Travis Scott's Performance in Fortnite

Cultural perspective:
The Last Dance Episodes 1 & 2: 6 million viewers
ESPN NFL Draft Round 1: 15 million viewers
Travis Scott's First Fortnite Performance: 12 million viewers

The Verge - "How to watch Travis Scott’s Fortnite concerts"
The Verge - "Travis Scott’s first Fortnite concert was surreal and spectacular"
Rolling Stone - "I’ve Never Played Fortnite, But Was Forced to Attend Travis Scott’s Fortnite Concert"

"The experience, which lasted about 10 minutes, was more animated short film than concert. Scott’s face melted away to reveal a robot skeleton that would make Schwarzenegger proud, and his giant avatar performed hits like “Goosebumps” through neon lasers, and “Highest In the Room” underwater. It was overtly trippy. It felt like marketing. Even in the confines of a video game, giant Travis was a detailed capitalist, making sure to wear an assortment of his coveted Jordan collaborations that currently fetch $500 to $1,000 on the resale market. In the game, the shoes appeared several stories tall.

To end the show, Travis went to space, bringing you with him whether you wanted to or not. It was then he premiered the biggest draw of the evening, a new collaboration with Kid Cudi called “The Scotts.” In the distance, a planet made in Travis’ image was visible with an Astroworld carnival situated on the crust and a boombox operating as the celestial body’s core. Yet as soon as the planet seemed within the player’s grasp, it started to crumble, claimed by a cataclysm. Then it was all over. I was back in the world of Fortnite, no longer besieged by Travis Scott. The player nearest to me realized they could use their weapons again, and killed me."

Coachella Documentary

Previously:
Coachella 2012 (April 2012)
California Dreaming... (January 2010)
Coachella 2013 Lineup (January 2013)
Desus & Mero on Beyoncé at Coachella (April 2018)
Coachella 2019 Lineup (January 2019)

Home Office Inspiration

Hypebeast - "A Look Inside Nike CEO Mark Parker's Office"
Architectural Digest - "65 Home Office Ideas That Will Inspire Productivity"

The Making of The Mandalorian

Debuting May 4
Polygon - "The Mandalorian behind-the-scenes show promises so much more Baby Yoda gold"

There Will Be Blood 10 Years Later

The Ringer - "“A Whole Ocean of Oil Under Our Feet”: ‘There Will Be Blood’ at 10"
By Sean Fennessey

New Los Angeles Chargers Uniforms

USA Today - "Los Angeles Chargers unveil new uniforms, which emphasize iconic powder blue"

The Future of New York City

Bloomberg - "A Vision of Post-Pandemic New York"

"At some point the risk from Covid-19 will recede but not disappear. What might America then be like? The largest cities in the country, and New York City in particular, will remain vital, but their futures will be clouded by serious health and economic issues.

Most of all, there will be an exodus of elderly residents. New York City will become even more the province of young people, assuming the role that Berlin has long played in Germany. That will be good for the city’s long-run vitality.

Rents and land prices are likely to fall. This is not necessarily because of a high number of deaths, a ghoulish and difficult detail to predict. Nonetheless many businesses will think twice about locating their headquarters in New York City, if only because senior managers tend to be relatively old. The net effect will be to make the city less attractive for businesses but more affordable for residents, most of all young people. It will be more like the New York of the 1970s and 1980s, with fear of infection replacing the fear of crime. "

The Importance of Instagram

New York Times - "Scrolling Through the Rise, and Takeover, of Instagram"

"Every once in a while, in the heat of a dramatic moment, there are reminders of just how silly the stakes are. In an “emergency meeting,” Systrom announced that Instagram would be launching a new feature called “stories,” basically copying Snapchat. “He explained that every user would get to add videos, which would disappear within 24 hours, to their personal reel,” Frier writes. An executive later recalled: “It was like being in the room when John F. Kennedy announces you’re going to the moon.”

This book is not about going to the moon, but we’re not going there anyway, or anywhere else; we’re on our couches, or in our beds, scrolling through Instagram. Now that that company — and the pleasure it brings us — are so deeply entrenched in the ever-growing behemoth that is Facebook, we need a book like this to explain what it is I’m tapping on all day. I spend hours staring at the screen, and now I have a better sense of who’s staring back. "

Rockefeller Center

New York Times - "Rockefeller Center's Art Deco Marvel: A Virtual Tour"

"I’ve read that Rockefeller Center trailed only the federal government as an employer during those years, accounting for as many as 225,000 jobs, if you include suppliers mining iron ore in Alabama and copper in Arizona, workers fabricating windows in Pennsylvania, etc.

The center accounted for as many as 75,000 jobs in New York alone. After the Empire State Building was completed in 1932, remember, it was the only private construction project of any size in the city until after the Second World War. There’s a bas-relief near the rear entrance to 630 Fifth Avenue that pays tribute to the workers who built Rockefeller Center, by the well-known sculptor Gaston Lachaise. Although labor and construction prices plummeted during the Depression, Todd and Junior used the opportunity not to cut costs but to spend extravagant amounts on materials like excess structural steel, which they added to various buildings to support lush roof gardens.

...

I hate to give a dictator the last word, so let me ask, what happened with the triumphal boulevard?

The Rockefellers tried for years to make it happen. But the 21 Club was in the way and its owners wouldn’t budge.

No matter how powerful the Rockefellers were, in the end even they were no match for the speakeasy business."

First Look at Denis Villeneuve’s Dune

Vanity Fair – "Behold Dune: An Exclusive Look at Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, and More"
Vanity Fair – "A First Look at Timothée Chalamet in Dune"

Previously:
The Remake of Dune

Swimming

New York Times – "What I Miss Most Is Swimming"
By Bonnie Tsui

"When we peer into a lake, river or ocean, we find that water encourages a particular kind of reverie. Perhaps its depths can enhance our consciousness even more if instead of just looking, we get in and swim.

We jump into that water and find ourselves in a curious liminal space. Here we are, suspended, yet moving; floating, yet ever in danger of sinking. And if we swim with the current, instead of fighting against it, we find a momentary state, one of motion and yet paradoxical stillness that is flow.

...

The focused immediacy of swimming encourages a mind-set that reminds me of how my young children think: It’s an ever-presentness. Every past moment is immediately replaced by a new one: a constant stream of now, and now and now that doesn’t allow much room to dwell too long on things past or what’s to come. Living in the now is a state of being that my busy brain finds challenging — but I desire it. Swimming is an antidote for the existential anxiety from which I suffer.

In “Waterlog,” his celebrated chronicle of swimming through Britain’s waterways, the naturalist Roger Deakin described swimming as having a transformative, Alice-in-Wonderland quality; it was an activity that had power over his perception of self and of time. “When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens,” he wrote. “Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world.” You’ve crossed a boundary, and the experience of life while swimming is intensely different from any other. Your sense of the present, he added, “is overwhelming.”

...

Cognitive scientists have shown that water sounds — the rhythmic hum of the ocean, the rush of a waterfall — are calming to the human brain. We experience a drop in heart rate and blood pressure and an increase in alpha-wave activity — those brain wavelengths associated with relaxation and boosted serotonin — as well as creative thinking. While tooling around on the Spotify music-streaming service one day, I found that white-noise water sounds are some of the biggest hits there; a track called “Rolling Ocean Waves” has been played nearly 60 million times.

Walks in the woods are all well and good, as Thoreau illustrated in his transcendentalist classic, “Walden.” But during the two years, two months and two days that he spent living in that cabin at Walden Pond, he also got up early every morning to swim; he described it as “a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did.” Each of his swims stimulated body and mind. Each day’s routine of rousing early to do so was a way to enact his desire to “live deliberately” in the New England forest.

Much has been made of the walk as the instrument for big thinkers: Charles Darwin; Albert Einstein; Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who famously rambled together and revolutionized our understanding of the psychology of decision-making. Less has been explicitly made of swimming — a similar kind of aid, more medium than tool — for channeling the inner life and improving the flow of thoughts.

The physical action matters just as much as the environment does. “The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa,” the science journalist Ferris Jabr notes in an essay titled “Why Walking Helps Us Think.” It follows that the pace of swimming, because of its fluid continuity, encourages a specific kind of thinking. There are the same changes to our body chemistry in swimming as there are in land exercise: faster heartbeat, increased circulation, more blood and oxygen to muscles and brain.

...

The marine biologist and author Wallace J. Nichols is an evangelist for achieving what he calls “blue mind,” which emphasizes the importance of drifting to discovery, and water as a way to enable that process. “Being around water provides a sensory-rich environment with enough ‘soft fascination’ to let our focused attention rest and the default-mode network to kick in,” he writes. In these times of stress and social distancing, he emphasizes that water is essential medicine more than ever."

The Future of Our Ocean

Rolling Stone – "Rising Tides, Troubled Waters: The Future of Our Ocean"

"Earth was not born with an ocean. Water arrived here from the cold depths of space with icy asteroids and comets, which bombarded the planet during the first few million years of its existence. It’s been a watery world ever since. Today, 97 percent of the Earth’s water is in the ocean, which covers more than 70 percent of the planet. The ocean was the petri dish for the creation of life, and we carry that early history within us. The salt content of our blood plasma is similar to the salt content of seawater. “The bones we use to hear with were once gill bones of sharks,” says Neil Shubin, professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago and author of Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body. “Our hands are modified fish fins, and the genes that build our basic body architecture are shared with worms and fish.”

Despite our intimate connection to the sea, for most of human history the ocean has been as strange to us as a distant planet, a realm of monsters and mayhem. Humans stuck close to the shore, mostly, and our ignorance about the ocean was profound. It still is. Scientists have only a vague understanding of exactly how ocean currents are driven, or how ocean temperatures impact cloud formation, or what creatures thrive in the depths. Far more people have been to the moon, which is 240,000 miles above us, than have been to the deepest part of the ocean, which is seven miles down. Eighty percent of the ocean remains unmapped, unobserved, unexplored. Marine biologists don’t know how sharks sleep or an octopus learns to open a jar.

But scientists know enough to know that the ocean is in trouble. Largely because of overfishing, 90 percent of the large fish that were here in the 1950s are now gone. One metric ton of plastic enters the ocean every four seconds (at this rate, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050). But the biggest problem, thanks largely to our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels, is that the ocean is heating up fast. The past five years have been the five warmest ever measured in the ocean, with 2019 the hottest ever. According to one study, the amount of heat being added to the ocean is equivalent to every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and night.

...

Monterey Bay is a crescent on the Northern California coast, a place haunted by the ghosts of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. The old sardine canneries are now T-shirt shops and touristy restaurants. From the pier, you can watch sea otters playing in the surf and, if you’re lucky, whales breeching just offshore. A deep canyon delivers cold, nutrient-rich waters into the bay, creating one of the most diverse ecosystems in the Pacific, including giant kelp beds that grow along the coast all the way up to Alaska. In good times, these kelp beds are teeming with life — otters, seals, sharks, rockfish, lingcod. “The kelp beds are the rainforests of the Pacific,” Kyle Van Houtan, the chief scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, tells me.

But like everything in the ocean, the kelp beds are changing fast. On a recent Saturday morning, I pulled on scuba gear and jumped in the water near Monterey to have a look for myself. What I saw was not the rainforest of the Pacific. Instead, I was greeted with nothing but rock and water and hundreds of purple sea urchins, their thorny spikes like medieval armor. A voracious horde had invaded the once-magnificent kelp forest and devoured everything (“purple urchins are the cockroaches of the sea,” one scientist told me), leaving only some empty abalone shells, a rockfish poking around, and a few pathetic kelp stipes. And this spot is just one fragment of a bigger picture. As a result of the Blob, many of the kelp forests along the coast from California to Oregon have vanished, done in by warming and the army of purple sea urchins, which thrive in a hotter world.

...

Former NOAA director Jane Lubchenco says it’s time to stop thinking of the ocean as a victim of climate change and start thinking of it as a powerful part of the solution. A recent study that Lubchenco co-authored suggests that by developing renewable energy from the ocean, including tidal power and offshore wind farms, as well as eating more fish and less red meat and substituting kelp for traditional feeds for farm animals, as much as one-fifth of the carbon-emission reductions needed to hit the 1.5 C target could be found in the ocean. To Lubchenco, we have spent far too long focused on the problems and not enough on the solutions. “For the last few decades, the narrative about the ocean is that it’s too big to fix,” says Lubchenco. “Coral bleaching, gross plastic pollution, ocean acidification, heat waves, collapsing fisheries. It’s been one disaster after another. But now a new narrative is beginning to emerge, one that recognizes how central the oceans are to mitigating climate change, to adapting to climate change, to providing food security, to so many things that we care about. The new narrative is far more hopeful, and it says the ocean is too big to ignore.”"

Fran Lebowitz on Politicians in the National Spotlight

New Yorker – "Fran Lebowitz Is Never Leaving New York"

Q: "Has this crisis shown us anything about Donald Trump that we didn’t know before?

No. Every single thing that could be wrong with a human being is wrong with him. But the single most dangerous thing about Donald Trump is how unbelievably stupid he is. It’s not the most dangerous thing in someone who has no responsibilities, but in a President it’s the most dangerous thing.

His absolute belief in himself, that is something that is not going to ever change. And he doesn’t care. When people say he’s not showing enough empathy—he doesn’t know what it means. Whenever he uses the word “love,” which he does occasionally, I think of the word “algebra,” because I don’t know what algebra is. I took Algebra 1 four times, because I failed it four times, and I still don’t know what algebra even means. I know the symbols. And that is what love means to Donald Trump.

Q: New Yorkers have suddenly rallied around Governor Cuomo and used Mayor de Blasio as a punching bag. As someone who’s been more of a fan of de Blasio than Cuomo, what do you think of that?

Well, I haven’t been a fan of de Blasio’s in quite some time. Look, I could see right away when de Blasio was running that he was slow. Whenever he talks, I’m always going, “Come on! Come on!” So that is a flaw. The mayor of New York is the second-hardest job in the country, after the President, and I never thought he was up to it. But his heart was in the right place, and it had been a really long time since the mayor cared about poor people, of which there are zillions in New York. Universal pre-K was a great thing. I said to my friends, “You don’t like him because he doesn’t cater to you. You don’t need him.”

...

Q: I want to go back to Cuomo, because he’s getting such adulation for his role in this, and I’m curious if you think that it’s deserved.

He’s being compared to Trump, so naturally he looks like Abraham Lincoln. First of all, Trump is very lazy. I can tell you, the same way basketball players say “game recognizes game,” sloth recognizes sloth. This is a lazy guy. I actually know this. And Andrew Cuomo is an incredibly industrious person, and I do think he’s doing a good job. He’s doing a job, which Trump is not.

I’ve watched some of Cuomo’s press conferences. Some of them drive me crazy. When he gets off of facts and starts talking about his mother and his brother, that’s the kind of folksiness—a New York version of folksiness—that I cannot abide. That’s when I shut the TV off. But my main question is: Where did he get that haircut? I watched him yesterday, I watched him today. Between these two times, he got his hair cut. Is there some secret haircutting place where you’re allowed to go? Because, if so, I also need a haircut.

Q: What do you think Joe Biden should be doing right now?

I think he should be out there more. He’s disappeared. Also, the interest in the election has disappeared, and that is a dangerous thing. Can’t people do more than one thing at a time?

Q: What are your thoughts on how the primary has turned out?

From the beginning, I was very depressed. I was quite an ardent supporter of Elizabeth Warren. It’s very unusual to have such a good candidate. I realized that she’s a woman and that was going to be a bad thing for her, as it is for all of us. Also, that she was the smartest, and that has always been something that Americans cannot stand. So a smart woman, I thought, doesn’t really have much of a chance.

But I am a person who loathes Bernie Sanders. Yes, I’d rather have had him be the President than Trump. There’s no one I wouldn’t rather have be the President than Donald Trump. But Bernie Sanders would not be a good President.

Q: Do you think the pandemic has given more credence to his argument for Medicare for All?

Medicare for All—which used to be called socialized medicine—is something that, of course, can be done. They have it all over Europe. Can it be done quickly in this country? No. But it’s an absurd idea that hospitals should be businesses. People say, “If you love your health insurance”—who is that? Who loves their health insurance? No one really wants health insurance. People want health care. It’s, like, no one wants car insurance. They want a car.

I think the popularity of Bernie Sanders just has to do with his shouting, which people seem to mistake for some sort of intellectual energy. It drives me crazy. And most of the things he says should be free, I agree with him. Yes! Public colleges should be free. They were, up until the late seventies, in New York. Someone has to explain: colleges were free, but they were paid for by taxes. Take my taxes and please pay for free colleges. Please do not take my taxes and give it to Carnival Cruise Line.

Q: This sounds like Bernie Sanders’s platform, though.

I agree with him. I agree with these ideas. But if you’re asking me if he would be a good President—he’s not even a good senator! He just yells. Also, I’ve always thought, What kind of person leaves New York when they’re eighteen? People should come to New York when they’re eighteen. And many of the things that are wrong with New York that prevent many people from coming—which is how psychotically expensive it’s become—should be changed. He’s seventy-eight, right? That’s the age you should go to Vermont. New York’s a very hard place to live, and I understand if, by the time people are seventy-eight, they can’t take it anymore. Go to Vermont, and, when you get there, take an eighteen-year-old and put them on a bus and send them to New York.

Q: It’s, like, the Bernie Sanders Exchange Program.

Right. And if the eighteen-year-old says, “Who can afford to live in New York?” Well, you, because we’re going to change everything for you. I have always really disliked Joe Biden, mainly because of the Anita Hill hearings, which I did not have to be reminded of during the Kavanaugh hearings. I remembered it very well and I was appalled. And because he turned Delaware into a cesspool of usury. But I was so happy when he started winning. And that to me was sad. I thought, This is what it’s come to. You’re happy that Joe Biden is winning.

...

Q: Speaking of former New York mayors, what happened to Giuliani? Was he always this insane?

I don’t think he was always this crazy, but it was always a sham. This idea that Giuliani was some sort of great mayor is absurd. Giuliani was the first person I remember who started this kind of poisonous politics of nostalgia, which is really just racism, at its core. When Giuliani was running for mayor for the first time, I kept saying to people, “Are you watching these ads of Giuliani’s, which are basically saying, ‘Vote for me and it’ll be 1950 again’?” I hated him as a mayor. In my entire time I’ve lived here, I’ve only liked two mayors, [John] Lindsay and [David] Dinkins.

But, in a way, what’s happening to Cuomo is somewhat like what happened to Giuliani. On September 11th, when Giuliani became “America’s Mayor,” the reason for that was that the President was hiding. We now have Cuomo, who’s not a sham like Giuliani, and the President is not hiding, but the President is totally incompetent. I guarantee you that Trump is seething at the attention Cuomo’s getting."

Sign of the Times

Wall Street Journal - "The Hollywood Premiere Is Moving to Your Living Room"

"That was the case for Corey Pendergrass, a 36-year-old plumber in Winston-Salem, N.C., who goes with his wife Brittany to the movies about once a month. When he saw “The Invisible Man” available to rent, he thought it was a chance to see a movie he’d missed when the pandemic closed the local cinema. But only if it cost $10, not $20.

A trip to the theater costs about $18 in tickets, he said, but “there is overhead. You’re supporting local workers. There’s the surround sound.” At home, he added, “I pay the power bill.”

He and his wife have opted instead for subscription-service fare like “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness” on Netflix, he said. “I know the movie industry is taking a hit,” Mr. Pendergrass said. “Join the club.”"

Weeknight Zoom Fun

"Who's the most famous person you could get to join this zoom call?"

The answer(s) are amazing 😂 pic.twitter.com/4PBleGGYDe

— Always Late with Katie Nolan (@AlwaysLateESPN) April 9, 2020

Returning to Comfort Foods

New York Times - "‘I Just Need the Comfort’: Processed Foods Make a Pandemic Comeback"

"“We don’t normally have chips at home. But now we have Doritos and Cheetos. Chips made with orange stuff and all sorts of seasonings that we normally don’t eat,” said Connie Huynh, an organizer with the grass-roots activist network People’s Action in Pasadena, Calif. “We are relaxing some of the rules during this stressful time just to get through it.”

For others, the food purchases are purely an emotional reaction. Consumers are reaching for foods that trigger a comforting childhood memory or are simply their go-to snack when they need to relieve stress."

Videochatting

The Atlantic - "We Need to Stop Trying to Replicate the Life We Had"

"The best part of any social gathering is the haphazard array of smaller, more intimate gatherings into which it inevitably breaks down. Just ask Shakespeare, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Edith Wharton. Romeo and Juliet meet during a stolen moment in the middle of a masquerade ball. Nick Carraway inadvertently befriends Jay Gatsby at a party when he’s off to the side, gossiping about Gatsby. The love affair between Newland Archer and Countess Ellen Olenska begins when the pair share a private giggle during a dinner, just out of earshot of the other guests.

I’ve been thinking wistfully about side conversations a lot the past few weeks. Like many others who are sheltering in place to curb the spread of COVID-19, I’ve participated in a number of Zoom happy hours of late. As friends trickle into the videoconference, one by one they demand to know how the friend who lives abroad is doing, you know, under the circumstances; how the friend whose wedding has been postponed is doing, how the friend who works in a hospital is doing. Each of the aforementioned friends then has to respond, while those of us who have been on the call from the start hear their responses for a second, third, fourth time. Eventually, lagging internet connections and the subsequent chaos of people talking simultaneously (“Sorry, you go!” “No, you go!”) force us all into a weird pattern of monologuing one after another. At this point, I always find myself desperately wishing I could discreetly ask another participant to “go get a refill,” or subtly invite them to break away and catch up in a quieter and less chaotic conversation of our own. (Sure, we could start a side chat on another platform or text each other, but it’s not the same.)

...

I can’t in good faith suggest that hanging out remotely will be an adequate replacement for time spent physically together, even if and when we develop better virtual social skills. Even those of us who succeed in adapting our social life to platforms like FaceTime will still undoubtedly long for the delicious, crackling chemistry of actual face time. But in this moment, it’s worth remembering that the options we have can be nourishing, too—and even satisfying, if we get creative enough. I suspect we’ll figure that out when we stop trying to pretend the tofurkey tastes just as good."

The Last Dance to Premiere on April 19

ESPN - "Michael Jordan series on ESPN, 'The Last Dance,' moved up to April"

""The Last Dance" takes an in-depth look at the the Chicago Bulls' dynasty through the lens of the final championship season in 1997-98. The Bulls allowed an NBA Entertainment crew to follow them around for that entire season, and some of that never-before-seen footage will be in the documentary.

In addition, ESPN spoke to more than 100 people close to the team and personalities who experienced the run, exploring all angles of the Jordan phenomenon.

Many consider Jordan to be the greatest basketball player of all time. He won six titles with Chicago in two separate three-peats. He played 15 seasons in the league, and the only year he wasn't an All-Star was the partial season, when he returned from a hiatus playing minor league baseball. He won the scoring title a record 10 times, was the league MVP five times and Finals MVP a record six times."

Where to Go in a Quarantine

The Atlantic - "Escape From Quarantine With a Western Movie"

"Almost every second of action in Howard Hawks’s 1948 film Red River, one of Hollywood’s greatest Westerns, takes place outside. An epic account of a 1,000-mile cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, the movie follows the rancher Thomas Dunson (played by John Wayne) and his protégé, Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift), as they move their cows north on a perilous march. When their journey comes to an end, Garth walks into a building and looks up in astonishment. “A roof is funny,” he muses. “We haven’t been under one in three months.”

I had put on Red River, which is available to stream on the Criterion Channel, out of a vague desire to watch a classic Western. Clift’s line perfectly summed up what I was seeking: the least claustrophobic movie possible, one with sweeping vistas and a potent sense of danger and adventure. Over the past week, I’ve been devouring one of the American film industry’s oldest genres, both familiar standards and later revisionist masterpieces, because Westerns offer pure cinematic escapism—from our hermetic homes to landscapes that are wild, exposed, and boundless.

Westerns have been around as long as Hollywood itself, so there are many eras to dig into if you’re in need of something to watch while isolating. For me, much of the broader appeal of the genre at the moment is aesthetic: Westerns revolve so much around the outdoors that the simple act of going inside is worth remarking on. Red River is a Moby Dick­­–esque fable of the extreme mentality required on the American frontier, with Dunson cast as an Ahab-like antihero pushing his men beyond their limits to achieve his goals. But it’s also just a nice movie about taking a really, really long walk outside. What could be more soothing?"

New York Times - "36 Hours in … Wherever You Are"

New York Times - "For the Uninitiated and Bored, an Introduction to the World of Gaming"
New York Times - "It’s a Perfect Time to Play Video Games. And You Shouldn’t Feel Bad About It."
Wikipedia: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Tigertail

April 10, 2020
Written & Directed by Alan Yang (Master of None, Parks and Recreation)

Sneaker Culture from Lena Waithe

You Ain't Got These coming to Quibi on April 6.

Previously on WDA:
Coming Soon to Quibi
The Future of Content 
How Many Quibis? 

Related:
The Ringer - "Is Quibi a Good Idea?"
CNET - "Quibi: Prices, shows, release date and WTF is a quibi actually"
AP - "New phone-only Quibi aims for bite of digital entertainment"

Custom WFH Nike Sweatsuit

@BRKicks: Work from home fit last couple weeks. @ClothSurgeon made this out of four Nike sweatpants 😂

Instagram Beat Battles

Pitchfork - "Our 10 Favorite Things in Rap This Week: Instagram Beat Battles and More"

"A lot of hip-hop and R&B producers and songwriters are using their quarantine downtime to take part in Instagram Live battles where they play their hits at one another. So far, only heavy-hitters have been invited to the Swizz Beatz and Timbaland-hosted events: Boi-1Da showered Hit-Boy with Drake smashes; The-Dream and Sean Garrett messily bragged about who JAY-Z loves more; veteran songwriter Johntá Austin, holding a glass of wine, kindly sent Ne-Yo packing once Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” dropped; and Mannie Fresh and Scott Storch reignited the regional rap flames. It’s undeniably enjoyable to watch these icons rattle through their catalogs, but here’s one problem with these battles: Nobody knows what the rules actually are. Is it who has contributed to the most hit records? Do points get docked for producing and writing bad songs? Is it about technical ability? Right now, the answer to all of these questions is: Whatever helps your narrative most. Which leads to debates that nobody can win—but at least it’s a distraction from everything else."

View this post on Instagram

Score card from the people !! Thank you @scottstorchofficial & @manniefresh for doing it for the people at home aka the culture ! We also hit 202k tonight VERZUZ !!! Scott won tonight but so did the culture ! @timbaland it’s a wrap 🙌🏽

A post shared by No Breaks In 2020 (@therealswizzz) on Apr 1, 2020 at 7:38pm PDT

Music Marketing in the Era of Tik Tok & Social Distancing

The Ringer - "Drake’s “Toosie Slide” Is a Master Class in Marketing, but Nothing Else"
Rolling Stone - "Before Drake Released ‘Toosie Slide,’ He Turned to a Few Dancers for Help"