By the time I, Robot was published 70 years ago today, Isaac Asimov had already released all nine of its chapters as individual short stories in popular science fiction magazines of the day. Each story was distinct, with some overlapping characters, but Asimov stitched them together and wrote an introduction that framed it as a coherent work. Literary scholars — a profession that relishes jargon like no other — actually have a name for this type of work. A fix-up novel, they call it. (The rate at which this profession can produce clumsy jargon is astounding.)

If pasting together stories sounds hacky to your purist ears, like seeing a band play their greatest hits as a medley, it’s worth noting the predominance of the practice. Contemporary genre fiction is rife with fix-ups, and most early works of classic literature could reasonably be classified as such, from The Odyssey to Le Morte d'Arthur to Arabian Nights. The Bible is the quintessential fix-up. Who’s the hack now?

Anyway, several of the stories in I, Robot would later be adapted for television, and of course there was the Will Smith movie. But one of the stories, “Runaround,” could arguably be called the most important science fiction short story of all time. It proposed the Three Laws of Robots:

• First Law. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

• Second Law. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

• Third Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly in the fields of driverless cars and facial recognition, have made the Three Laws more relevant than ever. But one could argue the Laws have played a larger role in popular culture than robotics. A very thorough wikipedia page has compiled uses of The Three Laws of Robotics in popular culture, from RoboCop to Repo Man, but it somehow overlooked this xkcd, which imagines what would happen if we rearranged the order of the laws:

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• 5 Years Ago Today: A terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, killed 14 and wounds 17.

• 50 Years Ago Today: After Richard Nixon signed an executive order, the Environmental Protection Agency officially began operations.

On a recent episode of Eli Roth’s History of Horror, Stephen King was asked what is the scariest Stephen King movie? Not known to play favorites, King surprisingly answered the question. Can you guess which of his filmic offspring he deemed most terrifying? You can probably predict it wasn’t The Shining, as he famously loathed Kubrick’s adaptation. How about that freakshow clown in It? Carrie torching the gymnasium? Malachai and Isaac spewing the bible verses in Children of the Corn? Nope, nope, and nope. King’s answer was... Misery, released 30 years ago today.

It is not the obvious choice. Misery contains only two graphic sequences, the fight scene at the end and the famous hobbling scene, which people often remember as gruesome, but shows nearly nothing. (The horror, as they say, is psychological. The worst kind, wah-ha-ha.)

You know the plot: A romance novelist is held captive by his “No. 1 fan,” who forces him to write a novel that resurrects her favorite character, Misery Chastain. I have always wondered if Misery was influenced by the story of overzealous Sherlock Holmes fans who demanded that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle resurrect the detective after Moriarty killed him off in “The Final Problem.” Like the novelist in Misery, Doyle tried offing his famous protagonist so that he could quit genre fiction and become a serious writer. No doubt Stephen King has entertained the thought himself.

Anyway, Kathy Bates won an Oscar for Best Actress for her flawless portrait of the fanatical captor. Director Rob Reiner wasn’t nominated for anything, which hardly seems fair. Shouldn’t you at least win an honorary award when Stephen King says you made the scariest Stephen King movie?

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• 80 Years Ago Today: Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz got hitched.

• 120 Years Ago Today:  Oscar Wilde died, impoverished and exiled in Paris. A few days later, he would be buried at Bagneux Cemetery, but in 1909, his remains were moved to a tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Yesterday I watched two movies about addiction released 75 years apart. 

The first was Belushi, a new documentary about the late comedian. It’s a good biography, stuffed with funny people being vulnerable, including Harold Ramis, Penny Marshall, Chevy Chase, and Candice Bergen. But the scene-stealer is another addict — Carrie Fisher. Fisher, who was briefly engaged to Dan Aykroyd, while he and Belushi were making The Blues Brothers, delivers the line that could substitute as the tagline:

Drugs are not the problem. Sobriety is the problem.

What she means is, for addicts, the gaps between drinks are interminable, because that is when you trapped alone with yourself. Don Birnam, the boozehound protagonist of The Lost Weekend, the second movie in my addiction double feature, says it this way:

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I can’t take quiet desperation!

Directed by Billy Wilder, The Lost Weekend, which debuted 75 years ago today, was pioneering in at least two profound ways….

First, it adopted the style of film noir (expressionistic, moody, hardboiled) but removed all the content traditionally associated with film noir (murder, femme fatales, detectives). Much like the Western would become detached from the West, Wilder foresaw how the moody style of film noir could be applied to new subject matter, beyond crime and dames. Despite being black and white, the film feels decades ahead of its time. Scenes of the protagonist enduring delirium tremens in rehab resemble what Hitchcock later did in The Birds. And the hallucinatory soundtrack uses a theremin, an instrument that would soon become associated with science fiction.

The second innovation was simply to make addiction a topic at all. Drunks had been common characters in movies and books, but addicts were new — and there is a difference. It was said that Wilder wanted to make The Lost Weekend to find an explanation for Raymond Chandler, after enduring his hopeless self-destruction during the making of Double Indemnity the year prior.

The film spooked the liquor industry. Contending it would lead to a reinstatement of prohibition, the liquor lobby hired a gangster to offer Paramount $5 million to not release the movie. Believe it or not, people continued drinking.

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• 10 Years Ago Today: Adele released the single “Rolling in the Deep.”

• 25 Years Ago Today: Ted Turner launched CNNfn, a 24-hour financial news cable network. It folded in 2004.

Why Hollywood hasn’t latched their hooks into this story yet is a mystery the size of Davy Jones’s Locker.

Mary Read (b. 1685) was the daughter of an English sailor who died at sea. Anne Bonny (b. 1697) was the daughter of Irish lawyer who would dress her in boy’s clothing. Rugged fighters and foul-mouthed sots by their teens, they each found their way to the Caribbean, where they fell into the company of a flamboyant pirate named Calico Jack. Assuming male identities, they both became renowned buccaneers under his flag.

Their pirate clan successfully marauded the sea for years, until the governor of the Bahamas finally put a bounty on them. When privateers caught up with the bandits off the coast of Jamaica, the crew, including Calico Jack, cowered in the hull while the women vigorously defended the ship. The scalawags were captured, tried, and sentenced to death. Anne visited Jack in prison on the day before his hanging, just to deliver this emasculating zinger: “If you’d fought like a Man, you need not have been hang’d like a Dog.”

The women were tried separately, but 300 years ago today were also found guilty and sentenced to hang. By “pleading the belly,” or claiming pregnancy, their executions were stayed. Both belly claims were actually true, but Mary died in prison months later. Anne was eventually freed.

Aspiring screenwriters might be interested to know that Mary and Anne were both romantically linked to Calico Jack, making possible a tawdry ménage à trois scene that generates half-siblings — which can (maybe) even be defended as historically accurate! Further research into your tale of feminist swashbuckling will likely turn up longform stories in the Post and Courier and Smithsonian Magazine. The original transcripts of the trial also exist. Or you can go directly to the primary source, A General History of the Pyrates, a 1724 book that may or may not have been written by Daniel Defoe.

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• 25 Years Ago Today: Bill Clinton signed the National Highway System Designation Act, ending the federal 55 mph speed limit. Sammy Hagar was thrilled.

• 30 Years Ago Today: Margaret Thatcher resigned as leader of the Conservative Party and, therefore, as Prime Minister.

• 60 Years Ago Today: Mauritania declared independence from France.

• 200 Years Ago Today: Friedrich Engels was born. A recent profile characterized the co-author of The Communist Manifesto as quite the hedonist.

• 500 Years Ago Today: After rounding Cape Horn, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan began crossing the Pacific Ocean. 

In some sense, all music after the Beatles was about the Beatles, but this was particularly true of music released by former Beatles. 

Soon after the group announced its breakup in April 1970, all four members were onto new solo projects. Ringo somehow beat everyone to the punch, dropping Sentimental Journey (no symbolism there) a month before the band even officially broke up.

A couple weeks later, Paul released his own solo debut, McCartney, where he found himself in a liminal state on the hit single “Maybe I’m Amazed”:

Maybe I’m a man and maybe I’m a lonely man
Who’s in the middle of something
That he doesn't really understand

Paul would soon sprout a band called Wings (no symbolism there) and spar with John over the cultural value of silly love songs.

John, meanwhile, slammed Paul’s album as “Engelbert Humperdinck music” in a Rolling Stone interview while promoting his own project, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, an album inspired by primal scream therapy. On the song “God” he screams, primally:

I don’t believe in Beatles! 
I just believe in me.

Well then. That brings us to George Harrison, who 50 years ago today released All Things Must Pass (no symbolism there), the title track of which begins: 

Sunrise doesn’t last all morning
A cloudburst doesn’t last all day

So level-headed!

Easily the best solo debut of the bunch, All Things Must Pass is a neither mournful nor regretful nor nostalgic. It is simply a beautiful, plainspoken reflection on time and memory and loss. Unlike his bandmates, George seemed pretty chill with the past, which makes for the perfect Black Friday playlist:

• “All Things Must Pass”- He couldn’t possibly be talking about the demise of the most important rock group in history, could he?

• “What Is Life” - An unexpected Motown-inspired hit that became a movie soundtrack favorite.

• “Isn’t It a Pity” - Probably about a girl, but it sure sounds like a band eulogy. 

• “I’d Have You Anytime” - Co-written by Bob Dylan, you can almost — very briefly — hear what it might have sounded like if Dylan were a Beatle.

• “My Sweet Lord” - A surprising blend of gospel, that signature weepy guitar, and Phil Spector’s production.

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• 30 Years Ago Today: John Major was elected to succeed Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of England.

• 80 Years Ago Today: Bruce Lee was born.

• 100 Years Ago Today: The Mask of Zorro starring Douglas Fairbanks debuted. Often called the first American superhero film, it became a crucial element in DC Comics lore, because Bruce Wayne saw his parents murdered in front of him at a screening of the film in Gotham City in 1920. The experience led him to don a mask and become Batman.

• 110 Years Ago Today: Penn Station opened in New York City.

• 125 Years Ago Today: Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prize.

Nobody knows anything, and those who claim dominion over the future know even less.

That’s the retrospective lesson of The Road Ahead, a book published by Bill Gates 25 years ago today, which attempted to predict the future of technology, entertainment, capitalism, media, education, and so much more. I try to read this book every few years, just to remind myself how laughably feeble humans are at predicting shit. 

In 1995, Bill Gates was peak Bill Gates. Windows 95 was being booted onto millions of computers, the antitrust trial against Microsoft was still a few years away, and the future looked like a heavy plastic box plopped on every desk. But the internet was just around the corner, and Gates was notoriously slow at realizing its impact. In the 286 pages of The Road Ahead, he mentions the internet only a few times, and usually in a manner that makes it sound like a photocopier playing footsie with a rolodex.

To his credit, Gates gets it halfway right, sometimes. He was remarkably close to predicting mobile devices, for instance, imagining a future where “wallet PCs” populate our pockets. Give him soothsayer points for this sentence: “A really sophisticated wallet PC might cost what an elaborate camera does now, $1,000 or more.” Nice one, Bill. Sorry, though, we have to deduct points for this one: “Mobile devices will be able to send and receive messages, but it will be expensive and unusual to use them to receive an individual video stream.”

For being a tome of futurism, The Road Ahead is strangely preoccupied with old tech, especially telephones and television. If it resembles any genre, it’s 1950s science fiction. At one point, Gates predicts phones will get screens and cameras (yeah), but then claims “they’ll look more or less like today’s phones” (oops). Thankfully the book comes with a CD-ROM, packed with videos of Bill explicating this wonderful gadget future. If only we modern folk had machines to play it.

The most telling chapter comes near the end, when Gates unveils his enormous “home of the future,” built the banks of Lake Washington across from Seattle. [Sidenote: I once drank two glasses of pinot grigio there, for a reception in 2006. Magnificent wood. Great bones!] Gates spends paragraph after paragraph gloating about the miles of ethernet cable winding through the walls of his “smart home.” At this exact moment, the book turns to tragedy, because the reader knows a crucial detail the author does not: In just a few years, Wi-Fi will be widespread and all those miles of copper will become completely worthless.

And yet, after all these follies of futurism, I still enjoy cracking open this book every few years, mostly to gauge its relevance today. I have come to believe that Bill knew his vision was cock-eyed all along. He agreed to write what was essentially a pulpy science fiction novel, and he somehow sold over 2.5 million copies. He must have known it was populist schlock, because before it even hit book stores, he famously wrote a grave internal memo titled The Internet Tidal Wave, declaring the internet an existential threat to Microsoft. Six months later, the book barely even mentioned the internet. Something is amiss!

Meanwhile, here’s how the rest of the world discussed the internet in 1995:

Nobody knows anything.

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• 60 Years Ago Today: The mathematically-minded literary group Oulipo was founded in Paris.

• 60 Years Ago Today: Wilt Chamberlain pulled down a record-setting 55 rebounds in a single NBA game.

• 70 Years Ago Today: Guys and Dolls debuted on Broadway at the 46th Street Theatre.

Do you actually remember who shot J.R.?

I have no idea. The name is probably stored somewhere deep in my memory banks, back there with the capital of Armenia and the name of the actress who played Anya on Buffy, but I have zero ability to retrieve it. J.R. had a brother, right? Was it Bobby? Did Bobby shoot his brother?

If people recall anything about Dallas, it’s likely the insane popularity of the primetime soap opera. The “Who Shot Jr?” episode scored the second-highest TV rating of all time. Seen by over 53% of households with television, it was huge by any historical yardstick. That number smashes Seinfeld; it crushes Game of Thrones; it beats every single Super Bowl. The only show to ever score a higher household rating was the finale of M*A*S*H, a few years later.

By gross numbers, 83 million Americans tuned in 40 years ago today to learn who shot the dickish oil tycoon in the 10-gallon hat. That was more people than voted for Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, combined, just a few weeks prior in the 1980 presidential election.

It makes you wonder: What insanely popular thing from today will be difficult to remember in a few decades? Will we all forget Tiger King? Harry Styles? The entire Marvel Cinematic Universe? Leave your best guess in the comments:

Leave a comment

If you don’t mind spoilers, here is the scene containing the big reveal:

Did you know? Eight months elapsed from the attack on J.R. to revealing the shooter. That gave Vegas plenty of time to create a betting market for the murder mystery. Placing money on major characters from the series paid out odds between 3:2 and 4:1. J.R. himself was longshot at 20:1. As something of a joke, oddsmakers offered 1000:1 probability on Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach being the shooter. The coach, Tom Landry, was a steal at 500:1.

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• 25 Years Ago Today: The Dow closed above 5,000 for the first time.

• 30 Years Ago Today: Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall got hitched in Bali. 

• 30 Years Ago Today: Dances with Wolves, starring and directed by Kevin Costner, premiered.

• 40 Years Ago Today: Steely Dan released their seventh studio album, Gaucho.

• 75 Years Ago Today: Actress Goldie Hawn was born.

• 400 Years Ago Today: Plymouth Colony settlers signed the Mayflower Compact.

One of the clutch go-to moves of this newsletter is to dig up some archaic scandal from decades ago and poke fun at the puritanical outrage of its time. Several recent issues — Justify My Love, 2 Live Crew, Pee Wee Herman, Milli Vanilli — have shown how history has a funny way of exposing moral sanctimony. Performative righteousness seldom ages well.

But now we finally have a case before us that isn’t so clear cut. 40 years ago today, CBS and ABC banned seven Calvin Klein commercials featuring a 15-year-old Brooke Shields in her best Lolita poses. Here is the most well known:

For those wary of hitting play, allow me to describe: The camera pans across the limbs of a teenage Brooke Shields in skin-tight jeans as she whistles “My Darling Clementine.” When her face finally appears, she looks at you, the viewer, and coquettishly asks, “Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

So what do you think? If a jeans company released that commercial today, what would happen? Would there be outrage? Or would no one care? I’ll put my guess in the comments.

Leave a comment

By the way, the power of phony outrage to accrue attention still thrives today. This week saw righteous airhead Ben Shapiro draw attention by proclaiming that rock stars wearing dresses will crash western civilization. Oh the humanity.

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• 30 Years Ago Today: Microsoft launched the first version of Windows Office.

• 30 Years Ago Today: Milli Vanilli were stripped of their Grammy Award.

• 40 Years Ago Today: Heaven's Gate, starring Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken, premiered. It would become one of the biggest box office bombs of all time.

• 45 Years Ago Today: The movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest premiered. It would go on to win the five biggest Academy Awards (Best Picture, Lead Actor, Lead Actress, Director, and Screenplay).

• 60 Years Ago Today: A drunken Norman Mailer stabbed his wife twice with a penknife.

• 400 Years Ago Today: The Mayflower reached Cape Cod and explored the coast.

I misremembered this story. Perhaps you misremembered it too.

My faded memory of the demise of Pee Wee Herman goes something like this: In the early ’90s, Paul Reubens was arrested for masturbating in an adult movie theater in Sarasota. That event led CBS to cancel his acclaimed Saturday morning children’s show, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, the last episode of which aired 30 years ago today. Reubens pled no contest and was sentenced to 75 hours of community service, during which he produced two drug PSAs, including one memorable bit about crack:

Most of that memory is accurate, except one small detail: CBS did not cancel the show because of the Sarasota theater incident in 1991. The network had already cancelled the show, after its fifth season, in 1990. However, CBS did remove the series from syndication, so for a long while, owning bootleg copies of Pee Wee’s Playhouse on VHS was considered a prize possession.

Today, no one cares what Pee Wee did in a movie theater in Sarasota. All five seasons of his zany children’s show are streaming on Netflix.

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• 1 Year Ago Today: The first known case of COVID-19 was identified as a 55-year-old man in Wuhan, China.

• 5 Years Ago Today: Actor Charlie Sheen revealed that he was HIV-positive. Many women soon sued him.

• 40 Years Ago Today: John Lennon & Yoko One released the album Double Fantasy, which contained “Watching the Wheels,” my personal favorite solo Lennon song. He would be shot and killed three weeks after its release. 

• 50 Years Ago Today: Lieutenant William Calley went on trial for the My Lai Massacre.

• 50 Years Ago Today: American inventor Douglas Engelbart received a patent for the first computer mouse.

• 60 Years Ago Today: Lhamo Dondrub, the current spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, was officially named the 14th Dalai Lama at the age of 15.

• 220 Years Ago Today: The U.S. Congress convened at the Capitol in Washington, D.C for the first time. Previous meetings were held at Congress Hall in Philadelphia.

Today’s edition of Today In History is adapted from an entry in my book The Encyclopedia of Misinformation.

The story of the rise and fall of Milli Vanilli is a faustian tale that scarcely needs repeating. But for the sake of clarity: In 1990 a dance-pop duo from Munich bolted to the top of the charts with their debut album Girl You Know It’s True, going septuple platinum and winning a Grammy for Best New Artist. At the peak of their fame, 30 years ago today, their producer revealed the pretty-boy performers did not sing a single note on their debut album and they lip-synced their hits in concert. They eventually became subjects in the very first episode of VH1’s Behind the Music, and months later, one member died from a pill overdose.

Those are the major plot points in the story arc that is Milli Vanilli. But this account fails to capture the loudest and most prominent aspect of the story — moral outrage. One might expect a band caught bluffing their voices to endure punchlines from late-night television, but the public flogging of Milli Vanilli far exceeded comic chiding. The duo became instant villains, symbols of the scourge of fakery sweeping society. Cultural arbiters furiously cranked up the sanctimony, portraying the duo as harbingers of moral decline — a society on the brink of collapse under the weight of artificiality. In a panic of authenticity, Milli Vanilli were forced to return their Grammy statue. 

Of course, nothing about the music had changed. “Blame It On the Rain” was still catchy/corny R&B, “Baby Don’t Forget My Number” was still infectious dance pop, and both (plus the title song) remained number one hits. The only thing that changed was their public image. They were now fraudulent, in the eyes of pious critics.

And only pious critics. Fans of the band were not riled by the disclosure. During a concert in Connecticut, for instance, a backing track started to skip at the most inopportune moment, repeating the line “girl you know it—,” “girl you know it—,” “girl you know it—,” over and over. The audience cared not one lick that they were lip-synching, but the malfunction set off a wave of media hysteria about musical integrity.

The reactionary loudmouths conveniently overlooked the obvious: Artificiality is a defining characteristic of the entertainment industry. Popular music largely exists to manufacture image and fantasy. Audrey Hepburn did not sing on My Fair Lady; Natalie Wood never crooned West Side Story. Even the most credible acts — the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Black Sabbath, the Sex Pistols — lip-synced their songs on Top of the Pops. Svengali producers have crafted countless waxworks through the years, from the Backstreet Boys and Josie & the Pussycats. The Monkees, who were formed through television auditions, did not play their own instruments until their third record. Critics called them the Pre-Fab Four, but fans cared not.

Pop music is media manipulation, from top to bottom, sound to image. The debut album from the Village People also used studio vocalists — and four of the six members weren’t even gay!

Today more than ever, music is assembled in the studio, by a horde of producers and songwriters and engineers. Even critically regarded acts like Drake and Rihanna have collaborator credit sheets longer than Leviticus. Rumors of secret studio vocalists pervade the industry, but few have been caught. Everyone from Lady Gaga to Tim McGraw uses autotune. Vocal comping — splicing together the best syllables from hundreds of takes — is just how albums get made now. 

Everyone knows these things, yet the gotcha game of catching the cultural impurity has thrived until recently. Sanctimony hit its high note in 1990, with a combination of the Milli Vanilli scandal and Whitney Houston’s lip-synced performance at the Super Bowl. The stigma has slowly eroded ever since. By 2013, when Beyonce received blowback for lip-syncing at the inauguration of Barack Obama, she could just brush it off — priggish controversies about authenticity had become a rite of passage. Fans now have the final say, and they can shrug off the pious commentators. 

Ultimately, the fakest thing about Milli Vanilli was the charade of moral outrage about Milli Vanilli. 

Girl, you know it’s true.

MORE ANNIVERSARIES

• 20 Years Ago Today: Bill Clinton arrived in Vietnam, becoming the first president to visit the country since the end of the Vietnam War.

• 30 Years Ago Today: Home Alone starring Macaulay Culkin premiered.

• 60 Years Ago Today: Patsy Cline recorded “I Fall To Pieces.”

• 75 Years Ago Today: Charles de Gaulle was elected president of France.

• 90 Years Ago Today: Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart (1958), was born in Nigeria.

• 100 Years Ago Today: Australia’s national airline Qantas was founded.

Some records have the animosity of their creation woven into their fabric. Rumors sounds like couples sharpening exquisite knives on each other. The White Album evokes a band on the brink of self-immolation. But the fourth and final Velvet Underground album, Loaded, contains none of that rancor, despite the seams of the band tearing apart during its recording.¹ 

If anything, Loaded resembles a band having the time of their life poking fun at the music industry. “Who Loves the Sun?” seems to be taking the piss out of the blithe optimism of The Beatle’s “Here Comes the Sun.” “Sweet Jane” has an excitable dude simply exclaiming “me, I’m in a rock ’n roll band!” And “Rock & Roll” recounts the life of Jenny, whose “life was saved by rock and roll.” Good times!

Even the album title derives from enthusiasm. The record label told the band to produce an album “loaded with hits.” But like all prior VU records, it had difficulty even making it into the charts. (The highest a VU album ever got on the Billboard 200 was their debut at #171.)

If albums can be assigned days of the week, Loaded is surely a Sunday album. So kick back and imagine it’s, 50 years ago today.…

It was alright. Yeah, it was alright.

¹ Surely someone out there is yelling, “Actually no, there was a fifth VU record.” Hello pedant! No one likes you! That album doesn’t count because zero original band members were involved.

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• 40 Years Ago Today: “Lady,” written by Lionel Richie and performed by Kenny Rogers, became a surprise hit, topping the Billboard Hot 100.

• 80 Years Ago Today: The Queens-Midtown Tunnel in New York opened.

• 300 Years Ago Today: The pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read were captured.

Based upon name alone, is there a band you would rather have performing during a terrorist attack than the Eagles of Death Metal?

Five years ago today, gunfire erupted at the Bataclan, a Paris theater where the Eagles of Death Metal were in the middle of performing the song “Kiss the Devil.” The attack was part of a coordinated terrorist assault that killed 130 people around Paris, including 89 at the sold-out venue. ISIS later claimed responsibility.

Months later, the band described the horrific events involving random shooters and detonated suicide vests to Vice News.

Despite accruing a galaxy of sympathy, lead singer Jesse Hughes later marred the affection by claiming in an interview on Fox Business Network that Bataclan security guards were conspirators in the attack. He reiterated the remarks in an unhinged interview in an alt-right magazine, blaming liberal religious tolerance for the shooting. He later apologized for the comments, and then apologized again a couple years later for comments related to the Parkland shooting.

Despite what the name suggests, Eagles of Death Metal are not a metal band. Their influences include rockabilly, bluegrass, and glam. They might best be described as joke rock.

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• 20 Years Ago Today: Britney Spears released the dance-pop single “Stronger,” the third single off Oops!... I Did It Again.

• 25 Years Ago Today: GoldenEye, the first Bond film to star Pierce Brosnan as 007, premiered.

• 80 Years Ago Today: Walt Disney released Fantasia, his third animated feature. Despite bombing at the box office due to WWII, the film would develop popular acclaim and masterpiece status through numerous rereleases.

• 190 Years Ago Today: Oliver Wendell Holmes published the poem “Old Ironsides,” which saved the USS Constitution — now the oldest active ship in the Navy — from decommission.

On November 9, 1970, a 45-foot sperm whale washed ashore in Florence, OR. As the creature decomposed on the beach, a distinct smell wafted into town. The locals grew anxious, and a bit nauseous. Finally, the highway patrol arrived. For a few days, they pondered their options. Bury it? Cut it up? Burn it? No solution seemed quite right, but the stench was worsening, so they settled on a decisive course of action: Blow it up!

And so 50 years ago today, a half-ton of dynamite was detonated under an 8-ton beached whale. As it turns out, that was overkill. Mammalian marine guts spewed everywhere, raining down on townsfolk. A quarter-mile away, cars were smashed with chunks of cetacean carcass.

This story remained a local legend for two decades, until the early ’90s, when the newspaper columnist Dave Barry mentioned seeing footage of the exploding beast. Soon after, a video clip went viral on the internet, long before “going viral on the internet” was even a thing. Here is that clip, which KATU in Portland recently remastered into HD 4K gory glory:

For me personally, “exploding whale” remains one of my earliest internet memories. On a deep midwestern college campus, some dude in a trenchcoat at a computer lab asked me, “Hey, have you seen exploding whale yet?” Um, no. He then opened Netscape and typed in a .edu domain, followed by a cacophony of slashes and tildes. After a couple minutes of buffering — boom, there were marine innards exploding all over my monitor. It felt like a time machine, via Windows 95. (Eventually that website moved to TheExplodingWhale.com, which survives to this day.)

A 2006 BBC story ranked Exploding Whale the fifth-biggest viral video of all time, after such hits as Star Wars Kid, Numa Numa, and Paris Hilton sex tape.

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• 10 Years Ago Today: Rihanna released her fifth studio album, Loud, which included the hit singles “Only Girl (In the World)” and “What’s My Name.”

• 30 Years Ago Today: Tim Berners-Lee published a formal proposal for the World Wide Web. The first web page would appear the following day.

• 40 Years Ago Today: Voyager 1 reached Saturn and took some pretty cool pictures.

• 75 Years Ago Today: FDR’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, won a Nobel Peace Prize for establishing the United Nations.

• 75 Years Ago Today: Neil Young was born.

• 120 Years Ago Today: The Paris World’s Fair of 1900 closed.

Is this how it all began?

No, probably not. That would be giving Saturday Night Life too much credit. But presidential candidate Donald Trump’s guest-hosting SNL — 5 years ago today — definitely helped humanize the radical views of a racist bigot. 

At the time, Trump was leading in the polls for the GOP primary, followed by Ben Carson. Still, most people doubted he could win.

Days before the show, a Latino PAC announced a $5,000 award to any audience member who yelled “Trump is a racist!” during the live broadcast. Larry David turned the reward into a bit, yelling exactly that in the opening monologue. (It’s on YouTube, if you can stomach it. Larry David did not collect his bounty.)

Predictably / regrettably / impossibly, the show drew its highest ratings in years with Trump. One might hope viewers tuned in to see the musical guest Sia, who turned down a selfie request from Trump.

The Donald has actually been the most-impersonated SNL subject of all-time. Phil Hartman, Darrell Hammond, Jason Sudeikis, Taran Killam, and Alec Baldwin all done impressions of him.

MORE ANNIVERSARIES

• 20 Years Ago Today: New York elected Hillary Clinton as Senator.

• 25 Years Ago Today: Shock jock Howard Stern published Miss America.

• 25 Years Ago Today: Alice In Chains released their self-titled third album.

• 80 Years Ago Today: The Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington collapsed. Video of the bridge swaying in the wind later went viral, or at least the 1940 version of viral.

• 200 Years Ago Today: Carrying all 22 states in the union, James Monroe was elected the fifth president of the United States.

It seems quaint now, to remember how controversial a pop song could be.

When Madonna released “Justify My Love” 30 years ago today, religious conservatives screamed bloody murder. The music video, which dared to show people in leather awkwardly leering at other people in leather, was banned from MTV. Today it would barely warrant an NSFW label.

Madonna, of course, had a knack for finding opportunity in outrage. After she appeared on Nightline to defend the song, “Justify” became a textbook case of the Streisand effect by immediately catapulting to the top of the Billboard charts. 

The controversy overshadowed the song itself, which is unfortunate, because it was a clever bit of composition. Written by Lenny Kravitz, and containing his background vocals, “Justify” was essentially the first trip-hop crossover hit. (A great remix recently posted to YouTube turns off Madonna’s vocals and cranks Kravitz’s panting.) The main sample is James Brown’s legendary “Funky Drummer,” but Kravitz apparently did not know that, because he lifted it from a Public Enemy song.

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• 5 Years Ago Today: Master of None, created by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang, debuted on Netflix.

• 50 Years Ago Today: Ethan Hawke was born.

• 160 Years Ago Today: Abraham Lincoln beat three competitors in the 1860 election to become the 16th president of the United States. Voter turnout was 81.2%.

Five years ago today, Twitter announced it was changing Faves to Likes. This change involved nothing more than swapping out one icon out for another. Nonetheless, people were pissed.

Let’s be specific. An extremely small segment of Twitter users were pissed, and most of those users had Twitter accounts before 2007. But this rowdy early-adopter minority could make quite the fuss.

Why kill faves?, they hollered. Twitter’s answer was simple: the threshold for favoriting a tweet was too high; plus, the star icon was confusing new users.

To be fair to the dissenters, that rationale was bullshit. The real reason for the change, which Twitter could never admit, was that Facebook called them Likes and used a heart icon. Adopting the jargon of the much bigger platform made Twitter more accessible to the many people who still didn’t get Twitter.

Diehard Twitter users disagreed. A favorite was special; a like, a mere trifle! And they screamed aplenty.

The distinction seems pretty silly today, unless you are one of those fifteen people still dying on that hill (hello friends!). But the whole incident reminded me of other instances where hardcore users became slightly unhinged about a small design change. Here is an abridged timeline of select redesigns that have infuriated users:

• Jan 2019: Slack introduced a new logo and people lost their shit.

• Nov 2017: Twitter changed the character limit from 140 to a 280 and people lost their shit.

• Aug 2017: Medium introduced claps as a replacement for likes and people lost their shit.

• May 2016: Instagram introduced a new logo and people lost their shit.

• July 2014: Airbnb introduced a new logo and people lost their shit.

My selective editing of that list might be unfair. To be sure, the internet is rife with unwise redesigns. There was the infamous v4 Digg redesign of 2010, for instance, which famously precipitated a user secession and the rise of Reddit. There was Netflix’s truly boneheaded idea in 2011 to change its DVD rental service name to Qwikster. And, perhaps most infamously, Facebook’s introduction of the Newsfeed in 2006 is still cited by many as the reason everything bad on the internet has happened ever since.

What redesigns really pissed you off? Leave a comment and let me know what dumb mistakes these platforms have done to rile you up.

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• 25 Years Ago Today: Kendall Jenner was born.

• 25 Years Ago Today: Mr. Show with Bob and David, a sketch comedy series starring Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, debuted on HBO.

When John Updike died in 2009, this quote, from a Life magazine interview, was repeated across his many obits and memorials, like an unofficial epitaph:

I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

The boundaries of the middle, for Updike, were rather unambiguous. He was obsessed with one specific demographic: WASPs. The first in a series of works defining that creamy nougat middle filling debuted 60 years ago today, with the publication of Rabbit, Run.

The plot is familiar and easy to summarize: A former high school athlete, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, cannot recapture his prior greatness so he flees his marriage and responsibilities. The character is essentially a stand-in for post-war America, but today, he seems an awful lot like the precursor to white-guy self-loathing. (If it’s not clear, the lead character’s nickname is Rabbit, because he ran. His last name is Angstrom, because he… angsts.)

Updike would publish 60 books, but this novel, and the other works that make up the Rabbit tetralogy that followed, would become his primary legacy.

Did you know? Eminem’s character in 8 Mile is nicknamed “B-Rabbit,” after Rabbit Angstrom. The epigraph at the front of the film is also a quote from the novel: “If you have the guts to be yourself… other people’ll pay your price.”

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• 30 Years Ago Today: Prince released Graffiti Bridge, his other movie set in the ’80s Minneapolis music scene. It would be nominated for several Raspberry Awards.

• 30 Years Ago Today: Jacob’s Ladder, a horror movie starring Tim Robbins and directed by Adrian Lyne, was released.

• 60 Years Ago Today: Penguin Books published Lady Chatterley's Lover, unexpurgated for the first time, decades after it was banned for obscenity.

• 100 Years Ago Today: Warren G. Harding was elected president. He died of cardiac arrest two years later.

• 140 Years Ago Today: James Garfield was elected president. He was assassinated ten months later.

I am just about as far from a Deadhead as you can get, though if you saw my greasy covid hair right now, you might think otherwise.

So this will not be an exercise in persuading you that American Beauty — released 50 years ago today and recently upgraded to #215 on the Rolling Stone megalist of best albums — is a masterpiece. To write this blurb, I tried listening to the album again. It’s probably been 20 years, and yep, “Sugar Magnolia” still sounds like mama bears warbling harmonies in an outdoor shower. “Truckin” still feels like a critter just ran up my pant leg.

So instead of trying to convince you of something I don’t believe, I’ll tell a joke. It’s my favorite joke, actually. Here it goes:

Q: What’s a deadhead’s favorite kind of cigarettes?
A: Yours.

Why jam when you can write this short?

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• 55 Years Ago Today: Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published posthumously, eight months after the death of the civil rights leader.

• 60 Years Ago Today: Elvis released his version of “Are You Lonesome Tonight.”

• 70 Years Ago Today: A Puerto Rican nationalist attempted to assassinate Harry Truman.

• 75 Years Ago Today: The first issue of Ebony was published. A collection of covers and stories will soon be published by Rizzoli.

Happy Halloween, zombies!

When The Walking Dead debuted 10 years ago today, no one would have guessed what a ratings success it would become. The first season had decent viewership, with over 5.2 million viewers per episode. But that number climbed each season, and soon the unthinkable happened: It became the highest rated scripted show on television — a first for a cable series. By season 5, The Walking Dead was eating every other show alive, with more than 14.3 million viewers per episode. (For perspective, the highest rating that Mad Men, another AMC show, ever reached for a season was 2.6 million.)

I have actually seen every single episode of the show. I’m not proud of this, because it’s not a particularly amazing show. But its popularity has always fascinated me. Every episode poses fundamental questions of philosophy — what constitutes intelligence? what constitutes life? does justice supersede law? does the good of the many outweigh the one? what are the essential components of society? And so on. Basically, The Walking Dead thinks of itself as really deep.

Of course, it’s actually not really deep. It’s mostly Ethics 101 wrapped in a zombie costume. But I mentioned the ratings of The Walking Dead at the onset for a reason. Knowing that 14.3 million people think it’s deep makes it interesting. It gives you insight into how our society views itself. The Walking Dead is an oracle for how people (particularly young people) view their roles in the modern world. And lemme tell you: It’s a scary vision. Scarier than the show itself!

Anyway, viewership for the series has been on the skids for a couple of years. Like the classic bell curve, ratings are now back to where they started. An end date of the show has been announced: The final season will air in 2022. At that point, the oracle will be closed forever.

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• 20 Years Ago Today: OutKast released Stankonia. Today In History reader Rick pointed me to the vinyl reissue, which looks pretty sweet.

Best meme of all time? Sorry, this is my newsletter, and the answer is “Anyway, Here’s Wonderwall.”

If I were a comedy sketch writer, I might try to write a bit about this meme. This totally hypothetical sketch would involve some dude explaining to his girlfriend why “Anyway, Here’s Wonderwall” is the best meme of all time.

First, he would open his laptop and show her a few examples of the meme.

[She might smirk.]

Then, like a pedant with a cultural history newsletter, he would explain how, 25 years ago today, two sibling songwriters from Manchester, best known for their acrimonious blood feud, released the single “Wonderwall.”

[“Oh really?” she might reply.]

“See, it’s funny because ‘Wonderwall’ is stupid easy to play on guitar,” he would continue. “And it’s the only song that some guys know how to play.”

[“Oh really?” she might reply.]

“Just four chords.”

[She might nod.]

“But the strumming pattern is actually quite complex,” he would continue. “Super rhythmic. I don’t think anyone knows that.”

Then he would pull out a napkin and pen from his breast pocket. He would scribble these letters on the napkin, like he had just decoded Hammurabi himself:

DDD DUDUD D DU
DUD D DU U UDUDU

“See, it’s actually super complex strumming,” he would say, his hand gesticulating in an up-down motion.

[Blank stare.]

Worried she doesn’t understand his revelation, he would then google a Collegehumor video titled “Learning How to Play Guitar... Well Enough To Get Laid.”

“You see, it’s funny because he plays ‘Wonderwall’ and that’s all he can play. But chicks dig him anyway. Because… it’s ‘Wonderwall’.”

[Mm-hm.]

Then he would pull up “the best version” of the meme. “Look at this guy inserting Smash Mouth lyrics into the song,” he would say, laughing his ass off.

Finally, exhausted, she would tear the laptop from his paws and google “dildo wonderwall.”

“Actually, this is the best version of the meme, you wanker,” she would reply.

“Good thing I’m more of a ‘Champagne Supernova’ kinda guy,” he would say.

“Good thing you don’t write sketch comedy,” she would say.

[Scene ends with Cat Power’s version of “Wonderwall” playing over the credits.]

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• 25 Years Ago Today: Pulp released Different Class. That’s right, the Britpop album containing arguably the greatest song of all time (again: my newsletter) was released on the exact same day as “Wonderwall.”