Working on Play
A quick dispatch this week! With recs for: a new scientific breakthrough, a surprise from Outkast's Big Boi, and a makeup mogul who gave it all away.
I spent this week hosting an event all about the importance and power of play. It was organized by LEGO and TED, two organizations that love capital letters, imagination, and big ideas.
At one point, I was in the greenroom with a world famous shoe designer, an accordion musician, a 9th grader who developed a new form of origami that can be used to create lightweight shelters in natural disasters, and a Harlem Globetrotter. If you’d told me that instead of this being a real work event, I’d actually suffered a major head injury and was hallucinating, that would have made significantly more sense.
You can check out a little bit about the event here, but my understanding is that the videos will be coming out over the next month or so and I’ll link to them when I can because I think they’re going to turn out great.
The flipside of an exciting work trip is that I took a redeye back home and my brain is currently made of oatmeal. As a result, this week’s newsletter is mostly just a list of recommendations. Here you go!
My upcoming events and other projects:
MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere
NEW PODCAST EPISODE: This week on the podcast, Simone Stolzoff on how to handle uncertainty! You can listen (or watch) wherever you get podcasts.
This week’s list
GREAT:
Despite a huge and concerted effort to undermine science, despite massive funding cuts, researchers are soldiering on and making some incredible advances. "Pancreatic cancer is one of the most dire diagnoses in medicine. There are few available treatments, and they do little to help. For decades, experimental drugs flopped in trials. Many researchers believed the biological obstacles could not be surmounted. In what seems the blink of an eye, all that has changed. A drug nearing regulatory approval, daraxonrasib, is the first to substantially extend the lives of patients with pancreatic cancer.” The story of how it was developed and what it might mean for patients is breathtaking.
FUNNY:
Nothing made me laugh more this week than this clip from Kid Cudi’s podcast where he’s interviewing the rapper Big Boi (of Outkast fame) and asks him what’s the nerdiest thing people might not know about him. The answer is so surprising and so funny but also extremely charming. Big Boi Nerds Out
INTERESTING:
It’s rare to hear about someone who is wealthy and famous and chooses to give that life up for something more meaningful. Which is why I think people have been so interested in the news that Scott Borba, founder of e.l.f. Cosmetics gave up his wealth and is about to be ordained as a Catholic priest. It reminds me of a joke that I’m pretty sure I heard Judd Apatow tell: Everyone knows that being rich and famous doesn’t make you happy, but everyone wants to find that out for themselves.
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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.
Have a fun weekend!
Chris Duffy
This has been Bright Spots, a newsletter.
…wait, who are you?
I’m Chris Duffy. I’m a comedian, I host TED’s How to Be a Better Human podcast, and I’m both a former fifth grade teacher and a former fifth grade student. I wrote a book called Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy that’s out now from Doubleday.