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THAT'S-A TOMATO-Y CARBONARA

A Newspaper That Decided To Provoke Italians, And More Of This Week's 'One Main Character'

Molly Bradley
Molly Bradley
A Newspaper That Decided To Provoke Italians, And More Of This Week's 'One Main Character'
This week we've also got a NIMBY athlete and a YouTube influencer whose content of the week was curing blindness.
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Every day somebody says or does something that earns them the scorn of the internet. Here at Digg, as part of our mission to curate what the internet is talking about right now, we rounded up the main characters on Twitter from this past week and held them accountable for their actions.



This week’s characters include a NIMBY athlete, a YouTube influencer whose content of the week was curing blindness and a newspaper that decided to provoke Italians.



Friday

Stephen Curry

The character: Steph Curry, pro athlete, Bay Area resident, hesitant NIMBY

The plot: Stephen Curry, pro basketball player and multiple time NBA Championship winner, and his wife Ayesha Curry, an actor, author and cook, took time out of their busy schedules to email their city reps(?) and asked them to either change the plan, or if that wasn’t enough, make a literal fence tall enough to block peoples’ sight lines into their property.



The Currys might be wildly successful on court and on camera, and even though they live in an area with absurd levels of wealth, where the median home price is a cool $7.4 million, it’s hard to see them sinking this shot. Do the Curry’s have enough clout to cancel a project? I don’t think so. But they will fight tooth and nail to get a higher fence on someone else’s dime.


The repercussion: Housing and real estate reporters don’t mess about, so expect this saga to drag out in the press as and when we get updates from local meetings, email chains and protests. Meanwhile calling yourself a NIMBY is catnip for NIMBY-Twitter.


 

Adwait Patil




Sunday

MrBeast

The character: MrBeast, the biggest YouTuber currently, and a man who loves to cure the blind

The plot: MrBeast put out a YouTube video in which he paid for the surgeries of 1,000 people with eye problems, and the internet got into a very large tiff about it. Was it good or bad that he did that? Was it a selfless act or a selfish act? Is it true that half of all the blind can be cured of their blindness? Clearly there was more going on here than meets… the eye.



The repercussion: We’re not sure where this debate is going, or where it came from, but a lot of people have thoughts. Like, A LOT of people chimed in to figure out if MrBeast was the good guy here or the bad guy. Is it our healthcare system and capitalism that needs the angry spotlight, or was it MrBeast himself? You decide.


                  

Jared Russo




Monday

The New York Times

The character: The New York Times, daily newspaper, desecrator of Italian dishes

The plot: We all know how protective Italians are over their recipes — they don’t like them to be messed with — and I’m by no means a traditionalist when it comes to food, but even I can agree that this “carbonara” recipe from the New York Times is pretty much sacrilege.



That’s right: they’re suggesting putting tomatoes in carbonara. Except then it isn’t a carbonara at all, it’s some other tomatoey pasta dish — which is fine, probably yummy, but it’s not a carbonara.


The repercussion: People on Twitter called NYT out for their terrible culinary take — which, for the Italians among them, appears to amount to desecration of the worst kind. Surely the NYT saw this backlash coming?



Darcy Jimenez


———

Read the previous edition of our One Main Character column, which included a self-appointed turnstile cop, a woman all for stigmatizing large breasts and a style guide with a well-meaning but slightly perplexing piece of terminology advice.

Did we miss a main character from this week? Please send tips to [email protected].

Comments

  1. Dennis Carwyr 1 year ago

    Most of the Mr. Beast ones are not making Mr. Beast the "One Main Character", but instead making the US "healthcare" system the OMC.

  2. jonnyflash 1 year ago

    How can anyone criticize the NYT recipe section without bringing up the greatest culinary disaster of all time? Green Pea Guacamole. NEVER FORGET https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015047-green-pea-guacamole

  3. John Doe 1 year ago

    Giving away $1M in a method that earns you $2M is not charity. It is business.

  4. Lozdog Hotdog 1 year ago

    This was a terrible episode of Digg's One Main Character. I love this column and this one was the first one to annoy me.

  5. Ghazi R. Haddad 1 year ago

    From what I know, Italians are the biggest community in the US. So be careful, if they get angry, they'll react negatively.

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