A little over a year again, I began working on my first podcast for Double Elvis Productions — a combination true crime thriller and history lesson covering the early days and development of the Southern Rock movement. The rest of the season would take a similar approach to other musical genres, placing popular songs in the context of the time and place that spawned them. — Read the rest

Last month, a young girl named Madeline write a letter to the LA County Department of Animal Care and Control requesting formal government permission to keep a unicorn in her backyard. Presumably, Madeline had already asked her parents if she could have a unicorn, and rather than disappoint their child by letting her know how impossible it would be to actually capture and domesticate a unicorn, they passed the buck to the bureaucrats instead — "Well, we would buy you a unicorn, but the city won't allow it because our property isn't zoned for unicorn grazing." — Read the rest

Many Americans read To Kill a Mockingbird in school. It's a great book. It was also, curiously, the only book that author Harper Lee published — at least until shortly after her death, when an earlier draft of Mockingbird was published as Go Set a Watchmen. — Read the rest

Semafor is a recently-launched news website from Ben Smith, former editor-in-chief at Buzzfeed News and a New York Times media columnist, and Justin B. Smith, former Bloomberg LP CEO. With such high-profile founders, and some significant bankroll from Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX, Semafor made lofty claims about being a company "based on journalistic transparency." — Read the rest

Every year, the publisher behind the Oxford English Dictionary picks a "Word of the Year" — something new that's gained notable prominence and frequency, with the potential to hold some lasting cultural significance as a common word. In 2013, that word was "selfie." — Read the rest

Jonathan the Tortoise is a bit of a celebrity on St. Helena Island, where he's lived for the last 140 years. The Seychelles giant tortoise is known not only for being horny as fuck, but also old as fuck. — Read the rest

Badlands is a spinoff of the popular rock n' roll true crime podcast Disgraceland, with lurid stories of sex, drugs, and murder in other celebrity cultures. And just in time for the World Cup, the new season takes a look at the seedy underbelly of soccer. — Read the rest

Over at The Fence, editor-at-large Fergus Butler-Gallie chronicled his efforts to buy his girlfriend a real-life goblin as a birthday present. And it is quite the journey:

Perhaps appropriately for this task, I took to the metaverse. Zuckerberg and Clegg came up trumps and a quick Facebook search for goblin sellers yielded results.

A rumor began circulating on TikTok this summer that Brigham Young University, with its majority Mormon student population, had recently suffered from an outbreak of public lice. — Read the rest

The summer of 2020 was a time nationwide unrest, but the protests in Portland, Oregon attracted a particularly rabid fascination. The then-President of the United States of America and his supporters encouraged the idea that there was a massive conspiracy of hyper-organized anarchist anti-fascists in the city working under direct orders from George Soros and/or the Democratic National Committee to cause civil unrest and destabilize the region in order to ensure a Democratic victory in the upcoming election. — Read the rest

Several Romanian tabloids photographed the notorious venture capitalist bloodsucker known as Peter Thiel along with his husband Matt Danzeisen at a fancy Halloween party at Bran Castle in Transylvania — commonly known as Dracula's Castle, though it wasn't actually Dracula's Castle, and it's historically unclear if even Vlad the Impaler, let alone Bram Stoker, knew anything about the place. — Read the rest

From BBC:

Posting on Chinese social media site WeChat, the Shanghai government said the park was barring people from entering and those inside could only leave once they had returned a negative test result.

It added that anyone who has visited the park since Thursday must provide three negative test results over three consecutive days.

I live in Boston, which is known among other things for having absolutely terrible drivers. I've also been bicycling as my primary mode of transportation since 2006, with only a handful of near-death experiences at the hands of oblivious automobile operators. — Read the rest

One of the contradictions at the heart of mass media journalism is the tension what people think they want to hear about, what's helpful for people to hear about, and what people actually pay attention to. Every journalists loves to assert their objectivity, but at the end of the day, journalists still make decisions about what they do or do not cover, and why. — Read the rest

The music and lyrics were written by Neil Gaiman, and performed by the FourPlay String Quartet, an Australian group who Gaiman first collaborated with back in 2010 for the soundtrack to his novella The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains. — Read the rest

From The Guardian:

Three-quarters of all known deposits of lithium in America are found near tribal land, igniting fears that a decline in destructive fossil-fuel mining could simply be replaced by a new form of harmful extraction.

Plans for a major, controversial new lithium mine in northern Nevada – a 1,000-acre site called Thacker Pass – will "will turn what is left of my ancestral homelands into a sacrifice zone for electric car batteries", Shelley Harjo, a member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, has warned, all still without meeting the burgeoning thirst for lithium.

In June 2022, I wrote about the unionization efforts among the wenches and peasants at the Medieval Times in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Even then, the company was reportedly spending $3200 per day to stop their staff from demanding raises above the state minimum wage of $13 an hour. — Read the rest

The Wall Street Journal just published an in-depth piece about GloriFi, a Peter Thiel-backed banking startup aimed at those who think that Wall Street is too woke and liberal.

You might want to go back and re-read that sentence, just so you know you didn't imagine it. — Read the rest

Princeton University's $37.7 billion dollar endowment is supposedly the largest per-student endowment of any American university. While the the nearly 300-year-old Ivy League has enough money to continue passively reproducing its own wealth for many, many years to come, at least it won't do so to the benefit of the fossil fuel industry. — Read the rest

The Intercept reports that In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded nonprofit venture capital firm, just joined the likes of Peter Thiel and Winklevoss Capital in throwing money at Colossla Biosciences, a company committed to cloning Woolly Mammoths.

Of course, as some people are quick to point out, even the best case use of this technology won't lead to any wonderful woolly mammoth petting zoos: