It’s a holiday week. Here’s some stuff to read.
Inside Danny McBride’s Lowcountry Comedy Commune [Sam Schube/GQ] – Incredibly talented dude, operating within his comfort zone, with people he cares about, and enjoying his life. Left Los Angeles and set up a production studio back in South Carolina. This is one of the recipes for happiness.
in 2017, he and a handful of his closest collaborators, who also happen to be some of his closest friends, decided to move to South Carolina, where they had filmed plenty of TV and then returned together as serial vacationers. The plan was simple, but grand in ambition: to airlift the whole McBride creative brain trust, 8 or 10 whole families, to a pleasant and occasionally hard-partying city far from the spotlight.
The Mysteries of Plant ‘Intelligence’ [Zoë Schlanger/The Atlantic] – So many weird and wonderful aspects of nature and evolutionary biology.
Rhoades [zoologist and chemist] had watched a nearby forest be decimated by an invasion of caterpillars. But then something suddenly changed; the caterpillars began to die. Why? The answer, Rhoades discovered, was that the trees were communicating with one another. Trees that the caterpillars hadn’t yet reached were ready: They’d changed the composition of their leaves, turning them into weapons that would poison, and eventually kill, the caterpillars.
Scientists were beginning to understand that trees communicate through their roots, but this was different. The trees, too far apart to be connected by a root system, were signaling to one another through the air. Plants are tremendous at chemical synthesis, Rhoades knew. And certain plant chemicals drift through the air. Everyone already understood that ripening fruit produces airborne ethylene, for example, which prompts nearby fruit to ripen too. It wasn’t unreasonable to imagine that plant chemicals containing other information—say, that the forest was under attack—might also drift through the air.
The Secrets of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’s Museum-Ready Art Collection [Nate Freeman/Vanity Fair] – Excellence is so sexy. Watching this amazing couple win together while impacting culture and economy is just BRAVO. They started collecting, nurturing, evangelizing black artists early in their careers and have established themselves as serious players.
The Deans also were collecting Black artists, especially Black figurative artists, at a time when the art market has started to correct for decades of neglect. Dean was particularly struck by the contrast he saw between visits to the homes of old-guard collectors and his peers. It further fueled their collecting. (The couple put many of their largest-scale works on view at their homes—including a $20 million mansion in La Jolla, California, that is said to have inspired Tony Stark’s house in Iron Man 3—and have never sold a work since the inception of the collection.)
The Only App That Always Wins The Battle For Your Attention [Ben Cohen/WSJ] – As the father of a daughter who prizes her Duolingo trajectory, our household lives this article. “Streak” mechanics are often cheap implementations of game mechanics, or even worse, build bad habits into bad apps, but when applied to learning a language, it’s hard to argue they’re empty calories.
Traits I look for in founders [Nakul Mandan/Audacious Ventures] – We enjoy coinvesting with Nakul and the Audacious Ventures team. Recently added his blog’s RSS feed to my reader [OPEN STANDARDS FOREVER] and highlighting one of his posts (but go back and read more).
Enjoy the 4th!
