First, an update for those of you who have been anxiously awaiting this news: I have a new recycling bin AND it was emptied into a truck without being either destroyed/kidnapped. WE’RE BACK, BABY!!

Now, onto this week’s email:

Way back in January, one of the goals I set for myself this year was to build a desk. I have my office in a little converted closet and the space is tight and kind of unusual, so none of the tables or desks that I have found premade work quite right.

I’m currently using a very tiny desk, which fits, but has so little space that I can’t have both my laptop and a drink on the desk at the same time. I have to choose one. I’m confident that there’s a better solution. I’m less confident that I am the one to make that solution a reality.

However, like a lot of things in life, there’s no one else coming to step in and solve the problem. I keep waiting, but no carpenters wander by our house offering their services for free. You’d think at least it would happen at least ONCE, but so far it has happened ZERO times.

With the guidance of my very handy father-in-law walking me through the process over the phone and my wife double-checking my measurements, I was able to draw an extremely technical schematic.

That’s as much progress as I’ve made in 9 months.

But then my new friend, a very talented builder, had an idea for a party where people could come over to her garage/workshop with any unfinished projects and she’d help figure it out and let us use her tools. I no longer had an excuse! The only question is: would I also have all my fingers?

As of the writing of this email, the answer is yes. My friend showed me how to use her table saw and then watched me practice and then said, “You know what? Let me make the cut and you help catch the board.” That was definitely the right decision. I continued to have all my digits and I learned a lot.

After 9 months on the post-it stage, and 2 hours of a workshop party, now I’m here:

Now I just have to paint it and mount it to the wall. So I’ll probably be done in about 2046.

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My upcoming events and other projects:

ASPEN, CO: Thursday, September 24th at 7:30 p.m. at the Wheeler Opera House. This is going to be a comedy show and Q&A with two of my funniest friends (who also happen to be Emmy-nominated writers for Colbert). Join me, Carley Moseley, and Asher Perlman as we perform comedy, talk about our books, and answer audience questions. Laugh More Everyday at the Wheeler Opera House

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

MY PODCAST: I’d never heard of a “quiet park,” a nature reserve dedicated to preserving places where you can’t hear any noises made by humans, only nature. But it’s a very interesting idea and after talking to sound recordist and environmentalist Matthew Mikkelson, I’m convinced. This was a very cool episode especially because Matthew brought so many amazing sounds for us to listen to. The last places without human sounds (w/ Matt Mikkelsen) | How to Be a Better Human

This week’s list

GREAT:

This short documentary about kids who skateboard in NYC is very fun. “Skateboarding in New York City has been pretty slow the last couple of years. Sure, there are a lot of new, talented transplants making their mark, but where’s the next generation of born and bred NYC skaters? Meet Ari & Luca.” Meet The Next Generation of New York City Skateboarding

FUNNY:

I love when a comedian figures out a new way to make videos that simultaneously highlights how ridiculous something is. Graham Dot Zip takes AI job interviewers and puts them into absurd situations. It’s so funny and feels like the best possible case for humans over machines. This one really made me laugh. Don’t Try This In Your AI Interview

INTERESTING:

I loved this poem by Elise Powers even if I don’t really enjoy peeling garlic and…gasp… I sometimes use the jarred pre-minced stuff. Still a great poem! “Anthony Bourdain once said if you’re too lazy to peel garlic, you don’t deserve to eat it.” Small Inconveniences by Elise Powers

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

Subscribe now

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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Always wearing goggles and closed toed shoes,

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.

Up until the recycling truck arrived, it had been a regular Tuesday. Just like every Tuesday, the bins were out in our neighborhood and the trucks drove by, lifting them up, dumping the contents, and then placing them back on the street.

The garbage got collected.

The yard waste and compost got collected.

All that was left was the blue bin’s turn.

I was coming back from the grocery store when I saw the recycling truck rumbling down our block. I went inside to put everything away, figuring I would come back outside afterwards and wheel the empty bin back into our driveway.

There was just one problem. When I came back outside, there was no blue bin. It had vanished without a trace.

I looked in our neighbor’s driveways to see if maybe someone had taken it by mistake. I wondered if some nefarious character might have stolen the bin, but why? Then, I realized the sad truth: the recycling bin had been recycled.

There’s something impressive about an entire blue bin being thrown into the back of a recycling truck by its large mechanical arm. I mean, let’s be honest, that’s some great recycling! You were a giant plastic bin meant to hold other smaller plastic containers and recyclables. But you flew all the way into the sun and got yourself recycled as well. You broke out of the endless cycle of suffering and transcended onto another plane of existence.

On the other hand: I need a recycling bin. And also, the recycling truck eating the recycling bin feels vaguely repulsive and cannibalistic. I do not approve. Exodus 23:19 “Thou shalt not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” This is basically that but with plastic and the sanitation department instead of goats.

I called 311 and requested a new bin. There was no drop-down category for “my container was entirely consumed into the maw of your machine” so I had to settle for “damage to the body of the container.” I think there are some interesting metaphysical questions to be debated about whether a body is “damaged” by disappearing entirely, but the LA 311 app did not allow me the space to ponder them. Can a thing be damaged if if no longer exists at all? Is the lack of existence itself a form of damage? I’m sure someone in grad school has the answer.

I spent the next several bin-less days creeping around the neighborhood after dark, surreptitiously placing my recycling into neighbor’s bins.

Finally, a week after the crime, a shiny, pristine new bin was dropped off at the curb. I went out to shake the hand of the sanitation worker who was dropping it off. Angelo was extremely polite and repeatedly addressed me as “sir” but would not accept a cold seltzer or any snacks. “I’m just doing my job, sir,” he told me.

I told him the story about how the truck had taken the entire bin and said that I’d never seen that happen before.

Angelo looked at me very seriously and said, “Sir, it happens a lot more than you’d expect.”

He then told me that a significant portion of his day was replacing bins that had been recycled. “Enjoy your new bin, sir.”

The circle of life continues. This Tuesday morning, our new bin will be lifted into the sky by the recycling truck for the very first time. I can only pray that it will return to Earth afterwards.

My upcoming events and other projects:

SAN DIEGO BOOK FESTIVAL: TODAY! Saturday, August 22nd from 12:30 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. Pacific Time at the University of San Diego. I’ll be doing a book talk, signing, and Q&A as part of the fest sponsored by KPBS! Free and open to the public. RSVP here.

ASPEN, CO: Thursday, September 24th at 7:30 p.m. at the Wheeler Opera House. The night before the Aspen Literary Festival begins, I’m going to be doing a comedy show with two of my funniest friends (who also happen to be Emmy-nominated writers for Colbert). Join me, Carley Moseley, and Asher Perlman as we perform comedy, talk about our books, and answer audience questions. It’s going to be a very fun night. Laugh More Everyday at the Wheeler Opera House

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

MY PODCAST: What happens when two behavioral scientists team up to try and combat climate change? Well, the first thing they do is realize that most of the messaging we hear about taking care of the planet ignores the science about how to actually change people’s behaviors. Instead, they decided to write a book about how working on the most pressing issue facing humanity might also be an opportunity to have fun. It’s counterintuitive and surprising but they’re very compelling! You can listen to my conversation with them here: How increasing your happiness can help solve climate change (w/ Jiaying Zhao and Elizabeth Dunn) | How to Be a Better Human

This week’s list

GREAT:

Eric Barker’s long running newsletter Barking Up the Wrong Tree is one of the best regular summaries of nonfiction books and scientific research. He’s uniquely talented at boiling down complex data into its most relevant and applicable points. This recent edition was about the French academic René Girard and how to understand ourselves. It’s a short piece, but I think it’s pretty profound. This Is How To Get What You Really Want

FUNNY:

Tanael Joachim, better known as TJ, is a very funny comedian. I always enjoy watching him perform. He’s got a natural charm and ease onstage, but he’s also a fantastic joke writer. I had somehow missed his special coming out, but my friend Jason helpfully sent it my way and I’ve been laughing ever since. TJ: Alien of Ordinary Ability

INTERESTING:

This New Yorker article by Evan Osnos about China’s drive to innovate is a fascinating look at that future. It’s also a look at the present competition between the U.S. and China and the internal forces shaping both countries. The question of what the future looks like and how global powers respond to it is very open right now and I haven’t read any better big picture looks at the situation. The Future, Made in China (I believe you should be able to read this even if you’re not a subscriber, but if not, you can always try using archive.is )

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

Subscribe now

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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Enjoy your new bin, sir,

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.

Some Thoughts I Had While Flying Cross-Country with 2 Kids Under 3 Years Old (in Haiku Form)

1. It’s incredible

   that people ever do this

   at all, even once

2. More tarmac delays?

   You must be trying to kill

   my entire spirit

3. This is not easy

   But we’re doing much better

   than those other kids

4. I spoke too soon, we

   are all in a plane of screams.

   Please help us, Bluey

5. We’re so close and yet

   the final sixty minutes

   last for centuries

6. Oh god, I forgot

   now we have to all drive home

   It’s another hour

7. Several days pass

   I forget the screams and tears

   Let’s do it again?

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My upcoming events and other projects:

VIRTUAL EVENT: Thursday, August 20th at 12:30 p.m. Pacific Time. Finding the Funny in Hard Times. I’ll be doing a live conversation with the Greater Good Science Center (UC Berkeley). It’s free and open to the public (1000+ signed up to attend already!), but you need to RSVP if you want to join them.

SAN DIEGO BOOK FESTIVAL: Saturday, August 22nd from 12:30 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. Pacific Time at the University of San Diego. I’ll be doing a book talk, signing, and Q&A as part of the fest sponsored by KPBS! Free and open to the public. RSVP here.

ASPEN, CO: Thursday, September 24th at 7:30 p.m. at the Wheeler Opera House. The night before the Aspen Literary Festival begins, I’m going to be doing a comedy show with two of my funniest friends (who also happen to be Emmy-nominated writers for Colbert). Join me, Carley Moseley, and Asher Perlman as we perform comedy, talk about our books, and answer audience questions. It’s going to be a very fun night. Laugh More Everyday at the Wheeler Opera House

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

MY PODCAST: Robert Moor’s book In Trees is one of the most beautiful nonfiction books I’ve ever read. It’s the product of more than a decade of research and reporting and it has completely changed how I think about the natural world. I was so glad Robert came on the podcast and talked about what we can learn from trees. You’re not going to hear a conversation like this from anyone other than him. Highly recommend giving this episode a listen! What trees can teach us about life (w/ Robert Moor) | How to Be a Better Human

This week’s list

GREAT:

Sarah Kay published a new poem in The Adroit Journal and it’s a beautiful one. Reading her poetry always reminds me how good poetry can be and how a good poem can floor you with its words and imagery. “Two Boys on the Subway” by Sarah Kay

Related: Not new, but a classic that feels thematically linked: Danusha Laméris’ “Small Kindnesses”

FUNNY:

I’ve never crossed paths with Elijah Nevels doing standup, but I could not relate more to this hilarious video he posted of a show he did where there was only one single person in the audience. We have all been there before. What’s different though is that Elijah has a great sense of humor about the situation and he ends up turning an empty show into one of the funniest stand up clips I’ve seen online. Elijah Nevels: The show must go on

INTERESTING:

Two people who I’ve worked with on live events, Nawar Nemeh and Kelly Rafferty, wrote essays about the (separate) shows we collaborated on. Both essays were so thoughtful! I felt like they really captured the spirit of the events and made me think about them in a new way.

Here’s Kelly on our upcoming virtual show: “I spent a summer at Second City and all I got was this will to live.”

And here’s Nawar on why we’ve spent years putting together scientists and comedians for a panel show: Wrong Answers Only: A Night of Comedy in Washington D.C.

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

Subscribe now

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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Hiding inside an airplane bathroom,

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.

When I think of Connecticut, several things immediately come to mind:

1. Wealthy, white people

2. Tick-based diseases

3. Clams on pizza

This past weekend, however, I gained a new lasting mental image of The Constitution State. An image of a large black bear, hungry for scraps.

We had joined a bunch of friends for a weekend by a lake in Northwestern Connecticut. There were seven families, all with young children, and we had an idyllic day splashing around with all the kids in the water. That evening, we ordered a bunch of pizzas for dinner and picnicked by the lake. The sun was starting to go down and we talked about the possibility of making s’mores. It was the kind of perfect evening that could only be disrupted by an apex predator.

We were all facing the lake and looking out at the sunset when my friend Richie looked behind us. His face dropped. Trying to keep his voice calm to not disturb the kids, Richie said, “Umm, guys? Turn around.”

Lumbering towards the picnic tables full of pizza was a large black bear.

I sprang into action.

Contrary to everything that you would expect to be true about me, I’ve actually had a fair amount of experience dealing with black bears. I grew up in a NYC apartment, but my dad loves nature and backpacking so we spent a lot of time camping as kids. I learned about keeping all food far away from your tent, tied up, and hung high off the ground in a tree. I learned that most bears, especially black bears, are just looking for some easy trash to scavenge (relatable!) and that if you start making noise and yelling at them, they’ll go away.

Living in Los Angeles, I’ve had many opportunities to practice this same technique on coyotes. Clap loudly and yell something like “NO THANK YOU, COYOTE!” and they scamper the other direction. Incredibly, this is also all it takes to get rid of most black bears.

Once, towards the end of my senior year of high school, a group of friends and I went camping unsupervised in the Delaware Water Gap. You won’t be surprised to learn that my role in our friend group was sometimes referred to as “the soccer mom,” since I packed snacks and cared a lot about following the rules. While we were camping one night, everyone else took mushrooms and tripped while I cooked Ricearoni. Midway through dinner, I was serving plates of food to my hallucinating peers, when a black bear wandered into the campsite. It immediately started devouring the packages of hotdogs that we had left scattered on the table. One of my greatest personal accomplishments is successfully convincing my friends, mid-mushroom trip, that they should NOT attempt to battle the bear with a machete and instead let me get a park ranger.

Anyway, all of that is to say that by the time this Connecticut pizza bear showed up, I was a literal parent, surrounded by other parents, and we all made noise and said “NO! GO AWAY BEAR!” in our sternest parent voices. The bear begrudgingly obeyed, without stealing even a single slice of pizza. He kept looking over his shoulder as he walked away, like “Really? C’mon!”

To be fair, after he left, I did notice a very prominent sign that said “There is a bear in this area. Do not leave any trash or food out.” It was his beautiful lake, not ours. But I can only imagine how disappointed he would have been to discover that we didn’t have a solitary clam on any of our pizzas. We also didn’t have a single machete between us. I won’t let that mistake happen again.

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My upcoming events and other projects:

VIRTUAL EVENT: Thursday, August 20th at 12:30 p.m. Pacific Time. Finding the Funny in Hard Times. I’ll be doing a live conversation with the Greater Good Science Center (UC Berkeley). It’s free and open to the public (close to 1000 already signed up to attend!), but you need to RSVP if you want to join them.

SAN DIEGO BOOK FESTIVAL: Saturday, August 22nd from 12:30 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. Pacific Time at the University of San Diego. I’ll be doing a book talk, signing, and Q&A as part of the fest sponsored by KPBS! Free and open to the public. RSVP here.

ASPEN, CO: Thursday, September 24th at 7:30 p.m. at the Wheeler Opera House. The night before the Aspen Literary Festival begins, I’m going to be doing a comedy show with two of my funniest friends (who also happen to be Emmy-nominated writers for Colbert). Join me, Carley Moseley, and Asher Perlman as we perform comedy, talk about our books, and answer audience questions. It’s going to be a very fun night. Laugh More Everyday at the Wheeler Opera House

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

MY PODCAST: Perrin Ireland is an incredibly talented visual artist, an excellent writer, an environmentalist, and a person with an always surprising sense of humor. She joined me on How to Be a Better Human this week to talk about her new book Poking the Squid and what we can learn about the natural world (and ourselves) by finding out how animals do it. Why should you care about animal sex? (w/ Perrin Ireland)

This week’s list

GREAT:

I love a good party game with friends, especially one that gets everyone laughing and making jokes. My friend Steve Moilanen created a hilarious and delightful game that plays on how you (and your friends) would act as imaginary characters. It’s a great way to spend a night together and guaranteed to generate lots of laughs. Check it out! Altered Egos

FUNNY:

I’ve been watching Nato Green perform political comedy for more than a decade now and I never stop being impressed with the way he’s able to take big (often terrifying) issues and turn them into jokes. Jokes that not only make people laugh but also illustrate a larger point! It’s so, so, so hard to do and Nato does it so well. Nato is one of those comics who other comedians know and respect but he’s only just now putting out his first special. I’m excited for the broader public to get to see him at the top of his game. Nato Green - The Darkest Hour

INTERESTING:

Brendan Leonard wrote a piece about writing. It’s about the value of doing things slowly, painstakingly, and without shortcuts. At a moment when people are bragging about AI writing so quickly and efficiently for them, Brendan has hit the nail on the head about what those AI boosters are missing. Do It 14,000 Times Slower With This One Trick

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

This week’s subscriber bonus is a video of me, barefoot, overly proud of myself, scaring away a bear. In addition to this exclusive video, paying subscribers get access to all posts in the archive and make Bright Spots possible!

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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Lumbering, regretfully, in the opposite direction of a pizza,

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.

As the parent of a 2.5 year old and a nearly 1 year old, I’m very familiar with runny noses. They get them, they give them to us, it’s a never ending cycle. In fact, if we go five consecutive days in our household with no one getting sick, I know we’re due for some sort of illness to strike.

But for the past two months, I’ve had a cough and sinus thing that just will not go away. Eventually, I felt like it might be more than just a parade of daycare colds, so I decided to go to the doctor. The only problem was that I was not at home when I made this decision. I was visiting my friend Jeff on Fire Island. But I noticed there was an urgent care that took my insurance and accepted walk-ins.

I showed up in the morning at 11 a.m. only to learn that the clinic’s hours were designed to maximize beach time for the doctor. I was told by locals that this is how they get doctors to work at this urgent care. You see a couple patients in the morning, go for a swim and have lunch on the beach, come back in the afternoon for a few hours, then go swimming again and have dinner. Pretty good gig! Apparently they offer housing too!

I returned to the urgent care about 10 minutes before the afternoon hours started. I was sitting outside waiting when a man in a swimsuit, tank top, and flip-flops walked up. “You want to be seen?” he asked me in a thick Long Island accent.

Obviously doctors are people too, but there was something about seeing a medical professional in full beach gear that put me in the same mental headspace as when you’re a kid and run into your teacher outside of school. I shouldn’t be seeing this. This is not right.

“Gimme a coupla minutes to change and then I’ll get ya in.” The doctor told me. A few minutes later, as promised, he had transformed into an innocuous doctor and brought me in for my exam. He took my vitals (all good), listened to my lungs (all clear), and told me there was probably nothing to worry about and I should feel better soon. Then the phone rang. He held up a finger to me to say “wait a moment,” and then went and answered the phone.

It’s one single room so I was just sitting on the exam chair while he was on the phone talking to a lady. Once again, it felt like I shouldn’t be seeing or hearing this. “Yeah, sounds like a UTI, but you gotta come in to get checked. If it is, I can write you a prescription… Yes, I have the antibiotics here so you could start the treatment.”

The doctor looked at me and mouthed “sorry.” I felt like saying, “No, I’m sorry! And also isn’t this some sort of HIPAA violation?” but instead I just gave him a thumbs up.

“No, I can’t just give you the drugs!” the doctor said into the phone and rolled his eyes at me. “This is a medical office, you gotta get checked in and in the system and examined and everything. I can’t just hand you medicine randomly!”

He hung up the phone and came back over to me. “Some people! Can you believe that? Why don’t I just put a fucking vendor machine out on the porch?!”

He looked at my chart again. “Ok, you’re good to go. If you keep feeling bad, come back and I’ll give you antibiotics.”

It was a truly unique medical experience for me. I did not start feeling better though, so I saw a completely different doctor in a completely different location and they prescribed me antibiotics and I’m starting to feel better now.

You know what would have been easier though?

A fucking vendor machine on the porch.

My upcoming events and other projects:

VIRTUAL EVENT: Thursday, August 20th at 12:30 p.m. Pacific Time. Finding the Funny in Hard Times. I’ll be doing a live conversation with the Greater Good Science Center (UC Berkeley). It’s free and open to the public (close to 1000 already signed up to attend!), but you need to RSVP if you want to join them.

SAN DIEGO BOOK FESTIVAL: Saturday, August 22nd at UC San Diego. I’ll be doing a book talk, signing, and Q&A as part of the fest sponsored by KPBS! Free and open to the public. More details on their website.

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

MY PODCAST: One of the best experiences of my brief book tour this January was getting to be a part of the Savannah Book Festival. I met so many inspiring authors. One of them, Keith Rushing, agreed to join me on the podcast to talk about his nonfiction book looking at history, ancestry, and how tracing his family line back through enslavement to Africa changed his perspective. I think Keith is one of a kind and I highly recommend his book, Descended, as well as listening to this conversation. How to understand your family history (w/ Keith Rushing)

This week’s list

GREAT:

I was walking in Manhattan this week, heading to get a haircut from a barbershop called Classic Barber 2, while reading Anne Kadet’s always excellent newsletter CAFE ANNE. This week’s edition was an unbelievable story about Chuck Norris, the doorman at the Park Avenue South Hotel who, without any fanfare or publicity, has changed many people’s lives. It’s a story you really have to read yourself. I can’t do it justice in summary. I finished reading Anne’s reporting and was shaking my head in amazement, when I realized I was standing right in front of Chuck’s hotel. And there was Chuck! I walked in and said, “Are you Chuck?” he said, “Yes, are you checking in?” I said, “No! But I just read the story about you! You’re amazing! Keep up the good work!” And then I shook his hand and went to get a haircut while he gave me a big smile and was also clearly surprised and a little confused. A perfect interaction, in my book. Read the story and understand more about why that is: The Nicest Man in New York

FUNNY:

Harris Alterman has been creating ads for fake tech companies and putting them up in the NYC subway. They are so funny. Here’s a selection.

INTERESTING:

Of all the crimes, I think counterfeiting and forgery are the most interesting. There’s something creative and mysterious when people are really good at it. They’re artists, but for evil! I’m not condoning it, but c’mon, that’s interesting! Here’s a story by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee about some of the most realistic fake U.S. currency in circulation and the attempt to find the person making it. The Hunt for the Counterfeiter Trying to Make the Perfect Bill

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

Subscribe now

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

Share

Diving into the ocean at noon like a doctor at the beach,

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.

By the time you read this, I will likely be on a plane flying cross-country with my entire family for the first time since we had a second kid.

Pray for me.

At a certain point, I think we had begun to figure out how to travel with one tiny child. The solution was to treat any trip over two hours as though we were simultaneously permanently moving to this new location AND as though we were transporting a live orca that needed to be fed and watered continuously to survive the journey.

Going away for 2 weeks? Pack everything we own.

Going away for 10 hours? Pack the exact same amount.

The amount of snacks, milk, water bottles, books, and toys we would strap to our bodies was almost incomprehensible. And that was just for traveling with one kid! We outnumbered him 2-to-1!

Now, we’ve got a second and we’re still planning on filling this plane’s entire cargo hold with diapers and changes of clothing. But we aren’t going to be able to maintain the same level of exotic animal transportation that we could previously achieve. I have no idea what the result will be, but our new technique is to essentially treat this airplane like The Purge1: the are no laws in the sky.

Normally, we’re pretty conservative on sweet snacks and screen time. But you better believe that once we reach cruising altitude, you can stare into an iPad for as long as you want if you’re staying quiet and calm. You want to gulp down a snack pouch? Be my guest. Just let us survive this journey. It’s like Oregon Trail, except with toddler meltdowns and infant diaper blowouts instead of fording the river and dysentery. But actually, let’s not be too overconfident on the dysentery front, what with what I’ve been reading about eating lettuce and raspberries.

As the great Dave Barry put it:

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My upcoming events and other projects:

VIRTUAL EVENT: Thursday, August 20th at 12:30 p.m. Pacific Time. Finding the Funny in Hard Times. I’ll be doing a live conversation with the Greater Good Science Center (UC Berkeley). It’s free and open to the public (600+ already signed up to attend), but you need to RSVP if you want to join. More details here

SAN DIEGO BOOK FESTIVAL: Saturday, August 22nd at UC San Diego. I’ll be doing a book talk, signing, and Q&A as part of the fest sponsored by KPBS! Free and open to the public. I’m still not sure the exact timing of my talk, but it will be announced on their website.

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

MY PODCAST: I find it really fascinating when there appears to be a cultural consensus around a solution, but the scientists studying the issue keep trying to get people to look at the actual data. Right now, there’s a huge push to ban social media for kids’ mental health, but the youth mental health experts are not onboard. This week on How to Be a Better Human, I talked with researcher Candice Odgers about what makes kids thrive, what makes them struggle, and how social media bans may dramatically backfire. It’s a thought-provoking one! What the data shows about youth mental health (w/ Candice Odgers)

This week’s list

GREAT:

Jo Firestone is the funniest and most charming person on the planet. That’s a hill I will die on. Her new book, a murder mystery, is out now and it’s spectacular. But even more spectacular is this appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers where she threatens to give birth in the studio, quotes Mary Oliver, and claims to have spent 65 years of her life watching Love Island.

FUNNY:

Marcello Hernandez is on a press tour right now for… honestly, I’m not sure what. Maybe a movie? It doesn’t matter. He is clearly having a great time and he’s so funny. This bit where he roasts Kevin Hart’s instagram photos made me laugh a lot. What absolutely killed me was Marcello’s interview on Hot Ones, specifically the story about him getting his elementary school teacher to write a note home about his behavior.

INTERESTING:

I think I may have recommended this book several years ago, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently with all the conversation around AI. Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human is a story about a side competition during the annual Turing test competition, where humans compete (using only computer chat interfaces) to prove to other humans that they are, in fact, real. It turns out that even a decade ago, it was extremely difficult to convince people you were a person. It’s only gotten harder (and more important) now. In the book, Christian uses AI’s “astonishing achievements as well as their equally fascinating failings to reveal our most human abilities: to learn, to communicate, to intuit and to understand. And in an age when computers may be steering us away from these activities, he shows us how to become the most human humans that we can be.”

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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Boy, are my arms tired!

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.

I have always loved books. One of my earliest memories is asking my mom when I’d learn to read in school. For one of my birthdays (I think fourth grade? maybe third?) the only presents I asked for were reference books. I was probably the most excited a prepubescent boy has ever been to receive a thesaurus.

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that I am now an active member of a book club. In fact, I think it’s the club I’ve been a part of for the longest. While I’ve been in writers group that have come and gone, a parenting dad’s group that fizzled out, the book club has endured for almost a decade at this point.

There are several reasons for this:

1. It’s a very fun book club. All of the members are comedians except for one woman who is a nurse. I can’t really explain how that happened but it’s perfect.

2. Despite the fact that at this point, we’ve got book club members spread out across a number of cities, the fact that we met on Zoom during the pandemic lockdowns meant that we were comfortable continuing with virtual meetings (and we often do a hybrid, where a handful of people are in one place and then everyone else calls in).

3. The book club is low pressure. Many times, very few people have actually finished the book or even started it, but we always get a breakdown of the book from the people that did read and then have plenty to discuss.

4. After each meeting, someone is chosen to write a recap email of the meeting. The emails are so funny and good. So even if you missed the meeting, you get to hear what people thought, what hilarious tangents were taken, and what drama went down with snacks and/or technical mishaps.

5. Comedians, contrary to what you might expect, don’t generally like to read funny books so we end up reading all sorts of stuff. It’s always a surprise what genre the next pick will be (the person picking rotates each time). One of the most notorious picks in book club history was when someone picked a nearly 1000-page instructional manual on meditation written by a monk. “Science Monk” is now shorthand for any book pick that is deemed totally impossible to finish.

One time, we spent the majority of our meeting just trying to understand the floor plan of the house that a book took place in. Everyone present drew a picture illustrating what they thought the layout of the house was and no two people’s were identical. Another time we read a book that seemed like it was going to be a sexy romance novel but then turned into a disturbing murder mystery and we all shared our outrage. Most recently, we joined what seems like every book club in America and read Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke.

Well, technically, I did not read it because my wife Mollie had just read it in her book club and told me she didn’t like it, so I skipped it. But when I told the club that, they immediately started roasting me for having my wife do the labor of reading the book about tradwives and then everyone called me “Caleb,” which I said I was going to take as a compliment and they assured me was not a compliment.1

I think I can say this vaguely enough to not spoil anything: The vast majority of our book club conversation about Yesteryear centered around the sign on the top of the house at the end of the book, which, if you’ve read it or had your wife read it for you, you will know what I’m talking about. It was very funny to hear people’s outrage at the twist and especially that particular detail. We also spent some time talking about other signs that could have been put up.

Then, right as we were about to wrap up the Google Meet, one of our members joined from what appeared to be a beautiful field in front of a barn. But she was on mute and couldn’t figure out how to unmute and we all agreed that was a perfect metaphorical summary of the book. Five stars for the book club discussion, 2.5 stars for the book itself.

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My upcoming events and other projects:

VIRTUAL EVENT: Thursday, August 20th at 12:30 p.m. Pacific Time. Finding the Funny in Hard Times. I’ll be doing a live conversation with the Greater Good Science Center (UC Berkeley). It’s free an open to the public, but you need to RSVP. More than 540 people have signed up already! More details here

SAN DIEGO BOOK FESTIVAL: Saturday, August 22nd at UC San Diego. I’ll be doing a book talk, signing, and Q&A as part of the fest sponsored by KPBS! Free and open to the public. I’m not sure the exact timing of my talk yet, but it will be announced soon on their website.

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

MY PODCAST: This week on How to Be a Better Human, our guest is Stanford professor and communication expert Matt Abrahams. Matt shares what he’s learned about how to respond during an interview, how to give a great speech, and the mistakes that people make that lead to not connecting with an audience. How to think fast and talk smart (w/ Matt Abrahams)

This week’s list

GREAT:

Rich Wells makes “moving art.” I love his collages and writing. Here’s a great behind the scenes look at how he made a recent piece about solo parenting as a dad.

FUNNY:

Kyle Gordon’s musical comedy is so funny. It’s pure silly absurdity. He’s clearly a very talented musician but also a complete goofball. This week, he put out a new music video that is both a parody of Paul Simon and white tourists, “Mr. Jambo.” But you might know him from his Eurodance parody “Planet of the Bass” or “The Irish Drinking Song.”

INTERESTING:

This article by Billy Brennan is one of the most surprising articles about consciousness and the science around how our brains work that I’ve ever read. “As they near death, some dementia patients recover mental faculties assumed to be long lost. Researchers want to know why.” The Strange Phenomenon of ‘Terminal Lucidity’

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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Writing from the present day,

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.

I’m taking a little break this weekend to get away with some old friends. So just the list this week. I’ll be back with a new essay and the full newsletter next Saturday!

My upcoming events and other projects:

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

MY PODCAST: Katina Bajaj is a researcher who studies “creative health.” She looks at what makes people feel happy and fulfilled in their lives and work. I think her research is fascinating and I loved getting to hear the scientific case for play and inspiration. You can listen here: Why you are starved for creativity—and how to fix it (w/ Katina Bajaj)

This week’s list

GREAT:

I’ve been really enjoying the Semi-Rad newsletter recently. This essay about going camping with your family and adjusting to being in a new phase of life resonated with me. “Sometimes I joke that growing up is just building your own prison out of things you love” is a line I will be thinking about for a long time to come. Life Stage: Big Tent

FUNNY:

Lenka Clayton’s “The Distance I Can Be From My Son” is such a funny and beautiful work of art. I wasn’t familiar with her work before coming across this video but now I’m a big fan. Lenka Clayton

INTERESTING:

Ryan Broderick is one of the writers who most astutely captures trends in tech and popular culture. His recent essay about why it’s so hard to be creative and make work you’re proud of that ALSO does well on social media has been getting shared a lot this week. For good reason! He’s captured something I haven’t been able to articulate myself but feel all the time. “If you follow the data you will eventually just make mass appeal nothingness. And if you do that for too long, people will just stop coming back.” Netflix and the value of streaming shovelware

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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Thanks for reading,

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.

In my life before having kids, one of my favorite things to do was to learn other languages. I know it’s a strange hobby and that most people associate language classes with a high school graduation requirement, but I think it’s fascinating to understand how differently ideas can be arranged and conveyed.

I’m thinking about other languages today because the Fourth of July as a celebration is all about the USA. It’s been interesting to have had some outside perspectives on the United States over my life.

When I was living in Suwon, South Korea, just outside Seoul, I took intensive language classes at Kyung Hee University. I was there on a program funded by the U.S. State Department called the Critical Language Scholarship, where the government paid for Americans to learn languages it deemed especially necessary for national security or diplomacy.

My fellow students were already committed to lives as diplomats or in the military. My roommate in the dorms was a future Navy SEAL who did intense workouts multiple times a day and had a six-pack. I was there because I had written something in my application essay about how I wanted to be a journalist and how speaking Korean would help open new stories. I hadn’t published anything outside of my college newspaper and (surprise, surprise) the journalism industry wasn’t exactly flourishing. So who knew how realistic that goal was? (Spoiler alert: not realistic at all.) But I’d gotten the grant and I wasn’t about to turn down an opportunity to live and learn in South Korea.

The word for “America” in Korean (미국 “miguk”) translates literally to “Beautiful Country.” If I wanted to tell someone where I was from, I would literally tell them “I am a beautiful country person.”

But Korea’s relationship with the United States is much more complex than just thinking it’s the hot girl across the ocean. The U.S. involvement in the Korean War, but then also U.S. meddling in domestic politics and support for authoritarian dictators in the South during the Cold War, plus the ongoing large military presence in the center of Seoul (and frequent disrespect and bad behavior by some of those soldiers), led to anger and many resentments as well. The country might be “beautiful” but “Yankee” was a slur, sometimes delivered as “Yankee bastard” (which I believe literally translates to “yankee animal offspring.”)

A few years before that, I had studied abroad in Senegal. I just happened to arrive a few weeks before Barack Obama was inaugurated as president for his first term and people in West Africa were excited. I mean, most Senegalese people I met were extremely friendly and welcoming regardless of where you were from, but they were especially excited to learn that I was a white guy who was NOT French. When they learned that my specific genre of not French was actually American, almost every person I talked to gave me some version of a thumbs up while saying “Obama!”

But if the conversation went on for more than a minute or two, it would almost always turn towards the difficulty of getting a visa to visit (or emigrate) to America and whether I thought Obama might make things easier. He did not. There was the real tension between the symbolic power of his victory and then the question of whether it would change anything practical for them. Several of the people in my neighborhood and fellow students at the university became close friends who I am still in touch with to this day. They always remind me (often explicitly) of the incredible luck I had to be born where I was and to have a passport that allows me to travel just about anywhere in the world without an issue. They also remind me of how incredibly bad I was at dancing when I arrived and how, even after intensive reeducation, I left as only moderately bad.

The other country I’ve spent a significant amount of time in is Greece. I lived in Athens for a year teaching English to middle school students at a fancy private school. I had students named Dionysus and Aphrodite. The students (and my Greek teaching colleagues) made very sure that I knew that while the U.S. might talk a big game about democracy, the Greeks invented it.

Greece was an interesting place to live as an American because so many tourists come there. Locals were always shocked when I told them that I wasn’t just there for a week, but instead living there. When I started learning enough Modern Greek to have a conversation, people got very excited. “What village is your family from?” a taxi driver would ask me. When I explained that my family is not Greek at all, they’d slam on the brakes, turn around to give me a full once over and then say “But you have a Greek head!” Athens was also the only place I’ve ever visited where when people found out I was from New York, they’d instantly reply with “You know Astoria, Queens?” Everybody had a cousin in Astoria.

So what’s my point? I guess it’s that, for me, it’s been an interesting lesson to learn that the U.S. is both an ally and an adversary, a beautiful country and one full of bastards, a place where your cousin can move and start a restaurant and build a life and also a place that deludes itself into thinking it invented freedom and representative government. It’s been all of that and more for the past 250 years.

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My upcoming events and other projects:

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

MY PODCAST: This week on How to Be a Better Human, we talked with Maxwell Pearce, a Harlem Globetrotter and fine artist. Maxwell is definitely the only person I’ve ever met who can dominate at a dunk competition and then also exhibit his work at Art Basel. We talked about how he navigates two very different worlds, what he’s learned about creativity, and why he thinks everyone should experiment with doing things in more unexpected ways. You can listen here: How play is the secret to success at work (w/ Maxwell Pearce)

This week’s list

GREAT:

Alison Leiby is a fantastic comedian and writer who you may have seen opening for Ilana Glazer on tour or in the credits of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, where she wrote. Alison is so talented and an all-around delight. Her new book of essays comes out this Tuesday and I cannot wait to read it. I highly encourage you to get a copy and read it too! I’m a Lot

FUNNY:

Heidi Regan is an Australian standup comedian and writer. I’ve recommended her bits before because she’s so funny and creative. I can never see the twists coming and they always make me laugh. One of her most recent bits really got me: Don’t Make This One Time Travel Mistake

INTERESTING:

A man in Seattle notices a car parked on his street and that a woman appears to be living in it. That’s just the start of this story, which ends up involving the whole neighborhood as they try to wrestle with what to do to help a stranger. It’s very much worth the read. Tangled up in Tangletown

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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Shoutout to everyone named Dionysus who’s getting ready to celebrate today,

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.

A strange part about being alive right now is that every week (every day?) there’s some sort of new catastrophe or disaster going on in the background. Sometimes I’m celebrating a friend’s wedding and trying to be in the moment while getting push notifications about war crimes. Other times, I mindlessly check my phone during lunch and discover that there’s been a horrific natural disaster and then I kind of just keep chewing my food while shaking my head.

I can’t say I know what we’re supposed to do about the constant crises. I swing between wanting to be fully engaged and take concrete action and wanting to completely disengage from the internet and focus all my mental energy on baking bread instead. I’m sure neither side of that spectrum is sustainable or correct. Although a good loaf of bread can’t hurt.

This past week, the most immediate ongoing catastrophe near us was a huge warehouse fire, releasing giant plumes of toxic smoke that covered Los Angeles. The warehouse was run by a company called Lineage Logistics. It was a cold storage facility holding millions of pounds of frozen food, which is now rotting, if it wasn’t previously incinerated along with the rooftop solar panels and thick insulation in the walls. None of which sounds like the kind of thing you’d want to breathe! But we were breathing it.

(Side note: If you also live in Los Angeles and you’re trying to figure out if the air is currently safe to breathe, I found this webinar/article by L.A. Material to be extremely helpful!)

We did our best to seal up the doors and windows and we were blasting air purifiers and keeping the kids inside. But then sometimes the wind would shift and everything seemed fine? It was very hard to know! As the director of our kid’s daycare said, “my expertise is in child development, but now I guess I should add air quality monitoring and infectious disease spread to my resume, since I’ve had to learn those too.”

As we approached Day 8 of the fire though, we were getting desperate for some out of the house activities, so I took our older son to a puppet show at the amazing Bob Baker Marionette Theater. It felt so weirdly normal to rush from the car out of the terrible smelling air into the theater where the air was purified and then see a pelican puppet with a frog in its mouth ride a train.

I guess that is normal nowadays?

I mean, not the pelican/frog combo riding the train, that’s delightfully extraordinary. But going about our everyday lives while things are on fire, sometimes literally. It’s wild.

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My upcoming events and other projects:

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

MY PODCAST: How to Be a Better Human (from TED/PRX). Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist who has spent years study our human desire for control and how it affects our brains and behavior. She’s come to the conclusion that the healthiest thing we can do is get better at letting go. We had a great conversation about her research and her upcoming book The Fine Art of Losing Control. You can listen (or watch) or conversation here: How to give up control - advice from neuroscientist Heather Berlin

LITHUB: I was honored to have Humor Me be recommended in LitHub’s article “40 Great New Books You May Have Missed.” I was especially honored because it’s a list of “Worthy Alternatives to JD Vance’s Oxygen-Sucking Memoir” and because I was recommended by fellow author pals Maris Kreizman and Bess Kalb!

This week’s list

GREAT:

Clio Chang is an incredible reporter. I love to read everything Clio writes. I first met Clio when we both did stories for the same tour of Pop Up Magazine. On the first day, as soon as I met her, Clio asked me if I wanted to be her ally. It made me laugh and it made me want to be her ally and we have been allies ever since. The alliance is strong and therefore I can and must insist that you buy her excellent new book all about the wild world of New York City lifeguards told through the story of its most legendary lifeguard, the first female chief, Janet Fash. Lifeguard: A Love Story is out now!

It also got a rave review in the NYT: After 40 Years, a Tenacious Lifeguard Still Swims Against the Tide (gift article)

FUNNY:

I normally put intentional comedy in here, like standup or sketch, but sometimes the thing that made me laugh the most is entirely serious and factual. This story about a top level CIA director inventing a completely fake program and then using it to get $40 million dollars in gold bars into his house is incredible. It’s a dark comedy that’s already written itself (and a strong argument for why taxpayer money shouldn’t ever go to untraceable slush funds with no oversight!) A $40 Million Gold Heist Risks Exposing CIA’s Top-Secret Spy Programs (gift article - I think that should work! I had to use my LA Public Library account to access it, very CIA of me)

INTERESTING:

I just started reading Brendan Leonard’s Semi-Rad newsletter and I’m really enjoying it. I thought this piece about what it means to be satisfied with yourself was very thought-provoking. It’ll Never Be Enough Until You Decide It’s Enough

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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Normally yours,

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.

Tomorrow is Father’s Day in the United States. A day I recently learned was originally intended to commemorate the victims of a terrible mining disaster but then got transformed by the daughter of a Civil War veteran living in Spokane, Washington.

Now, 116 years later, it’s a Sunday where Americans are socially obligated to give their father new socks. Incredible how time works!

(Shout out to France, whose Father’s Day celebrations were created by a company trying to sell more lighters, which is indisputably a cooler gift than socks, if less useful.)

Personally, I’m not a big fan of holidays where appreciation is mandatory. I’d much rather get a card or a gift on a random Tuesday when you just happened to be thinking about me than on a day when you’re “supposed to.” But who am I to disrespect the legacy of a day that led directly to the creation of the U.S. Bureau of Mines?

So I will be taking my kid to see a puppet show. I will be gratefully accepting a card. And, I’m not certain, but I think the odds that I’ll be wearing a new pair of socks are fairly high.

Actually, another quick side note here: I thought that was going to be the end of this intro story but I remembered a good sock-related anecdote. Many years ago, I was a contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? I did not win but I did become a meme. (I wrote about the experience here and also told the story on a live Pop Up Magazine tour.)

As I was working with the producers to audition and then prepare to compete on the show, one question my producer repeatedly asked me was “What would you do with a million dollars if you won?” She told me that if I won, I could do whatever I wanted but that I should not say something boring on camera like “save it for retirement” or “buy a house.” Instead, she wanted to know, “what would you do that’s exciting and different?”

She was looking for an answer like, “My wife and I have always wanted to live in Spain for a year,” or “I have a passion for fixing up classic cars,” or “I run an exotic bird sanctuary and this would save a lot of parrots.” Her job was to make me seem fun and relatable to the audience but also memorable enough that they’d root for me.

I gave her my honest answer of what felt like the richest thing I could imagine. I said, “I would wear a new pair of socks every day.”

My producer looked at me blankly for several seconds, trying to gauge whether I was joking or not. Then she said, unequivocally, “You cannot say that on television.”

I asked her why not? After all, it’s such a good, luxurious feeling. She explained that new socks don’t require winning a million dollars. In fact, I could probably achieve that dream by just getting a Costco membership.

I did the math and was amazed to discover she was right. When it came to new socks, I was already able to live the life of the millionaire in my dreams. It really took the pressure off.

Ultimately, I ended up saying something on air about how I wanted to get to the highest point of all 50 states, which is actually my dad’s dream, not mine, but I borrowed it for the day. Then I got on the show and promptly lost. And now, here I am, about to get some free socks tomorrow anyway.

Dreams do come true.

My upcoming events and other projects:

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

MY PODCAST: How to Be a Better Human (from TED/PRX). I first saw Rick Andrews perform improv almost 20 years ago and I can still remember scenes he created and how hard they make me laugh. Rick’s an amazing performer but his real passion is teaching improv. In this episode, we talk about why he loves sharing improv with people who have never done it before and what he has taught everyone from Ira Glass to Zohran Mamdani to me. Why you should try improv comedy (w/ Rick Andrews)

This week’s list

GREAT:

The Keeper is a short (6 min) documentary film by Skyler Knutzen. It’s a profile of Stacey Vasquez, a beekeeper in New York City who is allergic to bees. It’s such a beautiful and memorable short film about why you would keep doing something you love even if it doesn’t seem to make sense. The Keeper

FUNNY:

It was my friend Sarah Kay’s birthday this week but instead of me giving her a present, she gave me one by sharing this perfect standup bit from Ken Cheng about the phrase “to kill two birds with one stone.” BBC New Comedy Awards: “I’ve got some issues with the bird phrase”

INTERESTING:

This opinion piece about the current status of U.S. military strikes against fishing boats in Central and South America is the kind of thing I would like people in power to be asked about at every single news conference. It’s egregious, illegal, and immoral. As far as I can tell, The Bulwark is a center-right publication. So this perspective is not coming from some far left, super progressive organization. You’d hope that the principle that innocent people, thousands of miles away from any war zone, shouldn’t be randomly killed by the U.S. military would be a bipartisan stance. And yet… No Guns, No Drugs—Why Did We Blow Up These Boats?

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

Subscribe now

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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In strong support of both fathers and mining regulation/oversight,

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.

Just off the highway, in an industrial section of Los Angeles’ Glassell Park neighborhood, there’s a nondescript warehouse that is filled with treasure.

An organization called EcoSet runs a “materials oasis” where after a commercial, movie, or television show finishes shooting, they can drop off all their props and backgrounds, decorations, and other materials.

It’s stuff that would otherwise get tossed in a dumpster and brought to a landfill, but instead EcoSet grabs it, sorts it, and gives it out to schools and creative nonprofits to use for free. They also allow anyone who is interested to book an appointment to browse the warehouse.

Which is how I ended up at the materials oasis this past Friday. For $30, I got to walk around for an hour and take anything we wanted for free. The whole idea is that you’re giving materials a second (or third) life. But because it’s props and materials from Hollywood productions, it’s delightfully random and unpredictable.

Is your name Lenny and you’re looking for a giant wooden sign with your name on it? It’s yours for $0.

Need a giant reflective hyperspeed pod thing for your home? It’s on the house.

A giant ball of bungee cords larger than my body?

Or maybe you’re just looking for some free paint that’s exactly the right color to paint your fresh croissants.

The best part of EcoSet is you cannot possibly predict what you’re going to find. Even the people who work there have no idea what to expect. On the day I visited, they had clearly gotten a big delivery from an Oatly oat milk commercial but they also had a bunch of fake fireplaces.

I love that art teachers at local schools can get all these random treasures for 100% free and it’s so fun to imagine what independent set designers and artists working on a budget will transform these things into next.

I will definitely be back. It may even inspire me to take up woodworking so I can make all kinds of outlandish things for my kids and/or friends to play with.

For the moment, I just left with a bunch of Sharpie pens and a coat rack that’s shaped like a horse.

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My upcoming events and other projects:

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

MY PODCAST: How to Be a Better Human (from TED/PRX). This week, we talked with the always interesting Manoush Zomorodi about her new book, the emerging science of physical fitness, and what to do to have more energy at the end of a workday. Manoush is so much fun. Why you need to get up and move—right now! (w/ Manoush Zomorodi)

ALAN ALDA: In one of the biggest honors of my entire career, I got to have a long conversation with Alan Alda on his podcast, Clear and Vivid. He was so complimentary about my book and generous with his time. We had a lot of fun and laughs together. Truly a dream! Our conversation is the first episode of their new season. Chris Duffy: How laughter connects us

This week’s list

GREAT:

Here’s a confession: I did not like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I kept hearing everyone talk about how talented Dave Eggers was and it pushed me into a contrarian stance. For many years, I was anti-Eggers. But then I learned about his work teaching kids creative writing through 826. And I loved the writing and humor pieces that McSweeney’s was publishing. Eventually, I came around. I flip-flopped on the Eggers issue. I even re-read his writing and found that I actually enjoyed it a lot. Dave Eggers, it turns out, is extremely talented and thoughtful and interesting. People say he’s also a very nice guy! He has a new book out that I am excited to read. In the meantime, this interview he did for NPR’s Wild Card is excellent, especially what he has to say to young people about writing and AI. (It’s in the first 90 seconds of the video.) Dave Eggers’ urgent message

FUNNY:

Having spent a lot of time over the past month potty training and therefore thinking/talking about urine, my friend Katie (also parent of a 2-year-old), reminded me of this incredible and perfect clip from Nathan for You. It’s a good reminder that there is no one funnier on the planet than Nathan Fielder. “I’m not scared”

INTERESTING:

“At Post Modern Times cafe in Minneapolis, a tax protest has turned into a social experiment and a critique of the hospitality industry.” Especially in light of the fact that this week we heard about the world’s first trillionaire, I think it’s very timely to be thinking about how we distribute wealth and what we allow to become out of reach for everyday people. This story, from Minnesota, is one that I’m going to be thinking about for a long time and feels like is pointing us in a new and powerful direction. This Restaurant Stopped Charging for Food. And Profits Are Up.

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

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Regretting that I left the giant bungee ball behind,

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.

This email is coming to you a day late because I was struck down with a brief but intense toddler fever. Thankfully I feel much better today so I won’t let a week go by without a Bright Spots.

I will say this though: When it comes to infectious disease spread, having a toddler in preschool is roughly equivalent to eating undercooked pangolin meat on a cruise ship full of bats. The quantity and quality of illnesses is simply unmatched.

One time, many years ago, before I had kids, I interviewed a scientist who had studied the bacteria on the NYC subway system. He told me that it’s better for humans to get exposed to more bacteria and develop their immune systems and that he would let his own kids roll around on the floor of the subway no problem.

I thought that was an unhinged answer then and I still think it is now. But I hope he’s right because my immune system is challenged every day with new and exotic strains. Next time I’m back in NYC visiting my parents, I might as well try licking a subway pole.

My upcoming events and other projects:

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

This week’s list

GREAT:

I wrote about Sister Corita Kent in my book and how much I love her views on creativity, humor, and finding something new and interesting in everyday life. I was introduced to Sister Corita’s work by Wendy MacNaughton, another author and artist who I admire so much. This week, in her newsletter, Wendy wrote about why she loves Corita’s approach so much. There’s a drawing assignment that Wendy put behind a paywall (I highly recommend subscribing if you’re looking for a way to start a creative practice or just like to draw) but the essay itself is free for anyone to read. The Radical Nun Who Wants You to Use Your Scissors

FUNNY:

I subscribed to the print edition of The Onion this year and getting to read it in hard copy is such a delight. They are hitting so many comedic home runs. Checking in on The Onion more regularly guarantees that I laugh more. Here are three headlines that recently got me good:

Report: Requests To Prove One Is Not A Robot Up 400,000% Over Past 500 Years

Ambitious Nature Center Squeezes 25 Informational Placards Out Of Sad Little Marsh

Department Of Labor Cracks Down On People Getting Paid For Work

INTERESTING:

I thought this was an excellent piece about what it means for so much writing to be generated by AI these days. How do you tell when something is actually produced by a human and why does that matter? I believe it does matter quite a lot but I couldn’t have articulated it quite as well as Eve Fairbanks does here. The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI (gift article)

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

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White blood cells multiplying,

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.

Yesterday morning for breakfast, I used the last of my cranberries. Every year around Thanksgiving, I stockpile as many bags of fresh cranberries as I can fit into my freezer and ration them out for as long as I can.

Now, you might be asking yourself, “Who cares about cranberries? What are you doing with these cranberries anyway?”

To that, I would say: I care about these cranberries. And I’m eating them in my oatmeal.

I realize that sentence makes me sound like I live in a nursing home and have a UTI. But, in fact, neither are true! I am not yet a senior citizen and my urinary tract is clean as a whistle.

I just love a little tart explosion when I’m eating my hot mushed oats for breakfast. It’s fiber and vitamin C and antioxidants which I don’t understand but I believe are good for me.

Also this is neither here nor there, but when it comes to eating cranberries on Thanksgiving, the normal time most Americans encounter them, I actually only like the jellied sauce in the can, nothing homemade or natural. The rest of the year, I want my cranberries pure. But on turkey day, I want to see the imprint of the metal ridges when I slice a wiggly purple disk onto my plate.

I associate cranberries with New England, which makes sense because there’s an almost Puritan satisfaction to denying yourself one of the sweeter berries (the Devil’s gushers!) and instead suffering through the sharp acidity of a bog fruit.

Anyway, I’ve run out of my stash of frozen fresh cranberries and now I’m on the hunt for more. The only problem is it’s summertime and I live in Southern California. It’s an even bigger challenge than the time I tried to find Manischewitz and matzoh for Passover here in my regular grocery stores, striking out, and had to stoop to calling different markets asking for “Jewish crackers” before finally finding what I needed.

That being said, I will find my bog fruits. There’s already been a good omen. I was the guest on a podcast recently and the host showed up a few minutes late. While we were waiting, I made small talk with the producers, one of whom turned out to have a cranberry farmer for a father! I learned that actually Wisconsin is the nation’s largest cranberry producer (defying my New England mental image). And when I said it must have been fun to grow up on such an iconic farm, she laughed and then said, “Yeah except for the spiders!”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

She looked at me, surprised that she was having to explain herself, and said “You don’t know about cranberry spiders?” But then before she could explain anymore, the host arrived and we started the interview so I was left without any answers.

A brief, terrible googling later (I do not recommend looking at any of the images or learning any of the detailed facts), I now know that cranberry bogs are famously filled with spiders, “prized for their help in hunting destructive pests” without the need for pesticides. However, when they harvest cranberries by flooding the fields (which causes all the cranberries to float to the top for easy picking), a true nightmare occurs…

“[The flooding] displaces the spiders living in the vines, forcing them to skate across the bobbing berries or climb the tallest objects in the water (which often happens to be the harvesters themselves).”

Terrible, terrible stuff.

Wonderful, wonderful fruit.

I hope I find some in a store but never see it in nature.

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My upcoming events and other projects:

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

This week’s list

GREAT:

It’s very hard to write a good book about creativity. It’s even harder to write a good book about creativity that inspires people to actually make things themselves. But Austin Kleon has built a career out of doing exactly that. Steal Like An Artist is a huge bestseller for good reason. His newest book comes out this week and I’m very excited to read it: Don’t Call It Art

FUNNY:

I will watch anything that Conan O’Brien does. I’m also a sucker for a good commencement speech. Even before I watched the video of Conan talking to Harvard’s newest graduates, I knew I was going to love it. I was correct. Even though there are so many Harvard jokes that I don’t pretend to understand, it’s still fantastic. Conan is able to blend sharp comedy, intelligence, self-deprecation, and sincerity in a way that no one else can. And his message is one that I think is genuinely important right now: it’s not all about you. Nobody achieves anything alone. Also, nobody looks good in a cap and gown. Conan O’Brien Commencement Address

INTERESTING:

I got a very nice email from a reader this week who told me that they were enjoying Humor Me and that some of the ideas reminded them of a talk that Benjamin Zander, longtime conductor for the Boston Philharmonic, had given. I wasn’t familiar with Zander until I watched the video they sent but now I’m a fan. An excellent talk about teaching, motivation, and not taking yourself so seriously: Benjamin Zander - Work (How to give an A)

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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Climbing the tallest object I can find which may, in fact, be a farmer,

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.

We are potty training this weekend so I have bodily fluids on the mind.

I know that some people don’t find poop or pee to be funny. If that’s you, please feel free to skip ahead to this week’s list, which I promise is 100% potty humor free.

If you, like me, have a juvenile, immature, disgusting sense of humor, I have several things to tell you.

One is that, if you haven’t already, you should read my previous newsletter about the worst smell I’ve ever smelled. I had several readers report to me that, despite not being fans of potty humor usually, they thought it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever sent out.

As far as how to accomplish potty training, I got tips from my friend Lily who has three sons, all out of diapers. She told me to get as many of the small plastic potties as I could afford and to place them in every room of my house so there was never a far distance to travel when nature called. As a result, we have a large enough quantity of potties that multiple visitors have said “do you know how many potties there are in this house?” as though I kept going to the store and buying a new one, forgetting we already had one at home, like that viral video of the guy buying hoisin sauce.

We’re also working off this book, which we took out of the library and has several pages which are heavily stained.

If there was ever a book that I did not want to encounter a stained page in, it’s this one. But we’re in too deep to return it now.

This book is in a category of parenting books where the author swears once or twice to prove they’re not like those other uptight parenting experts, they’re actually cool! But the swear is something like “wipe your *#%!” and they didn’t even type out the whole word so they’re kind of a badass in the same way that I am, which is to say, not at all a badass. I remember one time my friend Ivan heard me say “what the heck” and shook his head with such disdain that, more than a decade later, I can still remember it. “Have some self respect and at least say ‘what the hell’ when you’re around me,” Ivan said.

I would also put Oh Crap! in the large category of parenting books that promise a foolproof technique to achieve a milestone (eating solid foods, sleeping through the night, etc.) and then include numerous anecdotes about the fools who failed to follow their advice and were cursed for years as a result. I won’t be one of the fools who dared to question “the Pied Piper of Poop.”

One of her dictates is to prove to my child how comfortable I am with bodily functions and how normal it is by allowing him to watch me when I go poop. So not only am I spending this weekend mopping up my kid’s pee, I’m also inviting him into the bathroom each morning where he looks at me somewhat confused while I grunt away my previous day’s meals. It’s a show I truly hope he will never remember but, given my luck, will probably be his first conscious memory.

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My upcoming events and other projects:

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

NEW PODCAST EPISODE: Adam Aleksic is a linguist who studies the way people talk online and how it affects our offline communication. He’s managed to take a very academic pursuit and translate it in a way that reaches millions of people through his social media account EtymologyNerd. This week on the podcast, I talked with Adam about his work, about how language works, and about why it matters what words people use. You can listen (or watch) wherever you get podcasts! How algorithms changed the way we communicate

This week’s list

GREAT:

There is so much to say about Colbert and his last week of shows that I won’t even attempt to do it justice. It’s a shame that his show is ending. It’s a shame that so many talented, hard-working, caring people are out of the job because of corporate cowardice and authoritarianism. But Colbert has refused to lower his standards or to be anything other than gracious. It’s been so generous how he has given the writers and staff on his show so much airtime and the opportunity to do ridiculous and extremely stupid but hilarious bits even in their final moments (shout out to Carley Moseley playing the most deranged daughter to ever appear on CBS and Michael Cruz Kayne’s musical number about fish). But one of my favorite moments of the entire farewell tour was Letterman coming back to the Ed Sullivan Theater to reprise an old bit. It’s contagious how much fun Letterman and Colbert are having and even some catharsis in the goofiest way possible: Wanton Destruction of CBS Property

FUNNY:

I’ve been watching Emmy Blotnick perform standup comedy for more than a decade and it’s always a delight. She is so funny and so smart but also so silly. She’s a great reminder of the fact that comedy is allowed to be fun. Her new special, What’s Her Secret?, is out now and she’s funny enough that I am willing to create a new account for a streaming service named Gorilla Comedy Plus, which is apparently a real thing and not just a bit Emmy made up. Although I wouldn’t put it past her. Here’s a clip that made me laugh a lot.

INTERESTING:

One of the best new media outlets I’ve come across is L.A. Material. They put out really compelling, well-researched features and articles that are obviously of interest to Angelenos, but also worth reading wherever you live. My pal Antonia Cereijido is an exceptionally talented journalist who writes for them. She’s published lots of great pieces but I thought this one, about Hollywood’s current obsession with short stories, was really mind-blowing and I haven’t heard it be reported anywhere else. The Big Short: How short stories became Hollywood’s hottest format.

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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With the triumphant sound of a toilet flushing,

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.

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.

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

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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.

Yesterday, my wife and I took care of a bunch of administrative tasks that we had been putting off. Now that we have two kids, the most important was updating our wills and medical directives.

You know, the kind of classic light-hearted activity that really makes you say the weekend has arrived!

The most straightforward change we had to make was adding our younger son’s name to the will. Since we were in there anyway, we figured we should review everything we had written to make sure it was up to date.

I had only the vaguest memories of filling out my medical wishes, should I be permanently incapacitated. It turns out that this is what I had written:

“I would like for any organs and tissue from my body that can be used to save someone else's life or mitigate their suffering to be donated. But I don't want my body to be used for research or for some med students to be looking at my naked butt. So once you're done with the donations, please bury me in a green burial (where I'm not embalmed or cremated and can decompose naturally). Ideally, I'm in a relatively natural setting in a simple pine box and I decompose into a tree or some flowers or grass or something. Once again, please do not donate my genitals to science.”

That’s in a legally binding document. A notary had to read that and stamp it.

I’m not quite sure what was going on in my life at the time that made me so concerned about medical students having outsized interest in my genitals, but clearly I was going through something.

I will say that it’s a family tradition to have strong and unorthodox requests for your body post mortem. My maternal grandfather asked that he be cremated and then flushed down the toilet. It was a sincere request but my mom and aunt told him that they refused and would sprinkle him somewhere nice instead. I’m sure if he had persisted in maintaining that the New York City sewers count as “nice,” they would have given in. But he said it was not worth the effort, which is exactly why he wanted them to flush him in the first place. It seemed like an easy way to get rid of a bowl full of ash.

My own father is obsessed with mountain climbing and once read a story about “sky burials,” a Tibetan tradition where “a deceased person’s body is dismembered and left on a mountaintop to be consumed by vultures.” He has repeatedly stated that that is what he wants us to do with him after he’s gone. I have had to make very clear that I am not going to be dragging a bonesaw and his corpse up to any mountaintops, so he better come up with a Plan B.

As for my own current wishes, I stand by only wanting my organs to be used for specific medical purposes. That’s because I watched this episode of Last Week Tonight where one guy (who wasn’t even a doctor) was charging $500 a ticket to watch an autopsy in a Marriott ballroom.

I can’t allow my dead corpse to charge higher ticket prices for a show in a Marriott than I’m able to charge as a living comedian! If that happens to me, you better believe I’m going to be haunting that hotel and making sure the waffle maker at its breakfast buffet never works properly even once.

I do still think the idea of decomposing into a flower or tree’s root system is nice.

But, on further reflection, I’m open to being convinced that medical students should be allowed to see my butt.

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My upcoming events and other projects:

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

NEW PODCAST EPISODE: Jenny Taitz wrote the book on stress. And I am frequently stressed out! But after talking to her, I am somewhat less stressed. That’s a victory! You can listen to our conversation and hear all her tips and research here.

This week’s list

GREAT:

Manoush Zomorodi is a good friend of mine who’s also a fantastic reporter and writer. She has a new book out this week called Body Electric about “how sedentary screen life is reshaping the human body — and the science-backed protocol for reclaiming our energy, focus, and health.” It’s a serious topic but a very fun read!

FUNNY:

Eugene Mirman is one of the funniest and most creative comedians alive. There’s probably no one in comedy that I admire more, both in terms of how he treats people and how creative and fun the premises he comes up with are. For example, this bit where he identifies celebrities on Venmo and then sends them money is hilarious and no one other than Eugene could have come up with it. His new special is called Here Comes the Whimsy and you can watch it all on YouTube now.

INTERESTING:

Shawn Wen and I met in college when we both worked at the college radio station and both took the same creative nonfiction writing classes. I was always struck by how unique Shawn’s perspective was and how interesting the stories she reported turned out to be. She has had a fascinating career, filled with numerous accomplishments and accolades. You might have heard her work on This American Life, All Things Considered, or Marketplace, or seen her videos screen at MoMA. Her latest project is hosting a new podcast called Foundering: The Killing of Bob Lee. “It’s about a tech executive who was stabbed in SF a few years ago, and how his death unleashed a wave of fear and misinformation around crime.” Listen to Ep 1 now.

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

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Still alive, for now.

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.

I was in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s and fully zoning out as I waited my turn. Then I heard the cashier laugh very loud and say, “Yes! I love that!”

In and of itself, that’s not particularly notable. Trader Joe’s cashiers are famously always in a good mood and eager to chat. In fact, while working on a project about small talk, I learned that the CEO of Trader Joe’s once had to publicly clarify that the employees are not flirting with you. “On an episode of the store’s official podcast, CEO Bryan Palbaum said employees are simply great at small talk and are ‘genuinely interested in whether or not you are having a good day.’ While this [chit-chat should not] be seen as flirting, Palbaum added that he ‘could see how that might be misinterpreted.’”

But that was not what was happening here. Instead, the woman in front of me, who was shopping alone and appeared to be about sixty years old, had simply asked if she could have some of the stickers that they normally only give out to kids.

“I need a little more whimsy in my life,” she told him.

He was DELIGHTED and gave her the stickers. She got her whimsy!

After she left, it was my turn, and the cashier told me how much he loved that she asked. He insisted that I take a lollypop after getting my receipt.

“We all need whimsy today! Take this lollypop!”

My upcoming events and other projects:

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

NEW PODCAST EPISODE: Yowei Shaw has made some of the most memorable audio episodes I’ve ever listened to. First at Invisibilia and now, on her new podcast Proxy, Yowei finds and reports stories that are jaw-dropping and somehow also extremely relatable. I got to interview her for our podcast about what her work has taught her about how to get emotionally unstuck. It was so fun and surprising. Listen here!

LA PUBLIC LIBRARY YOUNG LITERATI SALON: Wednesday, May 6th at 6:30 p.m. I’ll be discussing my book with Xuan Juliana Wang in a special event for the LA Public Library foundation. Tickets and details here

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: I was on WUNC’s Embodied talking with Anita Rao about how to take humor seriously. I’m a big fan of the show and Anita is a fantastic interviewer. Here’s a link!

This week’s list

GREAT:

Anytime someone sends me a piece of writing by Caity Weaver, I know that I need to stop what I’m doing immediately and read it in its entirety. She always delivers a roller coaster ride. Here is a tour de force. “Thirteen thousand miles. Infinite contenders. One beautiful loaf.” I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

FUNNY:

Hallie Cantor is one of the funniest writers alive. She’s also a lovely person who I am lucky to be friends with. Hallie has written for Arrested Development, Lady Dynamite, and Dollface. When I think about all-time classic humor pieces, a bunch of Hallie’s come to mind. For example, “Everything I Am Afraid Might Happen If I Ask New Acquaintances to Get Coffee” or “Why the People You E-Mailed Aren’t E-Mailing You Back, by Week.” Hallie’s new novel Like This, But Funnier is out now and I’m so excited to read it.

INTERESTING:

It’s rare that a celebrity gives real honest answers in an interview. I don’t think it’s always because they’re consciously hiding anything but more often because they just get asked the same questions so frequently that everything they say ends up having a polish and practice to it that’s not how regular people talk. But in this interview, I feel like you genuinely get a sense of how Colbert feels about his show coming to and end and the mixed emotions and ambiguity around what he’ll do next. It’s a shame that the show is going off the air and all the talented people who work there will be left looking for something new. I hope they’re all able to get hired quickly. And I’ll be very curious to see what Colbert comes out with next. I did not expect him to be writing a Lord of the Rings movie! Stephen Colbert Gets Ready to Hang It Up

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Just an adult man enjoying a lollypop at the grocery store,

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.

I was recently waiting in a long line at a public park to touch a garbage truck. This is the kind of activity that I do on Saturday mornings now.

It’s not because I have developed a passion for refuse. It’s because I have a toddler who loves garbage. When we’re out on my bike and we see a garbage truck, instead of turning away from its toxic stench, we follow it for as long as we can. The sanitation workers in our neighborhood know us well because when they come by to pick up our bins, we sprint out of the house, often in pajamas, so we can watch and wave. We are a garbage family.

While I was in line to touch that garbage truck, a parent recognized me because she was a reader of this newsletter. That’s a thing that almost never happens, but especially not while I’m in garbage mode. She was very nice and friendly and told me she particularly liked the editions of Bright Spots where I wrote about the experience of parenting, which made me realize it’s been a while since I’ve done one of those. So for my fellow garbage parent, here’s a list of 8 things I’ve learned in 8 months of having two kids.

1. Two kids remains much more than 1 kid. Balancing two different schedules, making sure that we have all the necessary supplies when we leave the house (multiple snack options and diaper sizes and wipes and all the rest), and trying to find ways to connect with them each and play and encourage them… it’s a lot. Two adults to two kids feels like not enough adults. I would say we could use 3-5 additional adults at all times.

2. I was completely full of BS. I had so much hubris going into kid number two. I thought that we had figured things out and how hard could having a second kid be? I was Icarus thinking about how nice the warm sun felt and how all the people on the ground must be really admiring my beautiful wings. Now I know that I know nothing. Honestly, this could be the end of the list.

3. It’s a lot easier to have less anxiety when you’ve done it before. With kid #1, every time he got even the slightest runny nose, I would call the pediatrician and frantically google. With kid #2, he could hack up a literal hairball and I’d just think “I probably should vacuum more.” Even though I’m exhausted and frequently overwhelmed, I feel a lot less anxious about the small stuff.

4. Things are often the hardest right before a big developmental leap. It’s very frustrating to almost be able to crawl. Or to be on the edge of walking. Or to kinda, sorta, almost be able to talk but not actually capable of doing it. I can now see, with kid #2, that a lot of the struggle and frustration happens just before they unlock a new ability and then they’re so relieved they’re able to do it. So it’s almost cool when they’re much fussier than normal. Almost cool, but not actually cool.

5. Kids interacting with each other is the cutest thing in the world. When my older kid gets up and immediately wants to run into his brother’s room to tell him “I missed you! I love you!” that’s just the best. I love that they love each other so much already that being 50 feet away while they were both unconscious feels like it merits a reunion tour.

6. The washing machine is the single greatest invention of the past 500 years. I cannot express how frequently I need to clean clothes and how unfathomably disgusting the clothes that I need to clean often are. As for who actually invented the washing machine? Google claims “Alva J. Fisher is commonly credited with inventing the first electric washing machine, known as the ‘Thor,’ around 1908” but more reputable sources tell me that “the first inventor of the electric washing machine remains unknown.”

7. It’s a miracle if you have a full conversation with your partner on a weekend day between the hours of 7 a.m. - 8 p.m. The sun rises and the sun sets but nowhere on a Saturday can more than a single paragraph be exchanged between two parents. Even a paragraph is a victory! Mostly it’s [noun] + [verb] + [primal screech].

8. It’s possible to be extremely muscular in only the muscles that pick up and hold wriggling children and out of shape everywhere else. You want me to lift a thirty pound bag of potatoes and hold it in one arm while I stir a pot of spaghetti with the other arm? No problem at all. You want me to do 3 consecutive sit-ups? You must be out of your mind.

That’s what I've learned so far. I look forward to discussing it with any and all readers next time I’m standing next to a giant truck.

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My upcoming events and other projects:

MY BOOK: Humor Me is out in bookstores everywhere

NEW PODCAST EPISODE: This week on the How to Be a Better Human podcast, Molly Graham talks to me about how to navigate career choices. When should you quit a job? What should you be looking for? How do you know what path to pick? As someone who has worked at a ton of very successful companies (and now is the new host of TED’s Worklife podcast), Molly knows her stuff. The right risks to take for a great career.

LA PUBLIC LIBRARY YOUNG LITERATI SALON: Wednesday, May 6th at 6:30 p.m. I’ll be discussing my book with Xuan Juliana Wang in a special event for the LA Public Library foundation. Tickets and details here

This week’s list

GREAT:

Maggie Rogers is one of my favorite musicians. Switched on Pop is one of my favorite shows. I was always going to love listening to their episode with her but it was even better than I expected. I especially loved this bonus feature, where students from Charlie Harding’s music class at NYU got to ask Rogers their own questions about her work and the industry. It’s a very fun read. Maggie Rogers goes back to school

FUNNY:

The Onion is taking over Infowars and alt comedy hero Tim Heidecker is going to replace Alex Jones. They’re going to turn one of the most despicable cesspools on the internet into a beautiful work of comedy. It’s incredible all around. And it’s going to mean that the families of the Sandy Hook students finally get some tiny measure of justice. This in-depth conversation between Pablo Torre and Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion, is very fun to listen to but also left me even more excited about what they’re doing. It’s a real victory. (Or if you want a shorter, bite-sized version, here’s a good social media clip.)

INTERESTING:

“ In 2021, a disabled parrot named Bruce made headlines worldwide for creating his own prosthetic beak. He didn’t stop there: Scientists reported on Monday that Bruce has now become the alpha male of his group. And he did it by learning to joust.” How Bruce the Parrot Landed Atop the Pecking Order, Without a Beak

BONUS FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS:

Paying subscribers make Bright Spots possible! Subscribers get access to special features as well as all posts in the archive. Paying subscribers also get my undying gratitude (which never dies). It’s never too late to join them!

Subscribe now

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.

Share

Thanks for reading!

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.