In the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, lovers of art, music, movie, comedy and other kinds of fans have had to come to grips with a serious incongruity. What happens when the artist you love turns out to have done terrible things? What to make of Kevin Spacey, for example, whose oeuvre is filled with beautiful work but who turned out to be something of a predator? This video explores that question through an examination of fine art. 

Lots of people have tried to figure out why Trump lies and lies and lies, and then lies some more. I have my own theory, which is published here, and can be summed up as: “A chaotic and unceasing hodgepodge of lies and exaggerations, however, will simply drown out the opposing narrative.” This video adds a bit more detail this hypothesis, explaining how Trump’s lies are partly a power maneuver and partly as a way of eliminating the importance of truth altogether. 

Michael Jackson died as the unchallenged King of Pop. Because of that, it’s easy to forget that he was not always the King of Pop. Indeed, he released a few albums in the 1970s that did not succeed at all. This video analyzes one song off his “Off the Wall” album––”Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough.” You probably are already hearing that song in your head, aren’t you? It’s such an ear worm that you can’t help it. This video explains why that song is so catchy. 

In one of the most famous––and most controversial––episodes of The Office, Michael Scott promises to pay for high school students’ college tuition. He cannot, of course, afford that. Dennis Frandsen, fortunately, is no Michael Scott. He has offered to pay for a two-year technical college degree for each student in the 2019 graduating class in Luck, Wisconsin. Frandsen said that he was concerned about the average student, since only the top one percent of high school students get scholarships to college. 

Alexander Ciccolo, also known as Ali Al Amriki, has pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and has been sentenced to twenty years in prison. Ciccolo’s lawyers claims that Ciccolo has mental health issues, has struggled with drugs, and had no real plans to carry out the attack. Nevertheless, he did buy four guns and was allegedly preparing to make a pressure cooker bomb. He also stabbed a prison nurse in the head ten times following his arrest. His father, a police captain in Boston, has not spoken publicly about his son’s arrest.

This video went viral in 2014 and now it’s going viral again. What’s the cause of this viral resurgence? It’s pretty simple, this video is hilarious. It might be one of Graham’s best videos, in fact. In it, he talks to Emma Stone about her love of the Spice Girls. In 2014, she was on a movie tour and got a video message from a Spice Girl in Australia. She wept, because she loves them so much. As a result, everyone wanted to talk to her about the spice girls. Watch Graham troll the heck out of her below. 

In Oakland, California, thousands of students get a hot meal at the end of the day. Or at least, they used to. According to the school district, budget constraints led the school board to vote to eliminate the free meals. Oakland school sports programs were also on the chopping block, but the an anonymous donor and the Oakland Raiders gave enough money to save sports. So football will still happen, which is nice. 

Traveling by plane is a dirty experience. The bathrooms are filthy, to say the least. Planes are germ magnets, especially the water. Seriously, don’t touch any water on the plane, even to wash your hands. Definitely don’t drink anything stored in a water tank. Just when you thought traveling couldn’t get any grosser, a recent study just added more fuel to your germaphobic nightmares. Those trays you have to put your luggage in to get through security are dirty. Really dirty. In fact, they’re dirtier than a toilet. They carry both the cold virus and the flu virus.

We’re going to quote the Guardian directly, because their lede captures the magnitude of the situation: 

Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum has been consumed by fire, and much of its archive of 20 million items is believed to have been destroyed.

It’s hard to describe just how tragic this fire is. The Brazilian National Museum was the largest natural history museum in Latin America. Brazil is 500 years old––the museum was 200 years old. The museum held indigenous peoples’ artifacts, which are now lost. 

There are a few nightmare scenarios that can happen on an airplane. One of the scariest (aside from the obvious) such scenarios happened recently on a Emirates flight from Dubai to John F. Kennedy Airport. About a hundred passengers complained of illness on the flight, with symptoms including cough and fever. The plane was briefly quarantined, and nineteen people were deemed actually to be sick. Health officials are still investigating as of this writing, but signs point to the flu.

If you’ve spent even ten minutes watching The Lord of the Rings, you probably got the sense that there is a massive mythology behind the stories. If you’ve read the books, then you absolutely know this. Few fans have slogged through Tolkien’s mythological background, The Silmarillion, which gives all that background. These two videos do that for you. What you’ll learn is that there is an overarching point to the stories, and that Tolkien believes in lobical moral black and whites but not practical moral black and whites. In other words, in theory morality is simple, but in practice it’s complex. 

There’s a floating patch of garbage in the Pacific Ocean. It’s twice the size of Texas, and it lives between California and Hawaii. When scientists sampled the patch, they determined that there were nearly two trillion pieces of plastic in the patch that, combined, weigh 80,000 tons. Obviously, this is a big problem for the environment. The Ocean Cleanup aims to reduce that by 90% by 2040 with a  600-meter-long floating device that can trap nearly five tons of plastic per month. Eventually, they aim to launch sixty devices to tackle the problem. This project isn’t a moment too soon. If things don’t change, then by 2050 there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish.