The Self-Proclaimed Genius of Lil Dicky

Lacey Rose’s piece on the rapper Dave Burd (Lil Dicky) manages to exude the same tone as Burd’s comedy series, Dave. It’s funny and fast. Burd’s blinding confidence is made evident from the first sentence, and although at times Rose at times seems bemused by this larger-than-life character, she still creates a very entertaining profile.

Jeff Schaffer, who’d written on Seinfeld, already had his hands full showrunning Curb Your Enthusiasm when a friend asked that he take a meeting with Lil Dicky. He didn’t really have the bandwidth for a second TV show, but he was intrigued enough to say yes. Even in early 2017, Schaffer knew exactly who Lil Dicky was. “Back then, the internet was, like, 70 percent porn, 10 percent clickbait and 20 percent Lil Dicky videos,” he jokes, recounting how, at that first meeting, Burd told him he was going to be the biggest entertainer in the history of entertainment. “And I’m looking at this guy, and he looks like a piece of broccoli had a bar mitzvah, and I’m like, ‘This is hilarious, it’s like cartoon-level delusion.’ And then I start thinking, like, ‘What a great engine for a TV show, because what if he’s right?’ ”

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How One Mother’s Love for Her Gay Son Started a Revolution

Kathryn Schulz profiles Jeanne Manford, who founded Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) fifty years ago this spring. For many, openly supporting LGBTQ2S+ folks was considered a radical act in the 1970s, so much so, that only a handful of people attended PFLAG’s first meeting. Fast forward to today, and PFLAG boasts 400 chapters worldwide with more than a quarter million members, all because a mother did what mothers do: She simply loved her son.

That growth reflects a cultural change of extraordinary speed and magnitude—a transformation, incomplete but nonetheless astonishing, in the legal, political, and social status of L.G.B.T.Q. people in America. Paradoxically, one consequence of that transformation is that the moral courage of Jeanne Manford, so evident to everyone lining Sixth Avenue that day, has become hard to fully appreciate. Parents in general, and mothers in particular, have long been a potent political force, from the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina to Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Moms Demand Action. In such cases, the power of parents derives from loving their children and trying to protect them, among the most fundamental and respected of human instincts. What made Jeanne Manford different—and what made her actions so consequential—is that, until she started insisting otherwise, the kind of child she had was widely regarded as the kind that not even a mother could love.

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One of America’s Favorite Handguns Is Allegedly Firing On Its Owners

SIG Sauer denies there’s a problem, yet strangely their P320 pistols have fired unexpectedly — without pulling the trigger — injuring 80 people to date. In this deeply reported feature, The Trace and The Washington Post have learned that the guns have gone off with routine movements such as holstering the weapon. Unintentional discharge is horrific, but what’s even scarier is that no U.S. government agency has the power to investigate gun defects or impose a mandatory recall, leaving gun manufacturers to police themselves.

Navy veteran and former gunner’s mate Dionicio Delgado said his P320 fired a bullet through his thigh and into his calf after he holstered it during a training session at a gun range in Ruther Glen, Virginia. Michael Parker, a welder, said his holstered P320 fired a bullet into his thigh as he removed the holster from his pocket while in his car in St. Petersburg, Florida. Police officer Brittany Hilton said her holstered P320 fired while inside her purse as she walked to her car in Bridge City, Texas. The bullet entered her groin and exited her back just inches from the base of her spine.

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Three Years Later, Covid-19 Is Still a Health Threat. Journalism Needs to Reflect That

For Nieman Reports, Kendra Pierre-Louis reports on the failures of the media to accurately report on COVID-19 — and the dangerous narratives pushed over the past three years that have downplayed its risks to the public. Pierre-Louis suggests ways that colleagues in journalism can and should improve coverage, including conveying nuance, being mindful of unconscious bias, and including perspectives of people in disabled, elderly, low-income, marginalized, and other at-risk communities.

In the process, we’ve failed at our field’s core tenets — to hold power to account and to follow the evidence. Our failures here could last a generation. As reporters, it’s our responsibility to accurately represent the needs of diverse perspectives and avoid an ableist bias that diminishes the real and lasting health concerns not only of those who are keenly at risk but those who are cautious about repeatedly catching a virus that scientists are still grappling to understand.           

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Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul

Describing the impact that Dril has made on Twitter — and by extension, on digital culture at large — is difficult to do without simply reading off a selection of his utterly unhinged mini-missives. Thankfully, Nate Rogers resists the trap (at least to a degree), and instead turns in a compelling, well-reported profile of the man behind the blurry Jack Nicholson avatar. With a last name and everything!

To most people, he is nothing; show the unaffiliated some of his posts, and they will likely just generate confusion and possibly anguish. (“Uh, so, I think I’ll stick with gardening. Where bull poop helps good things grow, and the tweets come from birds, not nitwits,” read one of many upset people in the comment section of a recent Washington Post feature about Dril, inadvertently adopting their own Dril-esque cadence in the process.) But to a large sect of the Very Online, he is king—the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting, the architect of a satire so effective that it has become impossible to tell when Dril stopped mocking the way people speak online and when we, instead, started speaking like Dril online.

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How Bookshop.org Survives—and Thrives—in Amazon’s World

Untold businesses shuttered during the pandemic. A very few managed to thrive — generally those who satisfied stay-at-home demands. But while you may know about Peloton and Zoom, you can add to that list one Bookshop.org, which launched in January 2020 with the aim of helping indie booksellers become ecommerce contenders. Helping stir-crazy readers and offering a local alternative to certain omniretail monoliths? This profile of the company and its founder manages to feel like that elusive species known as a “feel-good business story.”

Every six months, Bookshop dumped 10 percent of its sales, in equal shares, into the accounts of bookstores that had opted into its earnings pool. Some store owners were caught by surprise when they checked their accounts. VaLinda Miller, who runs Turning Page Bookshop in the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina, was facing a crisis when a broken air conditioner caused a gnarly mold outbreak in her shop. She realized she would have to move but couldn’t afford to give a new landlord several months’ rent, replace damaged merchandise, and pay movers all at once. When she finally remembered to check her Bookshop account, she was astonished to see that Turning Page had more than $19,000—enough to cover the move. “It hit during the perfect time,” she says. “It’s been a blessing.”

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How Does a Magician Trick Other Magicians? We Went to Find Out

From the late Ricky Jay to the not-so-great Gob Bluth, it’s impossible not to love the characters who populate the world of magic — though this dispatch from the triennial World Championship of Magic might test your limits. The only place on Earth where the answer to “trick or treat?” is always “both.”

Winning FISM requires more than merely fooling other magicians: It demands a new technique, a compelling story, a hilarious twist. And so some performers wove narratives at times surreal and poetic. One Japanese magician romanced an empty shirt that somehow wrapped her in its arms. A 15-year-old German student who goes by the name Magic Maxl dueled with a soft-boiled egg that seemed to come alive while he pretended to get ready for school. Others opted for simple, self-deprecating humor. “I spent two thousand dollars to be here,” one French competitor deadpanned, munching fistfuls of potato chips while pulling the four queens from a messy pile of facedown cards with inexplicable ease.

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