Link wept // What's Good: May 12, 2023
Weddings, the mob, and a milkshake duck.
Hello, good evening, happy Friday. I teased it on Twitter so I will tease it here too - I am going to start writing regular beer reviews on here, so you can look forward to that soon. The first will be a review of Sun Crusher, a Chicago classic. Anyway, the new Zelda game released today and I spent all day playing it and it fucking rules. I am going to play it more once I send this newsletter.
No seriously, it’s really good
Also I strongly recommend the review by friend of the newsletter Gene Park. Here’s a tweet from IGN showing off some NSFW creativity using the game’s new features.
Also, A conversation with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s creative leads.
The orange monster
Again, last night, on CNN. We have to see it all again, from this guy. Stoop shouldered, puffy midsection, rich suit buttoned unflatteringly over his gut, big red tie hanging down to his dick. The sculptured wispy hair that curves into horns from a certain angle, the palms out hand gesturing, the thing where he pulls down his bottom lip and lets his bottom row of plastic teeth shine and takes a dramatic pause before making a dumbass point. The weird fluctuations in his voice from trilly to gravelly to breathy, the painted eyelids that sit uncomfortably in a pale tanning booth puddle, the lies. And the crowd. The pink-cheeked enraptured crowd. The retired lawyers and insurance agents and young guys with bad haircuts in Men’s Wearhouse suits who never had the benefit of reading a good book in their lives. The pathetic crowd, with such a low bar for entertainment. The same crowd that used to cheer for the lions to eat the slaves in gladiator times. This is the best they can get now.
A change in perspective
Hard to describe how big of a deal this is:
Jonathan Eig was deep in the Duke University archives researching his new biography of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when he made an alarming discovery: King’s harshest and most famous criticism of Malcolm X, in which he accused his fellow civil rights leader of “fiery, demagogic oratory,” appears to have been fabricated.
“I think its historic reverberations are huge,” Eig told The Washington Post. “We’ve been teaching people for decades, for generations, that King had this harsh criticism of Malcolm X, and it’s just not true.”
The quote came from a January 1965 Playboy interview with author Alex Haley, a then-43-year-old Black journalist, and was the longest published interview King ever did. Because of the severity of King’s criticism, it has been repeated countless times, cast as a dividing line between King and Malcolm X. The new revelation “shows that King was much more open-minded about Malcolm than we’ve tended to portray him,” Eig said.
The quote was fabricated!!! One of the most historically significant quotes ever and it was just fabricated.
Patriot act
Turning in your treasonous ex is Good, Actually:
WASHINGTON — The breakthrough in the FBI investigation started inside a Joann Fabric and Crafts store. Last weekend, a clothing designer was standing in the checkout line waiting to purchase a needle for his sewing machine when his buddy saw something funny on his phone.
It was a tweet from the FBI’s Washington Field Office featuring two striking images of the 537th person added to the bureau’s U.S. Capitol Violence webpage, which has functioned as a “most wanted” list of Jan. 6 participants since the investigation began more than two years ago.
Kneecaps, etc
Ken Eto left the meeting at Caesar DiVarco’s club on Wabash knowing they were going to kill him. It was midday. The plan was to get up with Johnny Gattuso and Jay Campise that evening, then they’d take him to Vince Solano and they’d all have dinner together. Eto walked back to his black ’76 Torino coupe, illegally parked, and saw he’d gotten a ticket.
He drove around for a while. He had to figure out what to do, or what he could do. Around 3 p.m., he got back home to Bolingbrook. The thing was the life insurance. Mary Lou needed to know where the $100,000 policy was. He also had to give her the pawn slips — tell her to get everything out of hock by the end of next week, February 18, 1983, or she’d lose it all. And the lease for the restaurant in Lyons — Mary Lou needed to make sure it got signed. That way, after he was gone, at least some money would be coming in.
Milkshake duck
When The Kelly Clarkson Show debuted on NBC in the fall of 2019, the talk show immediately became a beloved, fresh addition to the traditional daytime lineup. With a built-in fan base from Kelly Clarkson’s singing career who have been rooting for her since she won the first-ever American Idol competition in 2002, the show captivated audiences. Over the past four seasons, the pop singer has interviewed guests like Hillary Clinton and Dolly Parton, performed “Kellyoke” segments where she sings covers of other people’s popular songs, like Whitney Houston’s “Queen of the Night” and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” and has maintained a level of candor and relatability with viewers at home.
But behind the scenes, employees say they were overworked, underpaid, and that working at the show was traumatizing to their mental health, describing The Kelly Clarkson Show as a toxic environment. These employees are veterans in the entertainment industry who know the potential downsides of working in a high-pressure environment like daytime television, and are disappointed to see this culture perpetuated on a show that had a chance to make a difference in the industry. One current and 10 former employees spoke to Rolling Stone under the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, and say they’re confident the talk-show host doesn’t have a sense of how unhappy employees are with the working conditions.
Eat, drink, and be married
I mean I don’t plan on getting married for a hot minute, but this is very cool:
You’re probably attending a wedding this year. Heck, it might even be your own (in which case, congrats!). And as anyone who has planned one can tell you, weddings today are about so much more than a marriage contract. At their best — whether they’re 300-person, three-day bashes or a trip to the courthouse followed by lunch — weddings are celebrations of partnership and community. At their worst, they are superficial status symbols, stressful ordeals for couples and guests alike. But wherever your next wedding falls on this spectrum (let’s hope it’s the former), one thing holds true: The food matters.
I’m carryin’ the wheel
The Jonas Brothers cannot be stopped:
For one week late in March, the Jonas Brothers were the TikTok For You page. They hadn’t put out a new song or made a special announcement. Their latest release, The Album, which drops today, May 12, was still weeks away. But Nick Jonas had dueted a post by 23-year-old comedy star Jake Shane.
Shane had recently hit it big on the app with a series of bare-bones videos in which he conducts a fantastical one-sided conversation about a moment in history—playing, for example, Diet Coke learning about the existence of Coke Zero. In Nick’s duet (a video reply that plays side-by-side with another video), he played the role of Coke, who was breaking the news of the betrayal.
“IN WHAT WORLD IS THIS ACTUALLY REAL,” Shane commented under the duet, but that wasn’t the end of it. As the days passed, Joe and then Kevin Jonas made their own contributions to the bit, constructing an elaborate cast of characters and a dramatic narrative arc about soda.
This week in dying twitter
Heads up, this is an article about animal cruelty. Things are not going well:
Graphic videos of animal abuse have circulated widely on Twitter in recent weeks, generating outrage and renewed concern over the platform’s moderation practices.
Cash isn’t king
Black voters in Chicago can’t be bought or bribed:
In the month leading up to the April 4 mayoral runoff, Tio Hardiman Jr., a native of the Austin community on Chicago’s West Side, was paid to work for former Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Paul Vallas’s unsuccessful campaign for mayor.
Hardiman Jr. told The TRiiBE that he learned about the opportunity from a long-time friend named Napoleon and decided to join. For $25 an hour, Hardiman and numerous other paid campaign workers operated out of a field office on the West Side.
Still no word from Vallas about why his checks are bouncing. Huh.
You deserve some good animal content
Things are still fucked. Twitter has broken Substack’s ability to embed tweets, and I want the posters to get credit for their posts, so you are going to have to temporarily click through to view each animal content entry. Sorry.
https://twitter.com/kristnmerrilees/status/1657193343690874880
https://twitter.com/shouldhaveapet/status/1657192588326076420
https://twitter.com/RedPandaEveryHr/status/1657187570223050757
https://twitter.com/twperritos/status/1657157151595409408
https://twitter.com/ServalEveryHr/status/1657142289167204352
https://twitter.com/contextdogs/status/1657089414529441795
https://twitter.com/OregonZoo/status/1657047525772390400
https://twitter.com/CincinnatiZoo/status/1656800101635850241
https://twitter.com/DallasZoo/status/1655701223721295872
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
‘Extremely Alarming’ Social Media Posts Lead SFPD to Massive Ammo Cache and Nazi Armbands. The Invisible Work of Mothers in Music. Elon Musk Wants to Relive His Start-Up Days. He’s Repeating the Same Mistakes. Keep Bluesky Weird. Why did Allen, Texas, mall shooter make neo-Nazi posts? Who's giving money to QAnon online? Privacy or safety? U.S. brings surveillance city to the suburbs. Amor Eterno.