Journos

( After you listen to this episode, make sure you listen to the second part, over at We Got This! ) 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 c...

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 like...

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 ma...

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 arch...

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 reformatte...

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...

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 a...

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 re...

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 ge...

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 ....

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 crea...

  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...

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 ot...

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 i...

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 o...

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...

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 su...

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 ....

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 hypothe...

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. el...

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 Ovsyannik...

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...

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 Stephe...

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...

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 wi...