Slaves to the Algorithm

Many people think Greg Chism is a freak — or worse. He says he was just following the incentives of the platform.

I promised Greg Chism I wouldn’t reveal anything about where he lives because there are people out there obsessed with him, convinced he’s a monster. What I can say is that my GPS took me from my hotel somewhere in the American Midwest to an upscale, spacious home with well-kept lawns. Greg was waiting for me in his driveway, an unassuming, friendly, ordinary father of two in his mid-50s, wearing a Van Halen sweatshirt and blue jeans. His smile faded as I jumped out of my car. He had agreed to meet me, but now he looked uneasy. He had never given an interview about the events that overtook his life in 2016 and 2017.

Greg took me inside and showed me his den — a shrine to his two great loves, Hot Wheels and Tom Petty. He led me through to his home office. We sat at his desk, and I turned on my recorder. It was 10 a.m. He had bottled up his story for seven years, and we didn’t stop talking until his younger daughter, Annabelle, arrived home from school at 4 p.m., beginning with his childhood in Granite City, Ill. [...]

In 2013, Greg created a channel, Geek to Freak Lawn Care, and filmed himself performing good Samaritan lawn work. If he saw a lawn in need, he would jump out of his truck and blow away the dead leaves or trim the edges and then vanish like the Zorro of lawn care chores. In other videos, he created a kind of lawn care ASMR, meditatively mowing back and forth, up and down, for hours at a time.

“I was posting one a week, and they were getting a hundred thousand views or more,” Greg said.

Sometimes Greg was interviewed by fledgling lawn care influencers, and the respect he had gained in the lawn care world was palpable. In one video, the interviewer Keith Kalfas — “the World’s Leading Landscaping & Window Cleaning Influencer” — called Greg the lawn care GOAT. When Greg attended a lawn care convention in Kentucky in 2014, the crowd went wild for him. A meet and greet was organized at a pizza place. “Dude, all these people were waiting for me,” Greg said. “And they all gave me their lawn care shirts so I could wear them in my videos. It was insane.”

But Greg’s story was about to spiral in bizarre and unexpected ways. In 2015, YouTube Kids debuted. It was pitched as a safe and educational experience for children. Stressed parents could leave it on autoplay, and their kids could watch hours of Peppa Pig or nursery‑rhyme videos. But by 2017, things had taken a disconcerting turn. Parents began reporting that they would leave their children for a while and return to find them being fed videos called “Mickey Mouse Baby Dead in Gas Explosion” or “Elsa Spiderman Attacked by Sharks.”

In these cartoons, Peppa Pig was no longer having normal Peppa Pig adventures. Instead, she was being tortured at the dentist, or worse, eating her own father, with blood spurting everywhere. [...]

As James Bridle put it in a viral 2017 essay that drew attention to the phenomenon, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet”: “Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize and abuse children, automatically and at scale.”

You might be thinking it was just the work of trolls, bored misanthropes skewing the YouTube Kids algorithm for their own nihilistic pleasure. But as Chelsey Weber-Smith, the creator of the podcast “American Hysteria,” has noted: Trolls tend to flash little victorious side glances to the camera. These videos were more like something your dreams might invent, weird and unsettling. Like how the characters would often repeat the same movements over and over, blank-eyed, as if taking part in some garish, otherworldly ceremony. As Weber-Smith said, “What makes this story even more bizarre, even more unnerving, is that no one has yet figured out the people who were making these videos, and why.”

But there was one exception. One man was identified. According to BuzzFeed, this man’s contribution to #Elsagate — as the scandal had become known — was to post videos of his daughters “screaming in fear, bathing, pretending to be babies, spitting up food” and “being force‑fed.”

That man’s name was Greg Chism.

In 2012, well before he established himself as a lawn care influencer, Greg created another YouTube channel called, simply, Greg Chism.

“It was just a way to store home videos,” he said. “Three or four a week. I didn’t even give them a title. It wasn’t anything. It had fewer than 1,000 subscribers.”

Greg showed me one of the videos. In it, he and his two daughters were running down the toy aisle at Walmart, fighting with lightsabers — a somewhat overindulgent, nonauthoritarian single father and his devoted children. It was endearing, but nothing more.

But then he tried something different.

“OK.” Greg hesitated. “My sister bought the kids a Barbie cruise ship for Christmas. So I thought, I’ll film them opening it. They loved it. They were playing in the box. They had the box on their heads, running around the house. It was funny.”

Greg uploaded the video and forgot all about it. Until he logged on a few weeks later and discovered it had been viewed a million times. “It was just dumb luck,” he said.

Eventually Greg accepted that “Unboxing Barbie Cruise Ship” (which eventually achieved 10 million views) was an anomaly, and he returned to lawn care influencing. Which was when he received an email from YouTube headquarters.

“I didn’t believe it was really them at first,” Greg said. “They told me they’d noticed I had a video with 10 million views, they’d started a kind of YouTube school, and would I be interested in learning how to replicate the success.”

YouTube school was online, and Greg attended assiduously. Everything the teacher advised, he put into action. The teacher suggested that he give his channel a better name than Greg Chism, so he came up with Toy Freaks. Next, the teacher suggested that Greg work on search engine optimization. The trick, he said, was for Greg to load his titles with as many of the most searched key words among children as he could — words like “toy,” “slime” and “gumball.” Greg suggested that he call his next video “Toy Slime Gumball Extravaganza.” The teacher said children didn’t know how to spell “extravaganza.”

Greg suggested “Toy Slime Gumball Party” instead.

“Perfect,” the teacher said. [...]

So he came up with food fights. “We went to a 7‑Eleven, got nachos, hot dogs, giant Slurpee sodas. We sat in the truck, I set the camera on the dash and said: ‘All right, Annabelle. You ask Victoria for her drink, she’ll say no, you steal some anyway, she’ll get mad and throw food at you. I’ll say stop, then you dump your Slurpee on my head. And then, boom, food fight in the truck.’” [...]

A week after Greg posted his food-fight-in-the-truck video, he was mowing someone’s lawn when he got an email from YouTube. The video had, in just seven days, been viewed 25 million times.

“But why?” I asked him.

Greg shrugged. “I don’t know.” [...]

Greg’s concept for the video, and the videos that would follow, was “Bad Baby.” Within days, the first video had 50 million views.

It was thrilling and possibly unprecedented, but stressful — because now Greg felt the pressure to maintain the success. But how, when this new world he’d found himself in made no sense? His fans were so fickle. How to keep them interested? How to up the stakes?

And then he had it.

In a subsequent “Bad Baby” video, “Sharky held the wand and this time bopped Victoria on the head. Boom. Now she’s a baby too! Oh, my God. Two Bad Babies. We go to a grocery store. I put them in the shopping cart. I’m throwing in groceries and filming the whole thing. We get to the car. Victoria rolls down the window and throws out a gallon of milk. That was the end of the video.”

Greg paused. “That,” he said, “was our first 100‑million-view video.” [...]

Greg has under his bed a stack of plaques from YouTube celebrating his viewer‑count milestones. One hundred million views here, one hundred million views there. And then there are the plaques from Tubefilter, a publication that covers YouTube, commemorating the months when he was the most-viewed creator on the entire platform. Between January 2016 and June 2017, his videos achieved a total of 13 billion views. I promised him I wouldn’t reveal how much money he made. But YouTube’s partner program was generous — the advertising-revenue split was around 50-50 — so it was a lot (although not so much that Greg quit his lawn care business). They got out of Granite City and moved to an upscale suburban community.

In 2017, they were invited to VidCon, an annual convention for influencers in Anaheim, Calif., where they had a meeting scheduled with a new YouTube adviser. She had told them how excited she was to finally get to know them in person. They checked in to a Disney hotel and played in the pool, passing time until the scheduled meeting. Which was when something odd happened.

“She canceled,” Greg said.

Greg had no idea why.

by Jon Ronson, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Chris Buck

[ed. “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” – George Carlin (more). In a couple months an American census is scheduled to confirm that theory. See also: Have we destroyed childhood? (New Yorker).]

Studio Ghibli’s Deepest Secret Is What Comes Next

On a Friday morning in April, at Studio Ghibli’s headquarters on the outskirts of Tokyo, Goro Miyazaki faces an excruciating test. After roughly a year of toil, it’s time to screen his animated short for his famously demanding father, Hayao Miyazaki — one of the most celebrated directors on the planet — and then listen to his unvarnished feedback.

The Miyazakis have often clashed over the years. “Constant arguing, constant fighting,” Goro recalls of one of their early collaborations. But perhaps this project will be different — the passage of time occasionally being a mellowing influence. Hayao is 85; Goro, 59.

For a long time, the creative dynamic inside Ghibli has largely revolved around the older filmmaker’s eye. Over the previous four decades, the studio has forged a distinctive style of richly layered, hand-drawn animation in more than 20 feature-length films. The movies, which appeal to both children and adults, often star young heroes saving war-torn environments from nefarious forces amid phantasmagoric phenomena. Collectively, the films have generated over $2 billion in ticket sales, won two Academy Awards and helped trigger a global boom in anime — a market now worth in excess of $25 billion annually, according to the Association of Japanese Animations. It’s been, by many accounts, the greatest run in animation since the heyday of Walt Disney.

Now, with Hayao in his professional twilight, things are inevitably changing — although into what exactly is still unclear. After starting his career as a landscape architect, Goro joined Ghibli in the late 1990s and went on to direct three major films. When Ghibliologists speculate about potential creative heirs, his name is inevitably front and center. But so far Goro has brushed aside such chatter, and his dad has offered nothing close to an endorsement — at least, not yet.  [...]

Studio Ghibli’s headquarters are on a serene, suburban block dotted with single-family homes. The outside of the main building is covered in dense, creeping vines, creating a green exoskeleton that gives the place a puckish, larval aura, like a shaggy caterpillar on the cusp of molting. Goro is joined in the conference room by Kenichi Yoda, an up-and-coming executive.

Three years ago, Ghibli announced it was selling a 42.3% stake in the business for an undisclosed sum to Nippon Television Holdings Inc., a major Japanese media conglomerate that had long invested in the studio’s films. Yoda, then a producer at Nippon TV, joined Ghibli’s board of directors and has since served as the primary liaison between the two camps. Whatever happens next, Yoda, 51, will be a driving force. (In May the companies announced that he’d been promoted to become Ghibli’s president and chief executive officer, starting on June 22.)

For the next two hours, the younger Miyazaki and Yoda hold forth on Ghibli’s future, from their inchoate plans for the next feature film, to their stance on artificial intelligence, to the importance of extending the brand beyond the screen. Yoda declines to say anything about Ghibli’s financial situation, or Nippon TV’s assessment of it. According to public records, as of March 31, 2025, Ghibli had ¥44 billion ($279 million) in assets and brought in ¥6 billion in net profit over the past year. “Ghibli is not a company focused primarily on profit,” Yoda says.

At a time of great flux in the entertainment industry, many incoming CEOs like to position themselves as agents of change, guiding anxious flocks into a brave new world of technologically optimized content creation. Not Yoda. If anything, he describes himself as Ghibli’s protector of the old ways. “Ghibli is not a place that works hard to maintain a company — I think it is a place to make art,” Yoda says. “When I’m often asked about this outside, I say what matters is that nothing changes.”

Despite its small staff — and the many years, often three to five, it takes to produce a feature-length animated film — Ghibli has managed to grind out a new movie roughly every two years. No sequels. But recently, the studio’s cadence has gotten off track.

It’s been more than two-and-a-half years since Ghibli’s latest film hit theaters, Hayao’s The Boy and the Heron. The movie, about a youngster who loses his mother and gets mixed up with mystical birds, was a success, winning the Academy Award for best animated feature and generating more than $290 million in global ticket sales. But since its premiere, Ghibli has announced no theatrical movies, intensifying scrutiny of the gnomic company.

The hunt for something new, Yoda and Miyazaki say, is ongoing — but tricky. The process is driven by the intuition of the studio’s aging founders rather than more prosaic concerns such as market research, investors or the calendar. “They don’t think ahead that much,” Yoda says. “We have put out films inspired by whatever’s happening at that point in time.” If it doesn’t feel right, he says, Ghibli won’t force something into production: “It doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped thinking about or coming up with creative ideas. They’re constantly thinking about, ‘OK, if we were to put a film out now, what would that be?’ ”

Meanwhile, the global demand for anime that Ghibli helped ignite decades ago has since attracted competitors from beyond Japan. The top film in the world last year was Ne Zha 2, an animated fantasy adventure from China that built off the huge reception for Ne Zha in 2019. The sequel grossed more than $2 billion globally, topping the best offerings of Hollywood and Japan.

Moviemaking, Miyazaki says, has become more industrialized: “It’s very hard to just create a feature film and put that into theaters and then make financial sense from that. A lot of the animation you see out there now is based on a manga, and then it becomes a TV series. And then you have the partnership with the music company to have a big theme song attached to it. And so there’s this wholesale business scheme — there’s, like, a template, almost, to make sure that it’s a profitable business in creating an animation film. We, as a studio, have never done that.”

Ghibli’s competitors have no such qualms. Major US animation studios continue to pump out sequels to prior hits. This year alone will see Toy Story 5, The Angry Birds Movie 3 and new installments in the Minions, Super Mario Bros. and Paw Patrol franchises.

Once, years earlier, Hayao considered making a sequel to his 2008 fantasy-adventure film Ponyo, but the idea was eventually scrapped in favor of another original, The Wind Rises. Sequelization just isn’t appealing to them, the Ghibli executives say; they aren’t considering My Neighbor Totoro 2 or anything similar. “When you make a film, it’s not like a fun, happy, exciting process,” Goro says. “It’s very laborious, it’s very tedious.”

If anything, the process of creating any animation has grown even more laborious. In part that’s because Ghibli’s gaggle of animators is older and less suited for round-the-clock binge working than they used to be and, in part, because of labor laws enacted to curb such workplace excesses. “So even when the engine gets going, we have to stop,” Yoda says. “That is extremely frustrating.”

Miyazaki says he’s not planning to pitch any movies to his dad anytime soon. Were the executives considering ideas from aspirational filmmakers outside their ranks? Yoda replies: “If there’s someone willing to do the film, yes, we would love to.” But doing so, Miyazaki points out, wouldn’t be easy under the current circumstances. “As long as … Hayao is around,” he says, “it’d be absolutely impossible.” Yoda nods and chuckles: “Any sane animation director would not come close to this castle.”

To the outside world, how, exactly, Ghibli operates has always been something of a mystery. [...]

As in many creative fields, the pressure on the animation industry is mounting. AI software is already capable of rendering elaborate animated sequences from brief prompts. What that means for the profession is still unclear. But recently there’s been a collective embrace of Ghibli as a standard-bearer for the growing AI resistance.

In March 2025, when OpenAI released a new version of its text-to-video AI model, users started refining their Ghibli-style knockoffs. Before long, people were inundating the internet with Ghiblified selfies, family photos and famous movie scenes. Mike Tyson posted a Ghibli-like rendering of himself. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, updated his X profile pic in Ghibli style.

Not everyone was amused by the spectacle of a rich American tech company offering the capability to appropriate the style of revered Japanese artists without compensation or consent. Amid the ensuing backlash, a particular clip from Never-Ending Man about Ghibli began recirculating on social media. In the documentary, a brazen Japanese tech executive tells Hayao that soon deep-learning AI will let computers paint like humans. Inside the Ghibli headquarters, he plays a demonstration. Together, they watch an AI clip of a misshapen, unclothed humanoid clumsily squirming across the ground. In response to the creepy video, Hayao tells a story about the sensation of greeting a physically disabled friend. Whoever made this video, Hayao says, gave no thought to human suffering. “It’s an awful insult to life,” he says. The clip snowballed into a global cri de coeur against AI slop.

In Japan, the Ghibli executives watched the OpenAI saga play out, unbothered. There has long been a tradition, Goro says, of fans making amateur art derived from their favorite manga, anime or video game characters. So the Ghiblification craze didn’t seem like a big deal. For amusement, one of the company’s executives even dabbled in the trend himself. “We didn’t think much of it, to be honest,” Goro says. “If someone started making a lot of money out of it, then it would be a problem.” 

Anyone positioning Ghibli in the vanguard of the AI backlash, Goro says, was twisting events for their own purposes; the studio itself was essentially AI agnostic.  [...]

One of the central themes in Hayao’s films is whether humankind will harness technology for the protection and enrichment of the natural world — or, alternatively, for its destruction. Susan Napier, a professor at Tufts University, says the roots of this fascination likely can be traced back to the nuclear horrors endured by Japan during and after World War II. But at a time when much of the planet is grappling, once again, with existential questions about a powerful new technology and its impact, she says, Hayao’s work is more relevant than ever. Hayao’s films teem with robots and other forms of sentient technology, some good, some evil. His films’ perspective on the topic, she says, is always complex. “What are the pleasures technology can bring,” she asks, “along with the perils?”

by Sohee Kim and Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Images: Kentaro Takahashi

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[ed. For young ones with us...The Book of Love (Monotones).]

'Coyote V. Acme'

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, SOUTHWESTERN DISTRICT, TEMPE, ARIZONA

CASE NO. B19294, JUDGE JOAN KUJAVA, PRESIDING

WILE E. COYOTE, Plaintiff

-v.-

ACME COMPANY, Defendant

Opening Statement of Mr. Harold Schoff, attorney for Mr. Coyote: My client, Mr. Wile E. Coyote, a resident of Arizona and contiguous states, does hereby bring suit for damages against the Acme Company, manufacturer and retail distributor of assorted merchandise, incorporated in Delaware and doing business in every state, district, and territory. Mr. Coyote seeks compensation for personal injuries, loss of business income, and mental suffering caused as a direct result of the actions and/or gross negligence of said company, under Title 15 of the United States Code, Chapter 47, section 2072, subsection (a), relating to product liability.

Mr. Coyote states that on eighty-five separate occasions he has purchased of the Acme Company (hereinafter, “Defendant”), through that company’s mail-order department, certain products which did cause him bodily injury due to defects in manufacture or improper cautionary labelling. Sales slips made out to Mr. Coyote as proof of purchase are at present in the possession of the Court, marked Exhibit A. Such injuries sustained by Mr. Coyote have temporarily restricted his ability to make a living in his profession of predator. Mr. Coyote is self-employed and thus not eligible for Workmen’s Compensation.

Mr. Coyote states that on December 13th he received of Defendant via parcel post one Acme Rocket Sled. The intention of Mr. Coyote was to use the Rocket Sled to aid him in pursuit of his prey. Upon receipt of the Rocket Sled Mr. Coyote removed it from its wooden shipping crate and, sighting his prey in the distance, activated the ignition. As Mr. Coyote gripped the handlebars, the Rocket Sled accelerated with such sudden and precipitate force as to stretch Mr. Coyote’s forelimbs to a length of fifty feet. Subsequently, the rest of Mr. Coyote’s body shot forward with a violent jolt, causing severe strain to his back and neck and placing him unexpectedly astride the Rocket Sled. Disappearing over the horizon at such speed as to leave a diminishing jet trail along its path, the Rocket Sled soon brought Mr. Coyote abreast of his prey. At that moment the animal he was pursuing veered sharply to the right. Mr. Coyote vigorously attempted to follow this maneuver but was unable to, due to poorly designed steering on the Rocket Sled and a faulty or nonexistent braking system. Shortly thereafter, the unchecked progress of the Rocket Sled brought it and Mr. Coyote into collision with the side of a mesa.

Paragraph One of the Report of Attending Physician (Exhibit B), prepared by Dr. Ernest Grosscup, M.D., D.O., details the multiple fractures, contusions, and tissue damage suffered by Mr. Coyote as a result of this collision. Repair of the injuries required a full bandage around the head (excluding the ears), a neck brace, and full or partial casts on all four legs.

Hampered by these injuries, Mr. Coyote was nevertheless obliged to support himself. With this in mind, he purchased of Defendant as an aid to mobility one pair of Acme Rocket Skates. When he attempted to use this product, however, he became involved in an accident remarkably similar to that which occurred with the Rocket Sled. Again, Defendant sold over the counter, without caveat, a product which attached powerful jet engines (in this case, two) to inadequate vehicles, with little or no provision for passenger safety. Encumbered by his heavy casts, Mr. Coyote lost control of the Rocket Skates soon after strapping them on, and collided with a roadside billboard so violently as to leave a hole in the shape of his full silhouette.

Mr. Coyote states that on occasions too numerous to list in this document he has suffered mishaps with explosives purchased of Defendant: the Acme “Little Giant” Firecracker, the Acme Self-Guided Aerial Bomb, etc. (For a full listing, see the Acme Mail Order Explosives Catalogue and attached deposition, entered in evidence as Exhibit C.) Indeed, it is safe to say that not once has an explosive purchased of Defendant by Mr. Coyote performed in an expected manner. To cite just one example: At the expense of much time and personal effort, Mr. Coyote constructed around the outer rim of a butte a wooden trough beginning at the top of the butte and spiralling downward around it to some few feet above a black X painted on the desert floor. The trough was designed in such a way that a spherical explosive of the type sold by Defendant would roll easily and swiftly down to the point of detonation indicated by the X. Mr. Coyote placed a generous pile of birdseed directly on the X, and then, carrying the spherical Acme Bomb (Catalogue # 78-832), climbed to the top of the butte. Mr. Coyote’s prey, seeing the birdseed, approached, and Mr. Coyote proceeded to light the fuse. In an instant, the fuse burned down to the stem, causing the bomb to detonate.

In addition to reducing all Mr. Coyote’s careful preparations to naught, the premature detonation of Defendant’s product resulted in the following disfigurements to Mr. Coyote:

1. Severe singeing of the hair on the head, neck, and muzzle.

2. Sooty discoloration.

3. Fracture of the left ear at the stem, causing the ear to dangle in the aftershock with a creaking noise.

4. Full or partial combustion of whiskers, producing kinking, frazzling, and ashy disintegration.

5. Radical widening of the eyes, due to brow and lid charring.

by Ian Frazier, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Luci Gutiérrez
[See also (new movie review): Toons Have Seldom Been Loonier Than in “Coyote vs. Acme” (New Yorker).]

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Darby Conley, Get Fuzzy
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“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

via:

Don't Feed the Ducks

Don’t Feed the Ducks! A Zany Animation Predicts the Absurd Outcomes of Ignoring the Rules (Vimeo)

How many people actually heed the warnings about not feeding ducks waddling around public parks? If you’ve taken a flippant approach to these guidelines in the past, we recommend you watch AJ Jeffries’ new animation, “DUCKS.” What opens as an innocuous jaunt around a pond quickly turns into a dark comedy full of strange contortions and feathered villains sure to pop into your head the next time you throw a chunk of bread.

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by Tom Gauld, My Jetpack |  Read more:

by Tom Gauld, My Jetpack |  Read more:

Evolutionary Quandaries

xkcd via: here/here

Consider the Sister

Amy Wallace has spent two decades guarding the human her brother was—against a world that prefers David Foster Wallace as a puzzle.

Early on Saturday mornings, Amy Wallace would be yanked out of bed by her big brother, David. He was determined not to miss the start of the cartoons. At their home in Urbana, Illinois, the siblings situated themselves in front of the television and waited for the color bars to turn to The Road Runner Show, David eager, impatient, full of energy. Eventually, he would splay out on the carpet and Amy would sit behind him on the couch. More than 50 years later, Amy is still haunted by the sensory experience of that couch. It was pea-green and scratchy, yet she dutifully—and gladly—sat there as part of their sibling ritual.

 

Their mother, Sally Foster, described the scene this way: Amy spent her mornings watching David watch TV. But that’s not quite right.

“Watching television with David was an interactive experience,” Amy says. The two children weren’t content with what was on offer. Often, they would invent new dialogue for the characters extemporaneously.

“That was one of our hobbies,” Amy says. “We just thought, whoever’s writing this, it could be so much more interesting.”

David identified as the Road Runner and told Amy she was his Wile E. Coyote. He had the speed, the tools—and the upper hand. She was left with only her wits to try to keep up with him, but of course she never could. The lot of Wile E. Coyote was to follow the Road Runner hopelessly, never to catch up.

It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her. It’s been nearly 20 years since his death by suicide, and while the legend of DFW the writer has grown, the story of the human has been flattened to the stereotype of a tortured artist who came to a tragic end.

Amy, who lives in Arizona, is now the only living member of the nuclear Foster Wallace family. James (a philosophy professor) and Sally (an English professor) moved from Urbana to Arizona in 2012. James died in July 2019, and Sally died just over a year later in July 2020.

The grief over the deaths of her brother and then her parents is a constant companion.

“Nearly every morning of my life, as a fully grown adult woman living a full adult life, I wake up and I’m back in my childhood bed,” she says. “My mom is making breakfast and David’s in his bedroom and it’s so vivid. Then I open my eyes and it’s like nope, that’s all gone.”

Amy’s own children are adults now. She says her eldest is now a writer as well. (Amy asked me not to describe them, to preserve their privacy.) They were old enough to have strong memories of their uncle, and they bear a strong physical resemblance to him. David’s death was a very public wound for a mostly private family.

In 2001, David published a piece of fiction about a man grappling with suicidal ideation. He wrote, in part: “I apologized for whatever pain my suicide and the fraudulence and/or inability to love that had precipitated it might cause” his family. To some extent, he foresaw the shadow he would cast.

Years after David’s death, their father asked Amy to write a book about him from her perspective. He asked her to make sure the people who raised him got a say in his memory, too.

Amy decided a book would be too invasive—but she came to understand that she had a responsibility to talk about her brother beyond the legend that was partly of his own fashioning. She has given radio interviews, appeared at a conference dedicated to David’s work, and has spoken to me at length about the person who teased her, protected her, alienated and embraced her, and eventually broke her heart.

“I do feel that it's kind of incumbent on me to let the world know what a very normal person he was,” Amy says. “And that he was mostly happy, generous—and extremely funny.”

*****

Amy has a knack for making you feel, very quickly, like you too knew this brotherly version of David, knew the sincerity of his often oddly shaped affection.

My own connection with Amy came as the result of my insecurity around David’s work, not the sort of deep, life-defining fanaticism that one often encounters in the cult of DFW. Generally, I have viewed his work the way I have at times felt about Salvador Dalí—we’re all humans with the same general set of blood, guts, and brains. How could these people pull so much more out of themselves than the rest of us?

In many ways, this envy has stood in the way of my own appreciation of David’s writing. It’s great, profound, and will never be repeated. But how did he know so many words? What’s the deal with that syntax? Why do I write in plain, gray English while his work hits my eyes like Technicolor?

In April 2025, I emailed Amy out of the blue. Here is what I said:

“I'm hoping that you might be willing to be interviewed about your mother and let me learn more about her life and work. I have always had a hard time getting past my envy of your brother's vocabulary, and I felt a little bit better about it when I read a bit about Sally.

“So, naturally, my curiosity turned to her and her life. I'd love to write a real feature piece about Sally.”

Amy and I spoke at length over the following weeks. She suggested I buy a copy of her mother’s textbook Practically Painless English. I read it on the subway and felt immediate clarity upon reading just the first few pages.

In a section about verbs, Sally laid out an exercise:

1. Please circle each verb you find in these sentences.
2. The fox moaned and groaned when the chicken escaped.
3. I baked a cake for Mongo, but he turned bright green after he ate some.
4.George is upset because his father thinks he lied about the cherry tree.
5. Florence sneaked out of her room, tiptoed down the stairs, and dynamited the refrigerator.
6. The big fish kept out of trouble because he shut his mouth and stayed in school.

Practically Painless English isn’t just a textbook for people who want to learn to speak proper English. It’s a guide to using language with personality. If Strunk and White offer a guide to frictionless diction, Practically Painless English demonstrates how to stand out within a traditional framework. I probably would have been a much more interesting writer if I’d been raised by a parent who felt so strongly that storytelling should contain detail, whimsy, and flair. Then I realized that Amy was raised by just such a parent, too.

Eventually, months after our first conversation, I reached out to Amy again. This time my curiosity turned to her and her life. I asked her if I could write a real feature piece about her.

In the course of subjecting Amy to many, many hours of conversations about herself, her brother, and my own writing life and hangups about it, I found someone who is as entertaining as she is earnest. Scrutiny around David’s upbringing is inevitably scrutiny of her own upbringing, though hardly any of those critics care to understand her experience—or even know she exists.

She carries that family trait of delighting in absurdity. She hasn’t deified or demonized her brother despite the persistent desire in the literary community to do one or the other. One afternoon, as she was detailing how David watched television, she described just how long she had to sit with him on Saturday mornings before the start of their cartoons.

“Well, no one ever accused your brother of brevity,” I responded, anxiously. I wondered where the line was between respecting the memory of someone and treating them like they were a real person whose peculiarities were worthy of note.

“Or patience,” she said, upping the ante and putting me at ease. “He bounced off the walls in those days.”

One of the ways that Amy protects her brother’s humanity is by showing how his anxieties seemed to travel through a prism and shoot out at unexpected angles. The gloomier results are well known, but there could be humor, too, in the fears provoked not just by his anxiety but by his own ethic of deep care.

She recalls David had an obsession with sharks—which she believes stems from a book called Shark Attack that lived in the bathroom they shared for a portion of their childhood.

Many years later, Amy went to study abroad in Australia. The water was warm there, and she was enjoying herself at the beach regularly after spending her childhood in the landlocked Midwest. Back in the United States, though, David kept thinking about the sharks. He sent letters reminding his sister how to spot them in open water. There was money, too, because he was distraught at the idea that she might wind up short on resources while out on her own. Amy was fine, but David was determined to protect her, in his own way.

“He’d sign off his letters to me with a picture of a shark fin,” Amy says. “Then there’d be a little stick figure. Oh my god, it was great.”

Amy says the last time she and her family spent significant time with David was on a vacation to Stinson Beach.

“When any of us were in the water, he'd be standing on the deck with binoculars scanning for fins,” she recalls. “He was so terrified of sharks and he didn't stick a toe in the water.”

Before he was the most revered and studied contemporary American author, DFW was just someone’s older brother. Amy didn’t see him as DFW, the public character. But she can talk at length about the person she grew up with.

by Lindsey Adler, The Small Bow | Read more:
Image: Road Runner Show/dreamstime

["We're working to make sure the images are as up-to-date and accurate as possible, with a minimum number of sponsored galaxies."]

via: xkcd

[ed. Why is God talking to himself?]

via: xkcd

Gary Larson

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Potential Slogans for J. D. Vance’s 2028 Presidential Campaign

J. D. Vance: Moderate Again

Playing the Long Game

Don’t Blame Me—I Was on Vacation the Whole Time

Trump’s V.P. in Name Only

America Deserves Someone Who Was Barely Involved

“Hillbilly Elegy”

I Kept My Head Down, for You

Just Following Orders, But Also I Wasn’t There

Better Me Than Eric

Better Me Than Don, Jr.

Better Me Than a Third Term

This Time I Mean It

Down to Be Memed

The Tariffs Weren’t as Bad as People Expected, and Also I Wasn’t Involved

Laura Loomer Won’t Get Access

Not in the Epstein Files, I Don’t Think

Protecting Democracy from the Inside, Kinda

The Adults Were Never in the Room, But, if They Were, I Wasn’t One of Them

I’m Just a Guy, Standing in Front of His Country, Asking It to Ignore the Past Decade of His Life

I Never Even Had the Nuclear Codes

Trump Routinely Forgets My Name

Trust Me, I Hated It, Too

Oh, Like Ron DeSantis Would Do a Better Job Than Me? Get Outta Here, Losers

I Really, Really, Really Need This

Hey! It’s Me, J. D. :)

by Ginny Hogan, New Yorker |  Read more:

Images: Jesse Shamon

[ed. No way, José (bet there's an actuarial table hidden inside his bible). If I were Trump, I'd avoid stairwells and have my burgers taste-tested. See also: Pope James David Vance the First (Atlantic).]

I'm Super, Thanks for Asking

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Wile E. Coyote
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