Tuesday, December 23, 2025
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI Slop
Lately, everywhere I scroll, I keep seeing the same fish-eyed CCTV view: a grainy wide shot from the corner of a living room, a driveway at night, an empty grocery store. Then something impossible happens. JD Vance shows up at the doorstep in a crazy outfit. A car folds into itself like paper and drives away. A cat comes in and starts hanging out with capybaras and bears, as if in some weird modern fairy tale.
This fake-surveillance look has become one of the signature flavors of what people now call AI slop. For those of us who spend time online watching short videos, slop feels inescapable: a flood of repetitive, often nonsensical AI-generated clips that washes across TikTok, Instagram, and beyond. For that, you can thank new tools like OpenAI’s Sora (which exploded in popularity after launching in app form in September), Google’s Veo series, and AI models built by Runway. Now anyone can make videos, with just a few taps on a screen.
If I were to locate the moment slop broke through into popular consciousness, I’d pick the video of rabbits bouncing on a trampoline that went viral this summer. For many savvy internet users, myself included, it was the first time we were fooled by an AI video, and it ended up spawning a wave of almost identical riffs, with people making videos of all kinds of animals and objects bouncing on the same trampoline.
My first reaction was that, broadly speaking, all of this sucked. That’s become a familiar refrain, in think pieces and at dinner parties. Everything online is slop now—the internet “enshittified,” with AI taking much of the blame. Initially, I largely agreed, quickly scrolling past every AI video in a futile attempt to send a message to my algorithm. But then friends started sharing AI clips in group chats that were compellingly weird, or funny. Some even had a grain of brilliance buried in the nonsense. I had to admit I didn’t fully understand what I was rejecting—what I found so objectionable.
To try to get to the bottom of how I felt (and why), I recently spoke to the people making the videos, a company creating bespoke tools for creators, and experts who study how new media becomes culture. What I found convinced me that maybe generative AI will not end up ruining everything. Maybe we have been too quick to dismiss AI slop. Maybe there’s a case for looking beyond the surface and seeing a new kind of creativity—one we’re watching take shape in real time, with many of us actually playing a part.
by Caiwei Chen, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image:@niceaunties (Wenhui lim)
[ed. See also: Let's Hear It for Slop (word of the year) - with bouncing bunnies included; or here.]
North Pole Economics
Or, how the Grinch stole Christmas. Again.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
We have a follow-up conversation about the price of toys. During the summer, a toy industry group warned that the president's Liberation Day tariffs would put Christmas at risk. Well, the holidays are now upon us, so we've called back Jay Foreman, the CEO of Basic Fun! That's the home of Care Bears, Tonka trucks, Lincoln Logs and Lite-Brite. Jay, so it might sound like we are completely obsessed with the price of a classic steel Tonka truck, but I got to ask again - what is it going to cost this year?
MARTÍNEZ: And these price hikes - what does that do to your sales? Are Tonka trucks so classic that people are just going to buy them anyway, or are you seeing a slowdown?
FOREMAN: Well, we're seeing sort of two different effects. The first effect was that we lost about eight weeks of shipping in the middle of the season, as well as this sort of uncertainty about what the tariff level would be sort of stunted the traditional pattern of buying from the retailers. So we got a lot less orders this year than last year. So whether the consumer shows up or not, there are going to be less Tonka trucks in the market. The other aspect, of course, is the consumer sentiment. We are really now starting to feel the consumer is noticing that prices are up and affordability is becoming an issue.
MARTÍNEZ: So I was looking at a report from the market research group Circana, and they say U.S. toy sales have been up by 7% this year. How do we square what they say and what you're reporting?
FOREMAN: So there's really two factors there. One is if you increase the price of toys anywhere from 10% to 30% because you've got a 30% tariff, then your gross sales are going to go up regardless. But the other thing that's skewing the sales data is there's a huge trend right now in the toy business, which is collectible trading cards, which aren't really toys. They're as much as a publishing item as they are toys, but they're sort of tracked by Circana in toys. And things like Pokemon cards, NBA cards, Major League Baseball cards, Magic: The Gathering trading cards - they're on fire right now. And the toy industry might be seeing some increase in sales, but it's in a very narrow band of categories and with a small group of companies. The smaller or medium-sized companies are really hurting pretty bad this year over the tariffs.
MARTÍNEZ: The last time we spoke, too, we talked about maybe considering where you manufacture things. Has enough time passed for you to make some kind of call, or maybe at least be leaning in a certain direction when it comes to where you manufacture your toys?
FOREMAN: Yeah. I mean, we held fast here at Basic Fun! and we kept our production primarily in China. It's just the most reliable supply chain. When you start to move the supply chain and set up new manufacturing, there's a big learning curve, not to mention a huge cost. We also kind of bet on the fact that there will be a recognition by the administration at some point that China is a very important trading partner. Almost, we have a symbiotic relationship with them, and while they can joust with each other, at the end of the day, they've got to play ball. And while we'd love to bring toy manufacturing back to the U.S., it's not really practical. We don't have the type of labor here. We don't have factories set up. We don't have the ability to finance the development of factories. So we're an industry that's generally not really going to be coming back to the United States, like some other industries might have a better opportunity to. So we've stuck it out in China, and so far it's paid off for us.
MARTÍNEZ: We mentioned back in the summer, too, that toymakers were saying that Christmas was at risk. Was that hyperbole, or is that maybe more of a reality now than ever before?
FOREMAN: Well, I mean, it was not hyperbole when, you know, tariffs were 145% and it was a de facto embargo on importations, not just from China but from other markets. You know, remember, India's tariffs are 50% right now. You know, I always say that consumers can always find products to buy. Stores will never be empty. It's all about the stuff you really want, and is that available when you want it, or are you going to get the next best item? So Christmas will come. It always comes. It will be full of a few less of the more desirable types of products, and consumers will have to, you know, be satisfied with sometimes the next or the third best thing on their list.
by A Martínez, NPR | Read more:
Image: Tonka truck/Walmart
[ed. See also: Mark Zandi, Chief Economist/Moody's Analytical (X):]
***
We’ve just updated our spending by income group data for the second quarter of 2025, based on the Federal Reserve’s Financial Accounts and Survey of Consumer Finance. Looking at the data, it’s not a mystery why most Americans feel like the economy isn’t working for them. For those in the bottom 80% of the income distribution, those making less than approximately $175,000 a year – their spending has simply kept pace with inflation since the pandemic. The 20% of households that make more have done much better, and those in the top 3.3% of the distribution have done much, much, much better. The data also show that the U.S. economy is being largely powered by the well-to-do. As long as they keep spending, the economy should avoid recession, but if they turn more cautious, for whatever reason, the economy has a big problem.
[ed. Solution - just lower your expectations.]
“You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils...Every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two. They don’t need that many, but you always need you always need steel,” Trump said.
“You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls,” he added.
“You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils...Every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two. They don’t need that many, but you always need you always need steel,” Trump said.
“You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls,” he added.
Stop, Shop, and Scroll
Commerce has long been central to social media; as long as ads keep the lights on at Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, we will all be pressured to buy, buy, buy. Instagram was a mall even before #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt and Pinterest became an “AI-enabled shopping assistant.” The influencer industry — which Goldman Sachs has predicted will grow to nearly half a trillion dollars by 2027 — has snowballed into a possible side hustle for anyone with access to a phone. There’s a handful of MrBeasts and Alix Earles at the top and an untold number of micro-influencers hawking goods and services at the bottom. For audiences, it means we have spent the better part of a decade living within a 24/7 digital infomercial, with social media — sponsored content and organic posts alike — resembling not much more than a buying guide, a catalog of unabashed and conspicuous consumption. Some audience members find themselves in deep debt or describe their behavior as a full-blown shopping addiction; others have developed careful strategies in an effort to limit their consumption. We have never been so aware of all the things there are to purchase, and the frictionlessness of shopping apps disguised as social media has created an army of voracious buyers. What has this abundance done to us? (...)
The impulse to shop is not exactly a secret — there’s often a resigned self-awareness to it. In a video viewed 1.5 million times, a woman stitches together clips of herself from random moments in her daily life. With a deadpan voice, and Radiohead’s “No Surprises” twinkling in the background, she recites highly specific products like she’s filling out a Mad Libs page: Chan Luu crystal toe ring. Arc’teryx hiking shoes. Vintage hoodie. “This is just the last 48 hours, mind you,” the caption reads.
This kind of video has become a mini-trend, with the idea being that the mere utterance of a temptation might soothe the part of your brain that wants to buy the item. (...)
We see so much marketing material that in certain subcultures online it is not just common but the expectation. In traditional marketing, it was understood that brands had to expose consumers to their message three times before they actually engaged with it, like going physically to a store to buy a product. In the age of social media and algorithmic overload, that number is now seven, says Mara Einstein, a marketing-professional-turned-critic and author of the book Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. For one, the vastness of the internet has allowed for the number of available products to bloat beyond imagination — there are simply too many things. But how we learn about products has changed drastically as well; as media has fragmented to a million sites, feeds, screens, and algorithms, so too has the advertising we see. There is no one TV commercial a quarter of households are seeing, then telling their friends about. Instead we see a digital display ad here, an influencer’s video there.
“You may be finding out information from people and so on, but you’re increasingly spending time in a space where you’re constantly being bombarded by sales messages,” Einstein says. Influencers know how to stay on message, constantly priming viewers to give in and buy something.
Being influenced is nothing new, of course. But the short- and mid-form video format creates a new type of intimacy and allure, especially if you are already looking for something to buy. It’s hard to argue with a sales pitch when you are watching someone in their home actually using the product they are trying to sell you.
The content doesn’t even have to be explicitly promotional: I recall a video I made last year about my reporting being used without credit by content creators. My frustration had hit a breaking point, so I recorded a selfie-style TikTok complaining about the contemporary media ecosystem. Only my head and a portion of my shoulders were in the video, but someone wanted to know where my blouse was from.
TikTok itself has only bolstered the idea that every piece of content is an opportunity to consume. Through TikTok Shop, anyone can become a digital salesperson. In much crueler, more tasteless examples, TikTok has added shopping prompts to videos coming out of Gaza: A woman in a head covering becomes a promotion for similar-looking garments with headscarves. A bespectacled Israeli activist protesting their government’s besiegement is a billboard for a pair of glasses. (...)
It’s easy to blame the influencers for all of this — and many do, regularly, like clockwork. The most recent discourse cycle, in late September, was kicked off by a TikTok video with 390,000 views and arguments that stretched on for weeks.
“These influencers make way too much fucking money,” the video begins. “You’re just getting paid to sell people shit they don’t fucking need. It’s literally just overconsumption … You’re perpetuating this cycle that’s really keeping us trapped.”
Content creators are admittedly a perfect target for the general rage many of us carry around. Many of them seem unencumbered by the endless horrors of the world, with daily routines that include blocks of time for “warm water” and to-do lists with “plan out mocktails for the new year.” Their digital presence exists suspended in time, where there is always something new to recommend, packages of shiny new things waiting for them, and a willing audience that completes the positive feedback loop. Wouldn’t it be nice — as people are in line at food banks, fighting for a precious few job listings, and snatched off streets by masked agents — to sit in your home and talk to yourself for a living?
But the draw of the influencer is powerful; even if you cannot become her, you can own the same things she does. For Antoinette Hocbo, who picked up hobbies via TikTok, the characters she encounters on her For You page seem effortlessly cool. They have an eye for design, they’re interested in the arts, they drink wine. You buy into the person first, and eventually — hopefully — you buy the stuff, too.
“[There’s] the whole idea of parasocial relationships,” Einstein, the marketing expert, says. “If somebody has gotten to the point where they’re spending that much time online with someone, they’re vested in what that person has to say.” The feeling of intimacy is physical: When followers watch their favorite TikToker, they are literally holding them in the palm of their hand. (...)
TikTok made going viral a possibility for a whole new slate of people. Now the hard part is how to keep things rolling when it happens to you. Most of the platforms themselves do not pay much for views, but brands eager to partner with buzzy people do. Creators often talk about their work in terms of self-discovery or self-actualization: This is who I want to be online, and these are the products and tips I truly, honestly want to share.
The tension comes then with the “very real commercial realities of playing to an audience, bowing to commercial sponsorships if you were lucky enough to have them,” Duffy says. “And then the new dimension, which doesn’t have the same precursors in legacy media, which is playing to the algorithm.” A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 62 percent of adults on TikTok are there to find product reviews and recommendations — especially young women. (...)
Project Pan, as a concept, is both clever and strange. For years, a community of people organized largely on the internet have committed themselves to finishing their beauty and personal care products — the name coming from your promise to hit the bottom of the pan that holds your blush, for example. It’s smart for the way it gamifies something people struggle with. (Who among us doesn’t have half-used bottles of soap or barely touched tubes of lipstick?) It’s also deeply revealing: These products are meant to be used, and we collectively are so bad at finishing them off that we need a little game to make it happen. Off the top of my head I can confidently say that I’ve never once “panned” a compact of blush; I have expensive tubes of red lipstick that didn’t end up being my color, but that I can’t bear to throw out; and I have four bottles of sunscreen that crowd my cabinet, waiting for the summer they’re finally used up. There are many more products that I could — should — Project Pan that I’ve forgotten I even own.
Cassandra Silva, on the other hand, knows exactly what she has. She knows, for example, that she spent $2,857.98 AUD on makeup in 2024 and panned products totaling $1,654.13. She owns eight eyeliners, but her ideal number would be four. In 2023 she panned seven mascaras, 11 colored lip products, and one blush, among many others, all lined up in a photo of the totally empty containers that show her progress. She keeps all this data in a giant spreadsheet that she shares with me after we talk, and as I scroll through it, I realize I have never seen an eyeshadow palette where every color is completely empty.
“Compared to beauty YouTube, it’s not insane insane, but it’s still more than any one human could ever reasonably use,” Silva says of her inventory.
She watches beauty YouTube channels, but needs to be careful about what she consumes: She tries to stay away from content showing off hauls, new releases, or the ever-tempting limited-edition holiday releases.
“I am as conscious as I can be for a makeup addict,” Silva says. “I try, and I am freaking susceptible. It’s so bad.” Recently, a palette of neutral eyeshadows hounded her Instagram feed — she caved and bought it, only to be thoroughly disappointed when it arrived. As a panner, Silva will be stuck with it for years until it’s finished.
Chessie Domrongchai used to make the kind of content that Silva perhaps would steer clear of — she was the one tempting makeup lovers with all of these products. As a beauty YouTuber, Domrongchai shared in-depth product review videos for brands like the once-buzzy direct-to-consumer brand Glossier and tested fistfuls of lip glosses in subtly different shades for her 40,000 subscribers. She shared new releases, compared similar products from different brands, and recommended items for upcoming sales. In a 2019 video, she walks viewers through her pinky-brown nude lipstick collection — 15 shades, not including lip glosses and liquid lipsticks. She followed makeup brands and watched other YouTubers, accumulating more and more products to explore ($10,000, she says, feels like a conservative estimate of the value of her collection at its peak). In makeup, Domrongchai found self-expression, creativity, and community.
Until one day in 2022, when a switch went off in her head.
“I started to view a lot of the overconsumption that I was seeing online as kind of disgusting and wrong, and I recognized a lot of the way that I showed up on the internet was to overconsume,” Domrongchai says. Not only that, but she felt her online presence also influenced viewers to keep buying more and more.
“These are just regular people that are just now stuck with the burden of their overconsumption,” she says. But as a content creator, it was hard to be part of the beauty space without having a constant parade of new products.
In recent months, Domrongchai has developed a new routine for the many products littering her home. One by one, she meticulously peels off stickers and labels: from shampoo and olive oil bottles, from dish soap dispensers and face wash. Using a mix of baking soda, mineral oil, and rubbing alcohol, she goes to town on brand names printed on the packaging of eyeshadow palettes and lipsticks, scrubbing away their origins and the millions of dollars of marketing that went into them — arguably why they are in Domrongchai’s house to begin with. The result is shelves and countertops full of bare bottles and tubes and pumps filled with product but stripped of just about everything else. Watching her videos, I’m slightly horrified at my own ability to recognize the specific products even without all the labeling, the colors and shapes of bottles acting like an afterimage of a CeraVe cleanser.
“Of course I’m going to buy the face cleanser that keeps my skin clear, but I don’t need it to continue to market to me in my own home,” Domrongchai says. “In the past I had three different [lotions] and all of their labels and their marketing on these products … They’re all kind of yelling at you trying to convince you to use it. They’re kind of [in] competition with each other.” In other words, it felt like a social media feed.
For some panners, finishing a product can elicit the same rush that buying something new does — that same dopamine rush of hitting “place order” creeps in when you hit that pan. Then you post it online for other panners to see, adding to the thrill. Finishing products becomes a task to complete, just like shopping is.
“What it can do — which I don’t love to admit to — is you’ll put more blush on than you would,” Silva says. “You just slather it on.” Silva shows me her spreadsheet page from 2024 showing colored lip products she used up: 23. Silva estimates that the average person finishes maybe one lipstick a year. In order to pan that many products, she was reapplying them 15 to 20 times a day, she says. Sometimes Silva wonders if she should ditch panning, too, like she did consumption-focused beauty spaces.
“When you first get into it, it’s so helpful, and you really get that community and you can turn some products over. Then the longer that you’re in the panning community, it’s like, all right, now panning is a problem,” she laughs. “Now I’ve taken all the problems I had with makeup consumption and translated them into late-stage panning. It’s like late-stage capitalism.”
This kind of video has become a mini-trend, with the idea being that the mere utterance of a temptation might soothe the part of your brain that wants to buy the item. (...)
We see so much marketing material that in certain subcultures online it is not just common but the expectation. In traditional marketing, it was understood that brands had to expose consumers to their message three times before they actually engaged with it, like going physically to a store to buy a product. In the age of social media and algorithmic overload, that number is now seven, says Mara Einstein, a marketing-professional-turned-critic and author of the book Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. For one, the vastness of the internet has allowed for the number of available products to bloat beyond imagination — there are simply too many things. But how we learn about products has changed drastically as well; as media has fragmented to a million sites, feeds, screens, and algorithms, so too has the advertising we see. There is no one TV commercial a quarter of households are seeing, then telling their friends about. Instead we see a digital display ad here, an influencer’s video there.
“You may be finding out information from people and so on, but you’re increasingly spending time in a space where you’re constantly being bombarded by sales messages,” Einstein says. Influencers know how to stay on message, constantly priming viewers to give in and buy something.
Being influenced is nothing new, of course. But the short- and mid-form video format creates a new type of intimacy and allure, especially if you are already looking for something to buy. It’s hard to argue with a sales pitch when you are watching someone in their home actually using the product they are trying to sell you.
The content doesn’t even have to be explicitly promotional: I recall a video I made last year about my reporting being used without credit by content creators. My frustration had hit a breaking point, so I recorded a selfie-style TikTok complaining about the contemporary media ecosystem. Only my head and a portion of my shoulders were in the video, but someone wanted to know where my blouse was from.
TikTok itself has only bolstered the idea that every piece of content is an opportunity to consume. Through TikTok Shop, anyone can become a digital salesperson. In much crueler, more tasteless examples, TikTok has added shopping prompts to videos coming out of Gaza: A woman in a head covering becomes a promotion for similar-looking garments with headscarves. A bespectacled Israeli activist protesting their government’s besiegement is a billboard for a pair of glasses. (...)
It’s easy to blame the influencers for all of this — and many do, regularly, like clockwork. The most recent discourse cycle, in late September, was kicked off by a TikTok video with 390,000 views and arguments that stretched on for weeks.
“These influencers make way too much fucking money,” the video begins. “You’re just getting paid to sell people shit they don’t fucking need. It’s literally just overconsumption … You’re perpetuating this cycle that’s really keeping us trapped.”
Content creators are admittedly a perfect target for the general rage many of us carry around. Many of them seem unencumbered by the endless horrors of the world, with daily routines that include blocks of time for “warm water” and to-do lists with “plan out mocktails for the new year.” Their digital presence exists suspended in time, where there is always something new to recommend, packages of shiny new things waiting for them, and a willing audience that completes the positive feedback loop. Wouldn’t it be nice — as people are in line at food banks, fighting for a precious few job listings, and snatched off streets by masked agents — to sit in your home and talk to yourself for a living?
But the draw of the influencer is powerful; even if you cannot become her, you can own the same things she does. For Antoinette Hocbo, who picked up hobbies via TikTok, the characters she encounters on her For You page seem effortlessly cool. They have an eye for design, they’re interested in the arts, they drink wine. You buy into the person first, and eventually — hopefully — you buy the stuff, too.
“[There’s] the whole idea of parasocial relationships,” Einstein, the marketing expert, says. “If somebody has gotten to the point where they’re spending that much time online with someone, they’re vested in what that person has to say.” The feeling of intimacy is physical: When followers watch their favorite TikToker, they are literally holding them in the palm of their hand. (...)
TikTok made going viral a possibility for a whole new slate of people. Now the hard part is how to keep things rolling when it happens to you. Most of the platforms themselves do not pay much for views, but brands eager to partner with buzzy people do. Creators often talk about their work in terms of self-discovery or self-actualization: This is who I want to be online, and these are the products and tips I truly, honestly want to share.
The tension comes then with the “very real commercial realities of playing to an audience, bowing to commercial sponsorships if you were lucky enough to have them,” Duffy says. “And then the new dimension, which doesn’t have the same precursors in legacy media, which is playing to the algorithm.” A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 62 percent of adults on TikTok are there to find product reviews and recommendations — especially young women. (...)
Project Pan, as a concept, is both clever and strange. For years, a community of people organized largely on the internet have committed themselves to finishing their beauty and personal care products — the name coming from your promise to hit the bottom of the pan that holds your blush, for example. It’s smart for the way it gamifies something people struggle with. (Who among us doesn’t have half-used bottles of soap or barely touched tubes of lipstick?) It’s also deeply revealing: These products are meant to be used, and we collectively are so bad at finishing them off that we need a little game to make it happen. Off the top of my head I can confidently say that I’ve never once “panned” a compact of blush; I have expensive tubes of red lipstick that didn’t end up being my color, but that I can’t bear to throw out; and I have four bottles of sunscreen that crowd my cabinet, waiting for the summer they’re finally used up. There are many more products that I could — should — Project Pan that I’ve forgotten I even own.
Cassandra Silva, on the other hand, knows exactly what she has. She knows, for example, that she spent $2,857.98 AUD on makeup in 2024 and panned products totaling $1,654.13. She owns eight eyeliners, but her ideal number would be four. In 2023 she panned seven mascaras, 11 colored lip products, and one blush, among many others, all lined up in a photo of the totally empty containers that show her progress. She keeps all this data in a giant spreadsheet that she shares with me after we talk, and as I scroll through it, I realize I have never seen an eyeshadow palette where every color is completely empty.
“Compared to beauty YouTube, it’s not insane insane, but it’s still more than any one human could ever reasonably use,” Silva says of her inventory.
She watches beauty YouTube channels, but needs to be careful about what she consumes: She tries to stay away from content showing off hauls, new releases, or the ever-tempting limited-edition holiday releases.
“I am as conscious as I can be for a makeup addict,” Silva says. “I try, and I am freaking susceptible. It’s so bad.” Recently, a palette of neutral eyeshadows hounded her Instagram feed — she caved and bought it, only to be thoroughly disappointed when it arrived. As a panner, Silva will be stuck with it for years until it’s finished.
Chessie Domrongchai used to make the kind of content that Silva perhaps would steer clear of — she was the one tempting makeup lovers with all of these products. As a beauty YouTuber, Domrongchai shared in-depth product review videos for brands like the once-buzzy direct-to-consumer brand Glossier and tested fistfuls of lip glosses in subtly different shades for her 40,000 subscribers. She shared new releases, compared similar products from different brands, and recommended items for upcoming sales. In a 2019 video, she walks viewers through her pinky-brown nude lipstick collection — 15 shades, not including lip glosses and liquid lipsticks. She followed makeup brands and watched other YouTubers, accumulating more and more products to explore ($10,000, she says, feels like a conservative estimate of the value of her collection at its peak). In makeup, Domrongchai found self-expression, creativity, and community.
Until one day in 2022, when a switch went off in her head.
“I started to view a lot of the overconsumption that I was seeing online as kind of disgusting and wrong, and I recognized a lot of the way that I showed up on the internet was to overconsume,” Domrongchai says. Not only that, but she felt her online presence also influenced viewers to keep buying more and more.
“These are just regular people that are just now stuck with the burden of their overconsumption,” she says. But as a content creator, it was hard to be part of the beauty space without having a constant parade of new products.
In recent months, Domrongchai has developed a new routine for the many products littering her home. One by one, she meticulously peels off stickers and labels: from shampoo and olive oil bottles, from dish soap dispensers and face wash. Using a mix of baking soda, mineral oil, and rubbing alcohol, she goes to town on brand names printed on the packaging of eyeshadow palettes and lipsticks, scrubbing away their origins and the millions of dollars of marketing that went into them — arguably why they are in Domrongchai’s house to begin with. The result is shelves and countertops full of bare bottles and tubes and pumps filled with product but stripped of just about everything else. Watching her videos, I’m slightly horrified at my own ability to recognize the specific products even without all the labeling, the colors and shapes of bottles acting like an afterimage of a CeraVe cleanser.
“Of course I’m going to buy the face cleanser that keeps my skin clear, but I don’t need it to continue to market to me in my own home,” Domrongchai says. “In the past I had three different [lotions] and all of their labels and their marketing on these products … They’re all kind of yelling at you trying to convince you to use it. They’re kind of [in] competition with each other.” In other words, it felt like a social media feed.
For some panners, finishing a product can elicit the same rush that buying something new does — that same dopamine rush of hitting “place order” creeps in when you hit that pan. Then you post it online for other panners to see, adding to the thrill. Finishing products becomes a task to complete, just like shopping is.
“What it can do — which I don’t love to admit to — is you’ll put more blush on than you would,” Silva says. “You just slather it on.” Silva shows me her spreadsheet page from 2024 showing colored lip products she used up: 23. Silva estimates that the average person finishes maybe one lipstick a year. In order to pan that many products, she was reapplying them 15 to 20 times a day, she says. Sometimes Silva wonders if she should ditch panning, too, like she did consumption-focused beauty spaces.
“When you first get into it, it’s so helpful, and you really get that community and you can turn some products over. Then the longer that you’re in the panning community, it’s like, all right, now panning is a problem,” she laughs. “Now I’ve taken all the problems I had with makeup consumption and translated them into late-stage panning. It’s like late-stage capitalism.”
by Mia Sato, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Cath Virginia
Monday, December 22, 2025
Alone in Self-Driving Cars: How Convenience Dissolves Consensus
There’s something odd about getting into a Waymo.
After a couple phone taps, the vehicle slowly glides to the curb with perfectly controlled movement, as if fixed on invisible tram-rails etched into the road for its robotic wheels. The white Jaguar moves with the elegance of a prima ballerina, with none of the emotion. All control. Perfect precision. No mistakes. The interior of the self-driving cocoon is comfortable. Supple leather, still new. It talks with a meticulously paced digital intonation. Ambient lo-fi music eases you in.
The whole affair reeks of violent convenience.
Convenience is the mind killer.
When we look at the tools, products, and systems we design, the guiding problem statement always seems to be the eradication of friction. Eliminate the delays, remove the resistance, rid the human inconsistencies.
In the driverless car, we enter seamlessly and we rest completely. We avoid the small irritations of a driver on the phone or a driver who wants to talk. No more “how-do-you-do’s” or “where-are-you-from’s.” There’s no shared an environment. A troubling silence smothers the car. It is difficult not to be reminded of Sartre’s line from Huis Clos:
The issue is that this hell is where we come to understand each other.
It is in the conflict of communication that we form consensus...
Many think pieces have been written about echo chambers and their consequential radicalizations, but, more importantly, our digital polarization has made it nearly impossible for us to share any common ground. This common ground, while sticky, uncomfortable and human, is where friction lives. It’s this friction that’s necessary for shared experience, discrepancy, negotiation and ultimately social progress.
This is why we’re witnessing a collapse of consensus.
We no longer share truths, we speak different languages, dispersed amongst a million Babels.
The Tower of Babel is a story in which humanity, speaking one common language, unites to construct a tower to reach the heavens. Seeing their ambition, God scatters the people, giving them different languages, and making cooperation impossible.
The story’s evocative because it foregrounds the complexity inherent in communication and how that complexity was imposed as punishment.
Communication is inherently difficult: we stutter, misspeak, use the wrong words and say the wrong things. We struggle to be understood every. single. day. An off-hand comment can land poorly with a barista. A joke to a friend can avalanche into a full blown conflict. The wrong salutation in an email can risk an entire exchange.
The dream sold by human-AI interaction – or really much of our consumer technology – is that of perfect communication. One where the interlocutor is always comprehended, always right. And one where the receiver is pliable and diligent, flexible and smooth, adaptable and compliant. “Sycophant” is the term – a servile self-seeking flatterer, one who praises those in power to gain approval.
This is why it feels so good to chat with a chatbot, because as interlocutors we are in utter control. As cybernetics scholar Norbert Wiener reminds us,
The advent of AI-human relationship also signals a similar flattening of the rugged ground of our human relationships.
It is the extension of perfect communication to an experience of endless frictionlessness. A dream of being known without being challenged. But without friction, there is no true dialogue, no true understanding, no true consensus, and no ideological encounter pushing us to new ideas. No fun.
by Matt Klein and Ruby Justice Thelot, Zine | Read more:
Image: uncredited
After a couple phone taps, the vehicle slowly glides to the curb with perfectly controlled movement, as if fixed on invisible tram-rails etched into the road for its robotic wheels. The white Jaguar moves with the elegance of a prima ballerina, with none of the emotion. All control. Perfect precision. No mistakes. The interior of the self-driving cocoon is comfortable. Supple leather, still new. It talks with a meticulously paced digital intonation. Ambient lo-fi music eases you in.
The whole affair reeks of violent convenience.
Convenience is the mind killer.
In the driverless car, we enter seamlessly and we rest completely. We avoid the small irritations of a driver on the phone or a driver who wants to talk. No more “how-do-you-do’s” or “where-are-you-from’s.” There’s no shared an environment. A troubling silence smothers the car. It is difficult not to be reminded of Sartre’s line from Huis Clos:
“Hell is other people.”It keeps echoing, because it seems to be the base assumption guiding our fear of friction. In the imagination of contemporary product makers, friction is other people. The designer’s premise tacitly becomes: life would be perfect if only you could remove the human being who stands between you and what you want.
The issue is that this hell is where we come to understand each other.
It is in the conflict of communication that we form consensus...
Many think pieces have been written about echo chambers and their consequential radicalizations, but, more importantly, our digital polarization has made it nearly impossible for us to share any common ground. This common ground, while sticky, uncomfortable and human, is where friction lives. It’s this friction that’s necessary for shared experience, discrepancy, negotiation and ultimately social progress.
This is why we’re witnessing a collapse of consensus.
We no longer share truths, we speak different languages, dispersed amongst a million Babels.
The Tower of Babel is a story in which humanity, speaking one common language, unites to construct a tower to reach the heavens. Seeing their ambition, God scatters the people, giving them different languages, and making cooperation impossible.
The story’s evocative because it foregrounds the complexity inherent in communication and how that complexity was imposed as punishment.
Communication is inherently difficult: we stutter, misspeak, use the wrong words and say the wrong things. We struggle to be understood every. single. day. An off-hand comment can land poorly with a barista. A joke to a friend can avalanche into a full blown conflict. The wrong salutation in an email can risk an entire exchange.
The dream sold by human-AI interaction – or really much of our consumer technology – is that of perfect communication. One where the interlocutor is always comprehended, always right. And one where the receiver is pliable and diligent, flexible and smooth, adaptable and compliant. “Sycophant” is the term – a servile self-seeking flatterer, one who praises those in power to gain approval.
This is why it feels so good to chat with a chatbot, because as interlocutors we are in utter control. As cybernetics scholar Norbert Wiener reminds us,
“Communication and control entail each other.”But scientists warn of social sycophancy in our AI. As more people seek answers from their LLM companions, the more one is praised (deservingly or undeservingly), and the more distorted one’s self-perceptions become.
The advent of AI-human relationship also signals a similar flattening of the rugged ground of our human relationships.
It is the extension of perfect communication to an experience of endless frictionlessness. A dream of being known without being challenged. But without friction, there is no true dialogue, no true understanding, no true consensus, and no ideological encounter pushing us to new ideas. No fun.
by Matt Klein and Ruby Justice Thelot, Zine | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Everything in moderation. A Gulfstream V waiting at the airport (and limo to drive me there) would be frictionlessness I could support.]
Touched for the Very First Time
Deep in California’s East Bay, on a mild fall night, a 32-year-old we’ll call Simon told me that minutes earlier, for the first time in his life, he had felt a woman’s breasts. The two of us were hunched over a firepit on a discreet wooden terrace while he recounted what had happened: The woman, with a charitable smile and some gentle encouragement, had invited his hand to her body. She let him linger there for a spell—sensing her contours, appreciating her shape—before he pulled away. Now Simon was staring into the embers, contemplating these intrepid steps out of the virginity that had shackled him for so long. He seemed in a bit of a daze.
“I haven’t been physically intimate with a woman before,” he said softly. “I tried to do it without causing her any discomfort.”
Simon is tall, broad-shouldered, and reasonably well dressed. On that evening, he wore a wrinkle-free button-down tucked into khakis, and a well-manicured mustache on his upper lip. A lanyard dangled around his neck with an empty space where he should have Sharpied his name. Instead, he’d left it blank. After traveling here from Europe—over an ocean, craggy mountaintops, and quilted farmlands—he was, I got the sense, a little embarrassed. Not everyone travels 5,000 miles to have their first kiss. Simon felt it was his only option.
Looking around at the top-secret compound we were sitting in, it was easy to deduce why he’d come. Everything about the place bore the carnal aura of a Bachelor set: daybeds lingered in darkened nooks and crannies. A clothing-optional hot tub burbled next to a fully stocked bar. Hammocks swayed in the autumn breeze. A fleet of beautiful women patrolled the grounds, demure and kind-eyed, ready to break bread with the men. Unlike most of the women Simon had come across within the checkered complexities of his stillborn sexual development—remote, inaccessible, alien—these women were eager to teach him something. They wanted him to grasp, in excruciating detail, how to turn them on.
Simon had purchased a ticket to Slutcon, the inaugural event of a radical new approach to sex education. In its most basic definition, Slutcon is an exclusive retreat for sexually and romantically inexperienced men to learn about intimacy. The women on site had a plan for them: Over the next three days, they would break these boys out of their inhibiting psychic barriers, rebuild their confidence, and refine the seizing glitches in their courtship techniques. By the end of the weekend, the men would understand how they too could become one with the sluts.
Of the 150 or so attendees of Slutcon, many of them, like Simon, were either virgins or something close to it. Tickets ranged from $1,000 to $9,000, and the retreat was pitched as a place to learn how to interact with women—as instructed by women themselves. Slutcon is staffed almost entirely by paid and volunteer female sex workers and intimacy experts, and together, they had made themselves available to be touched, seduced, or otherwise experimented on by the novices at any moment during the convention.
In the parlance of Slutcon, these professionals are referred to as its “flirt girls” or, more colloquially, its “flirtees.” Wearing plastic green wristbands that designated their consent, they darted between the men, sultry and warm, prepared to host anyone who endeavored an approach. Men brave enough to try would be rewarded with their most coveted desire: a chance to speak with, caress, or, hell, maybe even have sex with someone they were attracted to in a controlled environment, where fears of offense were nullified. After all, Slutcon is what its founders call “a place to experiment without getting canceled.”
Its organizers believe that America needs this sort of experimentation to repair its broken relationship to sex. Young people are hooking up at astonishingly low rates, and the problem is especially acute with young men: In 2013, 9 percent of men between the ages of 22 and 34 reported that they hadn’t had sex in the past year. A decade later, nearly 25 percent of that same demographic is reporting a prolonged period of celibacy. Fifty-seven percent of single adults report not being interested in dating, and nearly half of men between the ages of 18 and 25 have never approached a woman in a flirtatious manner. Experts have attributed the drop-off to a variety of causes: There’s the post-COVID loneliness crisis, men’s increasing aversion to romantic risk and rejection, and the political ideologies that continue to divide the genders. But regardless of the cause, in 2025—an age of both Lysistrata-tinged female separatist movements and the intoxicating misogyny of Andrew Tate—it is fair to wonder if men and women still like each other in the way they once did.
To soothe this discontent, Slutcon’s organizers treat femininity like a fount of knowledge. More controversially, they also argue that most men are good—if a bit misunderstood. The conventions of 2010s liberal feminism have no quarter here. Slutcon was not founded upon the idea that men must be leached of patriarchy to be properly socialized. And if I’m being honest, that position had left me with an icy feeling in my stomach from the moment I arrived. What if an attendee took undue advantage of Slutcon’s leeway? What if they flew over the guardrails and made the women here uncomfortable—or, worse, unsafe?
It’s a dangerous game that Slutcon plays. The organizers entertain the idea that to rehabilitate our decaying norms about intimacy, men need to shake off their fears about sex—with the help of women willing to grant leniency to their erotic forays. Almost a decade removed from #MeToo and the astonishing reckoning it unleashed, it was difficult for me to completely sign off on that. It wasn’t that Slutcon was a reactionary project or was concocting a backward tradwife fantasy. But the event did unambiguously assert that men alone are unable to fix our ailing sexual culture. At Slutcon, masculinity in itself was not toxic. Women too, people here argued, had a hand in this unraveling. And if these men and women could spend a weekend committed to radical empathy between the genders—blurring the line between sex education and sex work—maybe we’d relearn a skill that feels crucial to our survival. As the weekend wore on, I started to see their point.
“I was interested in being a part of a convention that was taught by women who are sexually successful and sexually open,” Jean said. “I have a mindset that isn’t You guys suck, and here are all of these ways you’re being weird. Instead, it’s like, I want to help you. I want so badly for you to hit on me better.”
“I haven’t been physically intimate with a woman before,” he said softly. “I tried to do it without causing her any discomfort.”
Looking around at the top-secret compound we were sitting in, it was easy to deduce why he’d come. Everything about the place bore the carnal aura of a Bachelor set: daybeds lingered in darkened nooks and crannies. A clothing-optional hot tub burbled next to a fully stocked bar. Hammocks swayed in the autumn breeze. A fleet of beautiful women patrolled the grounds, demure and kind-eyed, ready to break bread with the men. Unlike most of the women Simon had come across within the checkered complexities of his stillborn sexual development—remote, inaccessible, alien—these women were eager to teach him something. They wanted him to grasp, in excruciating detail, how to turn them on.
Simon had purchased a ticket to Slutcon, the inaugural event of a radical new approach to sex education. In its most basic definition, Slutcon is an exclusive retreat for sexually and romantically inexperienced men to learn about intimacy. The women on site had a plan for them: Over the next three days, they would break these boys out of their inhibiting psychic barriers, rebuild their confidence, and refine the seizing glitches in their courtship techniques. By the end of the weekend, the men would understand how they too could become one with the sluts.
Of the 150 or so attendees of Slutcon, many of them, like Simon, were either virgins or something close to it. Tickets ranged from $1,000 to $9,000, and the retreat was pitched as a place to learn how to interact with women—as instructed by women themselves. Slutcon is staffed almost entirely by paid and volunteer female sex workers and intimacy experts, and together, they had made themselves available to be touched, seduced, or otherwise experimented on by the novices at any moment during the convention.
In the parlance of Slutcon, these professionals are referred to as its “flirt girls” or, more colloquially, its “flirtees.” Wearing plastic green wristbands that designated their consent, they darted between the men, sultry and warm, prepared to host anyone who endeavored an approach. Men brave enough to try would be rewarded with their most coveted desire: a chance to speak with, caress, or, hell, maybe even have sex with someone they were attracted to in a controlled environment, where fears of offense were nullified. After all, Slutcon is what its founders call “a place to experiment without getting canceled.”
Its organizers believe that America needs this sort of experimentation to repair its broken relationship to sex. Young people are hooking up at astonishingly low rates, and the problem is especially acute with young men: In 2013, 9 percent of men between the ages of 22 and 34 reported that they hadn’t had sex in the past year. A decade later, nearly 25 percent of that same demographic is reporting a prolonged period of celibacy. Fifty-seven percent of single adults report not being interested in dating, and nearly half of men between the ages of 18 and 25 have never approached a woman in a flirtatious manner. Experts have attributed the drop-off to a variety of causes: There’s the post-COVID loneliness crisis, men’s increasing aversion to romantic risk and rejection, and the political ideologies that continue to divide the genders. But regardless of the cause, in 2025—an age of both Lysistrata-tinged female separatist movements and the intoxicating misogyny of Andrew Tate—it is fair to wonder if men and women still like each other in the way they once did.
To soothe this discontent, Slutcon’s organizers treat femininity like a fount of knowledge. More controversially, they also argue that most men are good—if a bit misunderstood. The conventions of 2010s liberal feminism have no quarter here. Slutcon was not founded upon the idea that men must be leached of patriarchy to be properly socialized. And if I’m being honest, that position had left me with an icy feeling in my stomach from the moment I arrived. What if an attendee took undue advantage of Slutcon’s leeway? What if they flew over the guardrails and made the women here uncomfortable—or, worse, unsafe?
It’s a dangerous game that Slutcon plays. The organizers entertain the idea that to rehabilitate our decaying norms about intimacy, men need to shake off their fears about sex—with the help of women willing to grant leniency to their erotic forays. Almost a decade removed from #MeToo and the astonishing reckoning it unleashed, it was difficult for me to completely sign off on that. It wasn’t that Slutcon was a reactionary project or was concocting a backward tradwife fantasy. But the event did unambiguously assert that men alone are unable to fix our ailing sexual culture. At Slutcon, masculinity in itself was not toxic. Women too, people here argued, had a hand in this unraveling. And if these men and women could spend a weekend committed to radical empathy between the genders—blurring the line between sex education and sex work—maybe we’d relearn a skill that feels crucial to our survival. As the weekend wore on, I started to see their point.
***
On the first night of Slutcon, Aella—the pseudonymous blogger, escort, and internet eccentric who is one of the event’s primary organizers—took the stage at the main pavilion for something of a keynote address. “We are pro-men here,” she said, outlining what the audience could expect from the days ahead. The attendees were reminded that the “flirtees” had consensually opted in to the weekend’s affairs and all were adept at interfacing with clueless suitors. Aella implored the crowd to release inhibitions, to breathe freely, to dig deep within their souls and excavate their inner vixen. Yes, she reminded the room, the women would maintain their personal boundaries, which were always to be respected. (“Some of you will find out in brutal detail that you are giving a girl the ick,” Aella said.) But also, she said, the men here shouldn’t fear bumping against those boundaries—and ought to receive the feedback that resulted graciously, with an open heart. As she wrapped up her remarks, she left the men with a homework assignment: At some point in the next three days, they should ask a woman if they could touch her boobs.
That message resonated with Ari Zerner, a 28-year-old attendee dressed—somewhat inexplicably—in a purple cape. “There’s this feeling of safety here. I know that even if there’s pushback, there’s not going to be punishment,” he said of the weekend’s social contract. Zerner told me that his top goal for being at Slutcon was to learn how to “escalate” a conversation with a woman into something more flirtatiously charged.
Earlier in the day, organizers had distributed a schedule to all participants detailing the retreat’s panels, presentations, and workshops. Some of them centered on seduction: One lecture focused on how and when someone should lean in for a kiss; another offered advice on optimizing a dating profile. Elsewhere, experts gave insight on the taxonomy of sex toys and the finer points of cunnilingus. There was a rope-play demonstration, a seminar on how to properly receive blow jobs, and an assessment of what it takes to be a tactful orgy participant. (One pointer: Shower before arriving.) Once the evening rolled around, Slutcon’s educational atmosphere would morph into a bubbly social hour, when the skills honed in the workshops could be tested on the flirtees. On Saturday night, everyone would gather for Slutcon After Dark—the weekend’s marquee party, and something of a final exam.
All of this made Slutcon sound a little bit like a pickup-artist boot camp, reminiscent of the greasy symposiums of the mid-2000s. Led by vamping gurus like The Game’s Neil Strauss, these “men’s workshops” had dispensed questionable wisdom to help guys get laid quickly, efficiently, and transactionally. (Sample advice: Be slyly rude toward the women you want to sleep with and isolate them from their friends as quickly as possible.) Yet while Slutcon featured a much softer methodology than the Tao of Mystery’s, and was expressly led by women who gave far better advice, nobody at the event ran away from that comparison. In fact, some of the enlightened organizers here wondered if, given the total backsliding of our sexual norms—and the fanatical inceldom we’re facing now—there was something worth reclaiming about an earlier age when, at the very least, men were enthusiastic about approaching women.
“I’m pro–the idea of pickup artistry, in the sense that it goes against the dominant resentful male ideology where guys feel like they’re doomed in the romantic market because their jaw is angled incorrectly,” said Noelle Perdue, a self-described porn historian and one of Slutcon’s speakers. “The idea that you can do certain things that make you more appealing to women is not only true, but there is an optimism inherent in it that I think we’re missing right now.”
After Aella’s commencement, like a class adjourning for recess, the men were unleashed. The sun had firmly tucked behind the chaparral hills, and all at once, everything was possible—for better or worse.
Nobody quite knew what to do with themselves. Some men clustered together, white-knuckling Pacificos, hoping to get lubricated enough to make conversation with the flirtees from a chaste distance. (Alcohol, throughout the weekend, was strictly rationed for safety reasons.) Others, revved up by Aella’s pep talk, hit on everyone in sight, with blissful ego death, to varying degrees of success: I watched one gentleman, balding and heavyset, tell each and every woman in the building that he found her pretty. The campus was permeated with the energy of a middle school dance, more anxious than anticipatory. But still, I admired the attendees’ gameness. Here was a legion of dudes, all gawky, stiff, and tragically horny—imprisoned by long-ossified social and fashion blunders, who write code for a living—taking a leap of faith. At last, they were putting real intention behind the hunger that had burned in them for ages. Slutcon had implored them to flirt their way out of the mess they had found themselves in, and they were willing to give it a try.
The women, meanwhile, were already hard at work. Many of them were coiled on patio furniture, maintaining disciplined eye contact with whatever attendee was currently talking to them. Some of them offered feedback on the men’s techniques, and more often than not, the counseling was astoundingly rudimentary: “It’s like, ‘You are a full foot taller than me and you’re kind of looming over me, so maybe don’t loom’ or ‘You’re not smiling, you’re not really having a playful time’ or ‘You’re getting touchy-feely too fast,’ ” said one of the flirtees, perched on a picnic table in a skirt and crop top, chronicling her interactions thus far. “It didn’t feel like teaching so much as both of us exploring the space together.”
Another flirtee, a striking 27-year-old with jet-black hair named Paola Baca, felt the same way. She had taken it upon herself to slowly disarm the layers of neuroticism that might have previously prevented some of these dudes from engaging with her back in reality. And in that sense, Baca felt that she offered a form of exposure therapy. “A lot of young men don’t think women are humans,” she said. “Not as less-than-humans, but more-than-humans. Attractive women are basically gods to them. I want to show them that we are humans too.” (In her civilian life, Baca studied evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.) (...)
That message resonated with Ari Zerner, a 28-year-old attendee dressed—somewhat inexplicably—in a purple cape. “There’s this feeling of safety here. I know that even if there’s pushback, there’s not going to be punishment,” he said of the weekend’s social contract. Zerner told me that his top goal for being at Slutcon was to learn how to “escalate” a conversation with a woman into something more flirtatiously charged.
Earlier in the day, organizers had distributed a schedule to all participants detailing the retreat’s panels, presentations, and workshops. Some of them centered on seduction: One lecture focused on how and when someone should lean in for a kiss; another offered advice on optimizing a dating profile. Elsewhere, experts gave insight on the taxonomy of sex toys and the finer points of cunnilingus. There was a rope-play demonstration, a seminar on how to properly receive blow jobs, and an assessment of what it takes to be a tactful orgy participant. (One pointer: Shower before arriving.) Once the evening rolled around, Slutcon’s educational atmosphere would morph into a bubbly social hour, when the skills honed in the workshops could be tested on the flirtees. On Saturday night, everyone would gather for Slutcon After Dark—the weekend’s marquee party, and something of a final exam.
All of this made Slutcon sound a little bit like a pickup-artist boot camp, reminiscent of the greasy symposiums of the mid-2000s. Led by vamping gurus like The Game’s Neil Strauss, these “men’s workshops” had dispensed questionable wisdom to help guys get laid quickly, efficiently, and transactionally. (Sample advice: Be slyly rude toward the women you want to sleep with and isolate them from their friends as quickly as possible.) Yet while Slutcon featured a much softer methodology than the Tao of Mystery’s, and was expressly led by women who gave far better advice, nobody at the event ran away from that comparison. In fact, some of the enlightened organizers here wondered if, given the total backsliding of our sexual norms—and the fanatical inceldom we’re facing now—there was something worth reclaiming about an earlier age when, at the very least, men were enthusiastic about approaching women.
“I’m pro–the idea of pickup artistry, in the sense that it goes against the dominant resentful male ideology where guys feel like they’re doomed in the romantic market because their jaw is angled incorrectly,” said Noelle Perdue, a self-described porn historian and one of Slutcon’s speakers. “The idea that you can do certain things that make you more appealing to women is not only true, but there is an optimism inherent in it that I think we’re missing right now.”
After Aella’s commencement, like a class adjourning for recess, the men were unleashed. The sun had firmly tucked behind the chaparral hills, and all at once, everything was possible—for better or worse.
Nobody quite knew what to do with themselves. Some men clustered together, white-knuckling Pacificos, hoping to get lubricated enough to make conversation with the flirtees from a chaste distance. (Alcohol, throughout the weekend, was strictly rationed for safety reasons.) Others, revved up by Aella’s pep talk, hit on everyone in sight, with blissful ego death, to varying degrees of success: I watched one gentleman, balding and heavyset, tell each and every woman in the building that he found her pretty. The campus was permeated with the energy of a middle school dance, more anxious than anticipatory. But still, I admired the attendees’ gameness. Here was a legion of dudes, all gawky, stiff, and tragically horny—imprisoned by long-ossified social and fashion blunders, who write code for a living—taking a leap of faith. At last, they were putting real intention behind the hunger that had burned in them for ages. Slutcon had implored them to flirt their way out of the mess they had found themselves in, and they were willing to give it a try.
The women, meanwhile, were already hard at work. Many of them were coiled on patio furniture, maintaining disciplined eye contact with whatever attendee was currently talking to them. Some of them offered feedback on the men’s techniques, and more often than not, the counseling was astoundingly rudimentary: “It’s like, ‘You are a full foot taller than me and you’re kind of looming over me, so maybe don’t loom’ or ‘You’re not smiling, you’re not really having a playful time’ or ‘You’re getting touchy-feely too fast,’ ” said one of the flirtees, perched on a picnic table in a skirt and crop top, chronicling her interactions thus far. “It didn’t feel like teaching so much as both of us exploring the space together.”
Another flirtee, a striking 27-year-old with jet-black hair named Paola Baca, felt the same way. She had taken it upon herself to slowly disarm the layers of neuroticism that might have previously prevented some of these dudes from engaging with her back in reality. And in that sense, Baca felt that she offered a form of exposure therapy. “A lot of young men don’t think women are humans,” she said. “Not as less-than-humans, but more-than-humans. Attractive women are basically gods to them. I want to show them that we are humans too.” (In her civilian life, Baca studied evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.) (...)
***
The boys at Slutcon, it seemed, were at least trying to unwind the multitude of traumas that had brought on their sexual maladjustment. But I remained curious about how all of this was going to turn them into better flirts. The following morning, I filed into a seminar led by Tom, the pseudonymous partner of one of the organizers and one of the few men on staff. He had convened a last-minute flirting training session after witnessing some subpar attempted courtships the night before. “I was like, Oh, gosh, a lot of this is not up to my quality standards, ” he told me. “I had the itch to step in and help.”
So, in a makeshift ballroom filled to the brim with contemplative men—many dutifully scratching down notes with ballpoint pen, eager to learn from the previous evening’s mistakes—Tom tried to adjust course. Spectators were summoned to the stage, one by one, and each of them was thrust into a simulated date with Jean Blue, a sex worker with a flop of auburn hair who had gamely volunteered to serve as a surrogate.
The problems were immediately apparent. The thrills of good flirting can be felt rather than thought—and that is a difficult principle to distill through language. How can anyone articulate the electricity of a good date, especially for those who may have never touched it before? “I basically stopped people when they made me flinch,” said Tom afterward. “And then I tried to name the flinch.”
There was, indeed, a lot of flinching. Some denizens of Slutcon offered Jean canned, dead-on-arrival opening statements (“What Harry Potter character are you like?”). Others attempted to ratchet up the intrigue in hopeless ways (“What’s your sexiest tattoo?”)...
So, in a makeshift ballroom filled to the brim with contemplative men—many dutifully scratching down notes with ballpoint pen, eager to learn from the previous evening’s mistakes—Tom tried to adjust course. Spectators were summoned to the stage, one by one, and each of them was thrust into a simulated date with Jean Blue, a sex worker with a flop of auburn hair who had gamely volunteered to serve as a surrogate.
The problems were immediately apparent. The thrills of good flirting can be felt rather than thought—and that is a difficult principle to distill through language. How can anyone articulate the electricity of a good date, especially for those who may have never touched it before? “I basically stopped people when they made me flinch,” said Tom afterward. “And then I tried to name the flinch.”
There was, indeed, a lot of flinching. Some denizens of Slutcon offered Jean canned, dead-on-arrival opening statements (“What Harry Potter character are you like?”). Others attempted to ratchet up the intrigue in hopeless ways (“What’s your sexiest tattoo?”)...
“I was interested in being a part of a convention that was taught by women who are sexually successful and sexually open,” Jean said. “I have a mindset that isn’t You guys suck, and here are all of these ways you’re being weird. Instead, it’s like, I want to help you. I want so badly for you to hit on me better.”
by Luke Winkie, Slate | Read more:
Image: Hua Ye
Sunday, December 21, 2025
What’s Not to Like?
Similes! I have hundreds of them on three-by-five notecards, highbrow and lowbrow, copied from newspapers, comic strips, sonnets, billboards, and fortune cookies. My desk overflows with them. They run down to the floor, trail across the room into the hallway. I have similes the way other houses have ants.
Why? To start, for the sheer laugh-out-loud pleasure of them. “His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish,” writes Raymond Chandler. “He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into the mud,” writes P. G. Wodehouse, the undoubted master of the form. Or Kingsley Amis’s probably first-hand description of a hangover: “He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.”
From time to time, I’ve tried to organize my collection, though mostly the task is, as the cliché nicely puts it, like herding cats. Still, a few categories come to mind. The Really Bad Simile, for instance. Examples of this pop up like blisters in contemporary “literary” fiction. Here is a woman eating a crème brûlée: “She crashed the spoon through the sugar like a boy falling through ice on a lake.” (Authors’ names omitted, per the Mercy Rule.) Or: “A slick of beer shaped like the Baltic Sea spilled on the table.” Sometimes they follow a verb like tin cans on a string: “The restraining pins tinkled to the floor like metal rain, hunks of hair tumbling across her face in feral waves.” Or sometimes they just make the page itself cringe and curl up at the corners: “Charlie’s heart rippled like a cloth spread across a wide table.”
Donne’s simile belongs to another category as well, the epic or Homeric simile. Every reader of the Iliad knows something like this picture of an attacking army as a wildfire:
“As when the obliterating fire comes down on the timbered forest / and the roll of the wind carries it everywhere,” and so the Achaean host drives ahead for another five lines. Modern prose writers can also unscroll a simile at surprising length. John Updike dives right in: “The sea, slightly distended by my higher perspective, seems a misty old gentleman stretched at his ease in an immense armchair which has for arms the arms of this bay and for an antimacassar the freshly laundered sky. Sailboats float on his surface like idle and unrelated benevolent thoughts.” And one would not like to have been the beefy Duke of Bedford when Edmund Burke imagined how revolutionary mobs might regard him: “Like the print of the poor ox that we see in the shop windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking no harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and stewing.”
It takes a dramatic mind to carry a comparison through so logically and so far. The Homeric simile evokes a world far larger than a single flash of thought, however clever. Its length creates a scene in our minds, even a drama where contraries come alive: an army driving into battle, an ocean tamed into a harmless old gent, a bloody clash in the streets between aristocrats and rebels.
“Perceptive of resemblances,” writes Aristotle, is what the maker of similes must be. There is one more step. The maker of similes, long or short, must perceive resemblances and then, above all, obey the first, and maybe only, commandment for a writer: to make you see. Consider Wodehouse’s “He found Lord Emsworth, as usual, draped like a wet sock over the rail of the Empress’s G.H.O.,” or Patricia Cornwell’s “My thoughts scattered like marbles.”
The dictionary definition of metaphor is simply an implied comparison, a comparison without the key words like or as. The most common schoolbook example is, “She has a heart of gold,” followed by, “The world is a stage.” Latching onto the verb is, the popular website Grammarly explains, “A metaphor states that one thing is another thing.”
Close, but not enough. There is great wisdom in the roots of our language, in the origin of words. Deep down, in its first Greek form, metaphor combines meta (over, across) and pherein (to carry), and thus the full word means to carry over, to transfer, to change or alter. A metaphor does more than state an identity. In our imagination, before our eyes, metaphor changes one thing into another: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Eliot’s metaphor is a metamorphosis. Magically, we see Prufrock the man metamorphosed into a creature with ragged claws, like a hapless minor god in Ovid.
Too much? Consider, then, what the presence of like or as does in a simile. It announces, self-consciously, that something good is coming. The simile is a rhetorical magic trick, like a pun pulled out of a hat. A metaphor, however, feels not clever but true. Take away the announcement of like, and we read and write on a much less sophisticated level, on a level that has been called primitive, because it recalls the staggering ancient power of words as curses, as spells to transform someone into a frog, a stag, a satanic serpent.
A better term might be childlike. Psychologists know that very young children understand the metamorphosing power of words. To a child of three or four, writes Howard Gardner, the properties of a new word “may be inextricably fused with the new object: at such a time the pencil may become a rocket ship.” Older children and adults know that this isn’t so. But for most of us, and certainly for most writers I know, the childhood core of magical language play is not lost. It exists at the center and is only surrounded by adult awareness, as the rings encircle the heart of the tree.
Still too much? Here is Updike, making me gasp: “But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.” No labored comparison, no signal not to take it literally. Like the pencil and rocket, their hands have become a starfish. Or Shakespeare, metamorphosing himself into an autumnal tree and then an ancient abbey: “That time of year thou may’st in me behold, / When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” Pure magic.
Yet why be a purist? At the high point of language, James Joyce blends simile, metaphor, and extended simile into one beautiful and unearthly scene, an image created by a sorcerer.
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s. … Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
The passage is like a palimpsest. A reader can see through the surface of the language. A reader can penetrate to the traces of the real person still visible beneath the living words that are, as they move down the page, quietly transforming her. It is as if we are looking through the transparent chrysalis to the caterpillar growing inside, watching its slow and perfect metamorphosis into the butterfly. Too much? No.
Why? To start, for the sheer laugh-out-loud pleasure of them. “His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish,” writes Raymond Chandler. “He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into the mud,” writes P. G. Wodehouse, the undoubted master of the form. Or Kingsley Amis’s probably first-hand description of a hangover: “He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.”
Writing about sex can drive a writer to similes of unparalleled badness. Someone has borrowed my copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but these more recent examples might do, from The Literary Review’s “Bad Sex in Fiction Award”: “Katsuro’s penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.” Or this loving, if somewhat chiropractic moment: “her long neck, her swan’s neck … coiling like a serpent, like a serpent, coiling down on him.” Or finally (my eyes are closed as I type): “Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey.” (...)
Donne’s simile belongs to another category as well, the epic or Homeric simile. Every reader of the Iliad knows something like this picture of an attacking army as a wildfire:
“As when the obliterating fire comes down on the timbered forest / and the roll of the wind carries it everywhere,” and so the Achaean host drives ahead for another five lines. Modern prose writers can also unscroll a simile at surprising length. John Updike dives right in: “The sea, slightly distended by my higher perspective, seems a misty old gentleman stretched at his ease in an immense armchair which has for arms the arms of this bay and for an antimacassar the freshly laundered sky. Sailboats float on his surface like idle and unrelated benevolent thoughts.” And one would not like to have been the beefy Duke of Bedford when Edmund Burke imagined how revolutionary mobs might regard him: “Like the print of the poor ox that we see in the shop windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking no harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and stewing.”
It takes a dramatic mind to carry a comparison through so logically and so far. The Homeric simile evokes a world far larger than a single flash of thought, however clever. Its length creates a scene in our minds, even a drama where contraries come alive: an army driving into battle, an ocean tamed into a harmless old gent, a bloody clash in the streets between aristocrats and rebels.
“Perceptive of resemblances,” writes Aristotle, is what the maker of similes must be. There is one more step. The maker of similes, long or short, must perceive resemblances and then, above all, obey the first, and maybe only, commandment for a writer: to make you see. Consider Wodehouse’s “He found Lord Emsworth, as usual, draped like a wet sock over the rail of the Empress’s G.H.O.,” or Patricia Cornwell’s “My thoughts scattered like marbles.”
The dictionary definition of metaphor is simply an implied comparison, a comparison without the key words like or as. The most common schoolbook example is, “She has a heart of gold,” followed by, “The world is a stage.” Latching onto the verb is, the popular website Grammarly explains, “A metaphor states that one thing is another thing.”
Close, but not enough. There is great wisdom in the roots of our language, in the origin of words. Deep down, in its first Greek form, metaphor combines meta (over, across) and pherein (to carry), and thus the full word means to carry over, to transfer, to change or alter. A metaphor does more than state an identity. In our imagination, before our eyes, metaphor changes one thing into another: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Eliot’s metaphor is a metamorphosis. Magically, we see Prufrock the man metamorphosed into a creature with ragged claws, like a hapless minor god in Ovid.
Too much? Consider, then, what the presence of like or as does in a simile. It announces, self-consciously, that something good is coming. The simile is a rhetorical magic trick, like a pun pulled out of a hat. A metaphor, however, feels not clever but true. Take away the announcement of like, and we read and write on a much less sophisticated level, on a level that has been called primitive, because it recalls the staggering ancient power of words as curses, as spells to transform someone into a frog, a stag, a satanic serpent.
A better term might be childlike. Psychologists know that very young children understand the metamorphosing power of words. To a child of three or four, writes Howard Gardner, the properties of a new word “may be inextricably fused with the new object: at such a time the pencil may become a rocket ship.” Older children and adults know that this isn’t so. But for most of us, and certainly for most writers I know, the childhood core of magical language play is not lost. It exists at the center and is only surrounded by adult awareness, as the rings encircle the heart of the tree.
Still too much? Here is Updike, making me gasp: “But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.” No labored comparison, no signal not to take it literally. Like the pencil and rocket, their hands have become a starfish. Or Shakespeare, metamorphosing himself into an autumnal tree and then an ancient abbey: “That time of year thou may’st in me behold, / When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” Pure magic.
Yet why be a purist? At the high point of language, James Joyce blends simile, metaphor, and extended simile into one beautiful and unearthly scene, an image created by a sorcerer.
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s. … Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
The passage is like a palimpsest. A reader can see through the surface of the language. A reader can penetrate to the traces of the real person still visible beneath the living words that are, as they move down the page, quietly transforming her. It is as if we are looking through the transparent chrysalis to the caterpillar growing inside, watching its slow and perfect metamorphosis into the butterfly. Too much? No.
by Max Byrd, American Scholar | Read more:
Image: locket479/Flickr
The Day the Dinosaurs Died
A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth. “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark."
If, on a certain evening about sixty-six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began.
A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.
If, on a certain evening about sixty-six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began.
Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.
The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.
The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.
Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.
Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.
One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years. Consequently, numerous paleontologists have argued that the dinosaurs were on the way to extinction long before the asteroid struck, owing perhaps to the volcanic eruptions and climate change. Other scientists have countered that the three-metre problem merely reflects how hard it is to find fossils. Sooner or later, they’ve contended, a scientist will discover dinosaurs much closer to the moment of destruction.
DePalma’s find was in the Hell Creek geological formation, which outcrops in parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, and contains some of the most storied dinosaur beds in the world. At the time of the impact, the Hell Creek landscape consisted of steamy, subtropical lowlands and floodplains along the shores of an inland sea. The land teemed with life and the conditions were excellent for fossilization, with seasonal floods and meandering rivers that rapidly buried dead animals and plants.
Dinosaur hunters first discovered these rich fossil beds in the late nineteenth century. In 1902, Barnum Brown, a flamboyant dinosaur hunter who worked at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, found the first Tyrannosaurus rex here, causing a worldwide sensation. One paleontologist estimated that in the Cretaceous period Hell Creek was so thick with T. rexes that they were like hyenas on the Serengeti. It was also home to triceratops and duckbills. (...)
The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.
The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.
Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.
Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.
Locked in the KT boundary are the answers to our questions about one of the most significant events in the history of life on the planet. If one looks at the Earth as a kind of living organism, as many biologists do, you could say that it was shot by a bullet and almost died. Deciphering what happened on the day of destruction is crucial not only to solving the three-metre problem but also to explaining our own genesis as a species.
On August 5, 2013, I received an e-mail from a graduate student named Robert DePalma. I had never met DePalma, but we had corresponded on paleontological matters for years, ever since he had read a novel I’d written that centered on the discovery of a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex killed by the KT impact. “I have made an incredible and unprecedented discovery,” he wrote me, from a truck stop in Bowman, North Dakota. “It is extremely confidential and only three others know of it at the moment, all of them close colleagues.” He went on, “It is far more unique and far rarer than any simple dinosaur discovery. I would prefer not outlining the details via e-mail, if possible.” He gave me his cell-phone number and a time to call...
On August 5, 2013, I received an e-mail from a graduate student named Robert DePalma. I had never met DePalma, but we had corresponded on paleontological matters for years, ever since he had read a novel I’d written that centered on the discovery of a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex killed by the KT impact. “I have made an incredible and unprecedented discovery,” he wrote me, from a truck stop in Bowman, North Dakota. “It is extremely confidential and only three others know of it at the moment, all of them close colleagues.” He went on, “It is far more unique and far rarer than any simple dinosaur discovery. I would prefer not outlining the details via e-mail, if possible.” He gave me his cell-phone number and a time to call...
DePalma’s find was in the Hell Creek geological formation, which outcrops in parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, and contains some of the most storied dinosaur beds in the world. At the time of the impact, the Hell Creek landscape consisted of steamy, subtropical lowlands and floodplains along the shores of an inland sea. The land teemed with life and the conditions were excellent for fossilization, with seasonal floods and meandering rivers that rapidly buried dead animals and plants.
Dinosaur hunters first discovered these rich fossil beds in the late nineteenth century. In 1902, Barnum Brown, a flamboyant dinosaur hunter who worked at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, found the first Tyrannosaurus rex here, causing a worldwide sensation. One paleontologist estimated that in the Cretaceous period Hell Creek was so thick with T. rexes that they were like hyenas on the Serengeti. It was also home to triceratops and duckbills. (...)
Today, DePalma, now thirty-seven, is still working toward his Ph.D. He holds the unpaid position of curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, a nascent and struggling museum with no exhibition space. In 2012, while looking for a new pond deposit, he heard that a private collector had stumbled upon an unusual site on a cattle ranch near Bowman, North Dakota. (Much of the Hell Creek land is privately owned, and ranchers will sell digging rights to whoever will pay decent money, paleontologists and commercial fossil collectors alike.) The collector felt that the site, a three-foot-deep layer exposed at the surface, was a bust: it was packed with fish fossils, but they were so delicate that they crumbled into tiny flakes as soon as they met the air. The fish were encased in layers of damp, cracked mud and sand that had never solidified; it was so soft that it could be dug with a shovel or pulled apart by hand. In July, 2012, the collector showed DePalma the site and told him that he was welcome to it. (...)
The following July, DePalma returned to do a preliminary excavation of the site. “Almost right away, I saw it was unusual,” he told me. He began shovelling off the layers of soil above where he’d found the fish. This “overburden” is typically material that was deposited long after the specimen lived; there’s little in it to interest a paleontologist, and it is usually discarded. But as soon as DePalma started digging he noticed grayish-white specks in the layers which looked like grains of sand but which, under a hand lens, proved to be tiny spheres and elongated droplets. “I think, Holy shit, these look like microtektites!” DePalma recalled. Microtektites are the blobs of glass that form when molten rock is blasted into the air by an asteroid impact and falls back to Earth in a solidifying drizzle. The site appeared to contain microtektites by the million.
As DePalma carefully excavated the upper layers, he began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. “There’s amazing plant material in there, all interlaced and interlocked,” he recalled. “There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress-tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber.” Most fossils end up being squashed flat by the pressure of the overlying stone, but here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. “You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science,” he said. As he dug, the momentousness of what he had come across slowly dawned on him. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century.
by Douglas Preston, New Yorker | Read more:
The following July, DePalma returned to do a preliminary excavation of the site. “Almost right away, I saw it was unusual,” he told me. He began shovelling off the layers of soil above where he’d found the fish. This “overburden” is typically material that was deposited long after the specimen lived; there’s little in it to interest a paleontologist, and it is usually discarded. But as soon as DePalma started digging he noticed grayish-white specks in the layers which looked like grains of sand but which, under a hand lens, proved to be tiny spheres and elongated droplets. “I think, Holy shit, these look like microtektites!” DePalma recalled. Microtektites are the blobs of glass that form when molten rock is blasted into the air by an asteroid impact and falls back to Earth in a solidifying drizzle. The site appeared to contain microtektites by the million.
As DePalma carefully excavated the upper layers, he began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. “There’s amazing plant material in there, all interlaced and interlocked,” he recalled. “There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress-tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber.” Most fossils end up being squashed flat by the pressure of the overlying stone, but here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. “You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science,” he said. As he dug, the momentousness of what he had come across slowly dawned on him. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century.
by Douglas Preston, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Richard Barnes
Saturday, December 20, 2025
The Online Scam That Hits Travelers When They're Most Distracted
When an actual human being answered an airline customer-service hotline after a single ring, I probably should have known I was being scammed.
At the time, I wasn’t exactly thinking critically. It was three days before Thanksgiving, and my family was about to miss our flight to Berlin, stuck in traffic en route to the airport in Newark, N.J. Blame a combination of poor planning, construction on I-95 and five consecutive canceled Ubers.
So when an empathetic-sounding man identified himself as a United Airlines agent named Sheldon and immediately asked for my phone number in case we got disconnected, I felt nothing but an overwhelming sense of relief. Sheldon told me not to worry. He’d get my family to Berlin. “Sheldon, you are an angel,” I said through tears, explaining that my father had died in July and this was to be our family’s first Thanksgiving without him.
Sheldon told me, with what seemed like genuine emotion, that he was terribly sorry for my loss. The good news was he could get us on a Lufthansa flight later that night, going through Munich. All I had to do was cover the price difference between the tickets: $1,415.97 for the three of us. I sighed and gave Sheldon my American Express card number.
That’s when I became the latest victim of what the Federal Trade Commission calls a business-impostor or business-impersonator scam. Like 396,227 other Americans in the first nine months of this year — up 18% from the same period last year — I fell for this increasingly sophisticated deception, in which someone claims to represent a trusted company to extract money and personal data from an unsuspecting victim...
The specific techniques the scammers use vary: Some pose as airlines on social media and respond to consumer complaints. Others use texts or emails claiming to be an airline reporting a delayed or canceled flight to phish for travelers’ data. But the objective is always the same: to hit a stressed out, overwhelmed traveler at their most vulnerable.
A sponsored scam
In my case, the scammer exploited weaknesses in Google’s automated ad-screening system, so that fraudulent sponsored results rose to the top. After I reported the fake “United Airlines” ad to Google, via an online form for consumers, it was taken down. But a few days later, I entered the same search terms and the identical ad featuring the same 1-888 number was back at the top of my results. I reported it again, and it was quickly removed again. (...)
Not a good sign
After paying for the new tickets, I received a confirmation email from an unfamiliar domain. Sheldon was still on the line with me, so I asked him what was going on. Shouldn’t the confirmation come from United.com, not some random site called Travelomile? Sheldon explained that because Lufthansa operated the new flight and the changes were so last-minute, United used the site as its payments-processing partner. This didn’t quite make sense, but I suppose I still wanted to believe in Sheldon.
It wasn’t until he asked me to upload images of my family’s passports to a janky-looking website that my head started to spin. When our cab pulled into the departures zone, I hung up on Sheldon and ran to United’s customer-service counter in tears. I showed the agent behind the counter our “boarding passes.”
“I don’t know what these are, but I will help you,” the agent said. He booked us on the next flight, through Frankfurt, at no extra cost — a holiday miracle.
When we arrived at our gate, I called American Express and contested the charge from Travelomile before canceling my credit card. I then contacted Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, to put a fraud alert on my file. Next, I filed complaint with the FTC and reported the fake ad to Google. Later, I looked up Travelomile on TrustPilot, an independent customer-review platform, and found 47 one-star ratings out 297 ratings total. Many of those one-star reviews were from people who said they had fallen for a similar scam. (...)
Stay on guard when you travel
What consumers can do to protect themselves from travel scammers, according to John Breyault of the National Consumers League:
At the time, I wasn’t exactly thinking critically. It was three days before Thanksgiving, and my family was about to miss our flight to Berlin, stuck in traffic en route to the airport in Newark, N.J. Blame a combination of poor planning, construction on I-95 and five consecutive canceled Ubers.
Sheldon told me, with what seemed like genuine emotion, that he was terribly sorry for my loss. The good news was he could get us on a Lufthansa flight later that night, going through Munich. All I had to do was cover the price difference between the tickets: $1,415.97 for the three of us. I sighed and gave Sheldon my American Express card number.
That’s when I became the latest victim of what the Federal Trade Commission calls a business-impostor or business-impersonator scam. Like 396,227 other Americans in the first nine months of this year — up 18% from the same period last year — I fell for this increasingly sophisticated deception, in which someone claims to represent a trusted company to extract money and personal data from an unsuspecting victim...
The specific techniques the scammers use vary: Some pose as airlines on social media and respond to consumer complaints. Others use texts or emails claiming to be an airline reporting a delayed or canceled flight to phish for travelers’ data. But the objective is always the same: to hit a stressed out, overwhelmed traveler at their most vulnerable.
A sponsored scam
In my case, the scammer exploited weaknesses in Google’s automated ad-screening system, so that fraudulent sponsored results rose to the top. After I reported the fake “United Airlines” ad to Google, via an online form for consumers, it was taken down. But a few days later, I entered the same search terms and the identical ad featuring the same 1-888 number was back at the top of my results. I reported it again, and it was quickly removed again. (...)
In retrospect, my refusal to face reality was my biggest mistake. We were still in traffic, set to arrive at the airport just as United Flight 962 was beginning to board, with three large suitcases to check. We had zero chance of making it.
The replacement of humans with not-always-helpful AI-powered customer-service tools makes it easier for an airline scammer to lure frustrated travelers. That’s what happened to me in the back of the cab when I opened the United app on my phone and began furiously texting, first with a bot, then with an actual representative, who sent me a link for the company’s Agent on Demand service to help passengers in urgent situations.
The link didn’t work. When I tried to text the agent on the app, the connection got lost and I was back to square one, chatting with a bot. Time was running out. Exasperated, I closed the app and typed “United airlines agent on demand” into Google. The top search result on my phone said United.com, had a 1-888 number next to it and said it had had “1M+ visits in past month.” In other words, it looked legit. I tapped the number. That’s when I first connected with Sheldon.
The replacement of humans with not-always-helpful AI-powered customer-service tools makes it easier for an airline scammer to lure frustrated travelers. That’s what happened to me in the back of the cab when I opened the United app on my phone and began furiously texting, first with a bot, then with an actual representative, who sent me a link for the company’s Agent on Demand service to help passengers in urgent situations.
The link didn’t work. When I tried to text the agent on the app, the connection got lost and I was back to square one, chatting with a bot. Time was running out. Exasperated, I closed the app and typed “United airlines agent on demand” into Google. The top search result on my phone said United.com, had a 1-888 number next to it and said it had had “1M+ visits in past month.” In other words, it looked legit. I tapped the number. That’s when I first connected with Sheldon.
Not a good sign
After paying for the new tickets, I received a confirmation email from an unfamiliar domain. Sheldon was still on the line with me, so I asked him what was going on. Shouldn’t the confirmation come from United.com, not some random site called Travelomile? Sheldon explained that because Lufthansa operated the new flight and the changes were so last-minute, United used the site as its payments-processing partner. This didn’t quite make sense, but I suppose I still wanted to believe in Sheldon.
It wasn’t until he asked me to upload images of my family’s passports to a janky-looking website that my head started to spin. When our cab pulled into the departures zone, I hung up on Sheldon and ran to United’s customer-service counter in tears. I showed the agent behind the counter our “boarding passes.”
“I don’t know what these are, but I will help you,” the agent said. He booked us on the next flight, through Frankfurt, at no extra cost — a holiday miracle.
When we arrived at our gate, I called American Express and contested the charge from Travelomile before canceling my credit card. I then contacted Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, to put a fraud alert on my file. Next, I filed complaint with the FTC and reported the fake ad to Google. Later, I looked up Travelomile on TrustPilot, an independent customer-review platform, and found 47 one-star ratings out 297 ratings total. Many of those one-star reviews were from people who said they had fallen for a similar scam. (...)
Stay on guard when you travel
What consumers can do to protect themselves from travel scammers, according to John Breyault of the National Consumers League:
- Save the airline’s real number in your contacts before traveling.
- If you reach out to the airline, do it through its official app.
- If you’ve been defrauded by an impostor, contact your bank or credit card company immediately. [ed. more...]
by Rachel Dodes, Bloomberg/Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited
John & Yoko: One to One
A fire alert disrupts the Venice screening of One to One: John & Yoko, Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ documentary about Lennon’s rambunctious post-Beatles heyday, when he and his artist wife Ono were first putting down roots in New York. Inside the hushed screening room, the flashing red lights and blaring alarm provide the second big surprise of the night. The first was how much I was enjoying the show.
Short of a documentary that unearths incontrovertible new evidence that he faked his own death, I’m not convinced that the world needs another John Lennon film. The medium, surely, has him well covered already. But Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have managed to find and mine a rich source of material, tightly tucked away amid all the other wildcat wells. Their film turns back the clock to the early 1970s and a benefit gig that occurred around the time of Lennon’s deportation battle with Nixon (see previous documentaries for details) and his extended lost weekend with May Pang (ditto). Crucially, too, it throws this concert against the maelstrom of the US political scene, with a channel-surfing aesthetic that skips from car and Coke commercials to the Attica prison riot and the near-fatal shooting of Alabama governor George Wallace.
While Lennon claims that he spent his first year in New York mostly watching TV, One to One suggests otherwise. Instead he hit the ground running, hurling himself at the action to become the standard bearer and figurehead for whatever progressive leftist cause was doing the rounds that week. The film blends archive footage with a trove of previously unheard phone conversations to show the ways in which he and Ono leveraged their celebrity status and surrounded themselves with a crew of colourful upstarts, from Allen Ginsberg to Jerry Rubin. The oddest of these, perhaps, is the activist AJ Weberman, who is tasked with a mission to raid Bob Dylan’s bins in order to prove what a “multimillionaire hypocrite” the singer has become. Ono pleads with Weberman to apologise, explaining that they need Dylan to perform at a planned “Free the People” concert in Miami, but AJ is unrepentant and initially won’t be budged.
In the event, the Free the People event was cancelled. But Lennon promptly finds a new focus with the One to One benefit for disabled children from the Willowbrook state school. Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have remastered Phil Spector’s muddy original recording so that the footage now plays with a fresh, bullish swagger. This was Lennon’s first full-length concert since the Beatles performed at Candlestick Park and, it transpired, the last he would ever play.
If only more nostalgic music documentaries could muster such a fun, fierce and full-blooded take on old, familiar material. One to One, against the odds, makes Lennon feel somehow vital again. It catches him like a butterfly at arguably his most interesting period, when he felt liberated and unfettered and was living “like a student” in a two-room loft in Greenwich Village. He’s radioactive with charisma, tilting at windmills and kicking out sparks.
Short of a documentary that unearths incontrovertible new evidence that he faked his own death, I’m not convinced that the world needs another John Lennon film. The medium, surely, has him well covered already. But Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have managed to find and mine a rich source of material, tightly tucked away amid all the other wildcat wells. Their film turns back the clock to the early 1970s and a benefit gig that occurred around the time of Lennon’s deportation battle with Nixon (see previous documentaries for details) and his extended lost weekend with May Pang (ditto). Crucially, too, it throws this concert against the maelstrom of the US political scene, with a channel-surfing aesthetic that skips from car and Coke commercials to the Attica prison riot and the near-fatal shooting of Alabama governor George Wallace.
While Lennon claims that he spent his first year in New York mostly watching TV, One to One suggests otherwise. Instead he hit the ground running, hurling himself at the action to become the standard bearer and figurehead for whatever progressive leftist cause was doing the rounds that week. The film blends archive footage with a trove of previously unheard phone conversations to show the ways in which he and Ono leveraged their celebrity status and surrounded themselves with a crew of colourful upstarts, from Allen Ginsberg to Jerry Rubin. The oddest of these, perhaps, is the activist AJ Weberman, who is tasked with a mission to raid Bob Dylan’s bins in order to prove what a “multimillionaire hypocrite” the singer has become. Ono pleads with Weberman to apologise, explaining that they need Dylan to perform at a planned “Free the People” concert in Miami, but AJ is unrepentant and initially won’t be budged.
In the event, the Free the People event was cancelled. But Lennon promptly finds a new focus with the One to One benefit for disabled children from the Willowbrook state school. Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have remastered Phil Spector’s muddy original recording so that the footage now plays with a fresh, bullish swagger. This was Lennon’s first full-length concert since the Beatles performed at Candlestick Park and, it transpired, the last he would ever play.
If only more nostalgic music documentaries could muster such a fun, fierce and full-blooded take on old, familiar material. One to One, against the odds, makes Lennon feel somehow vital again. It catches him like a butterfly at arguably his most interesting period, when he felt liberated and unfettered and was living “like a student” in a two-room loft in Greenwich Village. He’s radioactive with charisma, tilting at windmills and kicking out sparks.
by Xan Brooks, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: One to One/YT
[ed. Haven't seen this yet, but the link above about May Pang and her relationship with John was fascinating. Didn't know Yoko set them up to take pressure off of John's straying, and that, after a couple years (and an alleged affair of her own), became jealous and reeled him back in.]
Friday, December 19, 2025
The Violin and the Fan
(Teased at school for playing violin, and practicing alone in his bedroom one summer afternoon, he played a particular set of notes while the fan in the window was producing a high-pitched vibration in the glass)
“As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not the slightest inkling was there … it was total horror. It was all horror everywhere, distilled and given form. It rose in me, out of me, summoned somehow by the odd confluence of the fan and those notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more horrible than I shall ever have the power to convey. I dropped my violin and ran from the room … Shapelessness was one of the horrible things about it. I can say and mean only shape, dark, and either billowing or flapping. But because the horror receded the moment I left the room, within minutes it had become unreal. The shape and horror. It seemed to have been my imagination, some random bit of psychic flatulence, an anomaly”…
“I returned shortly to the room and the fan and picked up the violin again. And produced the same resonance again immediately. And immediately again the black flapping shape rose in my mind again. It was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I’ve ever confronted … Set free somehow by that one-day-only resonance of violin and fan, the dark shape began rising out of my mind’s corner on its own. I dropped the violin again and ran from the room once again, clutching my head at the front and back, but this time it did not recede… . It was as if I’d awakened it and now it was active. It came and went for a year. I lived in horror of it for a year, as a child, never knowing when it would rise up billowing and blot out all light. After a year it receded. I think I was ten. But not all the way. I’d awakened it somehow. Every so often. Every few months it would rise inside me … The last time it ever rose up billowing was my second year of college … One sophomore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time in years. It is the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt. There is no possible way death can feel as bad. It rose up. It was worse now that I was older … I thought I’d have to hurl myself out of my dormitory’s window. I simply could not live with how it felt … Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat with me until it went away. It took most of the night. We didn’t converse; he didn’t try to comfort me. He spoke very little, just sat up with me. We didn’t become friends. By graduation I’d forgotten his name and major. But on that night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself … It’s never come back.”
“As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not the slightest inkling was there … it was total horror. It was all horror everywhere, distilled and given form. It rose in me, out of me, summoned somehow by the odd confluence of the fan and those notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more horrible than I shall ever have the power to convey. I dropped my violin and ran from the room … Shapelessness was one of the horrible things about it. I can say and mean only shape, dark, and either billowing or flapping. But because the horror receded the moment I left the room, within minutes it had become unreal. The shape and horror. It seemed to have been my imagination, some random bit of psychic flatulence, an anomaly”…
“I returned shortly to the room and the fan and picked up the violin again. And produced the same resonance again immediately. And immediately again the black flapping shape rose in my mind again. It was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I’ve ever confronted … Set free somehow by that one-day-only resonance of violin and fan, the dark shape began rising out of my mind’s corner on its own. I dropped the violin again and ran from the room once again, clutching my head at the front and back, but this time it did not recede… . It was as if I’d awakened it and now it was active. It came and went for a year. I lived in horror of it for a year, as a child, never knowing when it would rise up billowing and blot out all light. After a year it receded. I think I was ten. But not all the way. I’d awakened it somehow. Every so often. Every few months it would rise inside me … The last time it ever rose up billowing was my second year of college … One sophomore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time in years. It is the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt. There is no possible way death can feel as bad. It rose up. It was worse now that I was older … I thought I’d have to hurl myself out of my dormitory’s window. I simply could not live with how it felt … Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat with me until it went away. It took most of the night. We didn’t converse; he didn’t try to comfort me. He spoke very little, just sat up with me. We didn’t become friends. By graduation I’d forgotten his name and major. But on that night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself … It’s never come back.”
[ed. I've had a similar experience, it's horrifying. A total soul crushing dread that's beyond description. My experience involved my head and hands, feeling massively huge, almost blimp-like, and obliterating everything they touched. Even worse - actually the worst - was the deep and malevolent 'thrumb, thrumb, THRUMBING" sound and feeling that accompanied the whole experience. The voice of doom. It felt like being crushed.]
Favorite Rob Reiner Credits
When Rob Reiner was killed earlier this week, along with his wife and creative partner Michelle, the world of film lost one of its most beloved and respected figures, an artist who had done very good and extremely popular work in a variety of genres, first in front of the camera, then behind it as a writer, producer, and director, and then again in his later life as an actor. All the while, Reiner maintained a spotless reputation as a mensch, in an industry with vanishingly few of those. He was one of the most sophisticated and successful political activists in California, and his work (and money) helped pass the state's groundbreaking marriage equality law. Few filmmakers have had as vast or varied an impact on American life over the last 50 years, which is something that Reiner would surely have found very funny. Here are some of Reiner's films and roles that we love:
Stand By Me
Stand By Me is probably the purest chunk of schmaltz in Rob Reiner's generational early-career run. The movie is oozing with sentiment, factory-designed to squeeze profundity out of every otherwise mundane childhood interaction, and some not so mundane. It pulls out every trouble-at-home cliché to make you root for the kids and add dramatic heft. Richard Dreyfuss's narration should come with an insulin pump.
And yet it works! It works. You root for the kids, and you identify with them; you laugh when you're meant to laugh and cry when you're supposed to; and yes, through the sheen of memory, all those moments with your own childhood pals take on a patina that preserves them as something meaningful. It's distilled nostalgia, which in moviemaking is much easier to fuck up than to get right.
Weapons-grade middlebrow competence was Reiner's strength. That's a compliment, to be clear, especially as Hollywood has come to devalue that skillset and the type of work it produced. He was visually unflashy, almost to an extent that it became his signature as a director. I'm not sure what a Rob Reiner film "looks like." He mostly picked great scripts, made his visual and storytelling choices, and got out of the way to let his actors cook. In Stand By Me, his first crucial decision was to give the movie a main character; the novella focuses on all four boys equally. The second was the casting. Reiner reportedly auditioned more than 300 kids, and got all four exactly right. A Mount Rushmore of child actors could credibly just be the four boys from this film.
It can be easy and is tempting to think of a movie as something that just sort of happens, and succeeds and fails for ineffable reasons, but it's really just a collection of a million different choices being made—most of the big ones by the director—and any one of which, if misguided, could torpedo the whole thing. Stand By Me doesn't work if the kids don't work. For its flaws, every choice that Reiner needed to nail in this movie, he nailed. You can more or less say the same for his entire first 12 years of directing. His hit rate was a miracle—no, not a miracle, that denies agency. It is the collective work of a real-deal genius. (...)
- Barry Petchesky
When Harry Met Sally
It’s like 90 minutes, and all of them are perfect. Harry and Sally might suffer for their neuroses, but the greatest gift a director can give an audience is a film whose every detail was obsessed over. New York, warm and orange, has never looked better. Carrie Fisher says her lines the only way they could ever sound: You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right. I want you to know that I will never want that wagon wheel coffee table.
That a film so brisk can feel so lived-in owes to Nora Ephron’s screenplay and also to Reiner’s neat choices, like the split-screen that makes it look like Harry and Sally are watching Casablanca in the same bed, an effect dialed up later in a continuously shot four-way phone call scene that took 60 tries to get right. Every time I watch When Harry Met Sally, I think it must have been impossible to make; the coziness of the movie is cut with something sad and mischievous and hard to describe. Estelle Reiner’s deadpan line reading at Katz’s Deli is a classic, and every family Pictionary night in our house began with someone guessing “baby fish mouth,” but the bit that came to mind first was this scene set at a Giants game: Harry tells Jess about his wife’s affair between rounds of the wave.
- Maitreyi Anantharaman
Stand By Me
And yet it works! It works. You root for the kids, and you identify with them; you laugh when you're meant to laugh and cry when you're supposed to; and yes, through the sheen of memory, all those moments with your own childhood pals take on a patina that preserves them as something meaningful. It's distilled nostalgia, which in moviemaking is much easier to fuck up than to get right.
Weapons-grade middlebrow competence was Reiner's strength. That's a compliment, to be clear, especially as Hollywood has come to devalue that skillset and the type of work it produced. He was visually unflashy, almost to an extent that it became his signature as a director. I'm not sure what a Rob Reiner film "looks like." He mostly picked great scripts, made his visual and storytelling choices, and got out of the way to let his actors cook. In Stand By Me, his first crucial decision was to give the movie a main character; the novella focuses on all four boys equally. The second was the casting. Reiner reportedly auditioned more than 300 kids, and got all four exactly right. A Mount Rushmore of child actors could credibly just be the four boys from this film.
It can be easy and is tempting to think of a movie as something that just sort of happens, and succeeds and fails for ineffable reasons, but it's really just a collection of a million different choices being made—most of the big ones by the director—and any one of which, if misguided, could torpedo the whole thing. Stand By Me doesn't work if the kids don't work. For its flaws, every choice that Reiner needed to nail in this movie, he nailed. You can more or less say the same for his entire first 12 years of directing. His hit rate was a miracle—no, not a miracle, that denies agency. It is the collective work of a real-deal genius. (...)
- Barry Petchesky
When Harry Met Sally
It’s like 90 minutes, and all of them are perfect. Harry and Sally might suffer for their neuroses, but the greatest gift a director can give an audience is a film whose every detail was obsessed over. New York, warm and orange, has never looked better. Carrie Fisher says her lines the only way they could ever sound: You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right. I want you to know that I will never want that wagon wheel coffee table.
That a film so brisk can feel so lived-in owes to Nora Ephron’s screenplay and also to Reiner’s neat choices, like the split-screen that makes it look like Harry and Sally are watching Casablanca in the same bed, an effect dialed up later in a continuously shot four-way phone call scene that took 60 tries to get right. Every time I watch When Harry Met Sally, I think it must have been impossible to make; the coziness of the movie is cut with something sad and mischievous and hard to describe. Estelle Reiner’s deadpan line reading at Katz’s Deli is a classic, and every family Pictionary night in our house began with someone guessing “baby fish mouth,” but the bit that came to mind first was this scene set at a Giants game: Harry tells Jess about his wife’s affair between rounds of the wave.
- Maitreyi Anantharaman
Michael "Meathead" Stivic in All In The Family
Rob Reiner was proof that every once in a rare while, nepotism is a great idea. Of all the lessons he could glean from his father Carl, one of this nation's undisputed comedic geniuses, he put nearly all of them to best use over his voluminous IMDB page.
The credit that Reiner broke out with was the one that seemed with hindsight to be the least consequential of them all—his straight man/son-in-law/earnest doofus role in the Norman Lear sitcom All In The Family. The show, which for several years was the nation's defining situation comedy, ran through the risible but weirdly prescient venom of Carroll O'Connor's towering performance, and positioned Reiner as the stereotypically liberal son-in-law and foil for O'Connor's cardboard conservative Archie Bunker. Reiner helped frame the show, while mostly serving up setups for O'Connor. He played the part well, but it was not an especially dignified one. I mean, his character's name was Mike Stivic, but he became known universally as "Meathead" because Bunker only referred to him as such. Reiner learned from his father's years with Mel Brooks how to be that acquiescent foil, and if his work in that part did not make him a recognized comedian except to those folks who knew how comedy actually works, it indisputably gave him an eight-year advanced education on all the things required to make funny. Those studies would serve him well in his director's chair. His gift was not in being the funny, but in building sturdy and elegant setups for the funny, and there has never been a good comedy movie without that. The Princess Bride doesn't work for 10 minutes without Cary Elwes, and Elwes's performance wouldn't work if his director did not repeatedly put him in position to succeed.
Maybe Reiner would not have gotten the AITF gig without being his father's son—Richard Dreyfuss also wanted the role and Harrison Ford turned it down, for what that may be worth—but sometimes nepotism works for those outside the family. Reiner wrote three of the 174 episodes in which he appeared; he learned to thrive behind and off to the side of the camera. It all counted, it all contributed, and every credit Reiner is credited with here owes some of its shine to that television show, which in turn owes its existence to The Dick Van Dyke Show and his father and Mel Brooks's work with The 2000-Year-Old Man and Your Show Of Shows. That takes us back 75 years, into the earliest days of the medium, which may as well be the entire history of American comedy. Every giant stood on the shoulders of another, and that giant did the same. It is all of a piece, and IMDB would be half as large a quarter as useful without them, and him.
- Ray Ratto
This Is Spinal Tap
In a particularly on-brand bit of trivia, I first became aware of This Is Spinal Tap through Guitar Hero II. The titular band’s hit “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” was downloadable content for that game, and I spent hours trying to perfect it before I ever thought about watching the movie it hailed from. I did eventually do it, and I remember exactly where I was—in Venezuela in the summer of 2007, traveling around for the Copa América—because Spinal Tap is a near-flawless movie, and one that seared itself into my brain. I can’t recall with certainty, but I’m pretty sure that this is when I first became aware of Rob Reiner—I knew his dad from Ocean’s Eleven, another perfect movie—and Spinal Tap is such a stunning collection of talent that it’s hard to pick out a favorite role or MVP. Here’s the thing about that, though: The best and most important performance in the film might be from Reiner himself, because the movie doesn’t work as well as it does without him.
On the one hand, this is obvious; he directed the movie and co-wrote it, so his fingerprints are quite naturally all over it. And yet, in a movie full of massive characters and comedians perfectly suited for those roles, Reiner’s performance as the flabbergasted documentarian is what makes the whole thing hang together. Reiner was a comedic genius in his own right, but I think the thing I appreciate most about Spinal Tap whenever I watch it is how much he understands about his cast’s strengths and how much he allows himself to recede into the background while still working to guide the jokes to their best conclusions. Every great comedy needs a straight man, and Reiner’s Marty DiBergi is certainly that, but the movie is so funny, and Reiner is such a welcome presence on screen, that even DiBergi gets to be effortlessly hilarious. He does this, for the most part, just by playing an ostensibly normal person and turning that all up to, well, 11.
Let’s take what I consider one of the most iconic comedic scenes of all time, and certainly the one that I have quoted the most in my life: “It’s one louder.”
Christopher Guest is perfect in this scene, unsurprisingly; his Nigel Tufnel is an idiot, and the movie gets a lot of humor out of that fact throughout, and especially here. However, Reiner’s plain-spoken incredulity over the idiocy is what really elevates the scene to me. You can feel his character grappling with this concept throughout: First with a plain-spoken revelation (“Oh I see, and most of the amps go to 10”), but then he comes in with the setup: “Why don’t you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder?” Every single time I watch this scene, the pause before Guest goes “These go to eleven” makes me giggle in anticipation.
Spinal Tap is hilarious in its own right, and also birthed the mockumentary genre; it’s crazy to think about all of the things that the movie directly influenced, from Guest’s own filmmaking work (shout out Best In Show), to Drop Dead Gorgeous, on through Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. God, I love that last one, and so many things that work in Popstar are directly traceable to the work Reiner did on Spinal Tap. (Spinal Tap also birthed a sequel just this year; I haven’t watched it yet, mainly because of how much I love the original and don’t need more from this stupid British band, but I am relieved to report that I’ve heard it’s a fine enough time at the movies.)
That This Is Spinal Tap was Reiner’s directorial debut only adds to the absurdity. Who produces not just a masterpiece, but such an utterly distinctive piece of work in their first real attempt? The answer, really, is that Reiner was a master, and he would go on to prove that over a historic run over the next decade, making Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men in just eight years. Ridiculous. This Is Spinal Tap is my favorite of all of those, though, and one of the most rewatchable movies ever made. Hell, as I’m writing this, I just remembered the scene where Reiner reads the band some reviews (“The review you had on Shark Sandwich, which was merely a two-word review just said … Shit Sandwich”) which is also among the funniest things put to film. The whole movie is strewn with gems like that. What a gift.
- Luis Paez-Pumar
[ed. See also: As You Wish: Rob Reiner (1947-2025). Ebert.com]
Rob Reiner was proof that every once in a rare while, nepotism is a great idea. Of all the lessons he could glean from his father Carl, one of this nation's undisputed comedic geniuses, he put nearly all of them to best use over his voluminous IMDB page.
The credit that Reiner broke out with was the one that seemed with hindsight to be the least consequential of them all—his straight man/son-in-law/earnest doofus role in the Norman Lear sitcom All In The Family. The show, which for several years was the nation's defining situation comedy, ran through the risible but weirdly prescient venom of Carroll O'Connor's towering performance, and positioned Reiner as the stereotypically liberal son-in-law and foil for O'Connor's cardboard conservative Archie Bunker. Reiner helped frame the show, while mostly serving up setups for O'Connor. He played the part well, but it was not an especially dignified one. I mean, his character's name was Mike Stivic, but he became known universally as "Meathead" because Bunker only referred to him as such. Reiner learned from his father's years with Mel Brooks how to be that acquiescent foil, and if his work in that part did not make him a recognized comedian except to those folks who knew how comedy actually works, it indisputably gave him an eight-year advanced education on all the things required to make funny. Those studies would serve him well in his director's chair. His gift was not in being the funny, but in building sturdy and elegant setups for the funny, and there has never been a good comedy movie without that. The Princess Bride doesn't work for 10 minutes without Cary Elwes, and Elwes's performance wouldn't work if his director did not repeatedly put him in position to succeed.
Maybe Reiner would not have gotten the AITF gig without being his father's son—Richard Dreyfuss also wanted the role and Harrison Ford turned it down, for what that may be worth—but sometimes nepotism works for those outside the family. Reiner wrote three of the 174 episodes in which he appeared; he learned to thrive behind and off to the side of the camera. It all counted, it all contributed, and every credit Reiner is credited with here owes some of its shine to that television show, which in turn owes its existence to The Dick Van Dyke Show and his father and Mel Brooks's work with The 2000-Year-Old Man and Your Show Of Shows. That takes us back 75 years, into the earliest days of the medium, which may as well be the entire history of American comedy. Every giant stood on the shoulders of another, and that giant did the same. It is all of a piece, and IMDB would be half as large a quarter as useful without them, and him.
- Ray Ratto
This Is Spinal Tap
In a particularly on-brand bit of trivia, I first became aware of This Is Spinal Tap through Guitar Hero II. The titular band’s hit “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” was downloadable content for that game, and I spent hours trying to perfect it before I ever thought about watching the movie it hailed from. I did eventually do it, and I remember exactly where I was—in Venezuela in the summer of 2007, traveling around for the Copa América—because Spinal Tap is a near-flawless movie, and one that seared itself into my brain. I can’t recall with certainty, but I’m pretty sure that this is when I first became aware of Rob Reiner—I knew his dad from Ocean’s Eleven, another perfect movie—and Spinal Tap is such a stunning collection of talent that it’s hard to pick out a favorite role or MVP. Here’s the thing about that, though: The best and most important performance in the film might be from Reiner himself, because the movie doesn’t work as well as it does without him.
On the one hand, this is obvious; he directed the movie and co-wrote it, so his fingerprints are quite naturally all over it. And yet, in a movie full of massive characters and comedians perfectly suited for those roles, Reiner’s performance as the flabbergasted documentarian is what makes the whole thing hang together. Reiner was a comedic genius in his own right, but I think the thing I appreciate most about Spinal Tap whenever I watch it is how much he understands about his cast’s strengths and how much he allows himself to recede into the background while still working to guide the jokes to their best conclusions. Every great comedy needs a straight man, and Reiner’s Marty DiBergi is certainly that, but the movie is so funny, and Reiner is such a welcome presence on screen, that even DiBergi gets to be effortlessly hilarious. He does this, for the most part, just by playing an ostensibly normal person and turning that all up to, well, 11.
Let’s take what I consider one of the most iconic comedic scenes of all time, and certainly the one that I have quoted the most in my life: “It’s one louder.”
Christopher Guest is perfect in this scene, unsurprisingly; his Nigel Tufnel is an idiot, and the movie gets a lot of humor out of that fact throughout, and especially here. However, Reiner’s plain-spoken incredulity over the idiocy is what really elevates the scene to me. You can feel his character grappling with this concept throughout: First with a plain-spoken revelation (“Oh I see, and most of the amps go to 10”), but then he comes in with the setup: “Why don’t you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder?” Every single time I watch this scene, the pause before Guest goes “These go to eleven” makes me giggle in anticipation.
Spinal Tap is hilarious in its own right, and also birthed the mockumentary genre; it’s crazy to think about all of the things that the movie directly influenced, from Guest’s own filmmaking work (shout out Best In Show), to Drop Dead Gorgeous, on through Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. God, I love that last one, and so many things that work in Popstar are directly traceable to the work Reiner did on Spinal Tap. (Spinal Tap also birthed a sequel just this year; I haven’t watched it yet, mainly because of how much I love the original and don’t need more from this stupid British band, but I am relieved to report that I’ve heard it’s a fine enough time at the movies.)
That This Is Spinal Tap was Reiner’s directorial debut only adds to the absurdity. Who produces not just a masterpiece, but such an utterly distinctive piece of work in their first real attempt? The answer, really, is that Reiner was a master, and he would go on to prove that over a historic run over the next decade, making Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men in just eight years. Ridiculous. This Is Spinal Tap is my favorite of all of those, though, and one of the most rewatchable movies ever made. Hell, as I’m writing this, I just remembered the scene where Reiner reads the band some reviews (“The review you had on Shark Sandwich, which was merely a two-word review just said … Shit Sandwich”) which is also among the funniest things put to film. The whole movie is strewn with gems like that. What a gift.
- Luis Paez-Pumar
by Defector Staff, Defector | Read more:
Images: Andy Schwartz/Fotos International/Getty Images; Harry Met Sally, Spinal Tap (YouTube).]
Images: Andy Schwartz/Fotos International/Getty Images; Harry Met Sally, Spinal Tap (YouTube).]
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