Hi!

Earlier this week, Hank Green shared a YouTube video about the dire wolf that was not-quite-rescued from extinction. (If you want to learn more about that, watch the video!) He promoted his fantastic new newsletter, “We’re Here” — which I’ve guest-written some trivia for a few times — just under 10 minutes into the video. And that led a lot of people to Now I Know. If you’re new to the list, welcome! If you’re not, hi again! 😀

The mission of Now I Know is to bring a little bit of joy to your inboxes each weekday by tapping into our sense of curiosity. From Monday to Thursday, I bring you some quirky, random, fun facts and the story behind them. On Fridays, it’s a lot more open-ended, but still random. With all these new readers coming in, I figured now is a good time to reintroduce myself to all of you, and a great way to do that is through fun facts (and mini-stories behind them) about me.

1) I have a voluntary nystagmus.

Sounds scary, but it isn’t. It just means I can vibrate my eyes on command. (According to a paper from 1978, about 8% of the population can do so.) I definitely have fun with it — it’s really fun to wiggle your eyeballs when someone is staring you down, for example. But my favorite is this weird “magic trick” I came up with just a few months ago.

My kids had some friends over — all teenagers — and I don’t know how we got on the topic of magic tricks, but I came up with this one in the moment. I took a metal fork out of the drawer and held the flat end. I told my son’s friend that if he grabbed the pronged end at the same time, electricity would flow through the fork from him to me, causing my eyes to shake. He didn’t believe me but when he grabbed the prongs, sure enough, my eyes shook. When I let go (it’s hard to see when he lets go, as my vision shakes when my eyes do), the eyes returned to normal. He and the other kids looking on were surprised, to the point where he asked that we reverse the forks to see if his eyes would shake. They didn’t, I came up with some unlikely explanation (not enough electricity was flowing from me, or something), and then I replicated the “experiment” with another one of my kids’ friends. My kids — who knew what was going on — were laughing, but their friends were amazed. I’m still not sure if my kids let their friends in on the joke.

2) My forehead is in a YouTube video with over 25 million views.

The video is “Share it Maybe,” Cookie Monster’s parody of “Call Me Maybe.” If you skip to about 11 seconds in, you’ll see a guy in a blue shirt on the right talking to two women. That guy is me but all you can see is my forehead (and my shirt, I guess).

I’m in the video because it was my project. I worked at Sesame Workshop, the non-profit behind Sesame Street, for a decade — I was the first dedicated social media lead and ended up running digital marketing and communications there before I left. One of my early wins was sharing a tweet from Cookie Monster (you can’t really let him too close to the keyboard, as he’s prone to eating it) riffing on Carly Rae Jepsen’s song. It had a brief viral moment and I used it as proof of concept, taking it to our production team and advocating for a full-on parody music video. It excited a lot of people at the company and after a few weeks, we shot the video above. Almost everyone in the video was a Sesame employee at the time, and it was filmed in the company’s offices.

Today, I have on my shelf a piece of a cookie eaten (well, except for that piece) by Cookie Monster.

3) I’ve never eaten bacon, a cheeseburger, shrimp, or lobster.

I keep kosher, mostly. I don’t eat patently non-kosher foods like the ones above, nor do I eat non-kosher meat (including chicken). I’ll eat non-meat meals that many observant Jews wouldn’t eat — for example, I’ll get a slice of pizza at a non-kosher restaurant. My level of kashrut is common among Jews of my age who grew up conservative (and to be clear, “conservative” is a level of Judaic observance, not a political term in this context).

I have, however, accidentally eaten calamari — something which is clearly not kosher. I can’t remember where I was, exactly, but there was an open food bar and I either missed a label or the calamari wasn’t labeled properly. I thought they were onion rings.

They most definitely were not, and it took me a while before I could eat onion rings again. I’m a big fan of onion rings, too, so that was definitely a downer.

4) I’ve been the New York Mets Designated Driver of the Game four times.

I’m a die-hard Mets fan and I collect Mets hats — I’m wearing one as I write this. Most years, I go to a couple of games at least, but rarely more than five. I’ve probably been to only about 50 to 100 games in my life, and likely on the lower end of that range. And yet, I’ve gotten my name on the screen via the Designated Driver of the Game content a few times. I have — or, more accurately, had — a trick. But first, here’s photographic evidence of one of my victories.

The Designated Driver contest is kind of silly. If you pledge to not buy any alcoholic beverages, they give you a voucher for a free fountain soda. You also are entered into a larger contest — they pick one name at random (maybe) and that person gets their name on the screen and a Mets polo or windbreaker or something, ironically with (at the time) a Budweiser logo on it also. The first three times, I entered for the free soda. And I won the bigger contest two of those three times.

It didn’t take me long to figure out why. First, very few people entered. You have to go to a kiosk that isn’t well advertised in order to enter and get the drink voucher, and most people won’t bother (especially if they’re going to buy a beer). Before COVID, they gave you a paper wristband so vendors wouldn’t sell you beer, making the contest even less interesting. So I was already up against a very small number of competitors.

And then my superpower came out: I have a very short name. Nine characters, including the space. Why does this matter? At the time, to enter the contest, you had to fill out a paper-and-ink form at a little kiosk that few people knew about. And the form was simply not designed well. You had to provide the team with a ton of information — your name, your seat assignment, your driver’s license number, your phone number, and probably more. There wasn’t a lot of room for any of this and the person at the kiosk rarely checked to make sure the information was legible. I wrote my name very clearly; most people just scribbled. I think the person selecting the winner just went for the easy-to-read (and spell) name. I’ve won four times and my brother won at least once, so it makes sense, right?

Post-COVID, the form is now wholly online, and I haven’t won since. 😢 But I have reason to believe that the contest isn’t quite a random selection. Last week, a guy named Pat Beers won — and he won last August, too. My name, it seems, is not as super as his.

5) I’m a non-practicing lawyer who came up with a ridiculous argument my first year out of law school which, surprisingly, worked… until the Supreme Court rejected the argument a decade later.

I shared this story with Now I Know readers last month, but if you’re new, and you’ve read this far, you can read that whole story here.

Please to meet you all! Let’s jump to the Week in Review! (Well, here are some ads first.)

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: The Cat That Inherited Millions: Lucky cat. But it has no idea.

Tuesday: When You’re Better Off Skipping a Court Date: I had mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, the guy did what he could to get to court in time for his hearing. On the other hand, that’s not the way to do it!

Wednesday: The Gross, Metallic Secret Behind America’s Westward Expansion: Lewis and Clark and a lot of pit stops.

Thursday: The Church of the World’s Oldest Tennis Ball: There’s a good chance this one hit your spam filter due to a technical issue (long story, and to be honest, I don’t really understand it anyway). But good news! If you click this link to read it instead, you’ll never know that I accidentally put the Lincoln Catherdal — the church in the story — in London, not Lincoln, England. Oops! Thanks to the dozens of you who corrected me.

Also, a fun fact I missed (!!): The Lincoln Cathedral the world’s tallest building starting in 1311, when its spire was finally completed. It held that title until 1549 when its spire collapsed. Thanks to reader Steve L. for sharing this!

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “The Great AI Art Heist” (Chicago Mag, 26 minutes, March 2025). Generative AI is allowing lay people to create things we couldn’t otherwise. But those machines are being trained off the work of artists,a nd artists often don’t have any recourse against the appropriate of their work. Can software help them fight back?

2) “Nearly 200 cows disappeared. The case remains cold.” (Washington Post/gift link, 9 minutes, April 2025). Here’s the opening:

The first report was filed just before Thanksgiving. Twenty-nine cows and calves, a rancher told a state agriculture official, hadn’t come home.

One week later, three more reports from three other owners: 46, 38 and 31 head of cattle, all gone. Three days after that, rancher Kelly Burch also alerted authorities. She had counted her herd and come up 43 animals short.

“I have this cow, but not this calf. Or I have this calf, but not this cow,” said Burch, whose family has run cattle on the same swath of public land for 106 years. “Something’s not adding up here.”

All 187 missing bovines had spent the warmer months grazing thousands of acres on the high Uncompahgre Plateau, rugged country where some animals always fall victim to predators, illness or weather. But never this many and not without leaving lots of carcasses behind. Also unusual: The vast majority were calves.

Ranchers and local authorities suspected they might have a modern-day case of cattle rustling on their hands.

3) “Don’t Think. Just Solve.” (New York Times/gift article, 5.614 seconds?, March 2025). This is a story about a guy who solved a Rubik’s Cube in 3.13 seconds, a record. And it shows how he did it, not that it’ll help you do the same.

Have a great weekend!

Dan