It’s hard to articulate what a big deal the Sokal Hoax was to a certain type of person back in 1996. That certain type of person included me, and maybe you, but if it wasn’t you, then we need to set the scene....

In the 1990s, literary theory hit peak awareness in popular consciousness. If that sentence sounds absurd, I get it: You really had to be there. It’s hard to imagine Cultural Studies (imported from Britain) being a cool new field of study and Postmodernism (imported from France) being all the rage in the humanities. And yet, during this era, if someone asked what you were studying at university, you could simply say “theory,” and people would know what that meant. It meant you were a wordcel who toted around dense books by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze. Being a postmodernist made you a type, a true archetype, just like being an existentialist in 1950s Paris made you a type. (Swap the black turtleneck for a ratty cardigan — you get the picture.)

During this time, no one thought it strange when the Los Angeles Times wrote a huge profile of the philosopher Jacques Derrida because literary critics Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia were already dominating the conversation. There were so many well-known academics participating in the discourse that we had to invent a lofty term for them: public intellectuals. These were basically just academics who wrote op-eds and appeared on talk shows. But in Barnes & Noble, you could find a theory-oriented magazine called Lingua Franca, which covered these public intellectuals like they were part of a trendy music scene. By the end of the decade, the Wachowskis snuck Baudrillard into The Matrix. Theory had its first Hollywood blockbuster.

It was an heady time, but of course there were haters. Very vocal haters. The chief criticism aimed at theory was its jargon-filled prose. This XKCD summarizes the sentiment:

That was the scene, 30 years ago today, when something truly wild happened. In the new issue of the esteemed cultural studies journal Social Text, an NYU physics professor named Alan Sokal published a paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Yep, as you guessed from the title, it was a hoax.

With slabs of stitched-together academic gibberish, Sokal mocked postmodernism by claiming quantum gravity was politically progressive and physical reality was a linguistic construct. Because it came from a credentialed physicist from a prestigious institution, the parody hit hard and the blast radius went wide. The New York Times put it on the front page and everyone with a substack newspaper column had their say. George Will fastballed in WaPo, Stanley Fish retorted in NYT, and Derrida himself fired back in Le Monde with the most plainspoken copy he’s ever produced. The whole ordeal reportedly made the homepage of People.com.

For me personally, the situation created mixed emotions. As a self-identified theoryhead, it was a sucker punch. I had invested crucial academic time in learning this arcane world, swimming in the aquarium of mysterious terms like aporia, subaltern, and différance. More importantly, I found the worldview and toolset of postmodernism extremely valuable. (Full disclosure: I still do, mostly.) The parody seemed unfair. I had also spent plenty of hours studying calculus and computer science, but no one was vilifying those fields. Why was literary criticism expected to appeal to casuals, while other fields were naturally accepted as too difficult for amateurs? Wasn’t language a real mystery — perhaps our biggest mystery — and wasn’t deconstruction a fresh attempt at uncloaking that mystery?

But on the other hand, Sokal’s parody was fucking hilarious. In my heart of hearts, I’m a hick from the midwest who loathes pretension, and theoryheads could be remarkably pretentious. Plus, I loooove a good hoax, especially a literary one. (My book is stuffed with them.)

Since the heyday of theorymania, the humanities have sadly tumbled out of focus from American discourse. Once a bold new field, Cultural Studies is rudderless. No magazine editor is clamoring to put a philosopher on the cover. If you say you analyze literary texts today, someone might ask if you do reinforcement learning for an LLM.

Actually, reading it today, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” seems less a parody of postmodernism than a hallucination from a chatbot: Total nonsense, weirdly plausible, and utterly delightful.

I miss the postmodernists. They would have loved chatbots.

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• 30 Years Ago Today: Barb Wire (1996), starring Pamela Anderson, premiered in movie theaters. It was nominated for a Golden Raspberry, but lost to Striptease.

• 30 Years Ago Today: I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) made its debut in theaters.

• 250 Years Ago Today: The Illuminati was founded in Bavaria.

No one seems to think Mae West’s play Sex was particularly good. When it debuted on Broadway 100 years ago today, the New York Times called it a “crude and inept play, cheaply produced and poorly acted.” Last week, when the same publication put it atop the listicle The Plays You Need to Know From the Last 100 Years, it reiterated the sentiment with a quote from a modern playwright: “It’s not a great play, but it’s interesting as an artifact.”

Audiences, however, came in droves. Sex was the only Broadway play that season to stay open into the following year. But then, after 375 performances, the coppers busted the joint. West was arrested and charged with obscenity (“for corrupting the morals of youth”). After serving 8 days in a workhouse on Roosevelt Island, her career exploded.

The plot is so forgettable that the text of the play actually went missing for 70 years. Synopsis: a prostitute tries to reinvent herself, falls for a wealthy young man, and is ultimately undone by the return of her past. The most memorable scene involves Mae exposing her navel in a belly dance. It unfuritated the censors.

By rule, all Mae West anecdotes should conclude with one of her quips. This one seems appropriate: “When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.”

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• 30 Years Ago Today: The rom-com The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996) premiered in theaters.

• 30 Years Ago Today: Jean-Claude Van Damme made his directorial debut in The Quest (1996).

• 40 Years Ago Today: Reactor no. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. The World Health Organization later estimated that 9,000 people in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia would die of cancer-related illnesses.

• 50 Years Ago Today: The Steve Miller Band released “Take the Money and Run.” The intro drum fill would later be sampled by dozens of artists, including NWA, Nas, De La Soul, Run-DMC, and Beastie Boys.

If three grand doesn’t sound like a lot of money, you’re right, it wasn’t. It was the union minimum at the time, and adjusted for inflation, it would be just $17,720 today. But 50 years ago today, Lorne Michaels made the offer on live television during the first season of Saturday Night Live. Here’s the video:

Here it is right here. A check made out to you, the Beatles, for $3,000. All you have to do is sing three Beatles songs. She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s $1,000 right there. You know the words — it’ll be easy.

If you want to give Ringo less, that’s up to you.

The gag here was that promoters had recently been announcing large sums of money for the band to reunite. A month earlier, promoter Bill Sargent offered the band $30 million for a reunion concert. By the end of the year, he had raised it to $230 million.

Lorne kept trying. A week after his first offer, he appeared again to increase his offer to $3200, plus free hotel accommodations. John and Paul were watching that episode from John’s place at the Dakota. They considered going to the studio but decided against it. George, however, showed up on the show a few months later. Lorne had to explain that it had to be all of the Beatles, so he wasn’t getting a quarter of that money.

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• 20 Years Ago Today: Gnarls Barkley released their debut studio album, St. Elsewhere (2006), featuring the single “Crazy.”

• 50 Years Ago Today: The minimalist masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich made its world premiere at The Town Hall in New York.

Does it still sound punk to you?

The official historical record is clear on this matter. By the mid-’70s, rock music had become bloated and over-produced. That’s when four leather-clad goons lined up outside CBGB’s to set rock music back on course. The Ramones self-titled album, which dropped 50 years ago today, invented a whole new genre.

That’s the authoritative story of punk. But when you listen to those songs today, how rebellious do the Ramones sound? I personally hear a lot of bubblegum pop. “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” is awash in early Beach Boys harmonies. “Judy Is a Punk” could fit on the Happy Days jukebox. And most of all, there is a lot of Phil Spector. (He would later produce their fifth record and pull a gun on them.) For something so new, the songwriting sure feels like a step back to the 1950s.

The main innovation of the album seems to be velocity. The band crammed 14 tracks into a little over half an hour. No patience, no contemplation.

I’m not here to rewrite history, but it makes me wonder: Was the first punk record really just sped-up doo-wop?

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• 10 Years Ago Today: Beyonce surprise-released Lemonade, a concept album with an accompanying HBO movie.

• 55 Years Ago Today: With cover art conceived by Andy Warhol, the Rolling Stones released Sticky Fingers (1971), containing the singles “Wild Horses” and “Brown Sugar.”

• 70 Years Ago Today: In 1956, Elvis made his first Las Vegas residency debut at the New Frontier. It bombed so badly that it was cancelled after one week. But when he returned 13 years later, in 1969, this time at the Westgate, Elvis became one of the biggest attractions in the city’s history.

• 95 Years Ago Today: James Cagney delivered his career-defining performance in the premiere of The Public Enemy. It is most remembered for the grapefruit to the face scene.

• 410 Years Ago Today: Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare both died on this day in 1616. Weird! (Salman Rushdie wrote about the quadricentennial 10 years ago.)

You know about the scroll, right?

On this day, 75 years ago, Jack Kerouac finished writing On The Road. Nudged on by the power of amphetamines, he knocked out the whole thing in just three weeks. He typed the entire manuscript on a makeshift scroll, made by taping together a ream of tracing paper into a single 120-foot sheet. Single-spaced, no margins, no paragraph breaks. Now that’s a bender.

It begs an obvious question: Why exactly? Kerouac said it was so that he would never have to stop typing. But seriously, how long does it take to change the paper on a typerwriter?

The Beats had a knack for this: Writing hacks that were also myth-making machines. William Burroughs did it with cut-up technique, and Allen Ginsberg did it by incorporating breath and chant into his poetry. Brion Gysin made a freaking dreammachine! These were true gadget guys.

The scroll had a way of turning Kerouac himself into a character. He called his writing process “spontaneous prose.” Truman Capote heard that and dropped the famous zinger: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” (This really ticked off Burroughs.)

Anyway, did you see that the original scroll actually went up for sale at Christie’s last month?

Country singer Zach Bryan ended up buying it for $12 million. Which is enough to earn it a place on the wikipedia page for most expensive books. The scroll will make a fine addition to the Jack Kerouac Center, a museum he is creating in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Kerouacheads like to debate whether On the Road should be read in scroll vs non-scroll form. But if you think about it, even the scroll version is a compromise — a paperback book, with page breaks. A purist would only read On the Road on an actual scroll. Someone should publish one. Quick, get Taschen on the line.

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• 80 Years Ago Today: Transgressive cult filmmaker John Waters was born.

• 100 Years Ago Today: Charlotte Rae (Edna Garrett on Facts of Life) was born.

• 150 Years Ago Today: In the first National League baseball game, the Boston Red Caps beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 6-5.

Prince was a big deal to a lot of people, but he was a really big deal if you lived in Minneapolis between 1984 and 2016. Like everyone who lived in Minneapolis in their 20s, I have a Prince story. It’s a quickie:

Prince had a way of shaping lives there, either directly or implicitly. Maybe you were a lucky fan who drove out to Paisley Park to see a late-night Chaka Khan performance, or maybe you were a journalist who landed your first big interview from him, or maybe he stole your girl. I personally remember his death — 10 years ago today of a fentanyl overdose at age 57 — as the founding moment for several groupchats that persist to this day. Every year around this time, those chats light up again.

This year, the chats have been revisiting The Book of Prince, the 9-hour documentary directed by Ezra Edelman — which you famously have not seen. NYT Mag wrote about the whole scandal back in 2024. The director, Ezra Edelman, spent 5 years making the 9-hour documentary, but the Prince estate battled Netflix to prevent its release.

When the story came out, many people predicted the same thing: Oh, this will leak online. But so far, it hasn’t.

Netflix is supposedly working on a different project with the Prince estate, but we haven’t heard much about that. Meanwhile, Edelman, who made arguably the best docuseries of all time, O.J.: Made in America, is currently working on a new project for HBO about Barry Bonds.

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• 1 Year Ago Today: Pope Francis — the first Jesuit pope and the first Latin American pope — died.

• 40 Years Ago Today: Geraldo’s The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults (1986) was broadcast live. The whole thing was insanely boring, but you can watch it on YouTube if you don’t believe me.

• 60 Years Ago Today: The Rastafari holiday Grounation Day began, in honor of Haile Selassie’s 1966 visit to Jamaica.

• 100 Years Ago Today: Elizabeth II was born. She died in 2022 at age 96.

• 500 Years Ago Today: The Mughal Empire of the Indian subcontinent was founded in 1526.

Tune in Tomorrow: Jack Kerouac finished On the Road on a…. scroll?

At 5:12 am, 120 years ago today, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck the coast of North California. In San Francisco, the ensuing fire caused the most damage — more than 3,000 people died and over 80% of the city was destroyed. It remains the deadliest earthquake in U.S. history.

I’ve seen photos of the devastation, but while researching the quake for this newsletter, I stumbled across colorized versions, in this YouTube video:

Whoa. If it weren’t for the goofy hats, one might guess these photos were taken last week.

The colorized photos reminded me of the photo dating quiz from the data vis wizards at The Pudding:

The Pudding asks you to guess the date of a photo. Spoiler: All photos were originally taken in color, but were randomly presented in either color or black and white. (The project was inspired by a tweet from Beyonce’s set designer about civil rights-era photography.)

The experiment suggests a sort of historical distancing that happens with photography. In photos, the past looks farther away, and therefore less relevant. The artifacts of the camera skews our perception of time.

Which leads to a few pertinent questions: Do photos taken today contain the same artifacts of their making? Will photos taken with an iPhone in 2026 look like old-fashioned “iPhone photos” in 2046? Will our sense of history change if the “texture” of its capturing device erodes?

Is the past getting closer?

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• 40 Years Ago Today: The movie Wise Guys (1986) premiered in theaters. A wise Letterboxd comment describes it as “What if Abbott and Costello were lowly henchmen in Mean Streets?” Director Brian De Palma himself called it “a movie I wish I hadn’t done.” The whole flick is free on YouTube.

This newsletter has at its disposal an infinite array of ways to frame the anniversary of Game of Thrones, which premiered on HBO 15 years ago today. We could discuss the demise of monoculture. We could rail against the finale. We could deliberate the rise and fall of recap culture. We could discuss those topics and so many more.

Instead, we will simply hand over the commentary reins to Jason Pargin, one of my favorite lesser-known internet creators.

Here, Pargin compares the despair of George R.R. Martin to Frank Herbert, and along the way, makes an excellent observation about how the magic of the series being unique characters interacting with each other:

Here, Pargin considers the controversial idea of whether someone will eventually use AI to give Game of Thrones a better ending:

And here, Pargin discusses why some actors from the series become famous while others did not:

I have my own controversial take about Game of Thrones: The ending was actually perfect! As you might predict, people yell at me whenever I present this theory. Friendships have been lost.

This newsletter is too young to lose subscribers, so instead of getting into that, I’m happy to put Pargin in the hot take ring. It’s healthy to offload your takes to someone else.

In my experience, creator culture can be alienating, until you find someone who thinks about the world like you.

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• 25 Years Ago Today: Jennifer Lopez released the single “Play.”

• 50 Years Ago Today: Following months of Chevy Chase mocking him as an inept klutz, Gerald Ford appeared on Saturday Night Live after Al Franken talked his press secretary, Ron Nessen, into being a guest. Nessen would call it among his greatest regrets.

• 65 Years Ago Today: The Bay of Pigs invasion began.

• 100 Years Ago Today: The earliest known version of the spiritual song “Kumbaya” was recorded, sung in the vernacular of Gullah.

Tune in Tomorrow: How photography of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake makes the past seem more distant than it is.

When was middlebrow culture invented? Try this theory on for size: 100 years ago today, when the Book of the Month club mailed out a proto-feminist witch novel as its inaugural selection.

Founded in 1926 by New York ad men, the Book of the Month was an early machine for mass-producing literary taste. Its first pick, Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, was hardly the safest possible choice. Sly and subversive, the debut novel depicts a woman who rejects domestic life and becomes a witch.

That first selection went out to 4,750 founding members. By the end of the year, the club had grown to 60,000. It quickly became an engine for churning literature into middle-class consensus, helping turn books into events. In 1936, the club selected Gone with the Wind by then-unknown Margaret Mitchell. In 1937 came Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. In 1940, Richard Wright’s Native Son became the first selection by a Black author. In 1951, the club distributed its 100 millionth book and selected J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Today, as celebrities have encroached, the book club has practically become its own genre. Oprah and Reese are the obvious touchstones, but a pageant of notables have created their own clubs: Dua Lipa, Dakota Johnson, Florence Welch, Emma Roberts, Kaia Gerber, and Andrew Luck.

What the Book of the Month figured out in 1926 still powers the form today: A book club is never just about reading. It is about borrowed taste.

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• 30 Years Ago Today: Rage Against the Machine released their second album Evil Empire (1996). The first single, “Bulls on Parade,” made its debut a few days earlier in a live performance on Saturday Night Live. The band was booted from the show for hanging American flags upside down from their amplifiers.

• 30 Years Ago Today: Local H released the album As Good as Dead (1996), featuring the single “Bound for the Floor,” also known as “the copacetic song.”

• 60 Years Ago Today: Walter Cronkite took over the CBS evening newscast in 1966.

• 70 Years Ago Today: Buddy Holly released his first single, “Love Me,” in 1956. It was not a hit.

Tune in Tomorrow: HBO’s Game of Thrones turns 15, Gerald Ford goes on SNL, and The Bay of Pigs.

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:

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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.

MORE ANNIVERSARIES

• 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.

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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.

MORE ANNIVERSARIES

• 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.

MORE ANNIVERSARIES

• 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.