Friday Inspiration 540

Sisyphus says he’s 95% done, a beekeeper who’s allergic to bees, when pizza was a new thing

My favorite part about this beekeeper who works in NYC (!) and is allergic to bees (!) was actually the quote (which might only make sense if you watch the 3-ish minutes leading up to it: “These are our little boxes. Do what you can to make it a nice box.” (video)

I don’t know if I have the words to describe how powerful Come See Me in the Good Light was for me, but I thought it was a masterpiece of documentary film work, and Andrea Gibson was a truly unique person who lived an amazing life, even as they were dying of cancer. (If you read my piece “We Go To The Dump” yesterday, you might have already watched this trailer—or, I guess, if you paid attention to the 2026 Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary Feature)

This is a pretty fascinating article about why phrases like “Satanic panic” and “brain drain” catch on and take root in our language so well—which is, duh, because they rhyme. It made me think of the term “wifi,” and how we’ve all just accepted it as an abbreviation for “wireless internet,” even though it clearly is a play on the word “hifi,” which means high fidelity, which is a sound thing, not an internet connectivity thing. (via Kottke)

This McSweeney’s piece of course started as satire about a political thing, but I think it’s such a brilliant idea that is hilarious even if you don’t know anything about the news item that inspired it: I, Sisyphus, Am Ninety-Five Percent Of The Way There

This is a fun piece by my friend Blake, who is doing a bike-powered book tour with his new book, Dirtbag Rich (which I have mentioned here before since I drew a couple illustrations for it). He titled it “15 Moments of Zen in Southern Utah,” and I think it’s an interesting approach to a trip report.

Here’s a helpful reminder/encouragement to go ahead and have that third coffee of the day that you’ve been thinking about.

The Atlantic periodically highlights stories from its archives, and this one is from the October 1949 issue (I’m not sure if the original title was actually just “Pizza”?). I thought was a really interesting read because it’s hard to imagine a time in which a journalist pitched a story to an editor at the Atlantic that was basically, “There’s this new food called ‘pizza,’ and I think it’s newsworthy.” My favorite part was probably this: “Regardless of what you may read, you cannot make pizza at home. Not unless you have a brick oven, two wooden shovels, and the knack of making a hard dough and twirling it out to twice its size. You may be able to make a concoction of tomatoes and cheese, but not real pizza.” [GIFT LINK]

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