Quit Your Job to Do Microsoft Excel Competitively
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Featuring a very quiet room, the old and the not-yet-dying, and floppy AI Art.
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Literally Just Something I Think Is Funny
To all my other Microsoft Excel-heads in the chat, allow me to present a short dispatch from The Atlantic about “The World Cup of Microsoft Excel,” a sweet little online community of total losers doing Microsoft Excel competitively in a tournament. Jacob Stern reports that while the competition skews heavily male (not for long, I WILL be entering next year), all the commentators/members of the community are very nice to each other as they watch people rush to complete countifs, concatenate, and vlookup formulas.
Live shot of the Excel World Cup, probably.
A Less Serious Item (Shhh)
Resident my-favorite-writer at the New York Times, Caity Weaver, wrote an incredible 3,000 words or so on the supposed “quietest place on earth” - an anechoic (free pass to google what this means) chamber in Minneapolis that is rumored to pay thousands, if not millions of dollars, if you can sit in it for a few hours. Inspired by these (mostly TikTok-founded) rumors, Weaver went to Minneapolis to find out what all the hullaballoo is about. Turns out there are no cash prizes, but there are some interesting ideas about whether or not sitting in a quiet room for a few hours will drive you to insanity (or, at least, hallucinations). And she DOES sit in the room for three hours.
This Week’s Theme: What Are We Doing With the Old and the Not-Yet-Dying?
First I’m directing you to a shorter piece on “kinless seniors” in America - these are seniors who have no living family - no children, no spouse, no parents, no siblings. If we lived in a nice society where people check in on each other, this would be less of a concern, but as it stands, there’s about a million of these people who will likely need some assistance as they age. Standby for uplifting anecdotes like “can you believe this woman has friends at her old age?” and “this woman had to put a bunch of money into long-term care insurance.”
Then we’re turning to a very long (40 minute read!) piece from The New Yorker and ProPublica about how “hospice care has become a for-profit hustle” (don’t worry, private equity IS involved). Think: defrauding Medicare (running hospices with no patients!), putting people with chronic but not terminal diseases into hospice care, outright conning people into signing up for hospice care. There are many, many lawsuits involved and very little justice, although it seems like some lawmakers are waking up to the scam that’s sweeping the country (but the scam IS continuing to sweep the country). And if you don’t read it (which you should!), I think this tidbit gets at the heart of the problem best:
Most older people will face a chronic disability or a disease in the last years of their life, and will need extra care to remain safely at home. That help is rarely available, and Americans often end up in a social-welfare purgatory, forced to spend down their savings to become eligible for a government-funded aide or a nursing-home bed. “We all think it’s not going to affect us, but if you have a stroke and go bankrupt you’re not just going to go out and shoot yourself in the desert,” Dr. Joanne Lynn, an elder-care advocate and a former medical officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told me. Once you cross over into the kingdom of the sick, she said, it’s easier to see that some problems classified as hospice fraud are really problems of the inadequate long-term-care system in this country.
Politics (The Bird Gang of Washington D.C.)
Please enjoy this piece from The Ringer about how a bunch of politics junkies (journalists, correspondents, actual politicians) in Washington D.C. have an even worse illness than working in politics: being an Eagles fan.
“We’re so sure we’re going to be disappointed because that’s how it always goes,” says New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel, a native of the Philadelphia area who’s on the email thread. “Then they win, and it’s like, ‘OK, fine, they won.’”
Justin Sink, a Bloomberg News White House correspondent (and the husband of Ringer staffer Claire McNear), says the emailers are “the most despondent group of people experiencing success you can ever put together.”
…
As Anne Caprara, an emailer who is chief of staff to Illinois governor JB Pritzker, says, “You stumbled onto the Illuminati of Philly sports.”
As an Eagles fan, it was a true joy to read this article. As any other NFL team fan, I hope you’ll enjoy how this group of people has managed to make themselves miserable even though the Birds are 11-1.
A Celebrity Thinger (And Kind of a Recommendation)
Frankly I can’t remember if I was doing this newsletter or not when FX’s The Bear swept the nation in June 2022 (read: a select group of young people binged it and then very publicly lusted for its star Jeremy Allen White), but if not I’ll start here: if you haven’t seen FX’s The Bear, watch it! It’s a genre-shifting show about a Michelin-level chef whose brother dies from an overdose and then he has to run the family Italian beef restaurant in Chicago. It’s frenetic, funny, and very, very specific to Chicago stuff.
The Jeremy Allen White everyone is lusting after.
I bring all of that up to say: The Bear brought comic and actress Ayo Edebiri into the spotlight. Enjoy this interview between her and her good friend Olivia Craighead for Gawker.
Ayo showing off her range in The Bear.
Flop Links (Flop, Flop, Bish)
AI Pics on Main - If you’ve been on Instagram at all this past week you’ve probably seen friends, enemies, crushes, truly anyone from any aspect of your life posting flashy, Lisa Frank-coded, AI-generated portraits of themselves to their literal grids. Some people will even take their own posts, and then share them to their story to say, “Look! Please look. Please? Here’s what I’d look like if I was the main character of my own life.” As someone who deleted their own graduation photos from their grid because they felt too sincere, you will not see me participating in this, but I’m ultimately fine with people who do. But if you want to be a hater, here is a thread of tweets alleging that the app people are using (and apparently paying a whole $7.99 for) “steals” existing artwork and samples it in order to generate these portraits. Or, if you’d rather be silly, here’s a thread where someone made AI-generated, anime versions of all of Taylor Swift’s album covers. Reputation is my favorite.
J to the Lie - When I first heard that Jennifer Lopez was tapped to perform a tribute to Whitney Houston at this year’s Grammys… I actually don’t remember what happened - everything went red and then I woke up in a field 10 miles away from my apartment. Then I realized, I accidentally took a tweet at face value again. Shame on me.
The tweet in question is here, but the audio has now been removed (most likely by the omnipotent and well-manicured hands of the J. Lo Legal Team). If you want to hear what I heard, the audio is located here. Apparently it was all fake, and now this person (whose name is Chris Evans, which makes for fun headlines) is being sued for defamation. A flop for a flop will make the whole world flop I guess. However, I’m left wanting to know: is the bad singing not actually J. Lo and that’s why this is defamation, or is this defamation because we fortunately don’t live in a world where J. Lo would ever be allowed to perform a Whitney Houston tribute, and that was the lie. Much to think about.
The Mourning Show - Well, we had a good run. In a decision that proves morning shows in general are allergic to being interesting, Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes have been put “on pause” (to use Real Housewives fandom lingo) following their tabloid firestorm of an affair. Good Morning America, you’re a flop for that. To reflect on what we lost, here’s a cute little clip from one of their final broadcasts post-scandal.
Like the flop links? Follow author Justin Crosby on Twitter.
A Recommendation (Christmas! Have You Heard of Her?)
Matt Rogers (of the podcast Las Culturistas and the Showtime show I Love That For You) just released a musical comedy Christmas special on Showtime called “Have You Heard of Christmas?” I do generally recommend the special (all hits IMO) but I want to more specifically recommend you watch the video for the song “Hottest Female Up in Whoville” where he’s singing as the only single woman in all of Whoville (“sort of a MILF with no kids”).
The Interactive Bits (Interact with me!)
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