Journos: Recent Episodes
Stephen Jackson and Brandon R. Reynolds
A stream-of-consciousness news podcast exploring the big, little, and unexpected stories that shape our absurd world.
We did our first live show! It was a bold evening of truths revealed and improvised scenes conjured as if by magic from the rude materials of current news. We thank our friends Mark Gagliardi, Hal Lublin, Annie Savage, and Janet Varney, and all the folks at the Elysian Theater. JOURNOS plans to do it again soon. You cannot want to miss it.
And so — in this episode, Brandon and Stephen talk about the Olympics and its obsession with all the hot young new sports, including ... drugs? Then it's on to Iraq, where militias are waging war on the United States through ... KFC.
Finally, we look to the near future, where Japanese scientists promise we will soon be able to grow new teeth, perhaps with the help of robots with living human skin. The future is very ... bodily. But the present! The present is all about breakdancing, fried chicken, and other matters of geopolitical importance.
NOTES
Breakdancing rules // Pole-dancing? // Drugs Olympics!!! // KFC attacks // Fast food in the Middle East // Thomas Friedman's McDonald's theory... // ... And why it's a dumb theory // Whataburger to the rescue in Texas // Find a location near you // The Waffle House Index // Even FEMA trusts it // Robo-skin science // An army of Chinese robots ... to help us
Big news! JOURNOS is doing its first live show! If you're in the LA area, come out and see us Wednesday, July 10 at 7:30 p.m. at the Elysian Theater! We'll be taking the stage to make the dumb news smart and the smart news dumb.
And we won't be alone, because we'll be joined by some improviser friends — Mark Gagliardi, Hal Lublin, Annie Savage, and Janet Varney! to create scenes out of our Live Journalism. News leads to improv, which in turn inspires the next news story. It'll be a true stream-of-consciousness experience!
Check out all the details and buy tickets here! Do not delay! We'll see you in July!
In this episode, we dive into a story about panda bear diplomacy and how the US almost lost one of our cutest assets. Then we genuflect about the possibility of having our first Millennial saint, a young man who built a website for miracles practically in the Web 1.0 days and who, after his death, may well have inspired some miracles himself.
We dig deep into issues of faith and geopolitical animal husbandry. Prepare yourself by praying (or voting) for whatever lights your candle.
For years, rear view mirrors have urged us to be aware that "objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear." And if you think about it, that's a pretty heady statement for a piece of automotive equipment -- reminding drivers that nothing in reality is exactly what it seems.
That was certainly the case for a bunch of despondent youngsters and their families in Glasgow, Scotland, upon entering what was billed to be an interactive, mind-bending, immersive Willy Wonka experience. Instead, the tots and weary parents were faced with something much more reminiscent of a meth lab.
A wonka-style Fyre Fest? You better believe the comparison was drawn.
Around the same time, across the pond, a larger discussion of business liability was discussed in the Supreme Court. The subject? Section 230, a "sword and shield" sort of law that protects companies like Facebook and others from liability based on what people say on their platforms, and provides them with the right to boot folks off of their platforms at their discretion. But perhaps what's most interesting about this story is its inability to be neatly placed in either a red or blue box, politically speaking. Either way, experts are saying that the Internet as we know it hinges upon the sanctity of this law.
So hop on in this haunted gondola ride to the twisted chocolate factory that is this episode of JOURNOS, decide for yourself if this section 230 thing should go the way of a greedy child turned into a blueberry (rolled back) or protected, like a whimsical chocolatier in a funny hat.
NOTES
E! News Clip on Wonka Fest//Fyre Fest Clip//NYT on 230//NPR on 230//Solid Primer on 230//Biden and 230//HBR on 230//ScotusBlog on 230//NYT on 230...in '96!//FOSTA-SESTA
It's a new year, and at least one of us at JOURNOS is celebrating Dry January. But what is this strange holiday? What are its origins? And how are booze brands evolving to adapt to the selfish preferences of those who forswear drinking for an entire month?
The hard seltzer White Claw offers some answers here, as it unleashes a zero-alcohol product, turning its seltzer into ... seltzer. It is an absurd miracle of form following function.
... Much like the second story we tackled, about how the lifeforms in the emoji kingdom don't match the biodiversity of the actual world. Is this a problem for our understanding of the natural world? An impediment to modern communication? Or should we leave ecology out of emoji and just stick to the ever-useful eggplant?
We get into these topics with a surplus of sobriety. In this episode, we promise less slurring ... plus, the ability to legally drive anywhere!
NOTES
Where Dry January came from // More people gettin' dry // Who's drinking worldwide? // Is Dry January good for us? // White Claw is very proud of White Claw // The Washington Post considers the value of zero-alcohol booze // The emoji biodiversity research // Extinct emoji and endangered emoji // Emojination // What's the most popular emoji?
We're introducing a new feature here on JOURNOS: a sort of journalism detective agency. You've got a question, we do journalism on it and find the answer.
(I should say that the term "do journalism on it" has had a mixed reception.)
Our first question comes from friend and guinea pig of the show, Janet Varney, who asks a pretty simple little question: "What is consciousness?"
Brandon & Stephen hunted far and wide and interviewed a couple of experts about theories of consciousness, the hard and soft problems, whether you can communicate with people in vegetative states, and more.
And then we talked to Janet about it and got deep on how these theories affect our view of ourselves, our world, and shine some light on what version of reality we'd all prefer.
Get ready to think about how we talk about thinking, and what we think we're talking about when we talk about what we're thinking about. It's a trip from the neurons to the stars.
NOTES
- Timothy Bayne weighs in on when consciousness starts and name-calling in the field
- Martin Monti talks mind-reading, vegetative states, and cloning consciousness
- Finding consciousness in the brain
- The juices & jolts of consciousness
- Anil Seth says we create our reality
- ... And takes a stab at defining consciousness
- ... Which may be a fight against entropy
- The current academic-type theories
- The recent catfight over one theory of consciousness
- Some history of panpsychism
- ... And a little more history of panpsychism
- ... And more on whether consciousness might be everywhere
- Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory
- ... Is wet enough for quantum
- You're never far from Buddhism
Suggested new phrase for the confusing pace of modern life:
"It's like having chopsticks stuck in your brain."
Not, of course, the song (we would never be so basic). No — literal chopsticks, but lodged in such a way that you can still go about your business ... just, everything just seems a lot harder. One man unwittingly has become the symbol for this new symbol, a man who got chopsticks lodged in his brain ... and didn't even know it.
So begins our exploration of weird stories about bodily invasion by foreign objects, from houseflies to, ahem, "a whole coconut."
Which of course led to the biggest invasion story of our time: artificial intelligence. In this episode, Brandon and Stephen survey the state of AI by looking at what it's doing to journalism, from clickbait to personalized news.
Will we leave it to machines to tackle the essential chopstick stories of our time? Will that free us up to work on real stuff that's not about a whole coconut that somehow found its way into somebody's ass? Will AI really be a trusty sidekick for our biggest stories? And will Angela Lansbury be the voice of the movement?
Most importantly: Why are mummies part of like the third-grade curriculum?
As one chopstick said to another, "We're really getting up to something now!"
NOTES
Complex’s combo chopsticks/housefly story // AI usage hype // The Sports Illustrated AI shitshow, and the weird fake author profiles // What people were reading on CNN in 2022 // A big-picture look at AI and journalism // AI and media predictions // One possible model for AI journalism // Our conversation with cartoonist Ted Rall from March
Is the universe a simulation? If so, is there someone twisting the dials or is the universe a big computer running itself, a program that includes things like the coati and those sneakers with wheels in them?
It's a big question (the biggest, really), and in this episode we dig into it with Dr. Melvin Vopson. Melvin is an Associate Professor of Physics at the UK's University of Portsmouth, and he's made news for his work studying the nature of information and entropy. His conclusion? The way things work — from electrons on up to stars — looks suspiciously like how a computer might run things.
It's a fascinating and controversial idea. Is information the base layer of the universe? And does this mean there's a planet full of popular, well-known fantasy characters out there somewhere?
We expel a little heat energy into the void to figure out how real Melvin Vopson's theories might be. (And how real we ourselves might be.)
NOTES
More on the simulation idea // Melvin's Second Law of Infodynamics // The implications for genetics // The Information Physics Institute
This Spooky Season, two twisted tales ...
In the first fearsome fable, an old monster returns: drugs in the Halloween candy. Fear not, because while there are terrifying candy-looking drugs out there, they're not aimed at kids. But the familiar holiday myth is a reliable zombie, dumb yet unkillable. To address the misnformation, we dress as wet, sexy vampires and go in search of truth ... or treats.
In the second sinister story, a terrifying force develops a taste for wine: we learn that climate change will actually improve the taste of Bordeaux. (But at a ghastly cost: the taste of beer will get worse.)
In this episode, we confront the uncomfortable: that some myths retain their power no matter how much debunking goes on, and that some truths are so scary we don't want to face the nuance.
Pour yourself a glass of the future and bite down on some razor-sharp apples with us in this Very Journos Halloween ...
(Mwah ha ha ha hah!)
NOTES
- Judy Klemensrud's NYT Op-Ed
- More on the fentanyl fear
- Spooky Halloween spending numbers here and here
- NatGeo and Agence France-Presse have a similar take on the Bordeaux news
- “The weather isn’t climate change”
- “The good news on climate”
- “Why climate change is good for the world”
- Farmers may benefit from climate change
- Get ready to cruise the Northwest Passage
It's mankind versus nonhuman invaders in this episode of Journos! Stephen's big talk about pant legs gets Brandon thinking about a Washington Post story on rat-hunting that reads like a newspaper version of a snuff film ... only with rats.
What's with WaPo's obsession with the city's rats? Our sleuths dig into the last few years of coverage to sort out whether the city's paper of record really really loves rats, or really really hates them. (Seems like a cross-species frenemy situation.)
All this talk of invasion inspires Stephen to ruminate on Mexico's space alien problem. The problem turns out not to be the aliens, though, because the aliens are fake. The problem is the fabulist who somehow got into Mexico's Congress to talk about fake aliens.
And the bigger problem, as we unpack here, is that the news media is only too happy to push the "alien" part of the story without spending too much time on the "fake" part.
So, prepare your terrier for battle. This episode goes for blood.
NOTES
Washingtonian Magazine gets to the dog story first! // WaPo's rat obsession includes playing rats, video game rats, ratcatcher tips, rat czars, rat panic, heroic rats, and car-eating rats // Orkin reveals the rattiest cities in America // Reuters and NPR report on aliens in Mexico (but wait: here's the original Reuters and original NPR versions!) // WIRED, not having it // El Pais gives us Avi Loeb's support // Loeb is no joke, astronomically speaking // Harvard goes all in on Loeb's alien hunt
After some discussion of one of the lesser-known markers of climate change (sticky leather seats), we kick off this episode by introducing you to a new guest host: Hondo!
Then it's on to the question of how we endure crises. First, the unfortunate recent diarrhea incident that forced a Delta plane to turn around. Then, we talk about a recent study in the journal Science that posits the human population went through a bottleneck such that we were down to fewer than 1,300 people.
That the modern human is the product of pretty serious inbreeding guides us straight into a new segment: a game show! Stephen runs the gauntlet of "Journos in the Hot Seat" to learn all about how, after the success of "Barbie," the toy company Mattel is itself trying to evolve its products into 45 upcoming movies. (Some creative inbreeding seems inevitable.)
Join Stephen (and Hondo) in ... the Hot Seat!
In this episode — stories of small towns, starting with a moral quandary for Stephen in the smallest town of all: the open ocean(?) What would he do if a rogue otter tried to steal his surfboard?
From there we get territorial on two country songs that are topping the charts of the culture war: Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town" and Oliver Anthony's "Rich Men North of Richmond." Both songs are big conservative talking points, but while Aldean's traffics in big-city stereotypes, Anthony's is a folky class commentary, even if its policy positions are a little wonky.
Which leads us down a two-lane road to a real exploration of power in small towns: the saga of the Marion County Record, a Kansas newspaper raided by local police for reasons that sound more personal than professional. While the cops had to return what they snatched, the tale shows how small-town stories can have international implications.
Stow your surfboard, pull up a stump, and let's jam a bit about class, press freedom, and greedy sea mammals.
It's the season of unions, and we've found a union story that's nearly mythic.
In February, performers at the Buena Park, CA, location of the Spanish-chivalry-dinner-theater-experience Medieval Times went on strike. They claim dangerous working conditions, low pay, sexual harassment, and unacceptable treatment of the horses all contribute to a work environment that is (might as well just say it) medieval.
In this episode, we talk to union organizer and strike captain Jake Bowman about living out the modern metaphor of a peasants' revolt, joining a union with The Rockettes, and why it's still cool to be a knight even if life and limb hang in the balance.
Forsooth it is verily an episode about the state of labor in Ye Olde United States!
The news media is a pretty literal biz. It regularly reports on only two metaphors: One is what that groundhog does every February. The other is what the Doomsday Clock does every January.
The Doomsday Clock is that thing that has been ticking intermittently toward (and sometimes away from) midnight (AKA the end of the world) since it was created in 1947 by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a publication launched by Albert Einstein and some scientist chums after WWII to keep people informed on the risk of man-made apocalypse.
(The Bulletin has since added some categories, like climate change, biosecurity, and artificial intelligence.)
In January, The Bulletin set the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it's been to apocalypse (per the scientists calculating such things). It's because of Russia, of course.
Who would run such a grim-sounding publication? And are they extremely emo?
In this episode, we talk to The Bulletin's editor-in-chief, John Mecklin, about the dangers of nuclear weapons, the power of metaphor, how AI complicates everything, and whether editing The Bulletin is the gloomiest job in journalism ... or the best.
Get ready for the only conversation about existential risk that asks the tough questions, like whether heaven exists as a dimension beyond time itself.
Oh yeah, we go there.
NOTES
A very short statement on AI risk // ... And The Bulletin's take on that statement // Here's OpenAI's Sam Altman talking to Congress. Can you tell if he's really asking for help ... or just trying to distract some easily confused politicians?
Hold on to your brain stems: Elon's in the news again.
This time, it's because the FDA approved Musk's company Neuralink to begin human trials for its brain implants, which he's claimed will do everything from curing paralysis and autism to turning us into web-surfin' cyborgs.
But on this episode, our second-time guest, Valerie Demicheva, takes us through Neuralink's history of animal-welfare violations, which have led to investigations by the USDA and Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
We talk with Valerie about the promise of brain-implants, the questionable effectiveness of animal testing, and Musk's amazing ability to bend media coverage to his will ... perhaps through the invasive implantation of Twitter.
Meanwhile, with this episode, let us implant ideas that may enable you to move your own opinions ... with your mind.
Used to be, we had forest spirits and talking animals and whatnot. But those days are long over, and now the closest to a mythology we moderns have is celebrities — those magical sprites that materialize in a puff of self-regard and vanish in a flash of cameras. It's not Grimm, but it is grim.
The Great American Fairy Tale added a new chapter recently when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were involved in a post-gala paparazzi pursuit that the royals' PR called "near catastrophic." Since nothing seemed to have happened, it suggests that just being in the neighborhood of catastrophe might be kind of boring.
Still, the event inspired Brandon & Stephen to think about celebs in the media, and that took them to another figure of myth and legend: Florida Man. Where does he come from? Why is he always getting into trouble? And what does it have to do with the state's Sunshine Laws?
But what's a fairy tale without a twist? In this case, it's how laws designed for government transparency can be used to ruin the lives of regular citizens.
If our story has a villain, it's gotta be Gov. Ron DeSantis, "the Florida Man Who Would Be King" ... if he can just manage to shut down anyone trying to tell stories about him.
In this episode, we tell a tale of swamps and snakes, haunted reputations, the power of sunshine, and a kitten trying to get into a strip club. Gather, children!
NOTES
The Royal Press Agent speaks! // Some Florida Man memes courtesy the NY Post // And USA Today, and here and here // The police like Florida Man stories too // The problem with mugshot tabloids, also here // Louisiana's bill to put juvenile arrest records online // China loves a good shaming! // The DeSantis administration dims Florda's Sunshine Laws, also here and here and here
CLIPS
- The Royal Chase on "The Today Show"
- "Good Morning America" has a Florida Man story with a happy ending
In this episode, two stories about trying to figure out what’s on someone’s mind.
In the first, we ogle the news media's obsession over the story of a woman who may or may not have had a "full-body orgasm" during a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 at the LA Philharmonic Orchestra. The only folks who hope the music moved her to sexual ecstasy more than the press? The LA Phil, no doubt.
The story hinges on the frustrating fact that we just can't get into that woman's head, and so — speculation is the mother of titillation. But the technology to read minds may now be here, according to a new study out of the University of Texas at Austin.
Participants got fed hours podcast audio in an fMRI and had their reactions to the words and phrases recorded. When participants were asked later to think of a particular story, the researchers (with help from some artificial intelligence) were apparently able to figure out with crazy accuracy the content and actual phrases of the story.
Naturally, this took us straight into fears of LL Bean reading our minds to find out our deepest feelings on fleece, and we had to dig into the current state of research on "mental privacy."
Come with us (so to speak) and be reminded why the brain is the biggest sex organ ... and why it's a flimsy, see-through little number.
Listen to this so many times a machine can hear it in your thoughts.
NOTES
The "Orgasm Audio" is a sexual Zapruder film // The fMRI technically just reads your blood, not your thoughts // The original performance of Maurice Ravel's "Bolero" also made people a little nutty // The "Bolero" we sampled is from a 2010 Lucerne Festival performance by the Wiener Philharmoniker with conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who went on to (possibly) conduct a woman to orgasm over at the LA Phil.
Sometimes a story isn't a story at all. It's a ball that interested players use to score points in whatever game they're playing — politics, cred, likes, lols.
In this episode, we're talking about one such story.
In San Francisco, a man named Bob Lee, a tech luminary, was murdered in the early morning hours of April 4. He'd been stabbed and left for dead. It was game on for commentators in the world of tech and elsewhere, like perpetual gamer Elon Musk, who used the opportunity to criticize the city's approach to violent crime.
A few days ago, the SF journalism outlet Mission Local broke a huge story: Police arrested the alleged murderer ... and he's a tech entrepreneur who knew Lee. Other major outlets like The New York Times and Washington Post followed up on Mission Local's scoop — even if they didn't credit the site for breaking the story in the first place.
There's still a lot of story swirling around: Who is the alleged killer, Nima Momeni? How did he know Lee? How did it lead to murder? And of course, this being San Francisco, the story still gets bounced around in the blame game of crime, homelessness, and drug addiction.
Lotta bouncing.
Today, we're talking to Brandon's longtime friend and former colleague from SF Weekly, Joe Eskenazi. Joe broke the story of the arrest. He's a lifelong Bay Area journalist who many call the best reporter in San Francisco.
We have him on to talk about the case and the ways it got spun to serve certain agendas. We also talk about those very real and lasting problems the city faces, why it's so hard for the city to deal with them, and how SF is still, in many ways, worthy of the title Joe bestowed on it way back in 2009 with his story, "The Worse-Run Big City in the U.S."
That story is still well worth a read if you want to understand how good intentions, money, and a lack of accountability lead to, as has become shorthand, shit and needles in the streets.
As for the Lee case, as Joe says in our discussion, "This isn't about tech, and this isn't about San Francisco. It's about something else."
In this episode, we try to dodge the balls and figure out what the game really is.
NOTES
Here's video of the city's press conference announcing Momeni's arrest. We play a clip of SF Police Chief Bob Scott talking human nature in the episode.
In our last episode, we talked about the hows and whys of engineering dogs to look like humans, and the consequences of monkeying around with nature. That got us thinking of an interview we did back in 2021 with Suzanne MacDonald, a psychologist at Toronto's York University who studies animal intelligence. She's become, for better or worse, an expert on one species vying with humans for control of our cities: the raccoon.
In this episode, we ask whether we're creating a new, smarter species, one trash can at a time, whether squirrels have a hoarding problem, and who the biggest jerk in the animal kingdom is. The answer may surprise you (but probably not).
Plus, some reader mail ... sort of. (For the record, we're pretty thorough in our consideration of "Don't Look Up" and asteroid mining.)
Put on your mask, and dabble some food for thought in the stream of consciousness with us.
Conspiracy abounds in this episode! We consider the not-so-secret breeding programs of the elite, who have for centuries manipulated the very laws of genetics themselves to produce ... cuddly-wuddly faces that you could JUST PINCH AND PINCH AND PINCH UNTIL THEY HAUL YOU AWAYYY
Yes. This episode is about dogs. Specifically, America's newest number One dog — the French Bulldog. The Frenchie toppling the 31-year-reign of the Labrador Retriever received the kind of media treatment you'd imagine, a lot of it with the ALL-CAPS enthusiasm of the American Kennel Club's own press release (stop yelling, jeez). But look closely and you'll see everyone dancing, lightly or not, over the wheezing, snoring facts of overbreeding.
Not us, though. We look the uncomfortable truth of designer breeding right in its eerily human eyes and wonder whether we're trying to build a better Good Boy ... or letting our hubris carry us where even nature knows better than to go.
From plastic rocks to engineered pets, this week, we look at the lifestyle choices of the Anthropocene human. If there was ever an episode that could get away with peeing on your rug, it's this one. Help us squeeze its face SQUEEZE ITS FACE SQUEEZE SQUEEZE SQUEEZE AGHHHH
NOTES & EPHEMERA
New rocks, new tricks // The deeply strange history of the French Bulldog // Guest-starring Toulouse-Lautrec // Genetics-wise, there's no turning back for the bulldog // But them dogs are money makers! // Health problems and all // Including that their heads are too big for their, ahem, birth canals // Which is part of why Norway banned bulldog breeding // (Though Brandon suspects it's a conspiracy to raise the profile of the Norwegian Lundehund) // Australia also considers a breeding ban // A TV doctor confronts the fact that we're making dogs look like people // Which, let's consider the weird psychology of liking things that look like us, per a 2018 study // And which causes all kinds of social problems // Dogs as the real social network // "Dogonomics"
NEWS CLIPS
- Good Morning America
- NBC Nightly News
- Westminster Kennel Club
- Fox 26 Houston
MUSIC & FX
- Bach's Minuet
- Drumroll
- Fanfare
Future shock? Who's got future shock? In this episode, we dig back into our Official Topic of 2023: the AI Revolution.
OpenAI just dropped a shiny new chatbot, GPT-4. This delighted tech journalists, who turned a product launch into lofty thinkpieces and listicles about all the things GPT-4 can do, from diagnosing illness and generating Madonna jokes to making it easier for everybody to sue everybody.
As AI continues its siege of the white-collar, we wondered what all this will mean for artists.
So, we turned to our friend — cartoonist, writer, and general troublemaker Ted Rall. Ted wrote a piece for WhoWhatWhy about how AI companies are building their extremely profitable tech on the backs of the millions of artists and writers whose work populates the internet.
His story looks at a lawsuit brought by a trio of artists against some big AI companies. The artists contend that using their work as training data amounts to a kind of 21st-century theft.
Our conversation with Ted roams hither and yon: We talk copyright, collage, Google Books, a vacuum cleaner conspiracy, and lots of other issues facing artists and writers in the age of the all-devouring chatbot.
Is the Cartoonist Singularity nigh? Can Ted finally turn over the pen to the machines and get a bike ride in? Can we use a chatbot to write us a lawsuit to sue a chatbot?
Let us know what you think. Our chatbox is open: journos@journos.net
JOURNOS is produced by Dave Coates
In this episode, Stephen (who, by the way, used to be a high school teacher) strikes off on his own to discover what went wrong during his wayward teenage years. Well, not really. But he does track down San Francisco-based therapist Denis Barron, MFT to learn more about what makes young minds tick.
Barron has spent his career working with adolescents, and has some great insights on everything from the reasons teens do the crazy shit they do, to the apparent evolutionary benefits of ADHD. He also gives some great advice on what developmental milestones are most important for adolescent kids these days, along with some ideas around what we can all do to best support teenagers in this weird, modern world.
Oh! And if you missed our appearance on The J.V. Club with Janet Varney, in which we share some of what we learned in this interview, you can check that out here.
JOURNOS is produced by Dave Coates.
In this episode, we ask: Must a story be told? What happens if it isn't? Could we be better off?
Brandon & Stephen are somewhat boggled by the existence of a story that seems out of journalism's primordial past. Not a "man bites dog" story, but an even more ancient piece of news: "dog bites man." We consider a story about how, when dogs attack mail carriers, sometimes whole neighborhoods lose delivery service. It seems that, indeed, everything must be made into news eventually.
But — apparently not everything. From postal pith helmets, we look at a story that didn't show up in the Times, the Post, or even the cable-news networks. It's a story about how the U.S. sabotaged a Russian pipeline providing natural gas to Western Europe. Or maybe it didn't?
What's the saying? "Disinformation is better than no information at all"? (That's not a saying.)
In early February, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh published a post on Substack that set this whole thing in motion. Hersh has broken huge stories in the past — about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, about torture at Abu Ghraib — so it's just ... weird that the legacy media didn't pick it up, if only to refute it.
That's what we wrestle with in this episode: Hersh's story, why it was ignored, and how we citizens should think about and respond to stories in which we aren't sure about any of it. Turns out, it's an act of faith, and a little something we like to call ...
... brave ignorance.
Put on your pith helmet and some long socks, and let's deliver some answers to that ancient question: How do we know what's safe if we don't even know who bit whom?
JOURNOS is produced by Dave Coates
NOTES
- Seymour Hersh talks about his journalism philosophy and responds to the controversy over his latest story
- Reuters dutifully relays the government's response to Hersh's story and explains who Hersh is, while the administration digs into denials
- Not surprisingly, Russia thinks Hersh is onto something
- Here's Hersh's 2004 New Yorker story about torture at Abu Ghraib
- Here's Hersh talking Bin Laden on CNN in 2015
- Another journalism veteran puts Hersh into perspective in a 2018 NYT review of Hersh's memoir, "Reporter"
- For the curious, here are some critiques of Hersh's reporting over the years from Slate, Snopes, Vox, and a sort-of one from NYT Magazine
- Hersh's reporting of the last decade is carried by the London Review of Books — controversial in part because the stories are built on only a few, anonymous, sources
- CNS News uses the pipeline story to go after NYT ... and shill a Mediterranean cruise with Rick Santorum!
Clips you heard in this episode:
- Biden's February 2022 press conference where he says he’d take action against Nord Stream if Russia invades Ukraine (C-SPAN)
- A 2022 CNN report on the pipeline explosion
- CNN's Wolf Blitzer interviews Hersh about Abu Ghraib in 2004
- Hersh on CNN in 2013 to talk about the Syria poison gas attacks
- A November 1969 ABC News story on the My Lai massacre
- The February 2023 Democracy Now! interview with Hersh
- Ding and wave sound FX from InspectorJ under a Creative Commons license
In this episode, Brandon has an idea with multimillion-dollar potential:
Lowercase numbers!
We, humans of the 21st century, are the proud consumers of such a huge variety of products and experiences that it would make a cornucopia blush. And yet ... we're all just resigned to one single way to write numbers. What's the deal?
So, yeah, we blow our horn of plenty a bit about the creative and financial opportunities for this new invention ... before Brandon drops the inconvenient truth.
But that gets us thinking about the way cultural innovations come in and out of style, which leads us, naturally, to the announced closure of "the world's best restaurant," Noma.
Where will foodies get their reindeer penis now? ask some of the wags in the media, who wouldn't know a good fricasseed reindeer penis if it came served in a hollowed-out antler enrobed in fermented goji berries.
News of the closure did allow for some soul-searching: Is this the death of fine dining? No ... but really? Like — fine dining?
A lot of the hoohah revolved around labor conditions at Noma and elsewhere. But the more existential question lurking under all these stories, and in our own heads: Does it really matter?
Tuck in your locally foraged napkin and sit down for a mental meal with us. When the check comes, don't freak out about the price, but think about how much more interesting those numbers could be.
NOTES
FOX News always has the best comments section // Bon Appetit talks "unsustainability" // Euronews on Noma // A bit from Hulu's "The Bear"
(When you finish this episode, listen to us solving the mystery of "teenagers" over at The JV Club!)
Few have plumbed the depths of the teenage experience more deeply than Janet Varney. For 11 years, she's interviewed actors, artists, comedians, scientists, and other creative types for her podcast, The JV Club. She's amassed quite a lot of research on such things as when "a late bloomer" is just "a bloomer," and how exactly one goes about becoming an artist (pro-tip: the wandering path may be the best path, or at least the most typical one).
In this episode, we talk to Janet about how The JV Club dominated the market for the journalism of "awkward teen years" and then embark on our latest Journos-as-a-Service mission ...
... answering the age-old question: What, exactly, is a teenager?
Join us at The JV Club as we delve into that sweaty mystery, with hair sprouting in all sorts of strange places.
And! If you have your own question that needs answering, we'd love to do some journalism at you! Hit us up: journos@journos.net.
Before you head off into your weekend, do you pull loved ones aside and tell them you've accidentally polluted a rainforest, or defrauded retirees, or contributed to a massacre? If so, you might be a popular corporation or politician!
In this episode, we're talking about a venerable American institution: the news dump. If you absolutely have to tell the whole nation that you screwed up, why not do it right before everyone's off for the weekend? We're Americans! We love to grill out and forget! By Monday, we're totally refreshed and entirely ignorant of whatever bad thing you did. It's a rebirth for us, and a second chance for you.
To keep you vigilant, even on Saturdays, we look at why the news dump became a thing and how news media on the right and left like to point out when politicians on the other side try to dump their news.
We also ask a big question: how has the news dump changed in the internet age, when the news isn't limited by the publishing cycle anymore and everyone's Very Online?
To get us going, Brandon and Stephen consider the strange case of the man who drove his family off a California cliff, and why everyone was obsessed with pointing out he was driving a Tesla.
Listen in as we explain why TGIF really means "That Goof Is Forgotten."
And: Dammit, don't forget we've launched Journos-as-a-Service! Reach out with your mysteries and questions: journos@journos.net.
NOTES
- Some takes on the "Tesla driver" story from NBC News, Newsweek, FOX News, and the LA Times
- The California Highway Patrol's press release on the incident and another one for comparison
- An example of how the headline doesn't usually contain the make/model of the vehicle
- The twist! The Tesla may have saved their lives!
- Want some walk-n-talks? Here's The West Wing on news dumps, AKA "Take Out the Trash Day."
- How Meta tries to bury its news amid other news
- A subreddit on Friday news dumps
- The Associated Press on a Saudi mass execution
- And, the heartwarming story of how a volcano was only trying to create more of Los Angeles
How hard is it to have a conversation these days? When it comes to politics, it is very, very hard. It ranks just below "Talking about your grandparents' sex life," according to an official totally made-up Journos survey we just conducted.
So! We need to have a conversation ... about how to have a conversation. The kind that advances civilization rather than one that ends with tears and sharpened sticks. (This is even hard for people who are supposed to be on the same side!)
To talk about civil discourse, we invited Mark Gagliardi & Hal Lublin onto the show. These two are the debate professionals of We Got This! with Mark and Hal, who for more than 400 episodes have settled eternal queries like: what is the best mustard? or who is the best MCU character?
We talk to them about what makes a good debate, confronting your biases, and how to be morally serious while joking around.
AND! In this episode, we launch a new initiative:
Journos-as-a-Service!
What is it? We're offering our journalistic services to podcasts and civilians alike! Got a question that needs answering? a mystery that needs investigating?
We can help. We're like a detective agency that turns the search into a good story.
Got something for us? Email us: journos@journos.net.
Let the sleuthing begin!
It’s the last episode of 2022, and in the spirit of auld lang syne, we’re taking it all the way back to the 9th millennium BCE, to a region found in modern-day Turkey. That’s because it’s there we find what archeologists and artsy types are calling the “oldest known depiction of a narrative scene.”
But watch out — this neolithic masterpiece is a bit NSFW! Carved into a stone bench in an area likely used for rituals of some kind, cheeky enthusiasts can gaze upon a composition consisting of “a squatting male figure holding a rattle or a snake against a bull, while the right shows a male figure in high relief holding its phallus as leopards approach from both sides,” per ARTnews. It’s a tense and steamy scene that's likely meant to reflect the changing view of our place in the world as we transitioned from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more sedentary one defined by agriculture, and eventually, what starts to look like modern-day civilization.
But oh, how far we’ve come. The year 2022 has also seen its fair share of advances in content creation, perhaps most emblematically defined by the rise of software that produces AI-generated images, narratives, corporate copy, B-minus level code, and soon, 3D objects. So, as the year comes to a close, we decided to take a look at what this watershed technological moment might mean for the year 2023 and beyond.
It’s hard not to wonder how that plucky stone-carver 11,000 years ago would react to a bonkers hellscape generated by DALL·E 2 in a matter of seconds. Perhaps he’d worry about his job security as a humble stone carver, as many of today’s copywriters think that they’ll soon be replaced by ChatGPT. Or maybe he’d just shrug, take his union-mandated 10-minute break, and get back to the important business of etching phalluses into benches that will one day be enjoyed by archaeologists, art critics, and tourists alike.
Happy New Year, from all of us at JOURNOS.
JOURNOS is produced by Brandon R. Reynolds and Stephen Jackson.
As stories go, it was pure, uncut catnip to news media around the world: San Francisco, that bastion of liberal values, was giving police the go-ahead to use KILLER ROBOTS on its enlightened middle-class citizenry of young moms, tech bros, recent immigrants, and people who like to drink coffee on steep hills.
There was hand-wringing on the left and hand-wringing about the left on the right. The majority of stories we saw were about as deep and nuanced as a 1950s sci-fi movie. "Robots! The chrome menace strikes!"
But: What about the rest of the military-grade weapons the police have access to? What about the law that made the whole story public in the first place? What about local journalism?
To dig into these issues, we turned to Will Jarrett, a data reporter for SF nonprofit news outlet Mission Local. Will reported on the Killer Robot Thing when it was only a twinkle in a policy draft, through the blow-by-blow of the Board of Supervisors vote, on up to when it all petered out (for now!), as supervisors balked at the public uproar.
It's a great conversation: We talk about public interest vs. officer safety, transparency laws, the difference between a robot and a drone, and whether the whole circus was, in fact, a success for democracy.
Curl up with your loved ones by the fire and listen to a story about how the true meaning of the holidays may well be ... The Chrome Menace!
Comments? Story ideas? Want to say hi? Email us at journos@journos.net.
NOTES
Check out all the SFPD's loot! // What's this big police noisemaker? // Some examples of basically identical coverage in The Guardian, FOX NEWS, NY Post // TechCrunch goes down the robot hole
Innovation is weird. One moment, you’re an early human spending half the day chewing raw, possibly tainted meat. The next, you’re sending your prehistoric carp back to the waiter because it “just wasn’t the same as last time.” Let’s talk about technological breakthroughs, and let’s do it through the lens of two stories that dropped, seemingly in sync, the other week.
Big news in the world of archaeological geochemistry: Scientists in Israel recently discovered evidence that humans have been cooking food for at least 780,000 years. Pretty cool, given that we previously believed we’ve been doing so for a measly 170,000 years. And make no mistake, at the time this discovery was no less high-tech than mapping the genome or — and of equal importance — the invention of the scratch and sniff sticker.
But that was then, and this is now. Just the other day, the FDA gave the FDA-OK to the folks over at Upside Foods, a startup in the business of making lab-grown meat. If you’re not familiar, this is crazy stuff, all enabled by a process in which scientists brew actual animal meat cells in a lab for human consumption. If it all works out, this could be a “learn-to-cook-fish” moment for the species, as proponents of the stuff boast that it can help with everything from saving our air to preventing the next pandemic.
And don’t get us started on what happens when the 3D-printing technicians start trading notes with the lab-grown meat scientists…
JOURNOS is produced by Brandon R. Reynolds and Stephen Jackson.
We awaken from troubled naps into the existential horror of clickbait. Two stories in particular caught our attention recently: the sad tale of the "World's Dirtiest Man" who lived and died in Iran, and a restaurant for dogs in San Francisco.
Like angry media-addicted teenagers, Brandon & Stephen ask: why were these stories even born? Is it just good old "churnalism" — press releases reformatted into news articles by overworked reporters? Or is there something more sinister at stake, like trying to distract from revolution in the streets?
We all think we know from clickbait, but do we really know clickbait? In this episode, we drill down into the deeper (lack of) meaning in fluff pieces, celebrity news, and human interest stories, and ask why even high-class dogs have to pay top dollar for flavorless food.
Take a quick transitional shower and click through for amazing deals.
Comments? Story ideas? Email us: journos@journos.net
NOTES
Identical takes on the "World's Dirtiest Man" from Yahoo, The Guardian, and Fox News. Plus, Breitbart's hot take on a dog restaurant.
Also, Iranian protests clips from CBC News, DW News, and Sky News.
Audio FX:
"Shower, A.wav" by InspectorJ of Freesound.org
"Fanfare" by bone666138
It’s late October, winter is fast-approaching, and there’s one big question on everyone’s mind: What the heck is going on with COVID? Compounding this confusion was President Biden’s declaration that the pandemic was over — despite the fact that the virus is still significantly deadlier than the flu. (This was later walked back, as the public health emergency has been once again extended through January 11.)
Quite the noggin scratcher indeed. To make sense of it all, we’re joined in this episode by Dr. Bob Wachter, a professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. In the early days of the pandemic, Dr. Wachter emerged as a trusted source of accurate information related to COVID due to his matter-of-fact, no-judgement postings on Twitter. Since then, he’s amassed a huge following and to this day he continues to live-tweet the pandemic play-by-play, leveraging his expertise and community of leading medical specialists in order to give the public some of the most accessible, fact-based insights anywhere on the ‘net.
Beyond talking about the current and future state of the pandemic (epidemic?), we also discuss the current precautions he’s taking to remain safe, what it means be both a human being and a doctor at the same time, and the nature of public storytelling in the 21st century.
Follow Dr. Bob Wachter on Twitter at @Bob_Wachter.
Let's take a look at things in places where they shouldn’t be, the illusory nature of reality, and bringing mammoths back from the dead to save the world.
First up, truck spills — the story that America just can’t quit. Not too long ago 150,000 tomatoes were strewn across the road from a big truck in California. Then — that very same week — thousands of jars of Alfredo sauce found their way onto an interstate down in Tennessee. But are stories like these just clickbait, or do they reveal something deeper about our yearning for order to prevail? Probably both. But either way, clear next Tuesday’s calendar and dive into the annals of www.truckspills.com. It’s what critics are calling “a delightful romp through Web 1.0.”
So, every time a truck spills its cargo, the fabric of reality is tested. We’re reminded that the utterly predictable can give way to absurdity in milliseconds. But what happens when we go out of our way to mess with the natural order of things?
We may find out soon enough. That’s because at least one tech startup is promising to resurrect the wooly mammoth to fight climate change. It could work — bringing back the bison population in Oklahoma was a huge success — or it could, you know, go all Jurassic Park on us. Or maybe it’ll just piss a few folks off, like these beavers did. Hard sayin’, not knowin’, since we’ve yet to “de-extinct” an animal. One thing’s for certain: A lot of money will be printed in the process.
Join us, as we take a wide-angle look at how all this weird shit fits together. Heck, a jar of creamy pasta sauce and a resurrected hairy elephant might have more in common than you think.
News from the "Wrongs Righted" Desk ~~
Adnan Syed, imprisoned for a murder he didn't commit, was released after 23 years in prison. If you've heard of Syed, it's from the podcast "Serial," which kick-started the ... trend? genre? industry? ... of longform podcasting.
But is it good journalism? After "Serial" premiered in 2014, questions arose about its accuracy; "Serial" creator Sarah Koenig's reporting focused on aspects of the story that made Syed look guilty (or just made the story look better) and ignored some crucial evidence that argued for his innocence. In the years since, there's been a lot of critique (and other podcasts) that have not only poked holes in the prosecution's story, but also "Serial" itself. And yet, now that Syed is out, all eyes will once again be pointed toward that flawed but very influential podcast, which has never corrected its mistakes.
We're getting into that today. But first, a missing person's case: Stephen is on vacation, y'all! So Brandon invited on two guests for a JOURNOS chat about the Adnan Syed case, the legacy of "Serial," and podcasting as a form of journalism.
Get deep into the weeds with Rebecca Lavoie of the podcast "Crime Writers On," and friend of the show (and sometime Elizabeth Holmes) Janet Varney, who cohosts the podcast "Truth & Justice" with Bob Ruff.
In the case of Adnan Syed, justice has been served, but it raises all kinds of questions about responsibility in journalism, the state of podcasting, and who gets to be the final authority on telling someone's story.
NOTES
A couple of true-crime podcasts get discussed in this ep, all excellent: "Undisclosed" is the one that corrected the flaws with the "Serial" story, co-hosted by Rabia Chaudry, without whom "Serial" might not exist in its current form, and without whom Syed might still be in prison.
We also talk about "Bear Brook," "Suspect," and "In the Dark." "In the Dark" is especially noteworthy since the reporting that went into that podcast was used as evidence to convince the Supreme Court to overthrow the conviction of Curtis Flowers, which says a hell of a lot about the potential of the humble podcast to make a difference.
Say what you will about the Vikings, but one thing’s for certain: They had a strong brand. So strong, in fact, that it’s easy to draw a pretty clear through line between their insatiable appetite for conquest and the relentless march of tech companies into our personal and private lives.
The only difference? Nobody back then would ever agree to a Viking's Terms of Service (ToS).
But before we get there, what’s up with Japan’s National Tax Agency, and why are they trying to get us drunk? And why is Coca-Cola hoping to tap into the collective dreamspace of Gen Z? The answer to both can be found in murky boardrooms on either side of the planet, in which bottom-lines are mandates from the gods, and are to be achieved at all costs.
It’s in boardrooms like these where we encounter modern-day Vikings, plotting and charting new voyages into the final frontiers of our minds, and even the inside (and outside) of our homes. Let’s face it — the folks at Amazon have what can only be described as Big Viking Energy™. It’s an aura readily apparent in the acquisition of two companies, iRobot (who got its start making machines for the military) and Ring (who isn’t afraid to talk to cops).
The purchase of these reflects the once-plucky online bookseller’s apparent endgame of surveilling our entire private existence. While the Roombas are busy mapping our homes and reporting back to the Cloud, the Ring video doorbells will stand sentry at our doorsteps, and perhaps catch an act of civil disobedience from time to time. Valhalla!
Of course, not everyone’s buying it just yet. But don’t worry, there’s a plan for that. And you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out what it is…
Fine. Here’s a hint: It’s a dystopian contest. (No, not that kind.)
Anyhow, grab your weird horned helmet and start rowing. It’s Viking-time people, and you might as well blend in.
For every season, there is a boogieman. Once upon a time, it might've been vampires, and your average British nobleman might've felt protected by an ornate, classy vampire-killing kit.
Ah, but times change. Boogiefolk change. Nowadays, the monster might be something more hip & modern, like wolves. Wolves! Unleashed by environmentalists! In which case, the best defense for some is to vote right. Way right. The righter the better.
The question of monsters and appropriate responses — that's what we're puzzling through in this episode. It means digging into a study with a cool name, asking why conservatives are so quick on the gag reflex, and thinking hard about journalists' own boogieman: our relevance.
Peer bravely into the darkness with this hand-crafted, finely wrought episode. It'll be a collector's piece in no time.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson. The cocktail party is catered by audio from 7by7 and KieLoKaz.
What makes life worth living? What kind of cake does the Mona Lisa prefer? What does a chair made of avocados look like?
Art, in its many forms, seeks to answer all of the above. And for years, humans have enjoyed a near monopoly on creating it. But things are changing — and fast. Here, we take a look at people, our penchant for environmental destruction, and our even stronger proclivity for creating technology that may one day wipe us from the face of the earth — or at the very least take control of creating next year’s fall lineup on Netflix.
First, what makes life worth living? We begin with a meditation on Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, spurred by the release of the first ego-melting images from the James Webb Space Telescope. What should we feel? Nihilism or reaffirmed humanism? Either way, we should probably start taking care of our humble cosmic abode. Or at least that’s what some plucky guerrilla environmental art-activists think over in the Old Country (Europe).
Speaking of Europe, what kind of cake does the Mona Lisa prefer? A few months back, one guy dressed up like grandma over at The Louvre and found out she never touches the stuff — the hard way. In an attempt to warn and admonish us of our planet-killing ways, the man physically attacked the famed woman with that weird half smile, smearing cake across her bulletproof shield. He did it in the name of the environment, as did a group of like-minded eco-Marxists who glued themselves to a couple of paintings at The Royal Academy in London a few weeks later. Methods of communication aside, they raise a decent point: Why make art in a world that might not be around for future generations?
Which brings us to our final question (and another one): What does a chair made of avocados look like? Moreover, what does an “emo sausage roll… waiting for a bus that might never arrive” look like? The answers to these queries and more are deftly proffered by the latest AI-craze to hit the internet, DALL•E — an AI art program that scrapes the world’s content to produce hellish visions of the digital subconscious. So what hath DALL•E wrought? Are artists (and for that matter, screenwriters) out of a job? It’s not clear yet, but we’ve certainly got some ideas.
Join us, and give this one an ear-gander. Heck, who knows how much longer this show will be hosted by humans at all.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather “Eagle Ears” Wilson. Illustration by Stephen Jackson.
Is this our first real "summer" type summer since the pandemic? The signs of a returned normalcy are there: people traveling, people complaining about traveling. People are even going on cruises again, which is normal, and having threesomes on those cruises, which is presumably also normal, and those threesomes are leading to 60-person battle royales of jealousy, which ... maybe we're all still a little feral.
But so to this question of "How do we come together as people anymore?" our friend and fellow journo Jenni Avins has one possible answer: psychedelic mushrooms.
Jenni wrote a piece for The Cut about the shroom as a wedding essential for some folks, and she came on to talk about who's doing it, who's selling it, how legal it might or might not be, "mushroom squires," and whether this could actually be exactly the thing that one uptight uncle might need to see that, you know, we're all connected, man.
You're cordially invited to this marriage of interesting ideas & wry asides -- no RSVP necessary. Here's your bouquet, made of only the finest in universe-reorienting blooms.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson
NOTES
Don't believe the cruise brawl story? Here's some video. // A little more on Michael Pollan and psychedelics
Proving that all the good science has already been found out and all that's left is the weird, gross stuff, Brandon & Stephen return from hiatus to tackle the recent discovery of a mite that lives on our face, where it has sex, and where it's gotten so good at having sex on our face that it doesn't know how to live independently anymore.
At a time when even humans have a hard time believing in other humans, it's somewhat heartwarming to know these little guys are going all-in on our species. Ride and/or die!
But so: adapting to new environments had us thinking about another bit of bedraggled science here at the end of some sort of cycle. Researchers asked the question of how, exactly, we're going to handle spending all this time in the metaverse, and 18 brave test subjects wore VR goggles for a week ...
Sorry, 16 brave test subjects spent a workweek in the metaverse and ... it did not go well.
Gird your face with cumbersome headgear, make some room for some mites, and descend with us into an exploration of evolution, empire, and things we'll put up with to earn a good night's sleep.
Plus: corgis.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson.
NOTES
The primordial ooze sequence was built by Brandon from audio samples by Patrick Corrà, BMacZero, DigPro120, and tigersound (under a Creative Commons license). Thanks to them for their excellent goop recording skills.
We did it! If you’re reading this, you’ve made it to the present day, and may have noticed that many erstwhile promises of science fiction have been delivered on. That's not great: Most sci-fi books and movies of yesteryear — with the notable exceptions of Star Trek and The Jetsons — spell out a blighted future for humanity, and among the most famous to do so is Soylent Green (1973), a film set in, you guessed it, 2022.
But to what extent does fiction predict the future? Or instead, does the past’s vision of tomorrow serve to inspire events to come?
Either way, it turns out that Soylent Green got a lot right. From deadly pollution to a global food shortage to the rise of assisted suicide, many of the film’s predictions were made with seemingly clairvoyant precision. And while we haven’t resorted to serving people to the proles, we are in the throes of a baby formula shortage here in America, a dilemma with undoubtedly dystopian undertones. Fun.
We wanted to properly plumb the depths of this oh-so-viridescent film, and get to the obscure bottom of whether or not fiction speaks reality into being. So, we called up writer, comedian, actor, movie buff, and Charlton Heston savant Dana Gould to help lead the way.
Dana’s preternatural understanding of old sci-fi and monster movies and experience writing on The Simpsons (also purportedly predictive) proved to be precisely what was needed to make sense of Soylent Green (spoiler: it’s people). He also helps answer the question of whether the stories we tell are accidental prognostications or words of encouragement for plucky young billionaires — egging them on to one day shoot themselves into space.
It’s a fun one. See you in there.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather “Eagle Ears” Wilson.
We begin with a mystery:
What does it mean when a pair of sexually aroused river dolphins engage in rough play with an anaconda? Science has no definitive answers, but the media — from Business Insider to The New York Times to BroBible — will happily cover the confusion.
So begins an exploration into pareidolia, that cognitive quirk where we see faces in all kinds of stuff, and "find" patterns of meaning in just about everything else. In this episode, Brandon & Stephen ask whether pareidolia applies to how we read (and produce) the news, too.
Is the announcement that SpaceX wants to land on Mars within the decade a sign of progress or of terrifying corporate control of the future? Are bodies in barrels a story of Vegas mob crime or a larger story of climate crime? And are we the only ones who missed the living political cartoon that was a rabid fox biting a bunch of people around the White House?
We wrestle a big anaconda of a question: is every story actually a "choose your own adventure" tale of variable meanings? Or are some stories, like the psychosexual hijinks of a couple of river dolphins, immune to our ability to see what we want? Are some stories too weird to be about anything but themselves?
Dive into these murky waters with us and pray you don't rub up against any strange barrels.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson.
NOTES
A message from Earth in the clouds // A handsome/scary face on Mars // Shep's mind is blown by Mars // A little more on pareidolia // A lot more on pareidolia, plus cute pics of car faces
Some interesting experiments around transportation cropped up lately:
In one, a study of big art projects painted on the streets cut down on "incidents" involving drivers and pedestrians. In another, a state called Utah lowered the legal limit for drunk driving while offering more ways for the intoxicated inhabitants of the desert to get home. The result: fewer drunk driving crashes, even as the state sold more booze.
This got us thinking: what's it look like when we design cities for the people we have, rather than the people we claim to want?
What if we go ahead and accept human faults and set up systems to adapt, rather than just punishing anybody who doesn't have the right buckles on their Puritan shoes?
Maybe we get better education or drug policy ... or maybe society itself comes crashing down. (Depends who you ask.)
Buckle your thinking shoes -- or you know what? Don't buckle anything if you don't got buckles. But do, for the love of God, think along with us as with try to find our flawed yet delightful selves.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears Wilson.
NOTES
More on Bloomberg's Asphalt Art Initiative // NYT digs into the arts groups behind the asphalt // Richmond, VA, paints the streets
Elon bought Twitter. (You may have heard.) The analysis, hand-wringing, and general worrywart-ery about how bad it might be for media has been great for media, giving journalists and pundits lots to fill up pages and airtime. And to tweet about, of course.
It's a lot to take in, but for us, it helps to think about the whole thing as a visit to a mall in a state of flux. What will happen to the sunglasses kiosks? Or the fountain where everyone chit-chats? And will an attempted government overthrow begin in the Orange Julius?
Brandon & Stephen dig into what it might all mean, from Musk's stated opinions on Twitter to whether the app will be overrun by the worst elements of the internet. We also question Musk's idea of "free speech absolutism" and dig into the United States' history of letting people say what they want ... or not. Get ready for some hot socialist goss and the wisdom of using swears as the name of your business.
Lace up your Mall Walkers (those are shoes), and let's set off at a moderately brisk toddle through the all-important, all-American topic of who can say what, and whether Gary Busey is the ultimate test of free speech.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson.
NOTES
Robert Reich thinks Elon just wants freedom from accountability // The Supreme Court and bad words // Disney, Florida, and Citizens United // Algorithms versus marginalized groups
For AriZona Iced Tea, the 99 cent price printed on the festive southwestern design of its big old cans might as well be carved into tablets lugged down a mountain. Marketing-wise, it's word-of-God stuff.
So the company's decision not to raise prices in 30 years became a fun story republished all over the place during the volatility of this inflationary period. "Billionaires Buck Economy Itself ... for the Little Guy!" is kind of the takeaway. But AriZona's founder, Don Vultaggio, knows a little marketing secret that'll keep us coming back: humans are primates.
It's true! The Iced Tea Economic Standoff sends us in search of some answers about taste itself, and where it comes from, and why we like the things we like. We talk about how our moms influence our preferences before we even have a chance to rebel, and the evolutionary origins of our love of salt, sugar, and big-ass eggs.
It's our ancient wiring that gets us into trouble, dietarily speaking. And especially so when companies know the easiest, sweetest way to a buck (or even 99 cents) makes us both obese and malnourished.
Print that on a can and gulp it down!
Some conflict in this episode: Brandon wants to talk about a new study that suggests black holes have quantum "hair" and Stephen wants to at least take a moment to discuss why the great minds behind the science didn't think a little harder about the branding of their hypothesis.
Chortling aside, the hairy black hole story is interesting to us for a few reasons. One is that, if correct, the hypothesis would resolve a contradiction at the heart of modern science — which involves whether or not anything can really escape the gravity of a black hole.
The other reason we latched onto this shaggy tale is that it got us talking about trust in science: how much of it do we have? how has it changed in recent decades? what does politics have to do with it? and is anybody really keen to let scientists put computer chips in our heads, regardless of how great the wifi is?
All this and a Very Special Quiz on Weird Science Names. We're all winners in the game of learning!
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson
Notes
Some funny scientific names // Some more funny scientific names // A fungus named for a sponge // The news media's fascination with one pop star's butt
Stephen said this episode was about "diagnostics," but no one's going to listen to an episode about "diagnostics." Even a diagnostician is going to pass on a diagnostics episode in favor of some vintage white-lady killings on "My Favorite Murder."
So! This episode is all about things infiltrating systems, which is much more interesting.
Check it -- scientists discovered that the ever-useful C. elegans roundworm, a research favorite, is naturally attracted to the smell of lung cancer. What did we ever do to deserve such a great little fella?
Also -- let's talk about the world of "ethical hacking," where companies hire sharp-eyed software engineers to break into their computer systems. It's, not surprisingly, a good career path, should you want to ditch the Bed, Bath & Beyond management track and head back to school, white hat in hand.
The timing for a career move is good, since ransomware attacks are at an all-time high ... and given the US tensions with Russia, it's not crazy to assume we'll see more hacks in the future.
All of which is much more exciting, and potentially unsettling, than "diagnostics." Luckily, Stephen also talks about goats and racehorses, so this is truly an episode with something for everyone.*
*Some conditions apply.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson. Music by Nathan "Nerthanial" Readey. Special thanks to Mike Bussing.
Well, would you? You don’t have to decide now, but be aware that lawmakers in Texas have introduced legislation to bring back privateering in order to empower citizens to seize the yachts of Russian oligarchs docked in American harbors.
Ahoy.
In this episode, Brandon and Stephen take a look at forms of protest and resistance in solidarity with and defense of Ukraine. First up is Marina Ovsyannikova, the woman who poached the state-run Russian airwaves with a message for her country’s people: “Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” Brandon then takes a look at a microbrewery in Kiev that’s turned its production plans on a dime in order to manufacture and distribute Molotov cocktails.
Over in Chicago, a shop called Citizen Brick is also making Molotov cocktails, but these are teensy-tiny LEGO versions. You can also buy a snazzy Zelenskyy mini-figure, and all the proceeds support Ukrainian relief efforts.
In Ukraine, a grassroots IT army of 300,000 hacktivists is stirring up trouble in Russia any way they can. In France, a former businessman-turned-badass broke into Putin’s daughter’s Biarritz villa and invited Ukrainian refugees to stay there. (Side note: Putin’s daughter, whom he’s yet to publicly acknowledge, is also an accomplished “acrobatic rock n’ roll star.”)
And, yes, people are going after Russian billionaires' yachts and houses. In Norway, they won’t even fuel ‘em up. Why? To start putting the screws to Putin’s cronies so that they might encourage the oft-shirtless despot to back out of Ukraine before all their fancy shit gets stolen.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather “Eagle Ears” Wilson.
Brandon's on vacation ... a cruise, actually! Which some people might consider work, but after a few dozen piña of coladas, he's feeling philosophical...
... And that's right when Stephen tracks him down to talk about, what else?, shipwrecks, because they're topical and because Stephen isn't reading the room. Still, it was interesting to talk about the Felicity Ace, that Portuguese ship carrying luxury cars that caught fire and had to be abandoned. Particularly, the viral rumor that all those Porsches and Bentleys were now up for grabs because something something law of the sea, which is not at all true.
(That's what you get for spreading maritime lore from a Twitter feed specializing in old station wagons and Chuck Norris thirst pics.)
The bigger — and more profound — shipwreck news is that explorers found Sir Ernest Shackleton's long-lost ship, the Endurance, which was right where he'd left it, at the bottom of the sea in Antarctica. Thus ends a chapter of human exploration with one more sea story...
Speaking of sea stories, Brandon can't get back to his important frozen cocktail work without regaling Stephen about his own Antarctic adventures, and some chit-chat about the Antarctic Treaty and whether we can learn anything from it so as to better share this planet with our fellow humans.
Pull up a drink and mix yourself a chair, we're ahoying!
Among the tiny relics dotting the timeline of Christian history, few items pack a bigger punch than the holy prepuce. For the uninitiated, that’s fancy-talk for Jesus’ foreskin, and the provenance and authenticity of numerous specimens purported to be the one-and-only bit of flesh have been questioned for years.
That’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg in this episode, as Brandon and Stephen pull back the layers of the holy prepuce to reveal that it may have, if nothing else, the ability to knock a few years off the penance of a wayward Italian from time to time.
But, as Stephen points out, those early Christians may not have been too far off in touting a tiny piece of Jesus’ penis as a balm in Gilead. That’s because, in these modern times, foreskins are used in fancy-pants skin care treatments — and so much more. Everyone from burn victims to those who’ve lost their eyelids can benefit from the cellular secrets locked in this prized bit of virgin tissue.
This gets our hosts thinking of all sorts of other weird, elite health hacks, from harvesting the blood of the young to preserving your brain for the metaverse to the literal holy grail: a procedure to slow the process of aging.
It’s a wild one, folks. See ya in there.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson. Music by Nathan "Nerth" Readey.
In this solo outing, Brandon talks about the big business of personalized, AI-generated music.
Companies with names like Spotify, Amazon, and Apple want to suck up all your valuable biorhythms and kick out the jams, while startups like Endel want to use artificial intelligence, and Grimes, to create a soundtrack for your mind because, as the company says, “we need new technology to help our bodies and brains adapt to the new world.”
Meanwhile, meditation apps like Headspace and Calm are recruiting celebrities and sports heroes to whisper encouragement, or deeply sensual lullabies, right into your brain.
So what are we talking about here? Possibly no less than the end of that particular kind of psychic jukebox shuffling of old tunes, random memories, and future-surfing we call daydreaming.
Is this more focused, more productive tomorrow a good thing? Or do we need the crap to keep us human?
A version of this story originally ran at WhoWhatWhy.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine loomed, Brandon reached out to his colleage, journalist Valerie Demicheva, to see if she'd be interested in writing a piece for WhoWhatWhy. Valerie talked to Ukrainians in the days and hours before the invasion to understand their feelings on Russia (and Russians) and how they were preparing.
We talked to Valerie about the people she met and how they're coping with Russian incursion. We also talk about Valerie's own history: she and her family left Ukraine when she was a child and the country was part of the Soviet Union. For her, writing the story revealed how she's still dealing with fear of an all-seeing state, and whether she can identify with the modern Ukrainian state of mind.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson.
How should we feel about city officials blasting pop songs to disperse protesters? Better than tear gas, but more disturbing that they're trying to weaponize our precious "Macarena?"
Big Brother's DJs were in effect in Wellington, New Zealand's capital — where protesters, inspired by Canada's own anti-vax demonstrations, took to the streets. The Wellington authorities' response? Barry Manilow, "Baby Shark," and even some James Blunt (at his request).
We decided to look at why weaponizing music is such a popular pastime for governments trying to assert control over public dissent ... or to break suspected terrorists.
The soundtrack of mass suppression includes your Britneys and your Meow Mixes, but police and military aren't afraid to get deep into electronica with the sick beats of a Long-Range Acoustic Device. And of course any selection of sound attacks wouldn't be complete without Havana Syndrome, which might be some sort of energy weapon, it might be mass psychogenic illness, or it might be something else entirely.
But why dwell on the negative? Stephen shifts gears to talk about the use of music for health (instead of merely crowd control or dumb old dancing). We get into some music for making pain relief, but also for light horticulture.
What we're really humming a tune about the place of things, about how taking music, or people, out of their "proper" context can threaten the whole. And that means talking about the secret meaning of dirt, and where we all belong these days.
Join Brandon & Stephen on the threes & fours ... 'cause the ones & twos ain't enough.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson. Music by Nathan "Nerth" Readey
Notes
New Zealand's COVID numbers are pretty nice // James Blunt was really in the military // More on Mary Douglas // More on protest and "dirt"
Audio Clips
James Taylor, "You've Got a Friend" // New Zealand protests // G20 Protests, CNN // Havana Syndrome, NBC News // Binaural Beats // Birds! // Hans Zimmer // "Plantasia"
In this episode, we start by reflecting on the mystery that is "Gazpacho Police." It's either a flub by Marjorie Taylor Greene, or the stunning reveal that the US Capitol Police's jurisdiction includes soups. Mistake or political ploy, it gave the news media something to freak out about, and the Right something new to fundraise around, probably.
But we're not here to talk about cold starter dishes. The MTG outburst reminded Brandon and Stephen that the government may indeed be spying on us, as was confirmed by the reveal that the CIA is indeed still spying on us. Will anyone care? Or are we still so tired of hearing about Edward Snowden that we'll just let the CIA have its fun? What's the harm? What's on streaming?
These days, we prefer our CIA to be presented to us via the boyish good looks and gun-show biceps of John Krasinski's Jack Ryan. The Amazon Prime show is coming back for a third (and fourth) season, so we had to drill down into the popularity of the most expensive CIA commercials ever. Focusing on the further adventures of "Jim from The Office" may take our minds off the fact that the show has a pretty troubling POV on places like Yemen and Venezuela.
But as long as heroic, nerdy Jack Ryan continues to bang-bang and keyboard-keyboard so winningly, we can forget about the real explosions being covered up by all the teevee ones.
Blow on your soups to warm them up, folks, because here be the real Gazpacho Police.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson.
Notes and Things
Wyden & Heinrich's press release // One redacted-ass letter // CIA and NSA contract with Amazon Web Services // The Toronto Star thinks Krasinski is "the hero we need" // The Atlantic on Jack Ryan as Reagan-era good guy // Some things to know about Yemen // A take on why the US should cut off Saudi Arabia // No but maybe for real // Venezuela isn't a Jack Ryan fan // Jack Ryan as government propaganda // Krasinski on The TODAY Show!
We've talked about Cucumber Time before: that "silly season" in summer and late in the year when the media decides not much is happening (all evidence to the contrary) and crams its news hole with frivolity.
A species of Cucumber Time is on us again: this one we call Horny Time, when outlets scramble to find stories about love and lust to fluff us up for Valentine's Day. NYT served us up a moist one about a Las Vegas airplane charter biz that rolls out the satin pillows for customers to join the Mile High Club. It'll cost you, but the pilot's privacy curtain is included.
All this talk of high-altitude frolicking taxied us over to another airline story: Southwest is finally bringing booze back, baby-baby! For those of us who carry more Southwest drink tickets in our wallets than shabby American "currency," this is fine news, at long last. Does this mean air travel is finally returning to normal? The FAA's handy tally of Unruly Passengers suggests midair mischief may be on the wane, and we can all re-stow our duct tape.
Why were we all such freaks on planes over the past two years, anyway? The wellness beat had opinions: shifting mask policy, pandemic fatigue, and, according to Spirit Airlines' former CEO ... violence in movies? Human behavior, like flight itself, is still a total mystery.
But what to do with all the flying asshats we've accrued over these two years? Delta thinks we need a no-fly list for jerks. (Delta also resumed booze service for its upper-crust, "that side of the curtain" passengers a full nine months before the bleating goats in coach, so maybe they've got some class issues to address.) Whatever the case, it could mean the next time you get crocked on Chivas and slap a flight attendant's ass, you may wake up in Gitmo.
While extraordinary rendition for sky-slobs has its charms, at least one guy, a lawyer for people stuck on the real no-fly list, thinks Delta's idea ain't great.
All this, plus Stephen's hatred of charts. Come soar with us; we got extra drink tixxxxx.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson.
"Airplane, Seat Belt Beep, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org
On today’s episode, we chat with aspiring documentary filmmaker Ronald Weaver II. Ron’s had an interesting couple of years: He’s attended over 200 Black Lives Matter and, later, Trump-related events (yes, including the one on January 6). During this time he’s meticulously captured this batshit-crazy moment in American history, live-streaming some…pretty tense moments to his thousands of followers on Instagram.
We picked his brain, fittingly, just a few days after he returned from filming those protests in Ottawa. We also hear some first-hand accounts of what it was like covering some heavily-armed events in Louisville, and ask him what a second civil war might actually look like in the U.S. (hint: it might be decentralized, like everything else these days). Throughout the conversation, Ron shares his personal journey throughout the process of getting up close and personal with today’s America, and we stumble upon a discussion of the ethics of presenting oneself as a Trump supporter in order to get a straight answer from some MAGA folks.
It’s a great one, folks. Dive in.
Oh! And you can catch up with Ron, his documentary, and all his other comings and goings over on his IG at: @rw2productions.
We talked about memes as "mind viruses" a few episodes ago, but boy, "Let's Go Brandon" got nothing on Wordle. The daily word game has become America's newest pandemic, so it was only a matter of time before someone figured out a way to spoil everything on Twitter.
So, we got to thinking about "spoilers." That led us to ideas about "controlling the narrative," which has taken some interesting forms lately:
- China changing the ending of "Fight Club" and other movies to make sure the state always wins
- American thickneck John Cena calling Taiwan a country, which pissed off Beijing, for which Cena apologized in a cringey way
- The US Left getting bent out of shape by Substack making money off vaccine skeptics and by Joe Rogan
- The US Right getting bent out of shape by light cursing and some drawings of nude mice in the graphic novel Maus
All of which proves that the stories we're telling, collectively, really matter. And thus: the irritation of spoilers.
But what if spoilers are good for us? One study suggests that spoilers actually improve our appreciation and understanding of stories — it's a Zen thing maybe: you can be in the moment without thinking about how things are going to turn out.
Speaking of endings, we spend a little time talking about the ultimate spoiler: the knowledge of our own deaths. Can that particular spoiler in fact help us appreciate life?
Rounding this out, we crunch into whether or not Stephen has any right to privacy when it comes to the ending of "Mad Men," which he is only just now watching.
The answer may surprise you.
This week, we're joined by fellow Journo Chris Roberts to talk about why it took so long for an American politician to finally smoke a blunt in a campaign ad. That man is Louisiana's Gary Chambers, Jr., and he's running for a U.S. Senate seat, and the story went all over the place, because of course it did.
Chris wrote about it, too, so we had him on to talk about using stunts to draw attention to bigger issues and why so many politicians claim to support cannabis but never smoke it publicly.
We also dug into how big business complicates the push for normalization, and why the news media can't help but make awful pot puns in their coverage. It's as awkward as watching a 1950s dad who's wandered into a sex party.
Where's weed policy going? Where's weed coverage going? And does smoking weed protect you from COVID-19? No, no it doesn't, Chris dutifully wrote.
It's a relatively pun-free episode, so roll up a sleeve and light up an abiding interest in media analysis, you mellow awesome friends.
We at JOURNOS believe that art, freed from the author, belongs to the recipient. So art can mean something particular to you, or me, separate from any authorial intention.
With that in mind, Brandon reads the "Let's Go Brandon" meme not as a political slight against President Joe Biden, but rather as a constant and enduring message of positivity and reinforcement to Brandon himself. It's uttered by NASCAR fans, Southwest airlines pilots, politicians, and an assortment of hoodies and camouflage tees, and it makes Brandon feel pretty great.
What does it all mean beyond a great self-esteem boost for at least half of our duo?
"Let's Go Brandon" started as a misrepresented chant centered around race car driver Brandon Brown, and became a right-wing meme, which then followed the career track of many memes these days and transformed into a “cryptocurrency meme coin" called LGBcoin ...
... which “allows owners to digitally voice their support for America and the American dream.”
That sounds like self-esteem all around. And we get into it in this episode, along with the market value of meme coins, whether "Brandon" is the new "Karen," and the idea that ideas themselves are using humans to propagate and evolve. So — who's paying whom, exactly?
It's a race to the finish and to the spoils go the victors. Vroom!
When the media gets a good story about a TRAIN ROBBERY, why, it's a special kind of glee. Headlines may read things like “Thieves loot freight trains in Los Angeles with impunity” but beneath the newsy professionalism is a childlike desire to write what reporters really feel about trains, crime, & policing:
"Choo-Choo's Boo-Boos Are No-Nos for the Po-Po"
In other words, some simple-ass storytelling, y'all.
Never fear, because our two intrepid news hoboes, Brandon & Stephen, dodge the bulls to hop aboard the story of these freight-train robberies in Los Angeles. Oh the boxes! So many boxes.
Who's to blame? Union Pacific points the finger at LA County's progressive District Attorney, George Gascon, for not prosecuting more people. The DA's office says it's hard to build a case since so few are caught in the act.
The news media, meanwhile, is so happy to wade through the packages that it doesn't dig down much deeper — into whether more prosecutions would help anything, or whether Union Pacific should just ... hire more officers for its police force. To actually protect the property they're transporting.
Union Pacific can certainly afford it. With revenue in the billions and big dividend increases, 2021 was Union Pacific's "most profitable year ever." So why is it threatening to reroute service out of LA? And who knew that a train could even do that?
All this narrative tension — it's enough to knock a freight right off the tracks.
There's plenty of ground to cover, so join our own Butch & Sundance to chase this one down, climb on, and steal the bullion of truth itself.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson.
This episode featured sounds from meaganlongley through Creative Commons.
In this solo outing, Brandon bravely confronts America's fear and hatred of ... the cassowary, "the world's deadliest bird."
There's a great study out from Penn State on how humans 18,000 years ago harvested cassowary eggs. It shines a light on how ancient, indigenous humans shaped their environment. News media went nuts over the bird's resemblance to velociraptors, which is a problem not just with media, but with our own dumb brains.
Brandon (again, very bravely) looks into how our evolutionary wiring makes us susceptible to fearing non-existent dangers and ignoring the really big ones right in front of us. It's a whole "conquering the wilderness" narrative.
Don't worry, he also answers the question: What bird is really the world's deadliest?
It's a real Man vs. (Human) Nature tale.
A version of this story first ran at WhoWhatWhy. Music by Nathan "The True Wilderness is Within" Readey.
When you do something wrong, what's your move? To accept responsibility, or to create a dirty little simulacrum who takes the blame while you cavort?
If you're an American company, you might go with the Mini-Me approach.
Today, we're telling two tales of bankruptcy. In the first, Cyber Ninjas is shutting down. They couldn't assassinate the will of the voters in Arizona, so they are attempting to vanish into the night, having at least pushed The Big Lie of voter fraud a little further toward this year's midterm elections.
(Not great that faith in honest elections is running pretty low right now.)
The judge called Cyber Ninjas a "piñata," which got Brandon & Stephen thinking about Johnson & Johnson's own festive atmosphere of dodging responsibility. J&J, responsible for tens of thousands of cases of cancer related to its talc products, is attempting a legal maneuver called a Texas Two-Step: split the company into two entities, and push all the legal blame on that new company. Then, declare bankruptcy and you're home free.
From here, it's a riff on companies as a kind of emergent intelligence dedicated not to human ethics, but to survival at all costs. It's a Paperclip Apocalypse, y'all, which is much less festive.
Grab your hittin' stick and lace up your cowboy boots for this fiesta of malfeasance.
On the Twelfth and Final Day of the 12 Days of JOURNOS, Brandon and Stephen reluctantly cover the story about the reality TV star who sells her own farts. Sigh. Not surprisingly, said farts are also available as NFTs. Double sigh.
All this gets them thinking about the need to invest in the collective brainpower of humanity, which has apparently dropped to an all time low. It’s time to “buy the dip” and prevent any future “fartrepreneurs” from poisoning the well of civilization any further.
How? The folks over at The Brookings Institute have an idea: The White House Brain Capital Council. It’s a somewhat radical idea that may or may not be driven by a desire to improve plebeian productivity. But if the skyrocketing price of a human fart in a jar is any indication, it might be worth a shot.
On the Eleventh Day of JOURNOS, we got ourselves a Special Guest: Elizabeth Holmes, fresh from her conviction on four of 11 charges (the ones related to rich folks, not the ones related to regular folks).
Brandon & Stephen walk through the rise and fall of Theranos, while newly minted Friend-of-Show Elizabeth looks on the bright side, including croquet with "Mad Dog" Mattis, joining a very exclusive crime club with Martha Stewart, and selling NFTs of herself making ... noises.
All this NFT talk gets us thinking about the strange world of tech investment. What's really the difference between a fortune built on made-up innovation that was supposed to be real and made-up innovation that's just ... made up.
From blood tests to mutant apes, it's a great talk with the one-of-a-kind Elizabeth Holmes about how the aura of value leads to success, or bubbles, or possibly just prison time.
You too can own a part of this episode, simply by listening.
Special thanks to the nonfungible Janet Varney for her backchannel connex to Lizzie.
JOURNOS is produced by Heather "Eagle Ears" Wilson.
Music: "Waking Up (Remix)" by Steve Combs
On the Tenth Day of JOURNOS, we’re talkin’ turkey about tech stocks, big bucks, and the jobs of tomorrow. You may have heard that Apple just received the first $3 trillion valuation in history. But you’ve certainly never seen anyone count to a trillion. Why? Would take too long, obv. Nevertheless, in an effort to demystify this astronomical price tag, Stephen walks us through a few somewhat more tangible examples to help us wrap our brains around the company’s mind-boggling market cap. Brandon then brings us down to earth with a run down of the most sought-after jobs needed in our mid- and post-pandemic world and Stephen reminds us that the billionaire class got richer (and larger) during said pandemic. Finally, the duo try their hand at predicting the next person to rise to their 10-digit ranks.
On the Ninth Day of JOURNOS, we remind ourselves that the year 2022 was first popularized in 1973 by the film Soylent Green. That vision of the future of cuisine gets Brandon & Stephen talking about other plans for how and what to feed people that isn't made of people.
Turns out one option is ... soylent, the food-replacement drink with the recommended daily allowance of misplaced irony.
But for reals, the near-future of food is wild: vertical farming, urban shrimp, upcycled coffee, plus algae, kelp, more kelp, heme, and, of course, insects ... so many insects. If the taste freaks you out, there's music that can make it sweeter.
The future wouldn't be complete without robots, of course: robots at the airport and robots loose on the streets, all designed to replace humans delivering our food.
Wrapping up this smorgasbord of weird ideas, Stephen throws his own futurist dining concept into the ... trough.
Good eatin'!
On the Eighth Day of JOURNOS, we unpack Brandon's first conspiracy: the secret marketing machinations that produce the Color of the Year. This year, a hitch: most of the colors were basically the same riff on greenish-gray. With this crack in the facade, Stephen & Brandon discuss the terrible power of the true palette-masters over at the Pantone Color Institute, which exercises considerable sway over the design and marketing choices of all sorts of brands.
Pantone's Color of the Year? A sick purp called "Very Peri!" Pantone's choice, as well as all those near-identical green-grays, was inspired this year by the psychological effects of a single ongoing event: the pandemic. The colors are meant to soothe and to inspire creativity (and per Brandon, to continue to exercise control over our built reality).
All this talk of the pandemic and mood got us thinking about a New York Times piece on the "boring pandemic" and the "mood of 2021." So we decide to kick off the year by announcing our own JOURNOS Color of 2022.
Listen and learn, but don't doubt: It's the perfect shade for your tinfoil hat.
On the Seventh Day of JOURNOS, fish rain down from the heavens into Texarkana, Texas. A Biblical tale rendered unto the news by a blessed waterspout, and a fitting end to a year of nature's oddities.
As the fishy heavens open up, we open an umbrella and do some updates to our episode on space, sea, and desert. Even though I reported on the issues with solar-energy development in the Mojave Desert, the Biden administration still opened up more desert land to those panel-lovin' freaks. The news covered the politics of the Joes Biden and Manchin, and Build Back Better, but didn't say much about the desert tortoises.
From there, straight into space, where China is all mad at Elon about his doggone satellites getting in the way of all the other junk & stuff up there. Elon's response? Space is, like, big, y'all.
Then we come back to Earth and plunge deep beneath the ocean so Stephen can get off on his precious nodules again. The New Yorker MUST have picked up on our last story, 'cause it followed up with its own take on the tale of polymetallic nodules on the ocean floor which are basically beautiful Easter eggs full of iPhone materials, apparently.
Is there anything down there other than stuff we might like? And will Nature put up with us poking around the Earth's nethers? Those are the questions of the year, and what we'll keep on thinking about into 2022, which based on current omens of fish and other afflictions will be ... eventful.
Auld Lang Syne-ing off! (Until Day Eight.)
On the Sixth Day of JOURNOS, we first look back on a ninja attack on American soil. Well, not really — but a guy in Kern County did dress up as one in September to ambush a special forces unit under a cloak of darkness. But speaking of vulnerabilities, how about that Colonial pipeline shitshow back in May? Among other things, it brought to light the burgeoning industry of Ransomware as a Service (RaaS), where organized crime starts to look a lot more like Salesforce than the Gambino Family. While the threat of ninja attack is nothing to be worried about in the grand scheme of things, the notion of a forever cyberwar certainly is. Problem is, we’re just too used to fearing The Bomb.
On the Fifth Day of JOURNOS, we sprint, dive, and slalom into the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, held in summer of 2021. We glory at the spectacle of so many controversies, from bribery and shameful resignations to a stadium sourced from endangered rainforests and the traditional procession of vomiting Australians that ends every Olympiad.
We linger voyeuristically at that other tradition: how Olympians are going to screw each other. This time around, it was complicated by cardboard no-sex beds, a utopian vision of corrugated-cardboard idealism from the 1960s that like everything these days was infected by disinformation.
The event we really gathered for, though? The conversation about athletes' mental health this year, from Simone Biles to Naomi Osaka. Brandon & Stephen wonder whether the pandemic contributed to these struggles, and maybe made it more okay to talk about them. (Certainly, more sports figures are.)
With all of us dealing with a two-year anxiety marathon, the athletes who take a pass on competition for their own good may end up being the really inspirational story of this 2020(+1) Olympiad.
Your sex-box or mine?
On the Fourth Day of Journos we check in on a Denver Area bear that, back in July, got a bucket stuck on its head. The incident made national news, and it wasn’t the only such story involving a rascally Ursus and a bucket that the media picked up in 2021. Needless to say, the bear/bucket saga was far from the most pressing issue that day.
That’s right, we’re taking a look at clickbait and why we can’t stop falling for it. Stephen looks into the psychology of it all, while Brandon pulls a few choice headlines for comparison. But what’s wrong with stupid news every once in a while? Is click bait the cure for media-informed depression? Maybe, maybe not.
One thing’s for sure — you won’t believe what happens next …
On the Third Day of JOURNOS, Brandon tells the story of three women who met over the social medium of a cheating boyfriend, bought an old school bus, and went on a road trip across the US, scattering feel-good news stories across this great nation and then creating their own content like a bunch of Johnny Appleseeds of the Influencer Economy.
Beating back our cynicism, we ask whether this is an earnest voyage of discovery, or just a good opportunity to generate some Intellectual Property, addressing thorny questions of how it's any different than travel writing of yore and whether the jorts industry is behind it all.
Then we shift gears and coast downhill into a discussion of how a generation is incentivized to broadcast their lives, one clip and NFT at a time, in hopes of monetizing its way to some new micro-celebrity middle class. Brandon wonders if we're any different, and Stephen smashes the subscribe button.
Everybody in the water hole!
On the Second Day of JOURNOS, Stephen sinks his teeth into a juicy story: What happened to the chicken tenders? Is there really a shortage, or is it just a case of price fluctuations leading to crispy, clickable headlines?
Stephen watches with cool amusement as a poorly sourced TODAY story inspires a sampling of imitators, and the occasional sales pitch. It's a game of Southern-fried telephone that leaves out essential ingredients like drought and climate change.
Meanwhile, Brandon recalls the flurry of stories in which chicken shortages were blamed on roosters not being cock enough to perform, which is maybe a cross-species kind of anti-male bias? Anyway it all ends up, as it must, in that hot feathery internet coop dedicated to all things prepper, where shortages today mean martial law tomorrow and, oh yeah, buy some gold.
We kick off "The 12 Days of JOURNOS," a collection of weird stories we loved but didn't get to, and follow-ups to those stories we did. It's short tales told through a phone call or two.
On the First Day of JOURNOS, Brandon interrupts Stephen's "Irish Goodnight" with the story of a sarcasm detector funded by the US government's DARPA. The goal? To scientifically determine if that dude on Twitter really thinks we're "so f*ckin funny" or if it's all a put-on.
We discuss the puzzles and pitfalls of one of humanity's greatest inventions — language itself, a technology so mysterious we have to invent another technology to explain it to us.
Along the way we sort out what sentiment analysis means to both aspiring politicians and aspiring burritos, and figure out if a sarcasm detector might've saved some time in the court case where Judge Roy Moore sued comedian Sacha Baron Cohen for using a "pedophile detector" on him.
It's all good fun until DARPA figures out how to aim drone strikes at satire. Merry Christmas!
Brandon and Stephen dig into Adam McKay's new climate-change-apocalypse parable Don't Look Up and spin out on the state of journalism, satire, and whether American comedy can handle existential threats (or even the quietly sad).
Brandon goes in search of answers about how big a business asteroid mining might really be, and Stephen shares a favorite chicken recipe for when it all falls apart.
Find a spot at the table, grab the wine, and remember that the future is somewhere else.
Notes
All kinds of people are getting into the heavenly-body business (or trying to), like rapper Lil Uzi Vert. Even clickbait news coverage of "impending" asteroid impacts are now slapping a price on the things. Know your rights!
Start with the Outer Space Treaty and read up on some of the other rules — including why claims to asteroids, planets, or anything else floating around up there are legally dicey.
Here's more on the World Space Mining Claim Registry, and if you want to find your own potential future asteroid fortune, check out Asterank.
A few weeks ago, we performed an experiment: a live report on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, with deep dives into which beloved balloon has ties to Mussolini's fascists, why Snoopy is a hero of existentialism, and what we'll do when we run out of helium. In this episode, we revisit the parade and how it embodies the best and worst of the holidays.
We at JOURNOS wish you a Happy Red Snapper Season and hope a giant runaway balloon lands at your doorstep this year. (It's worth a hundred bucks!)
Special appearance by Janet Varney.
The lovely piano piece accompanying Brandon's Ode to Snoopy is "A Simple Life" by Marcos H. Bolanos.
Brandon tells a story about how companies like Spotify are using artificial intelligence to learn all kinds of things about us from the music we listen to — and how one company is using AI to (maybe) turn our own playlists into a kind of stress-reducing medicine.
But this is also a story about how tech journalists tell tech stories, particularly the one about how "AI knows you better than you know yourself." It's a little bit sci-fi, a little bit wishful thinking, and a little bit of a guess about our uncertain future. Listen and hum along; it might just save your life.
From deadly space sprinkles to undersea Faberge eggs to the risks posed by flying tortoise shells, we're talking about unintended consequences in distant places.
The recent lunar eclipse has us looking to the sky, where we see ... a ton of debris. A Russian anti-satellite test gifted Earth's orbit with a lot of shrapnel. Astronauts on the International Space Station had to hide out in "lifeboats" probably trying not to imagine that scene from Gravity.
The whole affair got us thinking about how our orbit is getting crowded by more & more government and commercial satellites, raising the specter of "Kessler syndrome" — an unfortunate outbreak of space junk with long-term effects including not being able to go to space anymore.
Then it's down to the depths of the ocean, where little potato rocks called "polymetallic nodules" may offer a source of metals necessary for all our EV needs, without all the mining. The news media is certainly in favor! We look at how San Diego's NBC and ABC news go gaga for nodules and the adventurous band of explorers going to collect 'em. (The nodules, not the news shows.) But these lovely lumps may not be so environmentally swell after all, say environmentalists. (Also, did you know there's an international group just dealing with the seabed, AKA Earth's basement?)
Finally our trip ends up in the Mojave, where we talk desert tortoises and solar farms and ask if we can go anywhere in nature without screwing it up.
All this and a case of mistaken identity and Mars Attacks! Keep your eyes to the skies ... and seas ... and probably everywhere else, too.
Apple just announced a huge change: The company is finally going to stop big-timing us and let us fix our own i-Things. This is a significant piece of business for the Right-to-Repair movement, which we talked about in our Nov. 12 episode, "An Inside Look at the Yogurt Cup Mafia and The McFlurry Racket."
In this Audio Short, Brandon gives us an update on what Apple's move means for the Right to Repair and what it means for Big Concepts like "ownership," "freedom," and God's own feelings on corporate desserts.
Music by Nathan "Sticky Blizzard Fingers" Readey.
Brandon reports in from a hotel in Toronto that hides an amazing mystery, which gets our heroes thinking about the nature of pilgrimage, memory, and why people apparently can't stop themselves from boning whenever a TV camera is around. Plus, Stephen tells the story of searching for his father's childhood home in Honolulu and a wild story of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
So open your curtains wide and go on a journey with us. Notes - All about the Rogers Centre, aka the SkyDome - People really like to have sex during Blue Jays games. - Like, really like to have sex. - If Toronto's not your thing, here are some other sports pilgrimages
We dive into some utopian city concepts. Brandon walks us through Saudi Arabia's NEOM, Marc Lore's Telosa, and a big ole boat for billionaires to escape pandemics and poverty, plus some failed utopian projects of yore.
Meanwhile, Stephen obsesses over slime molds, finds out his dream home is actually an 18th-century prison, and frets over the duo's job prospects after the apocalypse.
Today, we're talking about stuff — the stuff we don't want that we can't get rid of, and the stuff we do want that we can't quite keep.
Two big stories clutter our minds: one is about a new report on how organized crime controls the lucrative, and corrupt, recycling market; the other is about the "Right to Repair" movement, a struggle to give consumers the ability to fix our own damn smartphones, dishwashers, and million-dollar agricultural equipment.
What we learn is that there are powerful forces not only in control of all our stuff, but therefore in control of us as well. It's McFlurry Savings Time, y'all!
Brandon reads his latest for WhoWhatWhy:
Throughout history, social stresses manifested as strange afflictions, from dancing plagues to fainting spells. But now we may be seeing one that goes from tremors to saber-rattling.
Music by Nathan Readey!
In this episode, we take a look at Facebook's algorithmic missteps and giant, exploratory leaps into the metaverse. But will Zuck's new plane of digital existence be an open-source nightmare or a high-def utopia? Probably neither. But maybe a bit of both. Let's take a look.