Jeff Maysh, writing at The Daily Beast:

On August 3, 2001, a McDonald’s film crew arrived in the bustling beach town of Westerly, Rhode Island. They carried their cameras and a giant cashier’s check to a row of townhouses, and knocked on the door of Michael Hoover. The 56-year-old bachelor had called a McDonald’s hotline to say he’d won their Monopoly competition. Since 1987, McDonald’s customers had feverishly collected Monopoly game pieces attached to drink cups, french fry packets and advertising inserts in magazines. By completing groups of properties like Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues, players won cash or a Sega Game Gear, while “Instant Win” game pieces scored a free Filet-O-Fish or a Jamaican vacation. But Hoover, a casino pit boss who had recently filed for bankruptcy, claimed he’d won the grand prize–$1 million dollars.

I don’t even know which part of this article to quote, just read the whole thing.

One of the last interviews with Anthony Bourdain has been published. It’s full of wonderful anecdotes and stories:

I do find that my happiest moments on the road are not standing on the balcony of a really nice hotel. That’s a sort of bittersweet — if not melancholy — alienating experience, at best. My happiest moments on the road are always off-camera, generally with my crew, coming back from shooting a scene and finding ourselves in this sort of absurdly beautiful moment, you know, laying on a flatbed on those things that go on the railroad track, with a putt-putt motor, goin’ across like, the rice paddies in Cambodia with headphones on… this is luxury, because I could never have imagined having the freedom or the ability to find myself in such a place, looking at such things.

To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.

Film Crit Hulk, writing at The Verge:

One of the most popular solutions that arose in online culture was, again, the mantra of “don’t feed the trolls.” This meant that any time a troll popped up in an online situation making inflammatory remarks, you were supposed to ignore them because responding would derail the thread and give them the attention they wanted. What no one seems to remember is it never worked, practically on any level. There was always someone who wanted to troll back in the opposite direction, someone who genuinely got offended for a personal and valid reason, or someone who wanted to try to be reasonable. Instead of solving anything, “don’t feed the trolls” became a motto for people who want to act above it all or regale us with stories about how much harder it was to troll back in their day when they had to troll uphill, both ways! But most of all, it became the mantra of how to ignore online abuse completely.

Fantastic piece. Definitely worth the read.