Journos

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 fieldMartin Monti talks mind-reading, vegetative states, and cloning consciousnessFinding consciousness in the brainThe juices & jolts of consciousnessAnil Seth says we create our reality... And takes a stab at defining consciousness... Which may be a fight against entropyThe current academic-type theories The recent catfight over one theory of consciousnessSome history of panpsychism... And a little more history of panpsychism... And more on whether consciousness might be everywhereOrchestrated Objective Reduction Theory... Is wet enough for quantumYou'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-EdMore on the fentanyl fearSpooky Halloween spending numbers here and hereNatGeo 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 changeGet 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?

(UPDATE: Here's Valerie's story.) 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 of 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 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 AmericaNBC Nightly NewsWestminster Kennel ClubFox 26 Houston MUSIC & FX Bach's MinuetDrumrollFanfare

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