“You can put it on the record: I’m definitely not the best wire walker in the world. But as far as business goes? I’m up there with the best for sure.” Buzzfeed’s Steve Kandell on Nik Wallenda: The Wal-Mart Of High-Wire Walkers. (I think I’ll stick to social media for my acts of self-promotion.)

+ The New Yorker’s John Seabrook: “Among the stranger aspects of recent pop music history is how so many of the biggest hits of the past twenty years — by the Backstreet Boys, ‘NSync, and Britney Spears to Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and the Weeknd — have been co-written by a forty-four-year-old Swede.” (In case you were looking for someone to blame.)

+ GQ’s Nathaniel Penn on the untold story of the Texas biker gang shoot-out. “Nothing I’d seen in the Marines had really prepared you for that.”

+ Vox: The nudists, doctors, and true believers who built vegetarianism.