PicoBlog

It is the FINAL episode of season 11 of Vanderpyoomp with Janie & Paul going into their REACTIONS and FEELINGS on this season of reality TV. It has been a RIDE y’all. And I don’t know what THIS means. But we went to the mall right after we recorded this very bonus podcast episode of STAY F.… ncG1vNJzZmivlZq4prrDsJitnaJjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89omaimpah6przIrKadnV2rrq%2BwxKunrqWgYr%2B2uMSsZKudk5a9boGYmg%3D%3D

I posed a question on Twitter last week. It got me ratio’ed — but, like, the good kind of ratio’ed (I did not previously know this was a thing). All of these interesting people showed up with thoughtful replies. If you’re interested in the subject, the thread is well worth your time. The (almost 200) replies ranged from start dates of 1994 to 2006, and from end dates of 2005 to 2016.

"You don’t need to argue that something is true. You just need to show that it’s associated with high status. And when low status people express the truth, it sometimes becomes high status to lie." This is a dark view of social epistemology. The Western world has in fact set up systems that correlate prestige with truth-seeking. Jonathan Rauch calls this the Constitution of Knowledge. But it seems that in the 21st century this system has been gamed and corrupted.

Today is Cover Reveal Day for the UK edition of Heartless Hunter! Outside of North America, the book will be published under its original title, The Crimson Moth. I’ll put both covers side-by-side so you can see the differences, but first: here’s the UK edition, coming out in February from Magpie, an imprint of HarperCollins. I’m so pleased with it. I love the botanical illustrations, the blood-red moth, and that tagline!

In all the time I wrote AdTurds (14 years and counting) I didn’t interview anyone. That was something I did in the day job and there was something liberating about just dashing off 500 words and sticking them up online. But in doing this newsletter I decided I can do more. There isn’t really anyone else doing this stuff. And there should be. While I made my name on slating adverts I thought were awful, I can appreciate advertising as a unique art form that forces the creativity of a dozen people through a sieve, bottles it and then injects it into your mind in concentrated 30-second bursts.

Every Tom Waits Song is an email newsletter covering just that, in alphabetical order. Find more info at this link and sign up to get it delivered straight to your inbox here: I have not seen Alice, the play Tom did with Robert Wilson and Paul Schmidt in the early '90s. I'm guessing most of you reading this haven’t either. It played for a couple months in Hamburg in '92-'93 and has been staged a few other places since, but otherwise seems to be, for a play with some big names attached, relatively under-the-radar.

I almost skipped commenting on thisAndrew Huberman mess from New York Magazine. Why? Because it’s overly sensationalized gossip dressed as news. ‘Oh, the recently rich and famous Phd self-optimization guru that’s on TRT and who has never been married has multiple girlfriends?’ Damn, that’s so crazy I would have never guessed. For those who don’t know here’s NY synopsis of him… “Today, Andrew Huberman is a stiff, jacked 48-year-old associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Happy Monday, y’all! It was my birthday on the weekend and I got some nice presents and I got to have dinner and drinks with my best friends. It was great. I hope all your weeks are just as good! Onto internet things. You’ll get bonus roundups of even more internet things, plus the smug sense of superiority over all the non-paying subscribers. It’s $5 a month or $30 a year (that’s six months free!

Goth Rock, dyed-black Post-Punk draped in the dark romanticism of Gothic Horror, had an accidental doula in John Peel. A band had bluffed their way up to the studio where the legendary BBC DJ was broadcasting and handed him their debut single as a white vinyl 12-inch. Peel said live on air, “We’ve got Bauhaus in the studio, they’re from Northampton, and they have a new single out called ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’.