Celebrity Mount Rushmore

The Celebrity Mount Rushmore For October 11–15

What four humans made lots of news this week?

We are starting a new weekly feature here at the Will Leitch Medium Experiment. It is a look back at the events of the week by focusing on five human beings of particular note. It will hopefully be informative and amusing but will likely be neither. Think of it as the Mount Rushmore of this week, if they carved statues on mountains every week, based on short observations on the news. Last week featured Dawn Dorland, Kyrie Irving, Sonya Lawson and Carlos Watson.

Email me your suggestions at williamfleitch@yahoo.com.

Ben Affleck. The website Vulture — which, full disclosure, I write for regularly, though you should know that generally speaking the vulture is my least favorite bird, and that’s accounting for the fact that I’m not a big fan of birds in the first place — has run a series of fantastic pieces about Ben Affleck this week; my favorite is Alison Wilmore’s feature about his best role as an actor ending up being playing himself. Affleck is having another moment right now, thanks to his parts in George Clooney’s The Tender Bar, his secretly awesome performance in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel and, of course, his We Love the ‘90s! rekindled romance with Jennifer Lopez. I don’t really have a lot of thoughts on that tabloid-manna romance — I sort of missed it the first time around, truth be told — but I do want to note the above picture of a young Affleck, back when he was known as much of a “writer” as he was an actor, sitting shirtless, with a cigarette in his mouth, in front of a typewriter. I smoked for nearly 15 years, have written literally millions of words in my adult life, have had many photographs taken of myself (though obviously much fewer than Affleck) and will confess to occasionally being shirtless, though very rarely with a photographer in the room. But those four circumstances have never converged on each other at the same time in the way they somehow did for Affleck in the above picture. There is no way he has ever used that typewriter.