While it’s easy to forget in these difficult times, one thing that the average person really loves is uniting around a common cause. This is hard to do with something as divisive as politics, or sport; these only end in arguments. It has to be simpler than that. What we need is a single-minded man on a mission that almost anybody can support. We need a man eating an unholy amount of rotisserie chicken. 

This hero that we didn’t know we needed was @AlexiconTom, who in early October shared with the world his goal of eating an entire roasted bird every day for forty days (he was then on day 11). A test of will that was like a reverse Temptation of Christ, Twitter users found themselves backing his challenge with little understanding of why it suddenly meant so much to them — apart from the fact that many found the guy hot. The whole thing culminated in a public eating of the fortieth chicken on Sunday, at an abandoned pier in Philadelphia. Once the deed was done, celebration ensued both on and offline. Those animals did not die in vain.