Friday Five: April 18, 2025
It's a Good Friday indeed.
Greetings, Consumers. I’m reporting live from my first holiday weekend over here! Not that freelance work really observes holidays… but it’s a treat to be in the city on a four day weekend. Here’s your weekly dispatch of catharsis, joy, and specific weirdness from the shadowy corners of the internet — and my mind.
Song of the week: A special throwback for the special times we’re living through.
Yes, this fantastic Good Charlotte song is in my head after all these years because it’s all I can think of in the wake of this week’s Blue Origin trip/blip (11 minutes). It still hits just as hard 23 years after it came out. To quote the brothers Madden, I’d much rather see a group of affluent, privileged people ‘spend a day or two, walking in someone else’s shoes’ rather than experiencing zero gravity. I think they’d stumble and they’d fall…
Cathartic Read: Relatedly, I really enjoyed reading
’s take on this whole situation. This bit is lingering with me: “the only reason this trip was “historic” was because it was a group of women who launched into space which had never been done before, not because they did something that actually contributed to furthering our education about space, or did anything of significance for women altogether. Many of our rights are being stripped away, the executive branch of the government has fully given the F.U. to the judicial branch, and people can barely afford groceries.”
Some Perspective (and the final bit of space news here!): This group of women weren’t the first celebrities to go to space and of course they won’t be the last. William Shatner took a trip with Blue Origin several years back and this was his takeaway:
I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s cosmic parade here, but I have a hard time feeling super positive about space travel and exploring ‘a new frontier’ when the vast resources allocated towards this could help so many people, animals, and flora and fauna literally everywhere on earth.
Communal Joy / News You Can Use: My friend
wrote a beautiful feature for the New York Times on The Brooklyn Stroll Club. It’s endearing, it’s hopeful, it’s humanity in action. I hope more clubs like this spring up everywhere, I hope Dads find and build community together wherever they are.
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The Good Stuff aka Joyful Internet Content:
I think eggplant is my favorite of this bunch (radish a close second), but why does this resonate so hard?
Nothing has ever made me want to play softball until seeing Grambling play:
Me hearing people speak Farsi all over London:
May you be pampered in this specific way:
Gossipping Raising awareness,
Roya