Bikers Against Child Abuse International
What Do You Say To A Naked Lady
Revisiting the X-Rated ’70s Prank Film That Scandalized America
“What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?” was more “Punk’d” than porn, but it still got people talking
The bulk of Allen Funt’s career revolved around his curiosity for reaction. He had a lifelong fixation on creating scenarios and documenting how his subjects responded to their unusual circumstances, but approached what would otherwise be clinical work with a mischievous zeal. He was no methodical researcher and came upon his insights casually, if at all. His earliest gigs, as the mind behind the wackiest stunts on NBC Radio’s Truth or Consequences and a punch-up man for Eleanor Roosevelt on her radio commentaries, hinged on his ability to play the public like a piano. He’d cut out the middleman with his own show in 1947, The Candid Microphone, in which a young Funt pulled a fast one on unsuspecting dupes and a 27-pound mic unit hidden in a park or office captured their flummoxing.
Funt believed he had happened upon a schematic with tremendous potential, and shopped a televised equivalent to ABC in 1948 with the title’s The dropped, Facebook-style. One year later, he crossed town to NBC and tweaked it once more to Candid Camera, which stuck for the next six decades of broadcasts. The show let the tactfully concealed cameras roll as oblivious marks landed in assorted put-ons, from desk drawers mechanically popping open to more elaborate tomfoolery involving Funt’s squadron of actor plants. (Millennial and Gen Z readers: this was the Punk’d of its time, and the one where they pranked then-former President Harry Truman was that era’s Justin Timberlake crying episode.)
As creator and host, Funt masterminded hundreds and hundreds of ruses, leaning on his yen for amateur psychology and sociology more and more as the years went by. Some segments dispensed with the wool-pulling entirely and chronicled revealing interviews between Funt and ordinary folks. He found the peculiarities of homo sapiens endlessly fascinating.
The other thing to know about Allen Funt is that, like many red-blooded Americans, he enjoyed looking at people with their clothes off. It was the marriage of these two great passions — quirks of pathology and full-frontal nudity — that yielded the illuminating historical footnote What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? 50 years ago this month.
Harriet Tubman – Emancipationist Ornithologist
Harriet Tubman, an Unsung Naturalist, Used Owl Calls as a Signal on the Underground Railroad
The famed conductor traveled at night, employing deep knowledge of the region’s environment and wildlife to communicate, navigate, and survive.
by Allison Keyes
Many people are aware of Harriet Tubman’s work on the Underground Railroad and as a scout, spy, guerrilla soldier, and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War. Fewer know of her prowess as a naturalist.
At the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park in Church Creek, Maryland, Ranger Angela Crenshaw calls Tubman “the ultimate outdoors woman.” She even used bird calls to help guide her charges, eventually helping some 70 people, including her parents and four brothers, escape slavery.
“We know that she used the call of an owl to alert refugees and her freedom seekers that it was OK, or not OK, to come out of hiding and continue their journey,” Crenshaw says. “It would have been the Barred Owl, or as it is sometimes called, a ‘hoot-owl.’ ‘They make a sound that some people think sounds like ‘who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?’ ”
That nugget comes to Crenshaw from the park’s historian, Kate Clifford Larson, author of the Tubman biography Bound for the Promised Land. “If you used the sound of an owl, it would blend in with the normal sounds you would hear at night. It wouldn’t create any suspicion,” Crenshaw says.
Be A Lady They Said
Be a Lady They Said from Paul McLean on Vimeo.
Canine Amor
What makes dogs so special? Science says love
by Issam Ahmed
The idea that animals can experience love was once anathema to the psychologists who studied them, seen as a case of putting sentimentality before scientific rigor.
But a new book argues that, when it comes to dogs, the word is necessary to understanding what has made the relationship between humans and our best friends one of the most significant interspecies partnerships in history.
Clive Wynne, founder the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, makes the case in “Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You.”
The animal psychologist, 59, began studying dogs in the early 2000s, and, like his peers, believed that to ascribe complex emotions to them was to commit the sin of anthropomorphism—until he was swayed by a body evidence that was growing too big to ignore.
Bad Dog!
Adrian Belew
Adrian Belew, part 1: 1976-1980
The man who was stolen from Frank Zappa by David Bowie – I give you Adrian Belew.
Stewart Copeland suggested this line in lieu of a resume for the gifted guitar player in a shared interview in 2017. Most musicians would kill to have the two legends in the opening line of their resume, but for Adrian Belew this was only the beginning of a meteoric rise from anonymity to a highly acclaimed musician, performer and sonic sculpture artist. This is a detailed two-part review, looking at the first decade of his unique career, from being discovered in a bar gig all the way to his first solo album and guest appearances on a multitude of musical projects.
At the age of 27 Adrian Belew was playing regional gigs around Nashville with Sweetheart, a cover band that adopted a look of old-time gangsters. Belew remembers: “To be in sweetheart you had to cut your hair 40’s style and wear authentic 1940’s vintage clothing. All the time! Even in the daytime if you were going grocery shopping.” The band members excelled at playing the more interesting repertoire of classic rock radio. However Belew started to get disillusioned with his dream of becoming a musician with a record deal, playing his own material. Doing cover songs in small clubs and bars can only get you that far in the music business.
But all of this changed thanks to Terry Pugh. Terry who, you ask? Fair question, for Terry the chauffeur is responsible for turning Adrian Belew’s career around. Without Terry, Adrian Belew could have been an obscure, unknown and forgotten cover band guitarist, a faith shared with thousands of bar band musicians, playing endless gigs without a hope of being discovered. Terry was a fan of Sweetheart and on the night of October 18th, 1976 he found himself driving a limo around Nashville with none other than Frank Zappa in the back seat. Zappa, on tour with his band, was looking for some live music to watch after his show at the Memorial Gymnasium in Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Frank asks Terry to recommend a favorite music act in town, and Terry tells him about a band called Sweetheart with a very good guitarist playing tonight at Fanny’s Bar. They walk in, Zappa likes what he hears and 40 minutes later, while the band is playing a cover of Gimme Shelter, he walks to the stage, shakes hands with the guitar player and tells him: “I’m going to get your name and number from the chauffeur, and when my tour is over I’ll call you for an audition.” So enters Adrian Belew the Zappa universe.
Ryan Newman Crash Yikes!
Wicca Rising
Why Witchcraft Is on the Rise
Americans’ interest in spell-casting tends to wax as instability rises and trust in establishment ideas plummets.
Juliet diaz said she was having trouble not listening to my thoughts. “Sorry, I kind of read into your head a little bit,” she told me when, for the third time that August afternoon, she answered one of my (admittedly not unpredictable) questions about her witchcraft seconds before I’d had a chance to ask it. She was drinking a homemade “grounding” tea in her apartment in a converted Victorian home in Jersey City, New Jersey, under a dream catcher and within sight of what appeared to be a human skull. We were surrounded by nearly 400 houseplants, the earthy smell of incense, and, according to Diaz, several of my ancestral spirit guides, who had followed me in. “You actually have a nun,” Diaz informed me. “I don’t know where she comes from, and I’m not going to ask her.”
Diaz describes herself as a seer capable of reading auras and connecting with “the other side”; a plant whisperer who can communicate with her succulents; and one in a long line of healers in her family, which traces its roots to Cuba and the indigenous Taíno people, who settled in parts of the Caribbean. She is also a professional witch: Diaz sells anointing oils and “intention infused” body products in her online store, instructs more than 8,900 witches enrolled in her online school, and leads witchy workshops that promise to leave attendees “feeling magical af!” In 2018, Diaz, the author of the best-selling book Witchery: Embrace the Witch Within, earned more than half a million dollars from her magic work and was named Best Witch—yes, there are rankings—by Spirit Guides Magazine.
Now 38 years old, Diaz remembers that when she was growing up, her family’s spellwork felt taboo. But over the past few years, witchcraft, long viewed with suspicion and even hostility, has transmuted into a mainstream phenomenon. The coven is the new squad: There are sea witches, city witches, cottage witches, kitchen witches, and influencer witches, who share recipes for moon water or dreamy photos of altars bathed in candlelight. There are witches living in Winnipeg and Indiana, San Francisco and Dubai; hosting moon rituals in Manhattan’s public parks and selling $11.99 hangover cures that “adjust the vibration of alcohol so that it doesn’t add extra density and energetic ‘weight’ to your aura.” A 2014 Pew Research Center report suggested that the United States’ adult population of pagans and Wiccans was about 730,000—on par with the number of Unitarians. But Wicca represents just one among many approaches to witchery, and not all witches consider themselves pagan or Wiccan. These days, Diaz told me, “everyone calls themselves witches.”
Bubbles Bubbles Bubbles
The Secret to Blowing Massive Soap Bubbles
This physicist-approved recipe uses a dash of polymers to create world-record-scale bubbles.
by JENNIFER OUELLETTE, ARS TECHNICA
EVERYBODY LOVES BUBBLES, regardless of age—the bigger the better. But to blow really big, world-record-scale bubbles requires a very precise bubble mixture. Physicists have determined that a key ingredient is mixing in polymers of varying strand lengths, according to a new paper in Physical Review Fluids. That produces a soap film able to stretch sufficiently thin to make a giant bubble without breaking.
Bubbles may seem frivolous, but there is some complex underlying physics, and hence their study has long been serious science. In the 1800s, Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau outlined four basic laws of surface tension that determine the structure of soapy films. Surface tension is why bubbles are round; that shape has the least surface area for a given volume, so it requires the least energy to maintain. Over time, that shape will start to look more like a soccer ball than a perfect sphere, as gravity pulls the liquid downward (called “coarsening”).
Bubbles and foams remain an active area of research. For instance, in 2016, French physicists worked out a theoretical model for the exact mechanism for how soap bubbles form when jets of air hit a soapy film. They found that bubbles formed only above a certain speed of air, which in turn depends on the width of the jet of air. If the jet is wide, there will be a lower threshold for forming bubbles, and those bubbles will be larger than ones produced by narrower jets, which have higher speed thresholds. That’s what’s happening, physics-wise, when we blow bubbles through a ring at then end of a little plastic wand: the jet forms at our lips and is wider than the soapy film suspended within the ring.
In 2018, we reported on how mathematicians at New York University’s Applied Math Lab had fine-tuned the method for blowing the perfect bubble even further based on similar experiments with soapy, thin films. They concluded that it’s best to use a circular wand with a 1.5-inch perimeter and to gently blow at a consistent 6.9 cm/s. Blow at higher speeds and the bubble will burst. Use a smaller or larger wand, and the same thing will happen.
QUEEN & SLIM’s Daniel Kaluuya on car sex
QUEEN & SLIM INTERVIEW: Daniel Kaluuya on car sex, difficult scenes and his chemistry with Jodie Turner-Smith
Queen & Slim star Daniel Kaluuya tells Sophie Goddard why filming one of 2020’s most impactful films left him dazed and confused…
Daniel Kaluuya should be used to starring in huge blockbusters by now (he’s already got Widows, Black Panther and Get Out under his belt) but his latest project, Queen & Slim has left him somewhat unsteady. The film – directed by Melina Matsoukas and written by Lena Waithe – sees the Oscar-nominated star appear alongside Jodie Turner-Smith in a love story that’s earned comparisons to Bonnie & Clyde (more on that shortly). “It’s very surreal,” he says, when asked how the unanimous praise feels. “It starts off being your secret, but then everyone else is watching it.” Here, he talks us through the filming process, and why he’s still unsure what he makes of it all.
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison’s Profound and Unrelenting Vision
“The Bluest Eye,” which was published fifty years ago, cut a new path through the American literary landscape by placing black girls at the center of the story.
By Hilton Als
Before closing the book on that town and those people, the author has us pause for a few final images and thoughts framed by regret, shame, and horror. The book? Toni Morrison’s début novel, “The Bluest Eye,” which turns fifty this year. As the story ends, one of its protagonists, the blighted Pecola Breedlove, has been more or less abandoned by the townspeople, who have treated her with scorn for most of her life; now she’s left to wander the streets in madness:
The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on her shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach—could not even see—but which filled the valley of the mind.
Spectacular even alongside other early novels bathed in the blood of gothic dread—William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” (1930), say, or Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood” or Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (both published in 1952)—Morrison’s book cut a new path through the American literary landscape by placing young black girls at the center of the story.
Like all the principal characters in “The Bluest Eye,” Pecola lives in Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison, who died last August, was born in 1931. When we meet Pecola, she is eleven years old but already ancient with sorrow. Her only escape from the emotional abuse that her family and her classmates heap on her is to dream. And the dream is this: that someone—God, perhaps—will grant her the gift of blue eyes. The kind of blue eyes Pecola has seen in pictures of the movie star Shirley Temple. The kind of blue eyes that she imagines lighting up the face of the girl on the wrapper of her favorite candies, Mary Janes. Pecola feels, or the world has made her feel, that if she had blue eyes she would, at last, be free—free from her unforgivable blackness, from what her community labelled ugliness long before she could look in a mirror and determine for herself who and what she was. Not that she ever looks in a mirror. She knows what she’d find there: judgment of her blackness, her femaleness, the deforming language that has distorted the reflection of her face. Eventually, Pecola does acquire, or believes she acquires, blue eyes. But in those harrowing final images, Claudia MacTeer, Morrison’s spirited nine-year-old narrator, sees what Pecola cannot, what her madness, the result of all that rejection, looks like to the rest of the town: “Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright.”
In this short, intellectually expansive, emotionally questioning, and spiritually knowing book, the act of looking—and seeing—is described again and again.
QUEEN & SLIM – Love on the run
Queen & Slim review – love on the run across the US racial divide
by Mark Kermode, Observer film critic
This arresting debut feature from Melina Matsoukas – Grammy-award winning director of Beyoncé’s Formation video, whose television CV includes Master of None and Insecure – puts new twists on familiar outlaw riffs that can be traced back through Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde to À bout de souffle and beyond. Boasting outstandingly empathic performances from dynamite screen presence Daniel Kaluuya (Oscar-nominated for Get Out) and rising star Jodie Turner-Smith, in a career-making first feature lead, it’s an intoxicatingly lawless lovers-on-the-run romance played out against the politically charged backdrop of racially divided modern America.
Shot in a dreamy natural light by Tat Radcliffe, who did such remarkable work on French-Algerian director Yann Demange’s Belfast-set ’71, and sensuously scored by Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange), Queen & Slimimmerses its audience in an unfolding road-movie fable. While Lena Waithe’s script (on which author/producer James Frey shares a story credit) may veer occasionally into narrative contrivance, there’s an emotional honesty to the central love story that rings true despite the odd note of implausibility – a sense of powerful, magical potential that burns out any first-feature flaws.
Lil Baby Drops “Catch The Sun” for QUEEN & SLIM
Jumbo @ Sundance
The Wild Sundance Movie About a Woman in Love With a Theme-Park Ride
The lyrical French Sundance indie “Jumbo” focuses on a little-known condition called objectophilia in which people develop romantic feelings for inanimate objects.
Jumbo may be among the first narrative films to focus on objectophilia—or romantic attraction to inanimate objects—but there have been enough TLC segments on the condition to at least half-absorb one’s attention through a very long flight. Perhaps the most famous of these cases is Erika Eiffel, an Olympic archer who married the Eiffel Tower in 2004. In the media, Eiffel’s case was rarely taken seriously, surveyed instead with raised eyebrows and punny punchlines.
Eiffel’s story was also the inspiration behind Jumbo, which approaches its object romance—between a theme park worker named Jeanne and a ride named Jumbo—with far greater curiosity and generosity than they’re so often granted. The film is writer-director Zoé Wittock’s debut feature, and it’s an impressively realized study, nailing a tricky tone without judging or fetishizing its subject. It’s also a gorgeous film visually, full of dimly lit sequences punctuated with swirls of vibrant color. Throughout, the story spins on an axis of vigorous subjectivity; from its vivid opening shot, in which Jeanne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire’sdazzling Noémie Merlant) stands in a field gazing at the ride, we’re acutely aware that what we’re about to experience belongs to her and her alone.
Contract Tracing Coming
Could “Quantum Cognition” Predict Human Behavior?
The same fundamental platform that allows Schrödinger’s cat to be both alive and dead, and also means two particles can “speak to each other” even across a galaxy’s distance, could help to explain perhaps the most mysterious phenomena: human behavior.
Quantum physics and human psychology may seem completely unrelated, but some scientists think the two fields overlap in interesting ways. Both disciplines attempt to predict how unruly systems might behave in the future. The difference is that one field aims to understand the fundamental nature of physical particles, while the other attempts to explain human nature — along with its inherent fallacies.
“Cognitive scientists found that there are many ‘irrational’ human behaviors,” Xiaochu Zhang, a biophysicist and neuroscientist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, told Live Science in an email. Classical theories of decision-making attempt to predict what choice a person will make given certain parameters, but fallible humans don’t always behave as expected. Recent research suggests that these lapses in logic “can be well explained by quantum probability theory,” Zhang said.
After 23 years, Porsche re-joins the Super Bowl – “The Heist”
Clownpocalypse
Eli Roth Excitedly Ushers in the Clownpocalypse Franchise
By Halle Kiefer
Photo: Rich Polk/Getty Images for Universal Studios Hollywood
Horror director and producer Eli Rothhas had it up to here with your zombie-apocalypse movies, and your evil-clown flicks are mere child’s play. Therefore, he’s taking it upon himself to usher in the next stage of horror evolution with (what else?) Clownpocalypse. According to Deadline, the House With a Clock in Its Walls director is collaborating with 3BlackDot on a multi-platform “360-degree horror project,” which will include a movie, video game, and short-form series in addition to a live event. There will also, of course, be merchandise.
Kobe Gone. )Only the good die young…(
Ski-Doo!
“The most 80s thing that ever happened…”
Blinded by science: Remembering the surreal ‘Synthesizer Showdown’ of the 1985 Grammys
Thirty-five years ago, something totally awesome went down at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards that changed television — at least in the science-blinded eyes of members of the original MTV generation.
That fateful evening, onstage at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium, elder-statesmen keyboard icons Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock joined new-school new-wavers Thomas Dolby and Howard Jones (the former in a powdered Beethoven wig, the latter resplendent in billowing primary-yellow satin while brandishing a keytar). Together, they delivered a futureshocking performance that has come to be known as the Great Synthesizer Showdown of ‘85.
It was probably the most ’80s thing that ever happened. Ever. And yet, the grainy Betamax footage of that night still seems cooler than anything that has taken place at the Grammys in the three and a half decades that have followed.
Cortez Live
Remain In Light 2020
Talking Heads Guitarist Jerry Harrison on His 2020 ‘Remain in Light’ Anniversary Tour
by ANDY GREENE
When the Bonnaroo poster went online earlier this month, many were surprised to see Jerry Harrison’s name listed on the fifth line of the Friday lineup. The Talking Heads guitarist hasn’t gone on a tour of any sort since the ill-fated, David Byrne-free No Talking, Just Heads tour of 1996, instead working behind the scenes as a producer for the likes of String Cheese Incident, No Doubt and Live.
That changes this summer. Harrison will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the groundbreaking Talking Heads LP Remain in Light with a tour featuring the Brooklyn-based funk band Turkuaz and former King Crimson/David Bowie guitarist Adrian Belew, who was a key part of the Remain in Light album and tour.
We spoke with Harrison about what fans can expect from the tour, his current relationships with Byrne and fellow Talking Heads alumni Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, and why that elusive reunion seems as unlikely as ever.
Demento On Letterman
Bad Teens!
Teens accused of putting porn on I-75 billboard have been charged
Two teens have been charged in connection with a pornographic billboard display along I-75 in October.
The 16-year-old, who was responsible for going into the shed and posting the X-rated video display, this week was placed in a juvenile diversion program. If he complies with the program, he will not face formal charges, Gagnon said.
The 18-year-old was charged with trespassing in November, Gagnon said.
Gagnon said the department was able to identify the two teenagers through anonymous tips.
The teens entered the building where the billboard controls were located about 10:49 p.m. Sept. 28 and were in the space for about 15 minutes, according to police.
Snubs
from IGN
Oscar Snubs 2020: All the Major Nominations Missing From the Academy This Year
Knives Out, Hustlers, Rocketman and more big snubs.
The 2020 Oscar Nominations have been revealed. While we’re excited to see terrific films like The Irishman and Joker get plenty of love, this year’s nominations are once again as defined by what’s missing as what’s included.There are some major snubs in this year’s lineup, including top-tier performances from the likes of Adam Sandler, Lupiuta Nyong’o and Jennifer Lopez and talented directors like Rian Johnson and Greta Gerwig. Check out the slideshow below or scroll down to see all the movies, actors, directors and songs that were snubbed this year.
Queen & Slim
Like The Farewell, Queen & Slim is a film that attracted plenty of early awards season buzz but couldn’t seem to generate enough momentum to land on the Academy’s radar. We would have loved to see recognition for first-time director Melina Matsoukas, writers James Frey and Lena Waithe and stars Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith.
Mining Marianas
History’s Largest Mining Operation Is About to Begin
It’s underwater—and the consequences are unimaginable.
Unless you are given to chronic anxiety or suffer from nihilistic despair, you probably haven’t spent much time contemplating the bottom of the ocean. Many people imagine the seabed to be a vast expanse of sand, but it’s a jagged and dynamic landscape with as much variation as any place onshore. Mountains surge from underwater plains, canyons slice miles deep, hot springs billow through fissures in rock, and streams of heavy brine ooze down hillsides, pooling into undersea lakes.
These peaks and valleys are laced with most of the same minerals found on land. Scientists have documented their deposits since at least 1868, when a dredging ship pulled a chunk of iron ore from the seabed north of Russia. Five years later, another ship found similar nuggets at the bottom of the Atlantic, and two years after that, it discovered a field of the same objects in the Pacific. For more than a century, oceanographers continued to identify new minerals on the seafloor—copper, nickel, silver, platinum, gold, and even gemstones—while mining companies searched for a practical way to dig them up.
No More Cowbell – Neil Peart Gone
THE MISFIT AWESOMENESS OF NEIL PEART AND RUSH
Neil Peart, the lyricist and virtuosic drummer of the Canadian progressive-rock band Rush, died on Tuesday, in Santa Monica, California. He was sixty-seven, and had been fighting brain cancer for several years. Rush formed in Toronto, in 1968 (Peart joined in 1974), and released nineteen studio albums, ten of which have sold more than a million copies in the U.S. According to Billboard, Rush presently ranks third, behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, for the most consecutive gold or platinum albums by a rock band.
Peart was wildly literate, and his earnest love of science fiction informed Rush’s singular aesthetic. Along with the singer Geddy Lee and the guitarist Alex Lifeson, he helped pioneer an audacious strain of brainy, intricate hard rock that perhaps borrowed more voraciously from Ayn Rand than the blues. Though the band’s influence was vast, something about its music seemed to speak deeply and directly to marginalized young men. Both Lee and Lifeson were the children of immigrants who had left Europe following the Second World War (Lee’s parents were Holocaust survivors; Lifeson’s fled Yugoslavia after the war), and a person gets the sense that the members of Rush had internalized a certain degree of cultural exclusion. Rather than retreating, they embraced ideas that eschewed convention.
Rush was struggling commercially when, in 1976, it made “2112,” an intense, ambitious, and unrelenting record about a dystopian future. The band had spent the previous year playing small, grimy venues. (In the 2010 documentary “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage,” the band jokingly referred to this stretch of shows as the “Down the Tubes” tour.) No one seemed particularly energized about the next album. Rush’s manager, Ray Danniels, had to cajole Mercury Records into not dropping the band entirely.
“2112” was a Hail Mary, but rather than dutifully capitulating to the marketplace—making something more aligned, spiritually and compositionally, with, say, Steely Dan’s “The Royal Scam” or the Rolling Stones’s “Black and Blue,” two of the most beloved commercial rock records of 1976—Rush instead assumed a kind of fuck-it abandon. The band had not assembled an audience via extensive radio play or critical adulation or corporate positioning but by people tapping each other on the shoulder and saying, “Dude, check this out.” For “2112,” the band leaned further into its idiosyncrasies rather than trying to curb them.
Medication Nation
The medications that change who we are
By Zaria Gorvett
They’ve been linked to road rage, pathological gambling, and complicated acts of fraud. Some make us less neurotic, and others may even shape our social relationships. It turns out many ordinary medications don’t just affect our bodies – they affect our brains. Why? And should there be warnings on packets?
“Patient Five” was in his late 50s when a trip to the doctors changed his life.
He had diabetes, and he had signed up for a study to see if taking a “statin” – a kind of cholesterol-lowering drug – might help. So far, so normal.
But soon after he began the treatment, his wife began to notice a sinister transformation. A previously reasonable man, he became explosively angry and – out of nowhere – developed a tendency for road rage. During one memorable episode, he warned his family to keep away, lest he put them in hospital.
Out of fear of what might happen, Patient Five stopped driving. Even as a passenger, his outbursts often forced his wife to abandon their journeys and turn back. Afterwards, she’d leave him alone to watch TV and calm down. She became increasingly fearful for her own safety.
Then one day, Patient Five had an epiphany. “He was like, ‘Wow, it really seems that these problems started when I enrolled in this study’,” says Beatrice Golomb, who leads a research group at the University of California, San Diego.
Buck Henry Gone
Remembering Buck Henry: Al Franken, Judd Apatow, Sarah Silverman, Albert Brooks Join In Praise For Comedy Legend
By Bruce Haring
UPDATE, with additional reactions Genius, a giant, legendary – those are just some of the words that writers strained to come up with to describe the titanic impact that Buck Henry had on their world.
The Graduate screenwriter and SNL host passed today at age 89. Here are some of the initial reactions from friends, fans and the industry as news of his death reached them.