Some people with way too much time on their hands have apparently come up with a theory that legendary author and semi-recluse Thomas Pynchon is on Twitter, posting gossip and memories of Hollywood in the 1970s in the guise of a fictional producer-director named Sam Harpoon, who happens to be a character with a bit part in Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie “Licorice Pizza.”
Begelman wasn’t the only studio head to pocket other people’s money. I’m convinced for years Jerry Perenchio was putting his Bergdorf account on the expense sheet for “The Hills Like Rams” but no one at Embassy said anything because he gave nice Xmas gifts. Out of my pocket! SH.
“It’s fairly obvious this is a legit account – it’s followed by most of the cast/crew from the film, as well as other directors like Rian Johnson and the Safdie Brothers (one of which stars in the film). […] Besides these tweets all reading exactly like Pynchon – the account also has an odd number of references to his work, including an homage to the 50th anniversary of Gravity’s Rainbow in his Twitter bio. […] We know TP and PTA are friends, and him secretly tweeting a micro novel’s worth of fictional 70’s film history feels so Pynchonesque I can’t help but believe it’s him.”
Eight years ago, Atlantic writer Yair Rosenberg started trying to figure out why an obviously Jewish character suddenly showed up in a minor role in the science-fiction show Firefly, but no one in the show ever mentioned the fact that he was Jewish. He wound up interviewing the actor who played the character, who said the role triggered a desire to learn more about Judaism, and finally tracked down the producer to find out why the show chose to make the character Jewish.
I also learned from this piece that the term “Kwisatz Haderach,” which author Frank Herbert used in Dune to refer to Paul Atreides and the myth of a messiah, is a transliteration of a Jewish term, term kefitzat haderech(קפיצת הדרך), which means the “shortening of the way” or “leaping of the path.” As Rosenberg describes it, “the messiah, in other words, is the one who propels humanity forward to its ultimate destination.”
This is exactly what it says on the tin, as the Brits like to put it: two MiG-21 jet engines mounted on a tank, an amazing invention used to extinguish the Kuwait oil fires after the Iraqi invasion. It’s called the Big Wind, and it can reportedly blow out burning oil wells like candles. Here’s a video of it in action.
Jodorowsky planned to film the story as a 10-hour feature, set to star his own son Brontis Jodorowsky in the lead role of Paul Atreides, Salvador Dalí as the Emperor, Amanda Lear as Princess Irulan, Orson Welles as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Gloria Swanson as the Reverend Mother, David Carradine as Duke Leto Atreides, Hervé Villechaize as Gurney Halleck, and Mick Jagger as Feyd-Rautha. The soundtrack was to be provided by Pink Floyd. Art was to be done by Jean Giraud, a French artist known as Moebius, and H. R. Giger.
Dalí was cast as the Emperor, but demanded to be paid $100,000 an hour. Jodorowsky agreed, but tailored Dalí’s part to be filmed in one hour, drafting plans for other scenes of the emperor to use a mechanical mannequin as substitute. According to Giger, Dalí was “later invited to leave the film because of his pro-Franco statements”. Frank Herbert traveled to Europe in 1976 to find that $2 million of the $9.5 million budget had already been spent in pre-production, and that Jodorowsky’s script would result in a 14-hour movie.
Update: Jodorowsky’s storyboards for his version of Dune are back in the news as a result of a staggeringly dumb project started by a group of crypto types, who formed something called the SpiceDAO (DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organization, something the blockchain is supposed to enable) and raised close to $12 million. They then used about $3 million of that amount to buy a copy of Jodorowsky’s storyboards — for what appears to be about 100 times what the book was expected to fetch, since there are multiple copies out there. They seem to have done this under the mistaken impression that buying the book would allow them to make an animated TV show based on it, and other works. Of course, buying the book does no such thing, since the family of Frank Herbert and/or his publisher still own all such rights.
So what happens now to the $3 million the DAO spent on the book, not to mention all those other millions the groups raised? Great question. Unknown! There are some signs that the organizers of the group may actually know that buying the book doesn’t really give them the right to do anything related to Dune. So then why buy it? Another good question. The group’s Medium post states:
Jodorowsky’s expansive vision for Dune in some way planted the seeds for nearly every Sci-Fi project over the last 50 years. While we do not own the IP to Frank Herbert’s masterpiece, we are uniquely positioned with the opportunity to create our own addition to the genre as an homage to the giants who came before us.
And then, another update — the group has failed to get anywhere in negotiations with any of the rightsholders related to the Jodorowsky treatment of Dune, so now it seems they will try to create something unrelated:
Latest in the Jodorowsky's Dune saga. The DAO failed to negotiate rights with the rightsholders, and will now develop an entirely independent animated series. pic.twitter.com/7iMPDEz6KU
Tycho Brahe, who lived from 1546-1601, is one of the most famous early astronomers — his scientific accomplishments include the discovery of the supernova in 1572, and a series of essays on the movement of comets (he also carried on a notoriously heated feud with Galileo). But he was also famously eccentric:
A fabulously wealthy man of noble birth, Brahe once owned roughly one percent of all the money in Denmark, and often elected to use his personal treasury to fund some rather unusual projects. For instance, after losing his nose in a duel while intoxicated in 1566, Brahe purchased a replacement made of a gold-silver alloy rather than more conventional wax (he always made sure to carry a small vial of paste around with him to reattach the orifice should it pop off). He also hired a dwarf named Jepp, whom he believed to be clairvoyant, as his court jester … and asked him to eat under the table during each meal).
At one point, Brahe also owned a pet moose, which was hardly a normal thing in 6th-century Europe.
The hoofed critter would trot alongside Brahe’s carriage like a loyal dog and lived inside his castle. But, unfortunately, it also appears to have developed a regrettable taste for Danish beer. Naturally, Brahe couldn’t resist showing off such a bizarre young animal to his various associates and, soon enough, a nearby nobleman had asked him to send the moose to his castle to entertain the guests at a party. As the dinner wore on, the creature grew increasingly tipsy until it eventually wound up roaring drunk. According to Brahe’s biographer Pierre Gassendi, “the moose had ascended the castle stairs and drunk of the beer in such amounts that it had fallen down [them]” to its eventual demise.
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
In January, the Aspen Institute set up a Commission on Information Disorder, and announced a star-studded group of participants — including co-chair Katie Couric, former global news anchor for Yahoo, as well as Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex — to look at solutions to the problem of rampant disinformation. Other not-so-famous members of the commission include Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute; Yasmin Green, director of research at Google’s Jigsaw project (who took part in CJR’s symposium on disinformation in 2019); Alex Stamos, founder of the Stanford Internet Observatory; and Dr. Safiya Noble, co-founder of UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. The commission was funded by Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist (who is a member of CJR’s Board of Overseers). On Sunday, the group released its final report, with 15 recommended steps that it says could be taken by governments, technology companies, and others to help address the problem of disinformation.
In their introduction to the report, the commission’s three co-chairs—Couric, along with Chris Krebs, co-founder of Aspen Digital, and Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change—say information disorder slows down our response time on issues such as climate change, and also “undermines democracy [and] creates a culture in which racist, ethnic, and gender attacks are seen as solutions, not problems.” They add that while in the past, there was a belief that in order to fight bad information, all we need is more good information, “in reality, merely elevating truthful content is not nearly enough to change our current course.” In some cases, if promoting more factual information involves debunking hoaxes and conspiracy theories, those practices can actually exacerbate the problem, as Data & Society researcher Whitney Phillips (now a professor of media studies at Syracuse University) pointed out in a 2019 report on “The Oxygen of Amplification.”
The Aspen report notes that “there is an incentive system in place that manufactures information disorder, and we will not address the problem if we do not take on that system.” Some of the major players in that incentive system, according to the group, are large tech platforms such as Facebook, which it says have “abused customers’ trust, obfuscated important data, and blocked research.” The commission mentions one example CJR has also highlighted: the fact that Facebook shut down a research project run by scientists from New York University by turning off their access to the social network. “Critical research on disinformation—whether it be the efficacy of digital ads or the various online content moderation policies—is undercut by a lack of access to data and processes,” the report states. Several of its recommendations are aimed at solving this problem, including one that asks the government to require platforms to “disclose certain categories of private data to qualified academic researchers, so long as that research respects user privacy, does not endanger platform integrity, and remains in the public interest.”
Some houses look normal on the outside but are insane inside, but this one starts out crazy looking and gets even more bizarre as you go through — be sure to zoom in on the sunken green kitchen thing. Please note that this isn’t just run-of-the-mill crazy — it was designed by internationally famous avant-garde artists Madeline Gins and Arakawa. They called it “Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa)” and said its design was designed to keep those who lived in it on edge, so that they had to “actively negotiate even the simplest tasks.” The couple insisted that constantly testing your senses and perception, and using every muscle in your body, would stimulate your immune system.
I’m as skeptical of cryptocurrency as the next guy — maybe even more so, since I keep reading about “rug pulls,” where the founder of a currency or a seller of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) disappears with the millions of dollars he has raised. You know it’s bad when this kind of thing is so common that people have already come up with a special term for it. There are a lot of scam artists out there attracted by the smell of easy money, and the whole idea of an NFT — a piece of code that exists on the blockchain, and in many cases simply points to a URL, which in turn points to an NFT gallery that basically hosts a JPEG of the image someone has paid hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for — is bizarre to me. But then, so is modern art in general.
Despite all this, there is something I find kind of fascinating about the whole idea of Axie Infinity. Not the crypto part — which, as an arts major, I admit I barely understand — but the move towards what some call DAOs or “distributed autonomous organizations,” which are powered by cryptocurrencies. These entities are like digital nation-states, with their own rules and currency, and one of the most interesting is called Axie Infinity (there’s also a DAO called Mirror that is devoted to crowdfunding writing and journalism, which I’m also kind of interested in, and I’ve published a version of this post there as well). What makes Axie Infinity especially interesting is that it’s really just a game — like an updated version of Neopets or Pokemon. And as Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz has said (paraphrasing author Clay Christensen), “the next big thing always starts out looking like a toy.”
Yosemite Valley is the most beautiful 2.12 square miles on Earth. Everything about it is perfection. Elliot McGucken and Steve Arita visited this weekend and each said three words, “Peak, GO NOW!” Their words may remain good for another day or two, but not much. Beyond that, you’ll miss the “at peak” visceral context expressed within America the Beautiful. Steve noted that the bomb cyclone has “definitely brought back to life the famous waterfalls at Yosemite…the water was just thundering across the valley floor…and not obviously just the waterfalls, but the Merced river and all areas throughout the valley there was water, that combined with the gorgeous fall colors at peak…just made for a beautiful place to be.”
Note: This was originally published as the online newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
Two weeks ago, Alex Heath of The Vergereported that the company then known as Facebook was planning to rename itself. An anonymous source told Heath that the new name was intended to focus attention on the company’s embrace of “the metaverse,” and away from existing products such as Facebook itself, WhatsApp (its messaging service), and Instagram, its photo-sharing app. Ten days later, at Connect—an annual conference the company hosts for developers—Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, said the company would henceforth be known as Meta. The change was necessary “to reflect who we are and what we hope to build,” Zuckerberg said, adding that eventually “I hope we are seen as a metaverse company.”
What isn’t clear, either from Zuckerberg’s comments at the conference or a “founder’s letter” he published announcing the name change, is exactly what it means to be “a metaverse company.” Zuckerberg says the metaverse is “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.” In this fabricated world, as he describes it, users will be able to do “almost anything you can imagine—get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create—as well as completely new experiences.” A video presentation shows Zuckerberg walking through a virtual house with a fireplace and a view of the digital mountains, choosing what clothes his avatar should wear with a wave of his hand, fencing with a partner who is located elsewhere, and attending a virtual meeting that includes a large red robot.
In interviews, Zuckerberg elaborated by saying that he sees the metaverse as something like the next iteration of the internet, built by many companies working together. In this vision, Meta’s Oculus headset would be just one window into a virtual universe. One hurdle in achieving this future is that it would require Meta and other technology companies to not just co-operate but also inter-operate—that is, allow their products to work together. As critics have pointed out, the company formerly known as Facebook has a terrible track record when it comes to interoperability, and many other technology giants aren’t much better (I hosted a discussion on CJR’s Galley platform last year with author and free-speech activist Cory Doctorow about how interoperability can help dismantle “surveillance capitalism”).
Mel Blanc (the voice actor who voiced every male character on Looney Tunes, as well as characters like Barney Rubble on The Flintstones and Mr. Spacely on The Jetsons) was in a head-on collision driving his sports car in a dangerous intersection known as “Dead Man’s Curve” in Los Angeles in 1961 (the same “Dead Man’s Curve” from the Jan and Dean song). His legs and pelvis were fractured, and he was left in a coma.
For weeks, doctors tried everything to get Blanc to wake up. Eventually, when things were looking bleak, one of his neurologists decided to address one of Blanc’s characters instead of Blanc himself, asking him “How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?” After a slight pause, the previously-comatose Blanc answered, “Eh… just fine, Doc. How are you?” Mel Blanc made a full recovery. When he got out of the hospital, he sued the city of Los Angeles for $500,000, leading to the city reconstructing the curve.
During the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, a man by the name of Tsutomu Yamaguchi managed, in a feat of massive misfortune (or good fortune), to be present at both atomic bomb detonations. He was working in Hiroshima for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the first atom bomb was dropped on August 6th. He dove into a ditch in the handful of seconds it took for the blast to reach him, which is probably what saved his life (although he was badly burned and his eardrums ruptured).
Tsutomu Yamaguchi.
He took a train to Nagasaki, woke up and went into work the morning of August 9th, where he reported to his boss, who didn’t believe him when he mentioned the strange new bomb that had evaporated parts of Hiroshima. “You’re an engineer,” he barked. “Calculate it. How could one bomb…destroy a whole city?” Famous last words. At that moment, the second atomic bomb hit the city. “I thought the mushroom cloud followed me from Hiroshima,” Yamaguchi later recalled. Despite everything, Yamaguchi would live to the ripe old age of 93 and have 9 children.
who earned his nickname by trying on various makeup products on his show, pre-sold 12 billion yuan in products ranging from Shiseido Co. lotions to Apple AirPods, according to preliminary data compiled by e-commerce data specialist Taosj.com.
Li’s sales are a record for any show livestreamed on Alibaba’s Taobao online marketplace, according to Taosj.com data. He has also survived a recent regulatory crackdown on androgynous pop idols and others who don’t conform to the country’s gender norms or express a more feminine style.
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
In September, the Wall Street Journal published a series of critical stories about Facebook that the newspaper said were based on a trove of hundreds of internal documents from an unnamed former employee of the company. Three weeks ago, that whistleblower revealed herself on 60 Minutes as Frances Haugen, a former product manager who said she became concerned about the harm being done by Facebook’s products, and the fact that the company allegedly ignored its own research. Haugen subsequently appeared before a Congressional subcommittee investigating Instagram’s impact on the mental health of young women. Then, beginning on October 24, Haugen launched what Ben Smith, the New York Times media writer, called “the journalistic equivalent of an outlet store,” by offering access to the complete trove of internal documents to a hand-picked group of news outlets.
The coverage of Facebook’s alleged transgressions is obviously a story about how a huge tech company deals with its responsibilities to its users, and to society. But, like any large-scale investigation—especially one that involves a consortium and a broken embargo—it’s also a media story. How the documents were released, and who was given access to them and why, has undoubtedly affected the coverage of the issues at hand, for better or worse. The use of an embargo, for example (one which was quickly broken, with the usual rationalizations) and the selection of a few media organizations as gatekeepers of the information seems almost deliberately designed to create a feeding frenzy among news outlets. This in turn has arguably resulted in massive duplication of effort and repetition of information.
Some believe the firehose of reporting risks overwhelming the public with information, and journalists have pointed out that much of what is being reported is already well known, and the new information isn’t terribly compelling. Not everyone agrees with that line of argument, however: Paul Kedrosky, a venture investor, called this “a very interesting rhetorical approach, the idea that if something heinous isn’t more heinous than we previously thought, that it’s fine.” Some might even argue that repeating stories about such complex topics is sometimes necessary, since many normal people (i.e., non-journalists) could have missed previous reports.
Robert Liston was a British surgeon in the 19th century who was noted for his speed and skill in an era prior to anaesthetics, when speed made a difference in terms of pain and survival. In his most famous case, he amputated a leg in under 2.5 minutes, but the patient died afterwards from gangrene (not uncommon in those days). As a result of his desire for speed, Liston also amputated two fingers of his young assistant (who also later died from gangrene). And he slashed through the coattails of a distinguished surgical spectator, who was so terrified — thinking that the knife had pierced his vitals — that he fainted from fright, and was later discovered to have died from shock.
