A Letter from the Wife of the Guy Who Invented the Venn Diagram

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In Today's Email  🔥 Fav Will Smith Take | 🤯 Insight |  ✍🏼 Story 

A Letter from the Wife of the Guy Who Invented the Venn Diagram

Dear Sister,

My sincerest apologies for not writing back sooner. I must admit, times in the Venn household have been trying. It's been nearly two full years and Dr. Venn has made little progress on his diagram. He claims he's close. His condition, however, has deteriorated considerably. His hair has all but fallen out. He's thin as a wooden rail. His hands bloody and blistered from the near constant work in his study.

And the circles. My god, the circles.

He's insistent that the next great diagram lies somewhere in that vile shape. I'm convinced they've driven him mad. Our flat is strewn with circles and when I finally demanded he get rid of the things,  do you know what he told me? "Take them. All I need is two." What has anybody ever accomplished with just two circles? The man has lost it. All day he places these circles at various distances from one another, ejaculating with delight that he's getting closer to the solution. I beg him to use graphs, or even numbers, but he won't hear any of it.

The diagram industry is exploding right now, obviously, and I’m positive that once he solves this haunting riddle we’ll be rich beyond our wildest dreams. But what if all the great diagrams have already been discovered?

Sister, I’m so tired of arguing with him. We run around and around one another, inevitably arriving back at the beginning except worse off than before. How I miss the years when Dr. Venn and I lived the same life. Dreaming the same dreams, wanting the same things. Now it feels like our lives occur in two entirely separate worlds. He in his and I in mine. Close but never touching.

But I refuse to despair. Perhaps I can show him, somehow, there still exists a space– however infinitesimal– where our lives… intersect. Different but linked at some irreducible point of commonality. Fuck me, there really should be a better way to express that. At least I know you listen.

Please visit. And let me know how your husband is progressing with that silly game of his. What is he calling it again? Tic tac toe?

Truly Yours,

Jane Venn

🎥 Have you heard about this Will Smith thing? Okay, before it's too late. Here's my favorite take from– what I think– is the very best TV podcast there is: The Watch. The hosts are so good that one of them was literally given a TV series of his own that ran for a season on USA. Listen from the beginning through 29:06 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else.

Bonus takes:

• The Breakfast Club (105.1 FM) comes from a TOTALLY different angle

• Former Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel on how he would've handled it

• Great point from a live TV producer

🤯 The Slap aside, the Oscars had a problem. Movies no longer drive culture. Partially, because they aren't as good. I'm writing a script that takes place in 1994 and I wanted to know what movies were playing that year to get a feel for what the characters might be talking about. I was blown away. Check out the lineup of films that came out in '94. The top-10 doesn't even scratch the surface. Go down the list to #200 and you get a real sense of how far we are from the glory days.

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Michael Weber is a writer and lobbies against the hat industry on behalf of small-headed gentleman. If you received this email, you signed up for his newsletter at some point. If you'd like to unsubscribe, you must first find somebody else to replace you. Share a link to subscribe!