there’s a third way, one that saves space while also allowing you to keep their art forever.
Thirty-two percent of adults have tattoos, according to a 2023 Pew study, and the number one reason that people get them is to honor or remember a person or thing. Meanwhile, according to Pew, parents today are putting a greater emphasis on showing love and building relationships with their children.
The Entire Internet Is Reverting to Beta
The AI takeover is changing everything about the web—and not necessarily for the better.
A car that accelerates instead of braking every once in a while is not ready for the road. A faucet that occasionally spits out boiling water instead of cold does not belong in your home. Working properly most of the time simply isn’t good enough for technologies that people are heavily reliant upon. And two and a half years after the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI is becoming such a technology.
Even without actively seeking out a chatbot, billions of people are now pushed to interact with AI when searching the web, checking their email, using social media, and online shopping. Ninety-two percent of Fortune 500 companies use OpenAI products, universities are providing free chatbot access to potentially millions of students, and U.S. national-intelligence agencies are deploying AI programs across their workflows.
My point isn’t that generative AI is a scam or that it’s useless. These tools can be legitimately helpful for many people when used in a measured way, with human verification ...
Therein lies the issue: Generative AI is a technology that works well enough for users to become dependent, but not consistently enough to be truly dependable.
The Onion Holds Up a Mirror; Society Flashes a Big Smile
How some students at University of Wisconsin-Madison created satiric cultural institution.
The Onion has been making fun of human folly since its founding by two undergrads at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988. The mock news site has created satiric pieces so smart some believed them real, others that were just plain silly, and one headline (“‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”) that has achieved a dark fame after being reposted after each U.S. mass shooting since 2014 Isla Vista, Calif., attack.
In this edited interview, Christine Wenc, A.M. ’08, talks about her new book “Funny Because It’s True,” on the origins of the newspaper that proclaims itself “America’s Finest News Source.” Wenc spoke about the legacy of The Onion, now based in Chicago, how it created modern news satire, and why it is revered as a cultural institution.
Everything is Enchanted: Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens
Being the Paris Review, this is a 3,500-word so I don't expect most people to read it any more than we'd read “Ulysses.” But if you've ever marveled at or even wondered about Kaufman's Foreign Man character or Reubens as Pee-Wee Herman, you'll pick up some good gems here.
Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens both appeared on the hit TV show The Dating Game, but not as themselves. If you had tuned in on a Wednesday night in 1978, you might have seen a rather weird bachelor amid the usual roll call of dudes with disco medallions. While the other contestants were all throwing scripted innuendos at one lucky lady, there was Andy Kaufman! Except it wasn’t him, not exactly. He had shown up as his squeaky-voiced Foreign Man character, Latka Gravas, whom he would soon make famous on NBC’s show Taxi (1979–1983. But no one knew who that was yet. On the show, it all got pretty discombobulating. He was grinning like a boy who’d just discovered what fire could do to his Action Man; he deliberately misunderstood the jokes, and squealed “I won!” when he didn’t win, all somehow earning him the gleeful indulgence of the studio audience. What the hell was that?
I have another solution to saving your kids' art projects without making it a permanent fixture on your body. I made Shutterfly books for each year of each kid's art and then threw the actual art away at some point. Now my kinds will have books of their creatives to show their own kids.
I saw Jaws in the local theatre when it first came out. Don’t remember anything except laughing until I was in tears every time my friend screamed. Which was a lot. She has the best screams.
The unsubscribe article was kind of interesting. I don’t recall seeing an unsubscribe option in the middle of an email.
Not a fan of tattoos, but what is your kid going to think when they are 14 or 15 and you have this bad drawing of a unicorn on your arm for everyone to see? Kids art is meant to be disposable and recyclable, that is why there is so much of it.