Top of the weekend to you all. This week’s learning: sometimes you have to endure the tedium to experience the joy. Happy reading.
1. The world’s biggest YouTube star
Apparently there is more to YouTube than cat videos and countdowns of the 17 post-grunge songs that should have been massive (but weren’t). Just ask the 400 million people who subscribe to MrBeast, creator of such viral smashes as I Spent 100 Hours Inside the Pyramids! and I Survived the 5 Deadliest Places on Earth.
Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old behind the moniker, is a big deal. Mark O’Connell goes deep on an entertainer who he describes as “monomaniacally committed to a lethally pure conception of algorithmically determined entertainment”.
Star-maker performance: Donaldson’s breakout video was 2017’s I Counted to 100,000!, which, over the course of about 40 hours, did exactly what it said on the tin.
How long will it take to read: Twelve minutes.
2. ‘It was like Raiders of the Lost Ark for kids’
A key to the appeal of The Goonies is perhaps the casting: enduring stars Josh Brolin, Sean Astin, Ke Huy Quan and Martha Plimpton among them, all before they were famous.
Astin and some of his fellow child actors, alongside crew members and Joe Pantoliano – one of the film’s adult villains – share the inside story of what it was like on the set 40 years ago. Steven Spielberg plays a prominent, uncredited role.
Friends for life: The cast members stay in touch via an email chain and still catch up. “We just know one another, and we kind of pick up exactly were we left off,” says Kerri Green, who played Andy. “It’s pretty special.”
How long will it take to read: Five minutes.
Further reading: Speaking of classic children’s films of 1985, Marty McFly’s guitar from Back to the Future is missing.
3. Why Jacinda Ardern called it quits
Jacinda Ardern likes drum’n’bass, has been seen in Portishead T-shirts, and was elected prime minister of New Zealand aged 37. Just six years later, as Jacinda-mania began to sour with some constituents, she dramatically resigned.
In her first major interview since calling it quits, Ardern takes the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner through her Mormon upbringing, her entry to politics, and learning she was pregnant days before becoming PM.
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“I’ve always felt like I had a general sense of where New Zealand is at on something. I relied on it a lot while I was in office. You feel an energy.” – Ardern on what guided her response to the Christchurch mosque massacre.
How long will it take to read: Ten minutes.
Further reading: Ardern asked Queen Elizabeth II for advice on parenting in the public eye – the monarch’s response was succinct and pragmatic.
4. What it means when the insects disappear
Daniel Janzen has been monitoring insects in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste conservation area since 1978. The first “light trap” he set up helped scientists identify an astonishing 3,000 species – these days, far fewer moths flutter towards the glow.
The declining numbers are part of what some call a “new era” of ecological collapse, where rapid extinctions occur in regions that have little direct contact with people. The loss of insect life can set other dominoes falling, and a clear culprit has emerged: global heating.
How long will it take to read: Five minutes.
Further reading: Blatten, the tiny Swiss village engulfed by a mountain – another entry from our age of extinction series.
5. Melissa Febos on surviving The Dry Season
The US professor and author Melissa Febos reckons humans have a “collective derangement” around love and sex, hooked on the early stages of infatuation.
So after a “ravaging vortex” of a relationship and five other “brief entanglements” she went cold turkey for a year. The Dry Season, her new memoir, details how her life subsequently flourished.
Happy ending: Having redefined love as “contingent upon a very conscious choice to support the flourishing of another person”, Febos met her now wife.
How long will it take to read: Five minutes.
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