Fresh Hell

Who Loves the Sun? Ah, the sun. Spherical majesty, chariot of Helios, sister to the moon. It warms the faces of children, coaxes buds from the earth, and makes golden gods of the jogger, the beachgoer, the unbridled nudist. But what has it done for us lately? The lambent plasmoid at the center of our solar system’s days of freeloading may soon be over: the European Union is looking into the prospect of blocking out the sun and re-engineering the atmosphere as a remarkably short-sighted solution to global warming and climate change. Sure, why ask us to change our lifestyles when you can simply alter the incandescent gas that blights us? Look, the end of the world is coming; at this point, it’s just a question of settling on the dystopia of choice. Will apes be our masters, will our flesh become food for albino morlocks, or are we looking at a Mad Max scenario, roving the desert in search of some sanctuary from our Immortan overlords? Choose and perish.   Truant Lies Horny Mormons have thrown the Salt Lake City legal infrastructure into chaos once again: a federal judge in Utah ruled that Skyridge High School did not violate a family’s religious freedom by relaxing attendance for a week at the end of the school year—sanctioned hooky that the family’s teen son used to have sex with his girlfriend in the parking lot, in flagrant disregard of their deeply held Latter-day Saints beliefs. This is the kind of frivolous lawsuit one expects for SLC, where it is illegal to throw rocks, modify the weather, or “cause a catastrophe.” Yeah, keep the catastrophes in godless Kansas City and stay off the grass, out of the parking lot, and stop trying to rob the Great Salt Lake of its buoyancy.   I’m with Cupid It’s not love that is in the air but hazardous smoke from Canadian wildfires, just one of many disappointments afflicting the dating life of miscreants this week: In Indiana, a mugger took $100 from a woman at gunpoint, forced her to add him on Facebook, and began sending her flirtatious messages like, “Damn, you was too pretty to rob,” before a SWAT team arrested the lovelorn desperado. A new book by former Trump staffer Miles Taylor dishes the unwelcome if grimly unsurprising fantasies the ex-president shared about his daughter Ivanka. Youtube creator Colleen Ballinger has denied allegations that she groomed her fans over the course of five years—through song, while accompanying herself on ukulele. Now that the routine public spectacle of public apology has gone twee, one can only anticipate that scandal-ridden politicians will make their mea culpas on theremin, juiced-up sports stars on melodica, influencers outed for backing unsavory causes on keytar.   Slum As You Are France has razed 275 slums in their territory of Mazotte off the coast of Africa since the beginning of the year and the interior minister has promised to “break the record for deportations” after expelling twenty-five thousand migrants from the islands in 2022. Condemned by human rights groups, the terror the state has exerted on its poor as part of its “Wuambushu” initiative to combat crime and immigration is surely not the only answer to economic jeopardy. Just look at Australia, where top financiers are pinning their hopes on the upcoming Taylor Swift tour to breathe new life into its flagging economy. Travel costs and spending (including luxurious VIP bundles) are apparently just what down under needs to put shrimps back on the barbie, the vegemite back on the toast, and keep the knives knives.     Unaware-Wolf Wild horses couldn’t drag me away, but they seem fine with being airlifted, as a helicopter in central Italy kindly rescued a horse stuck in a hole by tethering ropes around it and levitating it to safety. And if this news story sounds sedate, you haven’t heard of the scandalized baker in Dorset who was sacked after his three-hundred-year-old establishment was lambasted for making holey bread and won more than £15,000 after complaining to a court that baking is an art, not a science, and sometimes a hole is the mark of quality. And finally, the peaceful community of Piqua, Ohio, has been riven by controversy after the city asked one Mary Simmons to take town the ten-foot werewolf statue she left up after Halloween and has been dressing seasonally—including in red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July—ever since. “I’m not asking for a lot,” says Simmons, “just let me have my werewolf.” Hopefully, this defiant lycanthrope will survive the jackbooted thugs of Ohio, though, on the other hand, werewolves are nothing to take lightly. Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf-man when the wolfsbane blooms and the moon is full and bright.

Fresh Hell

Everybody’s Got Something to Hide And thanks to a yearlong investigation, we know that that includes the global network of monkey-torturing sociopaths recently unmasked by the BBC. Several arrests have been made and many more placed under investigation after horrifying made-to-order videos featuring the brutalization, and sometimes death, of long-tailed macaques have come to light, along with details of their manufacture and how the devious aficionados who patronize them connected over Telegram, all under the auspices of a mysterious ringleader alluded to in the story as “Mr. Ape.” It’s a little hard to swallow that in the same week that brought us the Titan submersible tragedy, a two-year-old’s shooting of his mother in Ohio, and the unconscionable banning of Pride flags on public buildings in one Michigan city, there are still more gems of glittering blight and depravity to pluck out of the news cycle’s jeweled skull, but monkey saw and man did. Our simian brethren weren’t put here for the abuse of shockaholics in Virginia, but to be curious, outkart Mario, and occasionally kidnap Fay Wray. Somewhere Dr. Zaius is taking notes.   Vanderbilt to Spill Starbucks workers at more than 150 stores have announced that they are striking after the company banned Pride decorations, but more grave institutional injustices are brewing down south in Tennessee. Vanderbilt University Medical Center turned over transgender patient records to the state’s attorney general, who used civil investigative demand to bypass judges and probable cause, for what they say is an inquiry into potential medical billing fraud on the part of providers, not patients. This comes as scarce comfort to families whose children have sought treatment at VUMC amid a political climate that saw the Volunteer State attempt to ban gender-affirming care for minors over the objections of the DOJ and had a state law limiting drag show performances declared unconstitutional earlier this month. But the hero we need isn’t from Washington, but right out of the Smoky Mountains: it is Dolly Parton, who has repeatedly spoken out against the North Carolina “bathroom bill,” and championed LGTBQ+ causes, saying (in a voice like a sassy velvet painting): “I hope that everybody gets a chance to be who and what they are.”    If It Roblox Like a Duck A series of phishing scams hitting crypto sites like Orbiter Finance has netted some $73 million in NFTs and tokens, locking down their Discord servers and using drainers inadvertently opened by users who receive airdrops and . . . oh my gosh, all this jargon, when did the chyrons on these sites turn into Gravity’s Rainbow? Anyway, the culprits? Almost entirely high-school students who are spending their ill-gotten gains on the online game platform Roblox, buying top-dollar skins for their avatars. The identity and methodology of the scammers were unearthed by security researcher Plum, and substantiated by one called Fantasy, who exposed one saboteur known as Pink, because now that money is theoretical and crime is virtual, regular names are just one more boomer vestige of the old world. And before you think of Prince, his name really was Prince. And Madonna really was the mother of god.   Stuck in the Middle with You Saudi Arabia has outdone the United States’s hijacking of Pride by disseminating vile and homophobic lies that President Biden has declared America “the nation of the gays” and is imposing homosexuality on Iraqi schools. The “journalist” spearheading the disinformation campaign is Hussain al-Ghawi, who helped brand slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi as an enemy of the state, but his source is good old-fashioned American conservative media, which originated many of the fabulations now seeing second life as propaganda. Elsewhere, a raid on the occupied Palestinian town of Turmus Ayya by Israeli settlers left one dead and ten wounded while cars, houses, and fields were blasted by both mob and military forces. The attack comes after an escalation in Hamas violence, as gunmen killed four at a settlement-side gas station on Tuesday. “Things are just repeating themselves,” said an Israeli activist. If history is a rerun, let’s keep this kind of overfamiliar turpitude out of the real world and back on ABC’s TGIF where it belongs.   Ace of Bass Well, this is nice. A Wisconsin diver has introduced the New York Post to his friend, the smallmouth bass he calls Elvis, whom he meets up with every summer to swim and recognizes by a distinctive facial scar the affectionate fish likely sustained from a fisherman. Let the trans-species harmony between this brave freshwater resident and this cheesehead remind us what can be done when you shrug off the hooks in your craw and makes eyes through the scrum. 

Fresh Hell

The Fire Next Time and the Time After That Too Among its lesser known charms, Canada is the storied birthplace of a great many mystifying innovations and personages that have subsequently been exported to the United States: from Michael Bublé and peanut butter, to deadmau5 and the Wonderbra, to Justin Bieber and Hawaiian pizza. Last week, our nominal ally expelled the carcinogenic byproduct of hundreds of wildfires—a bonafide airborne toxic event—down south to bedevil much of the eastern seaboard. As cities like New York were enveloped in a noxious haze reminiscent of the de rigueur color correction for all Netflix films set in the Global South, words like unprecedented and apocalyptic and really bad were thrown around in newspapers and group chats. Some speculated this might become the “new normal,” a grisly update to the previous “new normal.” Frankly, it’s getting a bit difficult to keep track of and respond with the appropriate gravitas to all the updates, a ceaseless torrent of disasters made worse by our implacable hunger for electric Hummers and ribeye steaks and hand creams with notes of vetiver and bergamot. Last week, a toxic cloud reeking of cigars; this week, thousands of dead fish washing up on the Gulf coast of Texas. And next week? Will the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica collapse? Might a toxic algae bloom finally swallow Miami? Who’s to say. Perhaps if we all glue our hands to an impressionist painting in a nearby museum, our elected leaders will do something to slow the apocalypse to a more leisurely pace.   With a Little Help from My Neural Network Meanwhile, the great, fearsome machinery of capitalist society remains doggedly focused on expanding the possible applications for “artificial intelligence.” As we reported last week, a computer can now draft an obituary for your deceased grandmother, freeing up precious time to start new email threads about separate email threads commenced so as to schedule a Zoom meeting regarding the status of various projects as tracked by Monday.com but waylaid by a discussion of “insensitive language” in an all-staff memo generated by ChatGPT. Speaking of ChatGPT, doctors are now reportedly using it to infuse their bedside manner with a bit more compassion. In the cultural sphere—to the extent it can still be meaningfully distinguished from commerce—The Beatles have announced they’ll be getting a little help from artificial intelligence to release a final record, which will, of course, feature vocals from John Lennon, who has been dead for over forty years.    Some Don’t Like It Hot Civil rights may be eroding from sea to acidifying sea, but it’s important to keep abreast of lesser threats to human flourishing, lest they be allowed to get a foothold: case in point, the rise of “hot phobia,” which the New York Post has been covering since at least April, when a young woman was kicked out of a supermarket in Brazil because, well, she was too hot. “Truth is,” the twenty-one-year-old declared, “we go through it because we’re too hot, that’s all.” The dread aversion to attractive women has also manifested in the UK, where one hot mom reports that the other moms ignore her because, yes, she’s simply too hot. “The other moms don’t talk to me when I look nice,” she said, according to a story in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun, which was then reprinted in the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post. “They just turn their noses up.” This menace must be investigated—panels must be convened, evidence examined, reports drafted, recommendations circulated, targets set, guidelines established, change made!   Carnal Knowledge While we’re on the subject of visual stimulation, pornography is again under attack. As Wired reports, courts in no fewer than five states have mandated the use of a faith-based, anti-porn app called Covenant Eyes for people on probation. The app—designed by a former NSA employee—helpfully monitors every single thing a user does on their devices, then sends the data it collects, including screenshots, to an “accountability partner,” in many cases a probation officer, who then reviews possibly “concerning” material. As one might suspect, this is working just fine. No bugs, no violations of privacy, no undue contraction of basic human rights, nothing of that sort, no, no. That said, yes, a man in Indiana is back in prison for violating parole because his wife allegedly visited Pornhub.   Repo Man Woe be unto those who happened to donate their body to the Harvard Medical School between 2018 and 2022, during which time Cedric Lodge, an enterprising morgue employee, helped himself to heads, brains, skin, bones, and sundry other body parts, which he then sold to interested parties across this great nation. According to the indictment, his clients were not dispossessed of a sense of humor as they methodically went about their macabre business: one client, a Mr. Joshua Taylor, paid $200 for what, according to the memo line in Paypal, was “braiiiiiins.” Even in death, thou shalt not be spared the indignities of the market.

Fresh Hell

Deepest Gondolances In a week that saw Canadian wildfires turn the air a sprightly yellow and ensconce the New York metropolitan area in a malevolent mist, closing businesses and blighting eyes, color seems in revolt worldwide: on Sunday, a Venice canal turned fluorescent green. Algae blooms and ecoterrorism were both briefly considered as the culprits in the sliming of the Veneto capital—and look, it’s not like the waters of Venice are exactly a model of septic health in the best of times—but it seems that the harmless dye fluorescein, widely used by forensic pathologists, is behind the chartreuse menace under the Rialto Bridge. What nobody knows is why. Is it a protest against the tourism traffic that has worn down the city’s natural beauty to a nub? Guerilla marketing for the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie? Did Nickelodeon dump two tons of its excess slime off the side of a gondola? All that seems certain is that the water, like the air, can no longer be depended on to retain its color for the convenience of idle mankind; if Venice wants to be green, let it be green. Yellow sky at night, sailor’s delight. Green water in morning, gondoliers nonconforming.    Patient Zero Here is a rhyme that comes with a riddle: What’s round at the ends, hi in the middle? Whatever it is, it seems to be host to a unique strain of Covid and, the hunt is underway in Ohio for the carrier of the mutated virus, which is unlike anything scientists have seen since the beginning of the pandemic. The patient is believed to be the most long-lasting sufferer of Covid and poses a danger should the disease take on new attributes and prove contagious. Authorities have narrowed down the likely commute of the unknown plague vector and speculated that they may be a student at The Ohio State University, but beyond that, the author of our future annihilation remains anonymous. Hopefully, whatever horrifying new Alpha or Omicron derivation is incubating in the Buckeye State will likely make it in time for next Christmas. “You there, boy! What variant is this?”    Let It Bey Archaeologists working on behalf of a Dutch museum have been banned from excavations at the Saqqara necropolis in Egypt due to their controversial exhibitions, which portray Miles Davis, Nas, and Beyoncé as ancient Egyptians like Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and King Tutankhamen. The Egyptian authorities allege that the museum is falsifying history by allowing speculative renditions of Nubian and Egyptian antiquity to influence scientific accuracy and is part of the wider question of race in the ancient world, which continues to be controversial, but the museum’s exhibit—which also features costumes worn by Sun Ra and songs by Erykah Badu and Nina Simone—only aimed to present the attendant motifs “as symbols of resistance, empowerment, and spiritual healing,” according to the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. It’s hard to imagine that Sun Ra wouldn’t approve of this mayhem, having once uttered prophetically, “I’m not real. I’m just like you.”   Police On My Back A report by the Department of Homeland Security has deemed protesters demonstrating against the construction of the massive “Cop City” facility in Atlanta “a violent far-left occupation,” copying language from a right-wing troll and provocateur who regularly targets activists in his screeds and fallacious news stories. Smeared as “militants,” one of the protestors against the $90 million mock city has already been killed by police and five more have been arrested. Domestic terrorism charges have been leveled at twenty-three of the activists in Georgia so far, and a bail fund for jailed protesters has been charged with money laundering, to the outrage of civil liberties groups, one of which has characterized the use of laws designed to battle hate crimes as “a political cudgel.” None of this bodes well for the rule of law in Atlanta, but at least the cops will soon have their own city-state, because they can stay there and entertain tourists making the pilgrimage to America’s heartland to see Cop City.   Grimace Tidings Grinning pangender nonthreatening spokesthing Grimace is celebrating their birthday at McDonald’s starting June 12—making the cretinous purple fuzz-mound a Gemini—and celebrants of the sordid nativity will have the opportunity to purchase pool floats and enormous purple shakes. The restaurant chain’s ad copy speculates on the ambiguous provenance of Grimace, suggesting that they may be a taste bud, which is a failure of internal communication, as the dollop of nightmarish aplomb was introduced in the 1970s as a ravenous shake-beast that dwelt in an unhappy valley that encroached on McDonaldland’s peaceable kingdom. Meanwhile, in the real world, more than six hundred tiny pigs were rounded up in Florida after escaping from a sanctuary, a seven-pound cheese wheel was rolled down the hill and over the flailing bodies of British extreme sports enthusiasts as part of a nearly two-hundred-year-old tradition, and a Connecticut bear broke into a bakery and ate sixty cupcakes and a coconut cake. It was, in short, another week filled with food, and none of it edible by human standards. You may look at it, you may run from it, you may advertise it, but you must not taste.

Fresh Hell

Babes in Oyland Life begins, language and memory dawn as the skull grows hard, and the digestion adapts to solids; the future is full of promise. But since disappointment, emotional scar tissue, and debt await you anyway, why not get the ball rolling and become traumatized by social media before you’ve learned to walk? The New York Times reports that screen names, social media profiles, and bulging spam folders are increasingly attached to newborns by their parents long before they have the cogency to operate them. One motivator is the mad rush to claim online IDs, lest you wind up like the father of Charlie Condoleon, who was infuriated to discover that Instagram handles were slim pickings for his toddler. “Someone’s got Charlie Condo,” he raged to the Times, “and it’s like some random dude!” The internet is, of course, random dude central, so nothing says childcare like making sure information traceable to your offspring is widely available in the digital realm from before they have even had an idea. Another child received their first email at three hours old. Welcome to the world; now prepare to consume and become dependent on what passes for reaffirmation now that love has been replaced by likes. The age you inherit is truly a matter of timing. Next time you’re in the birth canal, take the express lane.   WeShirk Determined to go global with decisions and investments so poor that Jared Leto has already played him on television, WeWork’s tragically credulous cofounder Adam Neumann may be taking his new residential real estate startup, Flow, to Saudi Arabia after being met with an understandable lack of interest from investors domestically. Neumann has wasted no time seeing eye to eye with the Saudi royals, seemingly undeterred by the oil-rich nation’s monarchs’ involvement in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and poor human rights records overall, calling the royal highness a “founder” and the country “a startup” because everything is just trendy tech-bro jargon to this guy. Amoral entrepreneurs in bed with foreign powers used to be the stuff supervillains were made of, but tools like Neumann are doomed to fail and born to hench, not so much an Oddjob as a Conjob.   The Boys in the Brand Daylight, the LGTBQ+ banking startup catering to the queer community, began promisingly with rainbow credit cards and free Grindr, but has rapidly escalated into a David Koresh-style cult of personality, with CEO Rob Curtis demanding absolute fealty from his employees even as he planned to expand into surrogacy (“The bank that made me pregnant!” he raved), enormously exaggerated Daylight’s finances, and regaled coworkers with tales of his youth recreationally imbibing GHB. Now facing meltdown and accusations of toxic behavior and predatory practices, Daylight’s real legacy may be in proving that the straight world does not have a monopoly on hellish workplaces or vainglorious overlords.   The Science of Creep Rafael Luque, one of the world’s most prolific scientists—so much so that he has published one paper for every thirty-seven hours this year—has been suspended without pay from the University of Córdoba in Spain after it was revealed that his more than seven-hundred studies, mostly on the subject of green chemistry, increasingly relied on artificial intelligence for “polish” that may amount to plagiarism. Luque also received funding from foreign institutions in Russia and Saudi Arabia looking to grow their research bonafides. The papers themselves are filled with torturous attempts to disguise the AI, unnecessary citations, and made-up scientific concepts that sound like the exposition from an episode of Star Trek. Luque denies the allegations and defends maybe cutting corners, since his industry relies on a “publish or perish” mentality that has seen him pump out formulae regarding “vegetative electron microscopy” like a Micro Machines guy does words.   The Bourne Mistaken Identity This week’s news cycle was punctured by cases of mistaken identity so unfortunate, they seem to have leaked from cinematic convenience not seen since Jeffrey Lebowski had his rug ruined. In Boston, a DOJ training exercise led to FBI cadets bursting into a hotel room and detaining the innocent tourists they mistook for actors; on the other side of the law, an Ohio man was arrested after he called a dumpster company and left a long voice message instructing them to murder his son because he thought he had the number of a hitman. Sadly, doomscroll regulars like Elon Musk, who removed the w in his company HQ’s logo on Thursday so it reads “Titter,” have proven to be exactly who we thought they were.

Fresh Hell

Meaty, Beaty, Big & Bouncy In a week that saw the historic indictment of a former president, the Senate overturning the Covid-19 emergency order, and a federal judge block coverage for preventative care and cancer screenings, the people can be forgiven for longing to return to a simpler time. Faced with the near-constant perturbations of the present, the hour is ripe to return paradoxically to the segment of time that was previously understood to be in front of us. Well, an Australian cultured meat start-up has used DNA sequencing to bring the ancient past to us, in meatball form, by engineering a big beefy sphere of lab-grown wooly mammoth protein. But this latest preference for nostalgic food balls is in truth a lazy deferral of the planet’s most endangered delicacies; why go back seven hundred thousand years when there are so many outlandish species going widely untasted right here in 2023? Sea turtles continue to swim around the oceans like they own the place, taunting us with their deliciousness, the flavor of pangolin remains an enigma to the world at large, and Panda Express is sadly lacking in the gristle of actual bear parts. Asked about the odor of the mammoth morsel in question, locals compared it to that of alligator, which is not nearly enough ambition. What we really want to know is, when somebody finally gets a bite, how does it compare to bald eagle?   Send Me a Kiss by Wire(less Internet) In the tragic actualization of a tender notion into a creepy plastic doodad, one Chinese company has invented a long-distance kissing machine that transmits the user’s “kiss data” to their long-distance sweetheart via a pair of haunting silicon lips. Thing is, it’s actually the third such abomination on the market. As long as people have had kisses, they’ve looked for ways to give them away. Made with the supposedly pure intention of bridging the confines of quarantine, reviewers have noted that the product has its charms “even if you are single” and the inventor himself admits that “there’s little we can do for how people use the device,” which bodes ill for the future of smooching, at least when the black market in stolen kisses begins its inevitable conquest of our pecks and hickeys. Once they have your “kiss data,” who knows who may be making out with you unawares? You might be necking with Xi Jinping right now.   Treedom Caucus Boy, we’ve really gotten fatalistic about this whole climate change thing. In anticipation of the coming blight, Serbian scientists have unveiled “liquid trees,” nanotech tanks of water and micro-algae that mimic the composition of the unwieldy chestnut, the sycophantic cedar, the mooching maple. While a boon to the construction, energy, and agriculture sectors, Loraxes across the planet have condemned the new technology, noting that they speak for the trees, not for the sludgy simulacra of what once was tranquil and smooth to the touch.   The Nudie Foodie In a scenario sure to haunt the dreams of the American red state omnivore class, naked vegans are cavorting in New York thanks to The Füde Dinner Experience, the brainchild of model and artist Charlie Ann Max, in which strangers pay $88 to feast on carrots and quinoa au naturel. A recent dinner focused around reconnecting diners to their menstrual cycles and Max cites body positivity and a greater connection to the human form free of patriarchal perversion and an unsavory emphasis on sexuality as her inspiration. The sight of numerous body types congregated along a rectangular table bedecked with candles does look like a step toward greater peace and intimacy. They also look like witches. That’s not a criticism, of course, but it’s all free bosoms and cacao raspberry avocado mousse until someone breaks out the toil and trouble. In a way, it’s sad to see casual nudity burdened with such momentous purpose. Naked people should be their own reward.    The Clown That Dreaded Sundown Everything can be a little worse, so let’s add to the regressive politics, sweltering heat, and carnivorous wildlife of Florida’s rich cultural gumbo with a liberal sprinkling of horrifying clowns. A cavalcade of the monstrous jackanapes descended on Orlando this week for the fortieth annual World Clown Association convention, littering the hotel bar with a sinister trail of red noses and floppy shoes. Their white-face ringleader, Pinkie Bee, was unrepentant about the squirting-flower-menace haunting children’s hospitals under the guise of spreading levity and joy, but actually acting as grim specters of death, every balloon dog a Cereberus hastening souls to the ticker-tape gates of hell. It’s been said that if the country needed an enema, Florida is where you’d stick the hose, but now we have an even more evil substance poised to blacken the Sunshine State’s festive netherworld. Just send in the clowns.

Fresh Hell

First, Do No Arm Take a walk, legs! See you later, head! Sayonara, belly button! After millennia in obscurity, arms are finally getting their due as the unsung body part: the torso’s twin protuberances are now the subject of an ode in Vogue by Ada Calhoun. Calhoun reports that while staying in a fifteenth-century Scottish castle, she finally realized that arms aren’t just sexy atavisms to be fawned over à la Madonna and Michelle Obama’s; they are actually useful for touching things. You can even carry furniture with them. Sometimes, if you like somebody, you can put your—what are they called again? Oh right, arms—around them and they will take it as a token of affection rather than suspect that you are attempting to calculate their mass before you devour them. That Vogue, a magazine about big sunglasses and trendy handbags, feels the need to run a piece explaining what arms are for verifies the long-held suspicion that its true readership are the alien overlords that lurk among us, printing our money, festooning our skyline with eyesore billboards, and inserting the annoying perfume strips into our periodicals to make them stiff and smell funny. Still not totally at ease with their human suits, it falls to Vogue to issue helpful pointers like “our arms testify to the work we have done and show how prepared we are for all that we have yet to do” and to ponder whether “arms [are] the new legs?” Yes, fellow meatform, and tongues shape the language with which we say “buy consume sleep obey” and fingernails are the new toenails. They testify to the noses we have picked and show how prepared we are for all the chalkboards we have yet to scratch.   David and Floriath Michaelangelo, whom history will remember as a party dude, faced further indignity this week, as the Tallahassee Classical School pressured its principal to resign after an art teacher showed Mikey’s lascivious sixteenth-century sculpture David to impressionable youngsters who, again, are enrolled in a classics school. But words don’t mean what we think they do, according to an edifying Q&A with the chair of the school board on Slate, where we learn that “classical” means moral values and personal responsibility in the current context, not, you know, rhetorical competence and a general knowledge of Renaissance art. Also, he clarifies that the issue was really permission slips and that “even poor people have standards,” which puts me in mind of another Florentine, Donatello, because don’t tell-o me that Florida, where gayness may not be acknowledged and marbled scrotums are grounds for termination, is the state that will decide the country’s legal and political future.   Slothing at the Mouth In a heartbreaking tale of innocence lost that doubles as a parable about getting what you want, a Michigan teen was elated when an exotic pet store allowed her the chance to feed apple slices to a sloth named Sid, her most beloved animal, only to get bitten by the surprisingly quick-witted arboreal hanger-on and require rabies shots. To make matters worse, the pet store put a bounty on the head of the girl’s mother for a kinkajou she is tardy in making payments on, putting the family in fear that their neighbors are now informing on them, to say nothing about the ludicrous pets in question. But at least Sid has taught us that slackness and chill vibes don’t mean you can’t start some shit. Two toes are more than enough to take a stand against truancy.   Nobody’s Perfect   A performance of Broadway’s Some Like It Hot has become the latest site of a phantom pooper’s reign of terror: an aisle adjacent to audience members Hillary and Chelsea Clinton saw the fourth such turd to be mysteriously planted in Shubert Theater in recent memory. Whether our serial defecator intends to criticize the former secretary of state’s politics or musical theater in general is unknown, but insiders seem ready to turn the other cheek, remarking that it is likely just an elderly person having an accident and it is rather sad. As Joe E. Brown famously observed, “Nobody’s Perfect.”   Mission Unpossible Rogue trader Nick Leeson, whose shady dealings precipitated the downfall of Barings Bank and became the basis of a 1999 Ewan McGregor movie, has rebranded as a spy now that his prison sentence is behind him. He recently joined Red Mist, a London-based private investigation agency that works on behalf of investors looking to recoup their losses without alerting federal regulators. Working with criminals on behalf of the other side of the law is nothing new for Red Mist’s founder, Seth Freedman, who did Harvey Weinstein’s dirty work back when he was an operative for another corporate espionage unit, Black Cube. At last, we have the formula for skullduggery: it’s a color paired with a state of matter. Vermillion Rhomboid. Indigo Plasma. Chartreuse Confetti. Magenta Vapor. Nothing says sinister like naming your agency like a cocktail from Sex and the City.

Fresh Hell

Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash After the fanatical persecution of Oliver Cromwell, the great famine of 1845, and Margaret Thatcher’s horrific treatment of the Sinn Féin martyrs, Ireland has finally won a reprieve: the archdioces of Philidelphia, Trenton, and Wilmington have issued allowances for observers of St. Patrick’s Day to gorge themselves on corned beef and moisten their gullets with Guinness, despite the holiday’s coinciding with the fasting period of Lent. Too long consigned to the high camp of Darby O’Gill and the Little People, U2, and Riverdance, at last the sacred rite of patriotic excess on behalf of the famously snake-adverse patron saint of the island nation has been granted a little dignity by no less an authority than the Catholic Church, which has offered revelers an act of contrition of their choice in exchange for a wee nip and a wee nap. So instead of fasting, consider eating an entire bowl of Lucky Charms and not just the marshmallows, telling three-leaf clovers they shouldn’t feel inferior, or raising a glass to the memory of Shane MacGowan, who is somehow still alive. The pipes, the pipes, are calling, but what they have to say is under sacramental seal.     The More You Toot According to startup-monitoring site Crunchbase, farts are the next big thing. Oslo-based company N2 Applied have received more than $50 million in funding for tech that promises farmers the power to make their own fertilizer out of air, electricity, and slurry; Tasmania’s FutureFeed is growing seaweed to cut down on livestock methane emissions; and CHONEX, of Alabama, is developing something called StrongSoil out of fly larvae weaned on chicken manure, which is literally science’s most ungodly affront to nature to date. Venture capitalists have been betting on the butthole since at least 2021, when Bill Gates-backed company Rumin8 first vowed to do their part to reduce greenhouse gasses through more equitable pooting. Despite man’s penchant for waste, it seems cows are largely to blame, accounting for 4 percent of the world’s most noxious bodily discharge, though cattle only stand to gain from the ongoing advances in PoopTech. In the words of Martin Luther, a happy fart never comes from a miserable ass.   The Sandwiches of Eastwick The Wall Street Journal reports that a government health survey has come out against sandwiches, labeling them a “heart bomb” that contain obscene amounts of sodium, sugar, and saturated fat, a dire warning that sadly came to late to save the four dogs who perished while competing in a French cross country race due to poisoned meatballs, an act of villainy that will echo along the crimes of Jared Fogle and the Hamburglar as crimes against sandwichcraft. Sadly, the ongoing battle against heart disease in fast food has claimed the Dunkaccino, as Dunkin’ Donuts has stopped selling the beverage, a victory for campaigners for reduced caffeine intake and a slap in the face for the advocates of creamy goodness.    Il Douche Quitting is what life’s all about, but the chairman of an Italian state-owned software company went out with a fizzle on Tuesday when he quoted fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in an internal memo that read: “Well, I declare here before you, and before all the Italian government, that I assume, (I alone!), the (political! moral! historical!) responsibility . . . for everything that has happened,” after a 1925 speech in which Mussolini owned the murder of political opponent Giacomo Matteotti. The embarrassing citation of the Nazi ally is just the latest of a long string of corporate appropriations of the twentieth’s centuries greatest monsters, after Peloton’s ill-advised “Heil Fitler,” Nike’s “Just Duce It,” and Jiffy Lube’s “If It Doesn’t Say Stalin, It’s Just Not the Purge of 1.2 Million Innocents.”    Witless For the Prosecution The gross miscarriage of justice that has proliferated in American courts following the death of the honorable Judge Wapner continued this week: attorneys for Boeing sought to avoid financial responsibility for the pain suffered by victims of the crashed Ethiopian Airline 737 MAX by arguing that their ends came so suddenly that they would not have suffered; a federal judge in San Diego handcuffed and humiliated a thirteen-year-old girl in a deeply misguided attempt at a teachable moment; and a Virginia judge cited an antiquated slavery law from 1849 in ruling that embryos of the unborn can be considered property. Such eyesores in the impartial gaze of Lady Justice are just the latest pleas to be unheard by a public desperate for moral guidance in these crooked times, but he who defends himself against remorselessness has a fool for a suppliant. 

Fresh Hell

Shilling Me Softly Celebrities: they’re just like us, finagling a 1990s career in radio-friendly hip hop into a second vocation meeting shady Chinese operatives at the Four Seasons to negotiate the release of American captives, only to be targeted by the FBI and linked to a complex scheme of extralegal communiques and financial wheelings and dealings that connect international espionage to Leonardo DiCaprio and Kim Kardashian. Bloomberg has reported that Pras Michél, formerly of the Fugees, took a clandestine meeting with Sun Lijun, China’s vice minister of public security, in order to suggest the release of a pregnant American citizen held under an exit ban as collateral for the U.S. government’s exportation of a real estate tycoon dwelling in New York under a temporary visa because he’d publicly offered to reveal the identities of top Communist Party officials. As you’d expect from your standard airport spy thriller, the story doesn’t get less crazy from there; we even learn that Michél, who now faces federal prison, became ensconced in his second career as a stand-in for Trump administration cronies after befriending the globe-trotting Malaysian grifter who financed The Wolf of Wall Street. Particularly clutch is Michél’s thought that “they can’t kill me in the Four Seasons.” Technically, they can. To everything, turn, turn, turn.   Bad Vibrations First they came for the Posh Silicone Bounding Bunny, and I said nothing, for I was not a sex toy. One of the architects behind the neo-Nazi propaganda group Terrorgram—who have explicitly encouraged and venerated shooters that target mosques, synagogues, and LGBTQ clubs—has been unmasked by anonymous antifascist researchers as Dallas Erin Humber, a thirty-three-year-old dildo salesperson based in Sacramento. HuffPost has additionally shared a selection of the drawings Humber exhibited on DeviantArt, including a Sailor Moon-looking rendition of Dr. Josef Mengele beaming in a blood-soaked lab coat outside the gates of a concentration camp. These horrifying calls to violence from a self-pleasure professional are an insult to the very institution of masturbation. Playing with yourself is supposed to be fun, but there’s a big difference between the she-bop and jerking off the egos of hate criminals.   Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey Meal kit delivery company HelloFresh has announced that it has severed ties with a Thai-based manufacturer of coconut milk after PETA uncovered abusive use of monkey labor: the exploited simians are forced to harvest coconuts while being chained and whipped. Around 80 percent of the coconut milk carried in American stores is produced in Thailand, meaning that time is ripe for the monkey unions to step in. Monkey see, monkey do, monkey seize the means of production and bring the market in dairy alternatives to its knees.   Serval the Servants Wild animals high out of their minds on woolies, woo-woo, and white rock—that is, cocaine—continue to trend in early 2023, as an illegal African serval was captured after being spotted wandering around Ohio and found to have somehow ingested a small amount of big bloke, Batman, or Beyonce. The big cat has been rehomed at the Cincinnati zoo, where it is recovering both from a broken leg sustained in its capture and the side effects of indulging in a little white fe-line fever.   Girls Just Want to Have Fungus The old adage “if the river was whiskey” accrued a new biome this month, as the New York Times reported that an ethanol-fueled fungus stemming from Jack Daniel’s warehouses in Lincoln County, Tennessee, has crept from big boozy barrels and engulfed neighboring trees—as well as birdhouses, road signs, and patio furniture—in a black pestilence. Residents facing the infestation of their wedding venues and country retreats have sued, citing the recent expansion of distillery storehouses and improper oversight of the effects of the rampaging scourge. Spokespersons for Jack Daniel’s have cited the financial rewards for the community in their defense, proving that, when it comes to the despoliation of the environment and widespread health risk in pursuit of filthy lucre, you don’t know Jack.

Fresh Hell

Cowabungled In a hell week that was particularly dystopic, even for 2023, Tennessee banned drag shows, Florida mulled requiring bloggers who want to critique the governor to register with the state, and the New York Times profiled a man who doesn’t wear shoes as though he were Harriet Tubman or something. But at least we still have the 1980s; or rather, we have the agreed-upon, phony-baloney cultural memory of Aqua Net, Nintendo, synthesizers, and DuckTales, to gloss over the realities of the Cold War, AIDS, or Reaganomics. Because convincing the masses that something used to be good is a public work, Northampton, MA, is spending a portion of the four million they received in pandemic relief funds to design four novelty manhole covers featuring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But even this utopian dream of an annihilating nostalgia elides the devastating reality we overlooked as children; namely that Raphael is a tragic case of identity misshapen by the whims of nature like something out of Ovid. What once passed for being cool but rude was only a cry for help from the most sexually-frustrated Ninja Turtle; unable to lose himself in the roles of leadership, the machine, or the life of the party like his brothers, and stuck with the shittiest weapon, Raphael cursed the half-shell that was his lot and wished only for the humanity that would allow April O’Neil to recognize his show of blithe indifference for the foiled longing it was because he could not trust her to love a monster imprisoned by existential doubt. But even a mutant would recognize a gross misuse of public funds when they saw it; in a world bereft of secrets, we have become the ooze.   Moby-Dick Move More aquatic angst befell the gentle humpback whale community this week, as the New York Times reports that the thirteenth whale in three months got killed by ten million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey (actually the culprit was likely cargo ships and offshore wind farms). All in all, twenty-three dead whales have washed up on the East Coast shore since December, resulting in mass graves designed to bury the smell of man’s own rapaciousness in warping the seascape to suit his profits, and occasioning choice commentary from the chief of the Unkechaug Nation, who said “It’s our responsibility to recognize and remind that all living things have a spirit,” and crusty old sea captain Timothy J. Ferrie, who croaked prophetically, “If the bait is there, the whales are there,” adding “Fairly warned be ye, says I. Arr!”    Days of Swine and Roses The hot potato of which world superpower will ultimately be responsible for the perversion of science that ends in apocalypse has been duly passed from America to China, then back to Russia in the public eye—but with 20/20 hindsight, we can, at last, recognize that it was Canada the whole time. A genetically-engineered species of superpig, capable of burrowing under snow and capable of spreading “a novel influenza virus,” is charging into U.S. borders and devouring all in its path. And lest you think these unstoppable superpigs are some variance of Mother Nature’s prelapsarian vengeance, no, they were partially bred to be hunted by superrich hunters looking for a challenge. That’s right, we did this too. In some ways, the swine-led extinction of the human race can’t come fast enough. That’ll do, pig.    I Am Become Debt, Destroyer of Woke If you rattled the couch cushions in search of spare change to afford a cup of coffee this morning, spare a prayer for the new owners of a trailer park home in Montauk, who netted the shabby-chic property for $3.75 million. This bold expenditure comes the same week as the Flyfish Club in New York hooked $14 million worth of private diners through NFT sales and opened its plush new affront to the public-dinning hoi polloi on the unquiet grave of the long-shuttered Sunshine Cinema, and we learned that a sect in Bengaluru, India, literally worships Elon Musk as a god, calling him the destroyer of woke and evictor of feminists. When one of the last surviving execs of old-guard Twitter is unceremoniously let go and the rich landlords of TikTok compare themselves to Mother Theresa (that scamp) and Gandhi (noted libertine), one wonders how the 1% sleep at night (on top of a pile of money, with many beautiful women).    Blitzkrieg Bop Music fans this week mourned the vanished melodies of Übermensch and Das Luftwaffenmusikkorps 3, as Spotify finally cracked down on the far-right musicians who, up till now, were available to stream on their site. Gone are the days of pulling the blankets over your head with your laptop huddled close to catch the latest Fashwave track from the likes of IronMensch. “Hate music,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “has also been a way for millions of dollars to flow into the global white-supremacist movement and related movements and music scenes. Sometimes this money has flowed directly into the hands of terrorist organizations and networks.” Rather than responding by removing tracks like “Aryan Fury” and the “SS Adolf Hitler Radio” playlist from its service, perhaps this is an opportunity for Spotify to abolish war as we know it. Let our battles be henceforth fought by the bands. Let loose the dogs of WAR! Unsheathe the Swords of Shania! Draft Bono to lead the rebellion! And somebody wake up the KISS Army, there’s merch to plunder!

Fresh Hell

Sphere is the Mind-Killer There seems to be no end to the ways that the formerly harmless old-timey knickknacks of a vanished Americana can harm us, with balloons peering down with sinister intent from the skies they once cluttered with box kites and fizzled fireworks, and trains, those quaint and peaceable choo-choos of yesteryear, derailing in the heart of the country and clouding our airborne toxic event calendar. But in the wider world, even the shapes seem dead set against humanity, as a mysterious metal sphere has washed up on a beach in Hamamatsu, Japan. Nobody knows what it is, but nobody likes it. Guesses as to what nefarious origin produced the malevolent rotundity have ranged from Godzilla egg to space junk to a rusty old buoy (it’s probably just a buoy), or possibly the moon (oh wait, maybe it’s the moon). Normally this wouldn’t be news, but everyone’s just a little on edge right now—who’s to say China didn’t decide to scrap the whole spy balloon initiative and decide to stoop to circles? What goes around comes around.   No Rest Stop for the Wicked A no-holds-barred exposé has riled the New Jersey community of Cheesequake and blown the lid off the Jon Bon Jovi Rest Stop’s foundation of lies, concluding that it is almost as if there’s something sketchy about rest stops. Crack journalism has discovered that the inspirational quotes from famous New Jerseyites that festoon the building are largely balderdash: Ed Harris never said that “acting is like a touchdown,” nor did Walt Whitman urge us to “be curious, not judgmental,” and you’ll be shocked to learn that Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates did not join hands and eerily orate in unison, “The act of actualizing one’s highest and best sense of self, with a moral excellence of character, and for the greater good,” which is not a sentence. Nor are those guys from New Jersey; this is all some real gabagool. Though the Jon Bon Jovi Rest Stop may be giving Cheesequake a bad name, they can at least console themselves with their bathroom’s wide selection of glory holes. It’s not like they have nothing to be proud of.    Turnip Slip In Britain, the island nation that is hardly a stranger to xenophobia and bland food, environmental secretary Therese Coffey has answered concerns about seasonal shortages of imported foods from Africa and Europe by suggesting that consumers support British farmers and take advantage of glorious staples of culinary wizardry like turnips. In reminding starving blokes and blokettes to “cherish the specialisms we have in this country,” Coffey essentially counseled critics to close their eyes and think of England, inadvertently casting a shadow over the green and pleasant land whose own chief exports continue to be played-out Monty Python punchlines, actors who portray devious villains, and Morrissey, who frankly nobody wants, nor him us.   Days of Future Pastor A German youth pastor who celebrated the eighteenth birthday of his longtime girlfriend by marrying her after four years of dating a child is under fire from grossed-out Redditors, who are literally late to the party; as defenders of the cleric have pointed out, the post is old, the age of consent in Germany is fourteen, and it’s not like the church has anything to be embarrassed about when it comes to the seduction of the innocent by powerful role models posing as authority figures. What’s really at stake here is the increasingly convoluted use of the word grooming, which has long been understood to refer to a litany of coercive behaviors motivated by sexual abuse of minors but, in the hands of anti-LGBTQ activists on the right, has lately been applied to any law or school that allows for basic acknowledgment of the sexual or gender identities of young people. Hopefully, the Republican Party won’t learn about the slang term broom, a portmanteau of bride and groom applied to same-sex couples, or they’ll know for sure that the queer community are all a bunch of witches.   Monsterpiece Theater The Santa Cruz Police Department has issued a warning to the public not to engage a man dressed as the Cookie Monster who has been harassing seaside visitors to the local wharf, spouting vulgarities and fringe conspiracy theories at passersby. It’s not illegal, it’s just not sanctioned by any letters of the alphabet. “No one wants to hear the Cookie Monster say he’s going to kill their family,” said a local business owner, a soundbite that will live on in cultural memory alongside the Sesame Street pinball song and the oddly melancholy “We All Live in a Capital I.” The “creepy Cookie Monster” turns out to be the latest guise of the “Evil Elmo” who terrorized San Francisco in the mid-2010s, a perpetrator making his way Muppetward toward infamy, and who happens to be named Adam Sandler. All reports have been careful to specify that it’s not that Adam Sandler, but let’s pretend it is. Somehow this all seems a fitting denouement for the Grown Ups 2 actor last seen busking outside 123 Sesame Street, singing songs about whoever happened by. He’s probably outside your apartment building right now. Do not engage.

Fresh Hell

Écarté Derrière This week Germany continued to lead the world in modeling how an empire engages in civilized discourse when Marco Goecke, the director of the Hanover State Opera’s ballet company, smeared dog feces in the face of his critic, who had written of his production of In the Dutch Mountains, “One alternates between a state of feeling insane and being killed by boredom.” The author of the feculence in question was Goecke’s dachshund, Gustav, himself a paragon of high culture who has notably dined with Princess Caroline of Monaco, so, as befits an exchange between such vaunted cultural commissars, this isn’t just any everyday hoi polloi turd we’re talking about—it’s the good shit. The episode invokes the history of artists who responded in kind to their naysayers, such as the time Joan Didion lit a bag of ordure outside Pauline Kael’s brownstone, rang the doorbell, and ran away cackling; Stephen King’s habit of prank calling Harold Bloom; and when Stanley Kubrick force-fed Gene Shalit his own pet lobster, David Pincher.   Dancing with the Starves The poor and underserved have been put on notice after hoarding such precious resources as food and sleep: the Wall Street Journal has advised struggling consumers to skip breakfast, which is a perfectly reasonable response to the inflation of egg products; and New York mayor Eric Adams stood by his directive that homeless and runaway teens be forbidden to snooze at drop-in centers that provide them with much-needed shelter—which is surely the next basic need to be targeted by the powerful elites who, in their wisdom, continue to show us how little we need to survive. And what about water? Why should the crisp runoff of our nation’s streams be relegated to the gutsacks of the indolent instead of bottled and sold at a markup, as nature intended? Sleep, sustenance, safe haven—soon you’ll be expecting modest health care, then working plumbing, then a simple haircut; it’s a slippery slope, you see, and hair is not a right, it is a privilege.   The Air Up There The U.S. military’s war on unidentified balloons joy-riding in the planet’s atmosphere—an action with the potential to unleash a War of the Worlds scenario, not to mention a slap in the face to fans of inflatables in general—may have claimed an innocent dirigible, as the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB), a hobby club that also deals in amateur ham radio, has reported one of their beloved pico balloons missing in action over Alaska. The truant balloon is feared exploded, which is much too logical an explanation for the balloon mania that has seized the easily distracted imagination of the country. So it’s not aliens after all? Alas, perhaps it is time to face that, in the intergalactic spaceways between dimensions, the planet Earth may be little more than a turnoff, less appetizing than a Howard Johnson without an adjacent Wendy’s and minus the hotel chain’s famous Game Gear promotional tie-in.   Gin and Jouissance The legitimate art form of blockchain-based digital pap-smear-looking blipblops received a boost this week after the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was gifted twenty-two NFTS from a mysterious benefactor operating under the alias Cozomo de’ Medici, widely suspected of being Snoop Dogg, the noted rapper/patron of the arts who once fantasized about having his face on a Mount Rushmore of weed smokers beside Bob Marley and Willie Nelson and openly dreams of opening an ice cream parlor called Scoop Dogg. For those critical of the rising profile of NFTs in the art world, may this serve as a reminder that critics once said the same thing about hip hop’s status in the world of popular music. Not that the Doggfather has ever been shy about honoring his forebears, memorably describing himself as the “Miles Davis of gangbangin.’” Now Snoop may be on his way to becoming the Hans Ulrich Obrist of getting blissed.   Life in Mars It’s funny until it happens to you: two contractors at a Pennsylvania Mars Wrigley factory were endangered, and the company fined, after they fell into a vat of chocolate and necessitated rescue, presumably with a rope made of saltwater taffy. This delicious instance of shoddy workplace safety not only brings to light the conditions endured by part-time employees under a conglomerate but causes one to pause and wonder how many Snickers bars and Dove chocolates have we devoured unaware that they contained the remains of hapless laborers awash in nougat. Cannibalism, of course, is always a possibility when it comes to sweets, except in the case of York Peppermint Patties, which are, and have always been, people.

Fresh Hell

Two in the Bush In a week that saw America seized by spy-balloon fever, a toxic chemical cloud escape from a train to bedevil the residents of suburban Ohio, and the pre-Psychic Network song catalog of Dionne Warwick blast from car stereos in remembrance of Burt Bacharach, gender reveal parties made a martyr of Flamingo, the confused and starveling pigeon dyed pink that we reported on last week after they perished of chemical inhalation. But hey, at least we know it’s a girl. Birds deserve better, but for every good-natured avian we defile in our lust for mirth, two dozen more are smuggled into our country from Guyana. Enter the kingpin of the songbird black market, Insaf Ali, who was captured by authorities after hiding a charm of finches in hair curlers strapped about his ankles in an attempt to skew New York songbird competitions in the direction of airborne turpitude. Viewing animals as merely a means to an end of mortal ambitions is obviously rank venality, but at least the feathered creatures of the planet have the sky to themselves and can boast of dinosaurs in the family tree, to say nothing of that surfin’ bird, of whom you may have heard tell.   Just Ask This Scientician The latest trend among the foolhardy 1 percent let’s-hunt-the-poor-for-sport jet set is luxury vacations where the ultra-rich can pretend to be scientists and make “contributions” to “paleontology” in the “field.” Yes, for £28,485, you can attend a dig in Wyoming and get in the way of actual scientists pursuing their trained vocation as they flatter your vanity because you are paying a chunk of their grant before you retire to your condo to drink champagne and marvel at how exciting your life is. Nor is cosplaying as Alan Grant the extent of this new market for lackadaisical groundwork: competing vacation packages will send you to observe reef regeneration in the Maldives, where you can pretend to care about something besides your putting handicap; or take you to lower Saxony to observe wolf conservation, where with any luck you will be eaten and digested knowing that you technically contributed to the same biosphere your idle life of usury and rapine has despoiled.   Misinform-Fitting As a fresh programming bloc of Super Bowl commercials promises to reanimate the corpses of our most beloved celebrities of yesteryear in order to sell us Snickers, and an AI-generated loop of Seinfeld has been pulled after going off-script, the New York Times reports that DeepFake technology has followed its natural drift toward authoritarianism. Now, phony flesh-puppet avatars are reading the news according to the whims of China (whose foray into digital propaganda has become known as “spamoflauge”) and Burkina Faso. Perhaps it is natural, here in the simulation known as real life, that we find ourselves inadvertently shilling for tech corps in exchange for the fantasy of social-media presentability, our heads filled with jingles and pop songs from an agreed-upon past that never was, lured into mindless support for far-right governments by studio-designed AI models named Carlo. Fake can be just as good and, when it comes to saying what’s real, what’s your basis for comparison anyway?   Canterbury Fails Such are the regressive and worker-targeting policies of modernity, that for societal progress, we must needs turn to Medieval Times—not the historical Middle Ages known for the Black Death and its cesspit toiletry, but rather the dinner theater franchise where you can be served pricey mead by waitresses in wench regalia while noble vassals joust for your honor and entertainment. After successfully unionizing in New Jersey, the performers at Medieval Times are facing legal challenges by the viceroys and viscounts that run the corporation and have been subject to censorship on TikTok, where videos in which they plead for public support for their ongoing attempts to earn fare wage for their vassalage are being removed for alleged copyright infringement. Even in the annals of Camelot, there are models for an equitable society, Lady of the Lake or no. Nothing is to be gained by hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society. You can’t expect to wield supreme power just ‘cause some watery tart threw a sword at you.   I Think We’re A Clone Now In one last spillage from the doomy clockworks of TikTok, a user rebuffed for wearing a medal of the Third Reich has come out with a perfectly reasonable explanation: he is the literal reincarnation of Hitler and is haunted by memories of his loathsome suicide in the Führerbunker, from which he retains a scar. That’s not how reincarnation works, and Felix Cipher is clearly playing by The–Boys–From–Brazil rules, but why am I arguing with an Internet person with a tiny-mustache-motif septum ring? “You can call me crazy,” he says, “You can say, ‘Get on your meds again, you nutter.’” Very well, you nutter, you are indeed two beer halls short of a putsch. Your Kampf is secondhand and second-rate. And your Hitler hairdo is making me feel ill. 

Fresh Hell

The Importance of Being Concise After another cruel turn of the old Gregorian, we once again find ourselves stranded in the month of February, which is the official month of grapefruits, bird feeding, hot breakfast, snack foods, children’s dental health, embroidery, and canned food. More importantly, of course, it is Black History Month, which, in these benighted states, we tend to commemorate with perfunctory gestures, “inclusive” brand partnerships, and the willful misuse of the words of Martin Luther King Jr. This year, it seemed the American people were ready to get in on the fun early. On Tuesday, Jennifer Tejada, the CEO of PagerDuty (which apparently specializes in SaaS incident response, whatever the hell that is), apologized for quoting the leader of the civil rights movement at the end of an email announcing the company was terminating about 7 percent of its workforce. “I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that ‘the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy,’” Tejada wrote. But upon further reflection, she realized this was not only “inappropriate” but also “insensitive”; it would have been wise to be “more concise” when firing scads of people. The following day, the College Board, bowing to pressure from the medium-rare ribeye steak in the Florida governor’s mansion, announced they would be purging purportedly “offensive” material from the curriculum of their new AP African American Studies course, including the names of Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience, and Black feminism. Meanwhile, in Miami, the police celebrated Black history by unveiling a special cruiser plastered with images of Africa. The arc of history may be long, but it will eventually plow into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters.   Birds of a Gender Flock Together In keeping with our longstanding quest to keep our readers apprised of the latest developments—every twist, turn, and severed limb—in our nation’s enduring obsession with gender reveal parties, we bring word that a pink-plumaged pigeon was found wandering around Madison Square Park in Manhattan on Monday, unable to fend for itself and suffering from long-term malnutrition. It was almost certainly dyed pink to inform partygoers at a renovated nineteenth-century farmhouse along the Hudson River that its loathsome proprietors will soon be in possession of a child—a girl, or so they’d like to presume. According to the Wild Bird Fund, the domestic King Pigeon “has it bad enough as a domestic bird unable to find food in the wild, fly well or escape predators, but being a bright, unusual color makes him even more of a target.”   Where the Vile Things Are Elsewhere in our fraying relationship with the animal kingdom: the Guardian reports that the former director of a zoo in southern Mexico ordered four pygmy goats in the zoo’s possession to be slaughtered, cooked, and served at the annual Christmas party. “This put the health of the people who ate them at risk,” according to one official, “because these animals were not fit for human consumption.” This is not the first time this has happened: an investigation has revealed quite a few of the zoo’s animals had previously been sold or eaten—including a zebra that was traded for some tools. Stateside, two emperor tamarin monkeys missing since Monday from the Dallas Zoo were found alive in the closet of a nearby home—the latest in a string of bizarre incidents at the zoo, including the “unusual” death of a vulture last week. Perhaps all this amounts to a sign that zoos are maybe a bad idea? Has anyone considered this?   High School 4 Ever Aside from the systemic infantilization of the American consumer, autonepiophilia, and the fascinating career of Frédéric Bourdin, it seems we’re getting fewer and fewer stories of adults masquerading as children. Once upon a time, hardly a week would go by without the local news reporting on a suspiciously baby-faced thirty-three-year-old man enrolling himself in a middle school, or a forty-five-year-old mother pretending to be her daughter. The dry spell appears to have broken: the New York Times reports that a twenty-nine-year-old woman successfully managed to enroll herself in a New Jersey high school, where she attended class for four days, visited the guidance counselor, and collected phone numbers from a handful of her momentary peers.    Justice: Not for You! Speaking of imposters, the Eleventh Circuit has ruled that the Constitution provides no remedy in the event you are jailed on a decades-old warrant from another state for a person who is not you but just so happens to have your name. The United States may have the greatest justice system in the world, but that doesn’t mean officials—police, especially—should have to bother with checking for obvious differences between you and your wanted homonym. Indeed, it’s been a banner week for justice: the Fifth Circuit also just decided that the Second Amendment protects your right to own a firearm even if you’re under a restraining order for domestic violence.   Hotter than Ever And, finally, we conclude with further confirmation—should you find yourself in doubt—that we are, as a society of consumer-citizens, doomed. BP announced this week that it plans to “dial back” its meek push into clean energy amid a booming demand for fossil fuels. “Societally, people are now more focused on the question of energy security,” one investor reports of BP’s commitment to our collective immiseration. “You can’t run down the old system too aggressively.” And you know what, he’s right: “run down the old system too aggressively,” and we might see a perilous rise in human flourishing but an untenable dip in Q1 revenue. (And, wait, did you hear that the wispy-haired French novelist Michel Houellebecq is starring in a porno coming out this March? Here’s hoping we don’t even make it to the end of Q1, lest that horror show see the light of day.)

Fresh Hell

Robofop The tech world is already a burrow of shady borrowings, competing patents, and dodgy dot-com schemes, but these iniquities have so far been within the domain of the human. Enter CNET’s AI reporter, which has been found to have plagiarized the work of journalists at competitors Red Ventures and Bankrate—and even its fellow drones at CNET. Factual errors and rephrasing notwithstanding, riveting missives on avoiding overdraft fees and buying gift cards are just the beginning of AI’s scheme to replace the world’s knavish, struggling writer contingent; soon the machine will be wearing blazers to loft parties to secretly tape the parlor wits for its Substack, teaching adjunct classes to the landed gentry for the price of the commute, and manufacturing middlebrow screenplays about their mid-life crises on the side. The age of the flesh-and-blood mediocrity is behind us, the machines have entered the freelance, party-going, Mencken-quoting fray. All hail Robofop, you have the right to remain semi-employed and fancy.    White Men Can’t Hump West Virginia, the state John Denver memorably exalted as “almost heaven” and where a judge has ruled that trans kids can be banned from playing sports, six Republicans have proposed what they’re calling the Sexually Oriented Business Regulation Act, which would outlaw any form of sanctioned sex work, while also targeting gay bars, nude model studios, and whatever “sexual encounter centers” means. Is that where you get your passport to Bonerville processed? As usual, the language of the proposed act of unconstitutional censorship outstrips the gnarliest vocabulary of underground erotica in its descriptive prurience. The bill bans the appearance of genitalia in a “discernably turgid state,” defines nudity as “the appearance of a human bare buttock, anus, anal cleft or cleavage, pubic area, male genitals, female genitals or vulva,” seems foggy about the exact placement of the areola, and classifies sex acts as “normal or perverted, actual or simulated, including intercourse, oral copulation or sodomy,” while maintaining that all of these are bad. It seems fairly certain that without pornography, the lawmakers in question wouldn’t know how sex even works, but if it’s dicks they want to police, they might start with the tool in the mirror.   Lament Horizon Scientists in the Netherlands have defied the skein of unknowing that keeps us safe from the ravages of the universe by simulating a black hole that emits Hawking radiation, or the particles produced by the rupture of spacetimes. Technobabble aside, what this means is that we are about to accidentally open the door to a parallel reality and confront our dark matter selves, who will likely replace us en masse while imprisoning the originals in the Phantom Zone. Also in hole news, Florida firefighters recently recused a local woman from a storm drain for the third time in three months. It’s not a cry for help, it’s a talent for scooching, and if we need a volunteer to bravely step into the black hole and leave behind the worlds of Euclidean geometry and self-preservation, we may have just found our internet.   Jingle Cells AP News reports that a precocious tot of Cumberland, Rhode Island, unwilling to consign the yuletide trespass of Kris Kringle to the realm of sugar plums, sent partially eaten cookies and nibbled carrot sticks to the Rhode Island Department of Health to obtain DNA proof of Santa Claus. The results were inconclusive pending further substantiated encounters with the jolly elf, but it’s a slippery slope—or lubricated chimney stack—if you happen to be naughty and DNA-testing instead turns up the cellular leavings of Krampus, the sixteenth-century Alpine demon who punishes children with birch rods and carts them off to Hell. Budding forensicists beware: there are horrors in store for the unwary that no Hallmark card can conceive or Advent calendar enumerate.   Critique of Pure Buttinsky A moral philosopher at Christ’s College, Cambridge has published a paper in defense of “revelatory autonomy” and counsels busybodies and fussbudgets to adhere to “a moral duty . . . not to interfere” in the self-authorship of others as they consider having children, taking jobs, or applying to grad school. This is the most articulate and scholarly invective against meddling in your friends’ beeswax on the books, a lively rejoinder to Nosey Parkers, Paul Prys, and Bertolt Buttinskys, a perfectly nice, peer-reviewed way to discourage your besties from advising you on your life choices based on something they read in Cosmo or Men’s Health. Small decisions are the bricks on the road to self-mastery. Sometimes self-determination begins with getting the cheapest thing on the wine list despite your cohort’s vigorous defense of Moscato; go ahead, swipe right on the dude posing with a vintage poster of Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama even if your friend prefers Bergman; bad taste is its own earthly reward, but backset drivers are on a highway to hell.