Watches, Stories, & Gear: Tim Cook Steps Down, a James Brand Favorite Gets an Upgrade, and Amazing Photos From Artemis II

“Watches, Stories, and Gear” is a roundup of our favorite content, watch or otherwise, from around the internet. Here, we support other creators, explore interesting content that inspires us, and put a spotlight on causes we believe in. Oh, and any gear we happen to be digging on this week. We love gear.

Artemis II Flyby Photos

It’s easy to plunge oneself into the nihilism that is our current political landscape, but the photos taken during the Artemis II mission offered something of an unfamiliar sensation upon viewing them. What was it…I can almost put my finger on it…oh yeah, a sense of hope. 

Taken during Artemis II’s seven-hour flyby around the Moon on April 6, these images show the lunar far side in remarkable detail, along with an in-space solar eclipse. While, of course, this feat in itself is impressive, there was something else that seemed to touch the hearts and imagination of us back on Earth – a trust in science, a camaraderie with our Canadian neighbors (one of the astronauts on board was Jeremy Hansen with the Canadian Space Agency), and a change in perspective that, no matter what’s buzzing in the news cycle, we really are just a little blue marble rolling around the universe.

Beef, Season 2

Netflix’s original series Beef is back for a second season, garnering similar critical acclaim as its first. This season, we meet an all-new cast, including Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Charles Melton, and Cailee Spaeny, and an all-new drama, focused both on economic and generational conflicts interacting against the drumbeat of dark humor that Lee Sung Jin can execute with a surgical precision into his dialogue and plotlines.

As this Deadline piece notes, Lee used his real-life experiences – from emergency room wait times to class distinctions at country clubs – as inspiration for this season’s Beef. But the themes of money, status, and age reach well beyond Lee’s own experience, giving the show a broader resonance. It’s my belief this is the secret sauce of the show: with so much of our world not clouded in the automated, curated, almost sterile world of AI, it’s nice to watch something with a little grit, a little emotion, that is anchored in a reality that we’ve all experienced, whether we wanted to or not.