Silver Jacket

Bloggy Blog

  • Duck and Cover

    Two months ago I came home and found Britney Spears on the cover of my April Atlantic. I immediately sent off an email to Gawker:

    Subject: wintry mix, chance of locusts
    omg srsly, what is the world coming to when britney graces the cover of the fucking atlantic?

    (Here‘s Ryan Tate’s write-up.)

    Last week I found that the Atlantic had answered my question with its June cover. This is what the world is coming to:

    Atlantic_britney_225
    Atlantic_skyfalling225

    Apparently asteroids will be saving the rest of the universe from Brit Brit. (The attentive will also notice that the mercurial mastermind Professor X has a byline in the issue. Coincidence?)

    In just two months the Atlantic, which usually features politics on its cover, has gone from US Weekly to Discover. Looking forward to the Alfred E. Neuman portrait in August. (Calling Andrew Hearst!)

  • Are tattooed girls easy?

    Tattoos200In the current issue of Psychology Today, I wrote a little piece about personality and body modification (titled "The Body Mod Squad" in the paper version.) I already have a pierced tongue and some scarification, but for the servicey sidebar (titled "Rebel Without a Commitment") I reviewed some more softcore ways to stand out. (And actually tried them; yes we are better than Maxim.)

    (more…)

  • Thumbs Up to Masturbation!

    The ad placement is just too good. Click for full size.

    Prostate_thumb

    Link to story. The idea that masturbation prevents prostate cancer is not new by the way.

    UPDATE: Per the comments, my sister sees the following ad with the story. I sure as hell want to prevent anything resembling those things. BRB.

    Pears

  • Blogging about Bullshit

    I’ve written some recent posts about bullshit for Brainstorm.

    Campaign_trail_08bThe first one defines bullshit and describes Hunter S. Thompson’s use of it on the campaign trail in 1972. And mentions a bullshit lecture on statistics I saw that was actually titled "Not Always Bullshit: A Simple Explanation of Statistics."

    The second one relays what Harry Frankfurt, author of On Bullshit, had to tell me about the use of bullshit by Hillary and others on the campaign trail in 2008.

    The third describes a bullshit music review in Maxim magazine, asks whether I committed the same sin in Psychology Today, and ties in material from the book How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read.

  • A fascinating, and queasy, new competition.

    Clive_guitar_2
    To be a journalist is to occupy one of the worst stations in life one can imagine. Picture it: Tied to a computer, sometimes on the road, occasionally forced to talk to strangers, always starting from square one on a new topic after each deadline. And you are maddeningly, incessantly indentured to the hard truth of reality, or the hard reality of truth, or some combination thereof, with the nitpicky public waiting to jump on you for any creative deviation from "fact." What a life! It’s enough to drive anyone to drink, or let their hair go, or at least compete with coworkers to slip inane specimens of verbiage into front page stories. Well, we know which route(s) Malcolm Gladwell has (claimed to have) taken.

    In case you missed it, read Jack Shafer’s rundown on Slate. Gladwell told a tale, broadcast on NPR, about challenging a colleague at the Washington Post back in the day to rack up instances of the phrase "raises new and troubling questions" in their articles. Then they moved on to round 2 with "perverse and often baffling." It’s a fun story, but Shafer did some legwork and called bullshit on most of it. Anyway, there was a flurry of attention in the blogosphere that seems to have abated.

    But wait! A new contender has entered the ring! Who else but Clive Thompson? First, let me quote from a February 11 story in the Canadian paper The National Post: "Malcolm and Clive? Both went to the University of Toronto around the same time. Both are whip-smart and terrifically ambitious. [True.] … The only difference? Clive never made it to pop culture level, and as one tittle-tattle who knows this world well tells me, ‘Clive has always been a little envious of Malcolm.’ [Unverified, and to be fair, Gladwell instills both envy and schadenfreude in writers from this country too.]"

    So what does Dark Horse Thompson do in his latest Wired magazine column? He creates a mashup that’s one part "perverse and often baffling" and one part "raises new and troubling questions." The result: "These tools raise a fascinating, and queasy, new ethical question." You can look it up, right on page 60.

    Malcolm, are you listening? That’s Thompson: 1, Gladwell: 0.
    Hop to it.

  • TURN UP THE JUICE!!

    Onionmagazine_archive_118a

    My boss sent me this.

  • Indistinguishable from Magic

    Matrix150
    Magical thinking–typically considered an archaic mode of cognition that populates the world with animistic forces, hidden dimensions, and evocative incantations–may actually serve us well in the future as we navigate an existence increasingly mediated by digital information.

    Read the full post at Brainstorm.

    But there are several cases where we’ve already jumped the gun in attributing powers to our tech toys.

    Read about this, too, at Brainstorm.

  • Lost in Translation

    Emmaus150In 1937, a long-lost Vermeer was revealed at auction, heralded by experts as one of the Dutch painter’s greatest works. Only it wasn’t a Vermeer at all. A man named Han van Meegeren had produced this and many other expensive forgeries. Once he stepped forward, their value dropped like the jaws on his customers. Why?

    Read the full post at Brainstorm.

    I’ll give you a hint. It relates to magical thinking.

  • Magical Thinking

    Blackcat2
    My latest feature article has just been published in Psychology Today. It’s about everyday magical thinking and how even the most hard-core skeptic thinks magically–believing in karma, luck, curses, tempting fate, etc. And it’s loaded with coverage of studies that involved voodoo dolls, royal spoons, dart boards, and Mr. Rogers’s sweaters. Check it out.

  • Point Blank

    Few things annoy me more than when a writer dramatically builds up to a revelation or punchline that turns out to be already obvious. Here’s an example from the Times this week:

    In the drawing, a nude man and woman stand on either side of a wall. Each wears a plastic breathing mask that covers the nose and mouth; the masks are connected to air hoses that pass through the wall. The hoses attach to pouches at each other’s underarms and crotches. [OMG they’re huffing each other’s stank!]

    It is a device that allows people — and there is no polite way to put this — [Whoa, what’s he about to reveal that’s even cruder than the fact that they’re remotely huffing each other’s stank?!] to sniff each other. Remotely.

    Dud_gun_2