Welcome to The Finite Scroll - a weekly-ish newsletter for curious people. It should take less than 5 minutes to read and give you something that piques your curiosity. 

For those tuning in after last week where I shared that I was running for our local school Board of Education along with some reasons why, I’m thrilled to report that I won one of the two seats and will be starting my three year term on July 1st 🎉

I'm grateful to all the people who helped me make it happen - hosting a lawn sign, getting the word out, handing out flyers, drilling me with questions ahead of the candidate forum and more than anything just dealing with me talking about little else beyond the race for over a month. It was an all-consuming experience that I'm so glad I got to have. All that said, I was so excited to get to follow it up with a 3 day weekend with no plans, no sports games to go to, nothing. The fam got to catch up on sleep and do all sorts of Summer kickoff stuff and I feel rejuvenated.

As for the Board - now the real work starts and it starts with an all day training session run by NY state for new trustees on Saturday June 28th followed soon after by another day long planning session with our district board where the new trustees will be sworn in. Lots to learn and I'm excited to dig in.

Election night with our daughter after the results came out.

Things I'm into this week

🧀 Last week was the annual Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake in Gloucestershire, England and this BBC liveblog has some great highlights and photos for you. If you think it looks like a swarm of zombies from The Last of Us racing town a steep hill after a wheel of cheese, you are correct!

If you have no idea what this is and your interest is piqued, I highly recommend you check out the segment about this race in the Netflix documentary We Are the Champions about unique competitions around the world. It's a great watch.

It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.
...
In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

👨‍💻 In case you missed it, last week both the Chicago-Sun Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer published an entire feature recommending children's books that don't exist and had been created by Generative-AI. This little episode is a microcosm of what's happening at a grand scale with GenAI and Dan Sinker summarizes this time we find ourselves in a great little piece called The Who Cares Era.

🎧 For all my fellow pop culture obsessives out there, this pod conversation between Derek Thompson and Spencer Kornhaber on the latter's hunt for objective measures of whether pop culture is worse than ever, is a fun listen. (ps: if you're more of the reading type, Kornhaber recently wrote Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture 🎁 for The Atlantic covering the same topic.)

🎼 I'm a sucker for orchestral renditions of pop songs I love and this version of Fred Again's Delilah (pull me out of this) by the Kaleidescope Orchestra is a beaut. (you can find the original here)

😍 The intersection of ambitious and whimsical always gets my attention and I am SUPER into this new Japanese restaurant in East Village, NYC called Shirokuro, who's entire interior is designed to look like a two dimensional drawing - all sketched in black and white. (h/t to Kottke)

🔥 Finally, with Memorial Day behind us, it's officially Summer time so I wanted to share one of my favorite old Soundcloud mixes to throw on at the BBQ from Mick Boogie + DJ Jazzy Jeff.

...that retro, soulful, cool out, bbq eating, suntan getting, beach chair sitting, rosé drinking, two miles an hour, so everybody can see you music. Enjoy!

If you're into this vibe, he's got a bunch more where that came from.

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading. If you want each new edition in your inbox, you can subscribe below or follow right from your favorite RSS reader.