“The question is always to what degree they voted for Trump because of his bigotry or flip it on its head, to what degree did they vote for him despite his bigotry?”

Look, if it’s going to be like this all the time now the least it could do is be sunny. Ugh. I’m ready for the missiles to fly already. Anyway, here’s music, enjoy. [Via]

★★★★ Incoming cool air and night noises had jangled up sleep in an easeful way. Dead roaches lay on the pavement. There was enough of a cloud layer to hold off the warmth of the sun. The wind was a November wind, the ten-year-old said, exaggerating but getting the feel of it. Changing into jeans seemed as plausible—that is, as not-quite-plausible—as changing into the waiting pair of shorts. Columbus Avenue was clogged with brunch tables and people strolling. In the Park, the burgeoning humidity offset the filter on the sunshine. Children designated two sunbathers on the Sheep Meadow as the pylons on the end zone of their football game. Gangs of youths in matching bright-colored t-shirts were going here or there in the Park or its environs. The leaves of the trees on Columbus Circle were dulled and drooping a little under their own weight. A pigeon of the most orthodox pigeon-plumage waded in a dirty puddle lined with dead leaves. By late afternoon, the five-year-old urgently needed to brought out to the playground to burn off energy. The cloud layer had solidified, with an under-layer of darker bits. The swing set rocked a little with the force of the children attacking it. The inland edge of the clouds let the sun through to spill across the dinner table, and then low overhead loomed a whorled and dinted surface of shining metallic pinks.

Wolfe’s penchant for exploiting other people’s content goes beyond books. As many people who run Facebook pages do, he posts highly sharable little memes and videos. The Wolfe method of making content goes as follows: take a picture or video that someone else created and add a line of text over it to make it look like it’s somehow yours. Do you like this retro keyboard that started up via Kickstarter? Wolfe liked it so much that he spliced the video, slapped his logo on it, and changed the background music. Out of love, I’m sure. Dig this umbrella that closes upwards? Wolfe apparently does too, so much so he edited down the video a little, added some text, and presto, more clickbait to lure people to his page. Think this futuristic baby stroller is amazing? Wolfe evidently thought so too, so he added some text to the video and tucked his logo in the corner of it.

While reading Yvette D’Entremont’s (aka The SciBabe) takedown of David Avocado Wolfe—a man whose middle name should indicate he hardly needs taking down, AND YET!—I was struck by this passage about viral video thievery. Not that this is anything new, but there’s something incredibly pernicious about the rise of the true shitvid—a stolen meme in video format, essentially used to catch your attention, capture your views, and claim them for a specific brand that often has little or nothing to do with the content of the video. It’s like brands on the internet have resorted to producing their own chum, regurgitating memes with the intention of keeping everyone trapped. And instead of some kind of mysterious evil genius behind the “Stories from around the Internet” algorithm, it’s just us, peddling each other our basest visual clickbait. This is what happens when brands become people, too.

Image: Kyle Pearce via Flickr

The best restaurant in New York has always just closed.

How Margaret Lamberton came to accuse Thomas Hogg of defiling her pig begins with a scene fit for an early David Cronenberg film. One day, during the winter of 1645-1646, Lamberton, wife to a prominent sea captain in the nascent colony of New Haven, ventured out into her property to check on the health of a pregnant sow. To her horror, she soon discovered the animal had given birth to “two monsters.” One had “fair white skin.” The other had a “head like a child’s” and a protuberant right eye. Disturbed, Lamberton summoned the town doctor for council. Before long, the pair came to a startling but inescapable conclusion: the malformed piglets looked just like Lamberton’s pig tender, Hogg. After briefly discussing the matter with the doctor, Lamberton approached town authorities, who soon arrested her servant on “suspicion of bestiality.”

The first reference to Thomas Hogg’s arrest in a published 1857 edition of the Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven From 1638 to 1649.

Marred by scientific malfeasance and biological ignorance, the ensuing investigation has for decades caused historians to titter behind collegiate lecterns. Indeed, the story has all the hallmarks of a jeer-worthy colonial yarn: bewildering superstition, mob-driven paranoia, and a painfully convoluted rationalization process, which forced town officials to reconcile rampant misbehavior in their supposedly enlightened communities.

Still, to treat the Hogg case solely as a source for derision is to sell it drastically short. Hogg, a noted town albatross, was the sort of uncouth or mildly threatening eccentric who today causes subway riders to discreetly switch cars or retreat defensively into their cellphone screens. His legal problems provide illuminating insight into how Puritans handled similarly awkward interactions with the most off-putting and bizarre of their neighbors.

Even more interesting, Hogg’s casefile demonstrates the limitations of puritanical fervor. Adherent to an unrepentantly harsh Old Testament legal system, officials in New England set low evidentiary standards for cases involving capital crimes. To justify the ugliness of this reality, and to protect their belief in the infallibility of scripture, magistrates aspired toward consistency in their application of biblical justice. Few cases better represent this phenomenon than that of Hogg, a peculiar and arguably disturbed man who had, long before Mrs. Lamberton’s accusations, tested the patience of his largely intolerant neighbors.

“Is it really better to burn out quickly than fade away?” —Burnin’ Burt

There are no good ways to die. Except maybe autoerotic asphyxiation. Anything autoerotic is probably a pretty good way to go. I’ve heard hanged people get erections, too. And possibly drowners.

Drowning I’ve tried and do not recommend. I used to be a breast stroker. I was pretty good until one day a kid playfully pushed me off a starting block. I hit the side of the pool, the lane line, and clunked my head on the bottom of the pool. Looking up, I could only helplessly watch as my swim team jumped in to save me. I don’t like having my head underwater anymore. Not at all. Drowning is not a good way to go, erections or not.

Your quoted conundrum comes from a Neil Young song that also declares “Rock n’ Roll will never die.” If rock isn’t dead, it’s certainly in the nursing home. Classic rock may still be classic, but contemporary rock usually just reminds us of something classic. Retro cords, retro feels. I might love every Warlocks cd or think Dinosaur Jr. is rad, but Rock n’ Roll’s best days are behind it.

Nothing about the new season of GBBO looks right, from its not being on the British Broadcasting Channel (the show jumped to Channel 4) to the distinct lack of Mary Berry to the extremely messed up trailer:

I don’t give a fuck if comedian Noel Fielding played Old Gregg on “The Mighty Boosh” and made me laugh very much; he’s claiming he won’t eat the goddamn cakes. Berry’s replacement, Prue Leith, recently admitted she thought twice about joining the show because of all her work campaigning for healthy foods. In that same interview, Fielding’s co-host Sandi Toksvig claims she’s never watched the show, in what is possibly an extremely unclear joke?????

We’ve got Theseus’s Bake Off on our hands and let me tell you, Mr. Public Relations Analyst who was the one opinion source for this Guardian story about how It’s Going To Be Totally Fine And Everyone’s Gonna Love It: Disrupting The Great British Bake Off, it’s not gonna be good and people aren’t gonna love it. We tried this before in the States—the series is untranslatable. Even though the new hosts and judges are Brits, the producers have managed to take all the joy and spirit out of the thing—the magic ingredient, you might say. The whole beast has become self-aware there is no guile left.

“New lineup will be a hit on Channel 4 precisely because it’s different from what audiences know, analysts say,” reads the subhead of the Guardian piece, which uses the word “disruptive” not once but twice (thank you, PR expert). The only hope is that the contestants bring some fresh life to the show, but perhaps it’s time to admit a certain kind of defeat, or at least twilight. Everything, especially pastries, goes stale.

Weren’t we just here? Wasn’t it moments ago that we were waking up to a new week, full of dread and barely able to drag ourselves to the starting line? Didn’t we just complain about how exhausted we were and wonder how much more we could take? I guess the good news is I can copy and paste this exact block of text over and over again until it finally all comes down, because we live in a world where it’s always like this now. Here’s some music. Enjoy.

★★★ During the long, sweltering crawl through the faltering subway system, the gloomy clouds had relaxed to let some heating sun come through. The light wasn’t bright enough to shake off the unease that a storm might still come up from somewhere. The shirt collar held the memory of the sweat from the commute, and the afternoon sun squeezed down on it. The train platforms had if anything become even more infernal. The clouds to the north after dinner were innocuous but a glance back to the south and west found things roiled and darkening. It seemed too risky, as the gloom moved in, to take the time to drop the groceries at home before stopping by the ice cream truck. Wet dots appeared on the pavement. A man in a pale gray pinstriped suit vest and pants, his bared shirtsleeves rolled up, held a long umbrella but kept it furled for the moment.