| | | | Dear 01101110,
The internet is a delightful, awful, absurd, frightening, meaningless, illuminating place. As a show, we've come around to the fact that once-esoteric websites, subcultures, influencers, think-fluencers and deep-fried-meme-powered micro-vloggers are shaping mainstream conversations –– sometimes as much as pundits and politicians. This past week, our Little Media Show That Could dove into the enormous and enormously fraught PewDiePie vs T-Series YouTube subscriber war (more on that after the jump).
As we sifted through the PewDiePie archives for sound, we producers were reminded of some of our all time favorite YouTube vids. Here are a handful:
s m o k e these m e a t s | | Everyman Mark Zuckerberg made a big juicy mistake when he decided to show off Facebook Live in October 2016 and share a behind-the-scenes look at his meat smoking rigs. Fun fact: nowadays, before smoking the meats, Zuck slaughters the animals himself. With a laser gun. For dinner guests like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Who are these people?!?!
The Best Whistler EVER!!! | | This is Ralph Giese, known to some as Mullet Whistler, throat whistling his inventive cover of "Georgia on My Mind" on the WXYZ morning talk show Kelly & Company in 1984. After some group digging, we found that Geise is still whistling and even records personalized birthday videos for a nominal fee. Brooke's big day is coming up...just sayin'.
Beyonce fan singing Halo | | Oof. Don't skip this one. That guitar solo at around 1:24 shreds. This video served as inspiration for a lovely American Masters documentary called The Godmother of Rock & Roll: Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Denver Official Guilty Dog Video | | We weren't sure about sharing this one, for fear of teaching our dog newsletter readers that it's okay to break into the kitty cat treats. It's not! Following the viral success of this video, Denver was invited onto Good Morning America several times. According to Denver's Facebook page, she passed away last February.
Denver, this newsletter is dedicated to you.
Onward. | | [ In Case You Missed It ] | |  | | There is a war over YouTube's subscriber count rankings and, not surprisingly, the war has turned ugly. PewDiePie — YouTube's most subscribed video maker, who has earned a reputation for cracking anti-Semitic jokes, using racial slurs and endorsing a white supremacist on his platform — could soon lose the top spot to T-Series, a company that dominates the Indian film and music industries. Brooke spoke with tech writer Clay Shirky, Indian YouTuber CarryMinati, PewDiePie fan Sarah Moore, and a middle school Youtube fan to understand this global culture war for Youtube supremacy. Dive in here. | |  | Does Journalism Have A Future? We tend to cringe when a headline asks as big a question as this one does. But when JILL LEPORE wrote the piece? We click on it real fast and brace ourselves for new knowledge. In this particular instance, Lepore explores the long history of how the press got here and the many moments when it could have worked out differently (two recently published books provide the opportunity for this dissection). The piece is full of extraordinary detail — "In 1960, nine out of every ten articles in the Times about the Presidential election were descriptive; by 1976, more than half were interpretative"— and the big punch to the gut comes in the last paragraph so stick around to the end. Read it here. | |  | | Remember that time when a bunch of millennials who thought they were going to attend the party of a lifetime got stuck on an island with sad sandwiches? Well, it turns out there was much more to that story than met our Twitter feeds. It was a masterclass in deception and the lengths people will go to project an aspirational image. The story is so wild that two filmmakers released competing Fyre Festival documentaries within days of each other. We've only watched the Netflix one so far, but we've heard they're both worth checking out. The Ringer has a great write-up about the war between the docs. Watch here. | |  | | When he was still in his twenties, Martin Luther King Jr. was, among other things, an advice columnist for Ebony magazine. Writer Mychal Denzel Smith studied those columns for an article this week in The Atlantic, and he found that readers asked the civil rights leader about everything from race relations to marriage problems. In some instances Dr. King was surprisingly unorthodox — the preacher's thoughts on birth control are particularly eloquent — and in others, his advice was less than sage. When one reader complained about her philandering husband, he told her to self-reflect: "Are you careful with your grooming? Do you nag? Do you make him feel important?" When another described her husband as a "complete tyrant," self-reflection on the part of the woman was, again, the answer. Denzel Smith joined Brooke last April to discuss Dr. King's mid-century masculinity, how it is still wielded as a cudgel against young black Americans, and why he thinks Americans — black and white — are due for a vacation from MLK-mania. Listen here. | | | If you're feeling whiplash from this week's walk-backs, you're not alone. | | | Thanks for listening, and for reading. We love feedback, so please contact us with any questions or comments. We're busy, but we read them all, promise. | | | | | | |
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