Ing-teresting – July 02, 2025

It's been a while since I’ve shared some interesting things so I thought I’d do that today. I’m thinking of creating a proper feed for this kind of content but I haven’t figured out the best way to go about that yet, so in the meantime please enjoy this random assortment of tidbits.

Update: I now have a live feed where you can keep up with my latest highlights.

How Harrison Ford Got the Role of Han Solo

A year into what was supposed to be a seven-year acting contract with Columbia Pictures, in 1966, a 24-year-old Harrison Ford was called in to meet with Columbia executive Jerry Tokofsky. “You ain’t got it, kid,” Tokofsky told Ford. “You have no future in this business.”

Dropped from Columbia, Ford—married, with two young sons, needing “to have another source of income”—borrowed books from the public library and became a carpenter. Carpentry allowed Ford to accumulate forms of cultural and social capital that, as it turned out, contained a capacity to generate acting opportunities.

The skills, habits, and discipline he developed through carpentry shaped his approach to acting: “Carpentry,” Ford explained, “is preparing your materials, lining out your process, putting a brick on a brick, and building something. And that’s exactly what you do in acting and filmmaking.” One director, who would cast him in five movies, said he liked having Ford around because he could figure out how to do just about anything: “I’ve seen him pick up a hammer and fix a set when the construction man’s not there.” Another praised “Harrison’s rigor and practicality…his carpenter’s approach to acting.”

And during the long stretches when he wasn’t acting—“there was a period of eight to ten years when I had three acting jobs”—Ford was accumulating social capital. He built bookcases for Joan Didion, a deck for Sally Kellerman, a recording studio for Sergio Mendes, and around Hollywood—an everybody-knows-everybody kind of town—he became known as the “carpenter to the stars.”

Most famously, in the mid 1970s, Ford was building “an elaborate portico entrance” at director Francis Ford Coppola’s offices, where Coppola’s friend George Lucas was leading casting meetings for Star Wars. Though Ford had a small part in Lucas’s American Graffiti, Lucas had sent a memo to the actors’ agents telling them not to bother with auditions—he wouldn’t be casting anyone from Graffiti in his next project. “So there I was kneeling on the floor in my carpenter’s belt, working late one night,” Ford said, “when I was asked by George if I would read with the other actors—just as a favor. There was no indication that I might be considered for a part in the film.” That night and the next, “I read with more than three hundred actors. And weeks later, they asked me if I wanted to play Han Solo.”

Read more → “Forms of Capital, Making Tea, A Missed Guess, A Cinderella Story, What Fortune Favors, and A Currency Like Gold”

Improving flexibility

If you are looking to improve your flexibility, it doesn't matter how often you stretch each week. What is important is that you aim for up to ten minutes per week for each muscle that you stretch. So, for example, you could stretch each muscle for a little more than one minute a day, or five minutes twice a week. The amount of time you should spend stretching will ultimately depend on how many muscles you need to stretch.

Read more → “Improving Flexibility Is Surprisingly Easy”

Sleep before midnight

Plenty of evidence suggests the human mind functions differently if it is awake at nighttime. Past midnight, negative emotions tend to draw our attention more than positive ones, dangerous ideas grow in appeal and inhibitions fall away.

Read more → “The Human Mind Isn't Meant to Be Awake After Midnight”

The earworm eraser

The Earworm Eraser is a 40-second audio track designed specifically to squash earworms — a song on repeat circling around and around in your brain that can't easily be shaken off.

Read more → “All I want for Christmas is ... help getting this song out of my head”

Note: I watched an episode of Evil about a very bad, no good earworm and I’ll never think of earworms the same way again. If clicking on the earworm eraser leads to you joining a sinister army or getting possessed in some way then I’m very sorry.

Time travel news update

[Mathematician Lorenzo Gavassino] says the laws of physics may not forbid [time travel] but if it is possible, these laws lead to some outlandish consequences, one of which is that any human who made the journey would not be able to remember it. The laws of physics suggest this person’s memory would be wiped clean as soon as they returned to the present.

Read more → “Mathematician Reveals Strange New Enigmas for Time Travelers”

The world’s longest diary

For 25 years, Robert Shields documented every five minutes of his life with obsessive dedication. The former minister and English teacher from Dayton, Washington produced what may be the world's longest diary— 37.5 million words that filled 91 boxes.

Read more → “A man sacrificed sleep for 25 years to create history's most obsessive diary”