For much of the month of June 2023, David and Daniel Hulett sat in their parents’ basement in Virginia throwing five-cent coins in the air. First David would flip his nickel. Then Daniel would flip his nickel. They were trying to get the coins to land on their edge, an occurrence they knew was vanishingly improbable, but not impossible. This was their work.
After three or four days, doubts began to set in. “When you’ve been doing it for so long, you’re like: the next one has to be it!” says Daniel, 26, the elder and generally chirpier of the two. “You get really optimistic. And then it doesn’t happen and you feel like the world is ending. It’s almost physically painful. You get messed up.”
