Brendan Leonard

Please watch these bears beating the shit out of trash cans and coolers as part of their product testing work at the Bear and Wolf Discovery Center in Montana. Even if you’re not into NBA basketball, this is a fascinating story about success, money, celebrity, losing it all, and finding peace. So we asked critics, musicians, and industry professionals to predict which tracks from the past 25 years we’ll still be dancing and singing along to for the next 100 years. If you’ve always wanted to profess your love for yellow mustard but weren’t sure how, Aaron Draplin has designed a hat for you.

The concept was pretty simple, and potentially disgusting: Run a marathon, 26.2 miles, around New York City, and eat five slices of pizza—one slice approximately every five miles. And then ran across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Tribeca, where we grabbed our first slice at Dona Bella Pizza at Mile 4.0, ate it on the sidewalk outside, and then ran west to the Hudson River Greenway, a great place to avoid rush hour traffic for several miles. At mile 26.7 (on Forest’s Strava; mine said 25.3), after 5 hours and 51 minutes (including sitting down to eat all the slices), we trudged into Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop in Greenpoint, the only other must-eat-spot on our itinerary, and I performed the chewing equivalent of running a 45-minute mile. According to estimates of the calorie content of a typical plain New York slice (482 calories), I probably ate 2,500 calories, not including the fried eggplant on my Traviata slice.

A much more accurate depiction of an algorithm is that it’s an opinion embedded in math. ’s Reaction, the story of Craig DeMartino’s 100-foot ground fall in a climbing accident and recovery, is now on Amazon Prime. If you haven’t seen this around the internets already, meet Justin Gallegos, the first professional runner with cerebral palsy. That is part of the reason why I am dedicating all 650 words of this essay to convincing your school that you should take a chance on me.

THAT ONE DAY ALEX HONNOLD WILL DIE FREE SOLOING AND SOMEONE BESIDES ALEX HONNOLD WILL HAVE TO PAY FOR THE CLEANUP, ‘COURAGEOUS’ TO ALEX HONNOLD’S FREE SOLO OF EL CAPITAN, COURAGEOUS BEING DEFINED IN THE MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY AS ‘MENTAL OR MORAL STRENGTH TO VENTURE, PERSEVERE, AND WITHSTAND DANGER, FEAR OR DIFFICULTY’ THAT WE WILL NOW SEE AN INCREASE IN FREE SOLOING BY OTHER ‘IDIOTS,’ WHO WILL NO DOUBT FOOLISHLY KILL THEMSELVES BY IGNORANTLY SAUNTERING UP TO THE MOST FAMOUS BIG WALL IN THE WORLD WITHOUT A ROPE, GETTING IN A BIT OVER THEIR HEADS, AND FALLING OFF ” —Rod123 THAT ALEX HONNOLD WILL EVENTUALLY DIE, UNLIKE THE REST OF US WHO DO NOT FREE SOLO GIANT ROCK