#stephen james model

[labuenosairesfrancaise]

Burton Constable Hall

Hi guys!!

I'm sharing Burton Constable Hall. This is the 19th building for my English Collection.

I decorated most of the house ground floor, for reference.

History of the house: Burton Constable Hall is a large Elizabethan country house in England, with 18th- and 19th-century interiors.

Despite its apparent uniformity of style, Burton Constable has a long and complicated building history. The lower part of the north tower, built from limestone, is the oldest part of the house to survive and dates to the 12th century, when a medieval pele tower served to protect the village of Burton Constable from the time of the reign of King Stephen. In the late 15th century a new brick manor house was built at Burton Constable, eventually replacing Halsham as the family's principal seat. In the 1560s Sir John Constable embarked on the building of the Elizabethan prodigy house that stands today. This incorporated remains of the earlier manor house along with the addition of the new range containing a Great Hall, which rose the full height of the building and was top-lit by a lantern, along with a Parlour, Chambers and South Wing.

By the 18th century, the Great Hall must have seemed old fashioned, and a surviving design of c. 1730 suggests that Cuthbert Constable intended to completely remodel the interior. However, it appears that remodelling was not undertaken until the 1760s when his son William Constable commissioned a number of architects for designs. These included John Carr, Timothy Lightoler and Capability Brown. The decorative plasterwork was executed by James Henderson of York. At this time, Constable also acquired the plaster figures of Demosthenes and Hercules with Cerberus, and plaster busts of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and the Greek poet Sappho, from the sculptor John Cheere. Above the fireplace is a carving of oak boughs and garlands of laurel leaves, crowned by the Garter Star, surrounding the armorial shield of the Constable family in scagliola by Domenico Bartoli.

The dining room was substantially remodelled by William Constable in the 1760s, who commissioned designs from Robert Adam, Thomas Atkinson, and Timothy Lightoler (who won the commission). The ceiling draws on contemporary interest in the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, with plasterwork by Giuseppe Cortese. The overmantel plaque of Bacchus and Ariadne riding on a panther was modelled on famous antique cameos illustrated in Pierres Antiques Gravées, published 1724 by Philip, Baron von Stosch and Bernard Picart. This room was again redecorated in the 19th century.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burton_Constable_Hall

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This house fits a 50x50  lot.

I only decorated some of the important rooms. All the rest of the house is up to your taste to decor.

Hope you like it.

You will need the usual CC I use:

all Felixandre cc

all The Jim

SYB

Anachrosims

Regal Sims

King Falcon railing

The Golden Sanctuary

Cliffou

Dndr recolors

Harrie cc

Tuds

Lili's palace cc

Please enjoy, comment if you like the house and share pictures of your game!

Follow me on IG: https://www.instagram.com/sims4palaces/

@sims4palaces

Download: https://www.patreon.com/posts/112319879

Public: 21/10/2024

[thislovintime]

Photos 1 & 2 by Gloria Malerba, photo 3 courtesy of Flip.

[Photos 1 & 2] “A fan sneaked into the lot, threw Peter a kiss as he was about to leave in his GTO — and I took the pic.” - Gloria Malerba, Teen Datebook, October 1967 (?) “Hendrix injured his right ankle — the one which was originally broken and caused him to be invalided out of the US Army — while a passenger in Monkee Peter Tork’s GTO car at Malibu Beach, Los Angeles, at the weekend. Tork was not in the car, which was spun round three times when another car crashed into it at a filling station. Co-passenger with Hendrix was Byrds’ Dave Crosby, but the Hendrix injury was not bad enough to prevent him continuing his tour.” - Jimi hurt in Monkee Peter’s car,” Disc & Music Echo, July 15, 1967 “Well, after Monterey, I got back down to L.A. and met Jimi at Peter’s house. We decided to go out to my house at the beach. Peter lent me his car, a burgundy GTO hardtop that was given to him by Pontiac. I loved it. My Rolls Royce was busted down. And so we all piled into his GTO and drove out to the beach. I was driving along Pacific Coast Highway when, all of a sudden, this Pontiac, just the smoke, was everywhere. I started to pull over and some idiot creamed me in the back. Instead of stomping on the brakes, I floored it and got the car under control and then pulled over. And then, the cops came and all they did was get Jimi’s bottle of whiskey away from him. We went down the street and bought another one. But the cops gave us all a ride to my house.” - Stephen Stills, Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and Music of Laurel Canyon (2009) [Photo 3] “Peter’s MGB-GT! Peter’s sleek, wire-wheeled spectacular is one of England’s most exciting cars! And Peter’s model is in raving red! Even when this MG is standing still, it looks like it’s moving! Peter has decked out the inside in black, which looks fantastic with the red on the outside! Peter’s also managed to put in a stereo tape deck, which means that his car is equipped to hear the grooviest music in the world, no matter where he is.” - Flip, May 1968 “Did I tell you, while I was in London I bought a red MGB-GT sports car, with a black interior. I had no real intention of buying one. I was actually looking at them because Marilyn Schlossberg — our publicity director — wanted to buy one, and I thought they looked so groovy I just had to buy one myself. We (the other three guys and myself) then presented Marilyn with her MGB-GT as a birthday gift. I am not really much of a car nut, but this car is a real groove, and man, it really travels!” - Peter Tork, Fabulous 208, 1967 “[‘MGB-GT’ is] my Homage to my old car, one of the great loves of my life. It used to stop running within coasting distance of service stations and like that.” - Peter Tork, Stranger Things Have Happened 1994 CD liner notes “Peter was a really bad driver. He was reckless, he took a lot of chances. I clearly remember this car [the red MGB-GT) and following [him] over Mulholland Drive in my [Volvo] P1800. I was trying to keep up with him but I was scared, I thought this is reckless teenage James Dean stuff. He always drove fast. He drove like he was immortal.” - James Lee Stanley, Stranger Things Have Happened reissue vinyl sleeve notes 

[mybeingthere]

Vanessa Bell, 1879 - 1961, British painter and designer.

The eldest of four children and sister of the future Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell was born to a wealthy and intellectual family: her mother, Julia Jackson, was the niece of a pioneering photographer, Julia Cameron, and one of the favourite models of the pre-Raphaelites; her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, a famous writer and alpinist. As a young woman, in 1901, she studied at the London Royal Academy of Art. After their parents died, the children continued to live together in central London. Within the Bloomsbury Group, Vanessa organised artistic evenings she called the “Friday Club.”

In 1907 she married the art critic Clive Bell, with whom she would have two sons. Her early paintings – Iceland Poppies (1908-1909), for example – show the joint influence of the American painters John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. She gradually became interested in Impressionism, particularly French post-Impressionism. A great admirer of Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro and Vincent Van Gogh, she painted portraits with synthetic outlines, simplified shapes and bold colours, like the portrait of her sister, Virginia Woolf (1912).

She made her first venture into decorative arts in 1910 with the Scottish painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter, Angelica, in 1918. The pair would work together throughout their lives. She painted boxes with geometric shapes that followed the aesthetic principle her husband had developed: the predominance of the “significant form” and of its outline and colour over the narrative subject. She took part in two exhibitions organised by Roger Fry in 1912: Quelques indépendants anglais (Barbazanges Gallery, Paris) and his second exhibition of post-impressionist art at the Grafton Galleries in London.

The following year, encouraged by Fry, she opened the Omega Workshops with Grant in London’s Fitzroy Square, where Woolf also lived. Inspired by the Wiener Werkstätte (the Viennese workshops) and Parisian fashion and interior design studios like Paul Poiret’s “Maison Martine,” the Omega Workshops employed artists on a daily basis to create fabric patterns, furniture, and interior design projects, thus promoting a dialogue between painting and decorative arts, in a search for equality between major and minor arts. In May 1914, she assisted Grant in Paris in the creation of costumes for Jacques Copeau’s staging of Twelfth Night, and visited the studios of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Upon returning to London, she created a special section devoted to fashion at Omega.

From the article by Cécile Godefroy

[themakeupbrush]

List of Met Galas since 2001

I've gotten a few asks for a list of Met Galas. Technically, the gala has existed since 1948, and been themed since 1973, but I started at 2001 to keep it short (there was no gala in 2000 apparently). If you're interested in every theme that's ever existed, there's a chart on Wikipedia.

Most lists online start somewhere around 2011-2013, since it wasn't covered by the press the same way before then.

2001 Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Christina and Lindsay Owen-Jones, Annette and Oscar de la Renta, Carolina Herrera Caroline Kennedy and Edwin A. Schlossberg

Sponsor: L'Oreal

2003 Goddess: The Classical Mode

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Tom Ford, Nicole Kidman

Sponsor: Gucci

2004 Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Renée Zellweger, Lawrence Stroll, Silas Chou, Edgar Bronfman Jr. Jacob Rothschild, Jayne Wrightsman

Sponsor: Asprey

2005 The House of Chanel

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld, Nicole Kidman Caroline, Princess of Hanover

Sponsor: Chanel

2006 AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Christopher Bailey, Sienna Miller Rose Marie Bravo, The Duke of Devonshire

Sponsor: Burberry

2007 Poiret: King of Fashion

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Cate Blanchett, Nicolas Ghesquière François-Henri Pinault

Sponsor: Balenciaga

2008 Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Giorgio Armani

Sponsor: Giorgio Armani

2009 The Model As Muse: Embodying Fashion

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Kate Moss, Justin Timberlake Marc Jacobs

Sponsor: Marc Jacobs

Ticket Price: $7,500

2010 American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Oprah Winfrey, Patrick Robinson

Sponsor: Gap

2011 Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Colin Firth, Stella McCartney François-Henri Pinault and Salma Hayek

Sponsor: Alexander McQueen

2012 Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Carey Mulligan, Miuccia Prada, Jeff Bezos

Sponsor: Amazon

2013 Punk: Chaos to Couture

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Rooney Mara, Lauren Santo Domingo, Riccardo Tisci Beyoncé

Sponsor: Moda Operandi

Ticket Price: $15,000

2014 Charles James: Beyond Fashion

Co-chairs: Aerin Lauder, Anna Wintour, Bradley Cooper, Oscar de la Renta, Sarah Jessica Parker, Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch

Sponsor: AERIN

Ticket Price: $25,000

Theme Announcement: September 4th, 2013

2015 China: Through the Looking Glass

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Jennifer Lawrence, Gong Li, Marissa Mayer, Wendi Murdoch, Silas Chou

Sponsor: Yahoo

Ticket Price: $25,000

Theme Announcement: September 11th, 2014

2016 Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Taylor Swift, Idris Elba, Jonathan Ive Nicolas Ghesquière, Karl Lagerfeld, Miuccia Prada

Sponsor: Apple

Ticket Price: $30,000

Theme Announcement: October 13th, 2015

2017 Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady, Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams, Rei Kawakubo

Sponsor: Apple, Condé Nast, Farfetch, H&M, Maison Valentino

Ticket Price: $30,000

Theme Announcement: October 21st, 2016

2018 Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Rihanna, Amal Clooney, Donatella Versace Christine and Stephen A. Schwarzman

Sponsors: Christine and Stephen A. Schwarzman, Versace

Ticket Price: $30,000

Theme Announcement: November 8th, 2017 (currently the latest they've announced the theme)

2019 Camp: Notes on Fashion

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, Serena Williams, Alessandro Michele

Sponsor: Gucci

Ticket Price: $35,000

Theme Announcement: October 9th, 2018

Planned for May 4, 2020 (canceled) About Time: Fashion and Duration

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Meryl Streep, Emma Stone, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Nicolas Ghesquière

Sponsor: Louis Vuitton

September 2021 In America: A Lexicon of Fashion

Co-chairs: Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Amanda Gorman, Naomi Osaka, Tom Ford, Adam Mosseri, Anna Wintour

Sponsor: Instagram

Ticket Price: $35,000

2022 In America: An Anthology of Fashion

Co-chairs: Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Regina King, Tom Ford, Adam Mosseri, Anna Wintour

Sponsor: Instagram

Ticket Price: $35,000

2023 Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty

Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Dua Lipa, Michaela Coel, Penélope Cruz, Roger Federer

Sponsors: Chanel, Fendi, Karl Lagerfeld (brand)

Ticket Price: $50,000 (most expensive to date)

Theme Announcement: September 30th, 2022

[knightofleo]

Favourite Songs of 2023

abracadabra, Actress, Aïsha Devi, Ali Sethi, Ana Tijoux, ANOHNI and the Johnsons, Aphex Twin, Arthur Russel, Art School Girlfriend, Avalon Emerson, B. Miles, Baby Queen, Baltra, Bayonne, Belén Aguilera, Bendik Giske, Björk, Black to Comm, Blawan, Bleary Eyed, boygenius, Brimheim, Brutalismus 3000, Carly Rae Jepsen, Caroline Polachek, Carmen Villain, Caterina Barbieri, Chelsea Wolfe, Christine and the Queens, Complete Mountain Almanac, Confidence Man,P crushed, Daniela Pes, Decisive Pink, Deradoorian, Dj Karaba, Eartheater, Earth Trax, Feist, Fever Ray, Floating Points, Forest Swords, Gossip, GRETA, Gus Dapperton, Kate NV, Haley Blais, Hania Rani, Hannah Jadagu, Hannes Kretzer, Hayden Pedigo, Helena Deland, Hilary Woods, How To Disappear Completely, How To Dress Well, Ichiko Aoba, James Holden, Jenny Owen Youngs, JFDR, John Roberts, Jonah Yano, Julie Byrne, Justin Walter, Katie Gately, Kelela, Khotin, KISS OF LIFE, Kristin Hersh, Kumo 99, Laura Groves, Laurel Halo, Lawrence English, Loscil, L'Rain, Lucinda Chua, M83, Mandy, Indiana, Mark Barrott, Mary Lattimore, Matthew Herbert, Maya Jane Coles, Metteson, Militarie Gun, Mitski, Model/Actriz, Montañera, Naomi Sharon, Nathan Fake, Nation of Language, Nick León, Nicolas Jaar, Nico Paulo, Nina Kinert, Ólafur Arnalds, Palehound, Pangaea, Parannoul, Park Hye Jin, PJ Harvey, Poppy, Rosalía, Runnner, Ruth Radelet, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Salamanda, Sampha, Searows, Shalom, Shygirl, Sigur Rós, Siv Jakobsen, Skeleten, Slowdive, Sofia Kourtesis, spill tab, Stephen Steinbrink, Sufjan Stevens, Susanne Sundfør, TENGGER, 'T Geruis, Tim Hecker, Tinashe, Tsunaina, Two Shell, Tzusing, Underworld, U.S. Girls, Vanishing Twin, Willow Avalon, Wishy, Yerin Baek, yuné pinku

[diceriadelluntore]

Storia Di Musica #333 - Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Get Happy!!, 1980

Quando, in una sera del 1976, gli venne l’idea di presentarsi con un nome d’arte omaggio alla sua nonna, pensava forse che sebbene volenteroso, il suo vero, Declan Patrick Aloysious McManus, sarebbe stato preso per uno scherzo. Quella sera si presenta come D.P. Costello, che cambierà nel definito Elvis Costello, come omaggio al Re del Rock’n’Roll. Occhialoni alla Buddy Holly, look che esibiva orgogliosamente il suo essere fuori moda, a metà degli anni ’70 Costello è un giovane arrabbiato che ha le carte in regole per dire la sua, in modo interessante, oltre il nichilismo furbetto del punk. Quando Nick Lowe, suo amico e collaboratore, gli trova un ingaggio per la Stiff Records, lui non essendo in totale fiducia decise di non abbandonare il proprio posto da operaio nella ditta di cosmetici Elizabeth Arden (a cui dedicherà una stupenda canzone, I’m Not Angry). In effetti non erano tempi da cantautori, ma bastano i primi guizzi di My Aim Is True (1977) per sgombrare il campo: l’offensiva antifascista di Less Than Zero unite a doti melodiche di alto livello (la mitica Alison, suo pezzo culto) presentano al pubblico un nuovo modo di raccontare musicalmente i tempi. La seconda prova è ancora meglio: This Year’s Model (1978) lo vede insieme ai The Attractions, il gruppo di Stevie Nieve (alle tastiere) e Bruce Thomas (basso) e Pete Thomas (batteria, i due non erano parenti), e in un disco multiforme, dai testi lunghissimi, sciorina la sua bravura in canzoni stupende come I Dont’ Want To Go To Chelsea, Pump It Up (altro inno di quegli anni), Little Triggers e Night Rally. È richiestissimo e parte per Tour in Europa e Stati Uniti. Nelle pause delle date, scrive sull’onda dell’entusiasmo altre canzoni, che compongono il terzo disco in tre anni, Armed Forces (1979): segnato dallo stress e dai primi, evidenti eccessi di vita, è un disco ansiogeno e un po’ frettoloso, che alle belle e ormai garantite belle canzoni aggiunge riempitivi. Sarebbe tutto normale, ma le cose stanno prendendo una brutta piega: le dipendenze da alcool e droga lo rendono nervoso e aggressivo e durante il tour americano, a Columbus, in Ohio, si incontrò con Stephen Stills nel bar dell’Holyday Inn. Qui in preda a deliri alcolici sbiascica pesantissimi insulti razzisti a James Brown e Ray Charles, litiga fino alle mani con la cantante Bonnie Bramlett (che era diventata famosa nel duo con il marito Delaney & Bonnie) e vede in un attimo disintegrarsi la sua reputazione negli Stati Uniti. Ci furono ulteriori polemiche poiché la vicenda fu quasi semi oscurata dai giornali britannici. Le successive scuse in una goffa conferenza stampa non servirono a nulla. Torna in patria e nel 1979 produce il primo, storico, album degli Specials, fa l’attore in Americathon (semisconosciuto film di Neil Israel, dove Costello si esibisce cantando Crawling In the USA). Durante la produzione del disco degli Specials, scrive e suona da solo tutti gli strumenti per del nuovo materiale nei piccoli studi di registrazione Archipelago (scritto così) di Pimlico, nei sobborghi londinesi. Costello ha la necessità di dare un taglio al suono precedente e per il nuovo si ispira alla musica afroamericana degli anni ’60, allo ska, e ha tantissime cose da dire.

Get Happy!! (che esce nel 1980) prende il titolo dalla canzone omonima composta da Harold Arlen, con i testi scritti da Ted Koehler, negli anni ’30 del ‘900, che riprendeva un testo di tipo evangelico. Fu portata al successo da Judy Garland e negli anni è divenuto uno standard per centinaia di artisti. Registrato tra Londra e i Paesi Bassi, a Hilversum, prodotto da Nick Lowe e Roger Béchirian, è un disco-mondo dove Costello mette 20 brani, molti dei quali brevissimi, meno di 2 minuti. È una prova di amore per quella musica, e anche di liberazione in un certo senso (nonostante anche durante le sessioni perdureranno i problemi con alcool e droghe). Ci sono due cover: I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down di Sam & Dave e I Stand Accused dei Merseybeats come omaggio al mai abbandonato amore per il suono di Liverpool. Per il resto, l’enormità (per l’epoca dove esistevano solo i vinili) dei 18 pezzi rimanenti passano dagli omaggi fin troppo sfacciati (Temptation è in pratica la Time Is Tight di Booker T & The MG’s con un testo diverso),a canzoni stupende come Love Me Tender (che apriva il disco), Possession, King Horse fino ai capolavori come New Amsterdam elegia sulla selvaggia New York, High Fidelity, doloroso e drammatico affresco sulle delusioni dell’amore e Riot Act, canzone scritta sui fatti di Columbus. L’omaggio alla musica r’n’b è evidente nella copertina: dalla grafica e dai colori cari alla Stax di Memphis, vedeva tre foto identiche di Costello sfalsate in colori acidi, e aveva una particolarità: l’effetto vissuto del cerchio bianco proprio al centro, a imitare il consumo dell’uso eccessivo. Tra l’altro le prime edizioni avevano la scaletta scritta al contrario, con Riot Act primo brano e Love Me Tender ultima, e valgono di più nel mercato dei collezionisti.

Il disco all’epoca fu accolto con grande favore dalla critica e dal pubblico: numero 2 in Gran Bretagna e un sorprendente numero 11 negli Stati Uniti. Negli anni il disco ha guadagnato ancora più favori, sottolineando la scelta niente affatto facile di Costello di distaccarsi sempre con intelligenza dai generi imperanti per la ricerca di una via personale alla sua necessità di musica. Scriverà un altro disco capolavoro, Imperial Bedroom (1982) che è una grande prova di pop d’autore, che aprirà le porte ad una nuova trasformazione verso un colto, raffinato, ma un po’ meno eccitante, modello di voce-pianoforte che diventerà il modulo classico della maturità costelliana. Ne ha fatta di strada in decenni quel tipo con gli occhialoni che prese in prestito dalla nonna il suo nome d’arte per la celebrità.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: James B. Meigs

Published: Spring 2024

Michael Shermer got his first clue that things were changing at Scientific American in late 2018. The author had been writing his “Skeptic” column for the magazine since 2001. His monthly essays, aimed at an audience of both scientists and laymen, championed the scientific method, defended the need for evidence-based debate, and explored how cognitive and ideological biases can derail the search for truth. Shermer’s role models included two twentieth-century thinkers who, like him, relished explaining science to the public: Carl Sagan, the ebullient astronomer and TV commentator; and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a popular monthly column in Natural History magazine for 25 years. Shermer hoped someday to match Gould’s record of producing 300 consecutive columns. That goal would elude him.

In continuous publication since 1845, Scientific American is the country’s leading mainstream science magazine. Authors published in its pages have included Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk, and J. Robert Oppenheimer—some 200 Nobel Prize winners in all. SciAm, as many readers call it, had long encouraged its authors to challenge established viewpoints. In the mid-twentieth century, for example, the magazine published a series of articles building the case for the then-radical concept of plate tectonics. In the twenty-first century, however, American scientific media, including Scientific American, began to slip into lockstep with progressive beliefs. Suddenly, certain orthodoxies—especially concerning race, gender, or climate—couldn’t be questioned.

“I started to see the writing on the wall toward the end of my run there,” Shermer told me. “I saw I was being slowly nudged away from certain topics.” One month, he submitted a column about the “fallacy of excluded exceptions,” a common logical error in which people perceive a pattern of causal links between factors but ignore counterexamples that don’t fit the pattern. In the story, Shermer debunked the myth of the “horror-film curse,” which asserts that bad luck tends to haunt actors who appear in scary movies. (The actors in most horror films survive unscathed, he noted, while bad luck sometimes strikes the casts of non-scary movies as well.) Shermer also wanted to include a serious example: the common belief that sexually abused children grow up to become abusers in turn. He cited evidence that “most sexually abused children do not grow up to abuse their own children” and that “most abusive parents were not abused as children.” And he observed how damaging this stereotype could be to abuse survivors; statistical clarity is all the more vital in such delicate cases, he argued. But Shermer’s editor at the magazine wasn’t having it. To the editor, Shermer’s effort to correct a common misconception might be read as downplaying the seriousness of abuse. Even raising the topic might be too traumatic for victims.

The following month, Shermer submitted a column discussing ways that discrimination against racial minorities, gays, and other groups has diminished (while acknowledging the need for continued progress). Here, Shermer ran into the same wall that Better Angels of Our Nature author Steven Pinker and other scientific optimists have faced. For progressives, admitting that any problem—racism, pollution, poverty—has improved means surrendering the rhetorical high ground. “They are committed to the idea that there is no cumulative progress,” Shermer says, and they angrily resist efforts to track the true prevalence, or the “base rate,” of a problem. Saying that “everything is wonderful and everyone should stop whining doesn’t really work,” his editor objected.

Shermer dug his grave deeper by quoting Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald and The Coddling of the American Mind authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who argue that the rise of identity-group politics undermines the goal of equal rights for all. Shermer wrote that intersectional theory, which lumps individuals into aggregate identity groups based on race, sex, and other immutable characteristics, “is a perverse inversion” of Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society. For Shermer’s editors, apparently, this was the last straw. The column was killed and Shermer’s contract terminated. Apparently, SciAm no longer had the ideological bandwidth to publish such a heterodox thinker.

American journalism has never been very good at covering science. In fact, the mainstream press is generally a cheap date when it comes to stories about alternative medicine, UFO sightings, pop psychology, or various forms of junk science. For many years, that was one factor that made Scientific American’s rigorous reporting so vital. The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and a few other mainstream publications also produced top-notch science coverage. Peer-reviewed academic journals aimed at specialists met a higher standard still. But over the past decade or so, the quality of science journalism—even at the top publications—has declined in a new and alarming way. Today’s journalistic failings don’t owe simply to lazy reporting or a weakness for sensationalism but to a sweeping and increasingly pervasive worldview.

It is hard to put a single name on this sprawling ideology. It has its roots both in radical 1960s critiques of capitalism and in the late-twentieth-century postmodern movement that sought to “problematize” notions of objective truth. Critical race theory, which sees structural racism as the grand organizing principle of our society, is one branch. Queer studies, which seeks to “deconstruct” traditional norms of family, sex, and gender, is another. Critics of this worldview sometimes call it “identity politics”; supporters prefer the term “intersectionality.” In managerial settings, the doctrine lives under the label of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI: a set of policies that sound anodyne—but in practice, are anything but.

This dogma sees Western values, and the United States in particular, as uniquely pernicious forces in world history. And, as exemplified by the anticapitalist tirades of climate activist Greta Thunberg, the movement features a deep eco-pessimism buoyed only by the distant hope of a collectivist green utopia.

The DEI worldview took over our institutions slowly, then all at once. Many on the left, especially journalists, saw Donald Trump’s election in 2016 as an existential threat that necessitated dropping the guardrails of balance and objectivity. Then, in early 2020, Covid lockdowns put American society under unbearable pressure. Finally, in May 2020, George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer provided the spark. Protesters exploded onto the streets. Every institution, from coffeehouses to Fortune 500 companies, felt compelled to demonstrate its commitment to the new “antiracist” ethos. In an already polarized environment, most media outlets lunged further left. Centrists—including New York Times opinion editor James Bennet and science writer Donald G. McNeil, Jr.—were forced out, while radical progressive voices were elevated.

This was the national climate when Laura Helmuth took the helm of Scientific American in April 2020. Helmuth boasted a sterling résumé: a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California–Berkeley and a string of impressive editorial jobs at outlets including Science, National Geographic, and the Washington Post. Taking over a large print and online media operation during the early weeks of the Covid pandemic couldn’t have been easy. On the other hand, those difficult times represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for an ambitious science editor. Rarely in the magazine’s history had so many Americans urgently needed timely, sensible science reporting: Where did Covid come from? How is it transmitted? Was shutting down schools and businesses scientifically justified? What do we know about vaccines?

Scientific American did examine Covid from various angles, including an informative July 2020 cover story diagramming how the SARS-CoV-2 virus “sneaks inside human cells.” But the publication didn’t break much new ground in covering the pandemic. When it came to assessing growing evidence that Covid might have escaped from a laboratory, for example, SciAm got scooped by New York and Vanity Fair, publications known more for their coverage of politics and entertainment than of science.

At the same time, SciAm dramatically ramped up its social-justice coverage. The magazine would soon publish a flurry of articles with titles such as “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity.” The death of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed biologist was the hook for “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson,” an opinion piece arguing that Wilson’s work was “based on racist ideas,” without quoting a single line from his large published canon. At least those pieces had some connection to scientific topics, though. In 2021, SciAm published an opinion essay, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” The article’s five authors took issue with the effort by some social-justice advocates to create a cute new label while expanding the DEI acronym to include “Justice.” The Jedi knights of the Star Wars movies are “inappropriate mascots for social justice,” the authors argued, because they are “prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic light sabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).” What all this had to do with science was anyone’s guess.

Several prominent scientists took note of SciAm’s shift. “Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine,” Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago emeritus professor of ecology and evolution, wrote on his popular blog, “Why Evolution Is True.” He asked why the magazine had “changed its mission from publishing decent science pieces to flawed bits of ideology.”

“The old Scientific American that I subscribed to in college was all about the science,” University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller told me. “It was factual reporting on new ideas and findings from physics to psychology, with a clear writing style, excellent illustrations, and no obvious political agenda.” Miller says that he noticed a gradual change about 15 years ago, and then a “woke political bias that got more flagrant and irrational” over recent years. The leading U.S. science journals, Nature and Science, and the U.K.-based New Scientist made a similar pivot, he says. By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he says, “the Scientific American editors seem to have decided that fighting conservatives was more important than reporting on science.”

Scientific American’s increasing engagement in politics drew national attention in late 2020, when the magazine, for the first time in its 175-year history, endorsed a presidential candidate. “The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people,” the editors wrote. “That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden.” In an e-mail exchange, Scientific American editor-in-chief Helmuth said that the decision to endorse Biden was made unanimously by the magazine’s staff. “Overall, the response was very positive,” she said. Helmuth also pushed back on the idea that getting involved in political battles represented a new direction for SciAm. “We have a long and proud history of covering the social and political angles of science,” she said, noting that the magazine “has advocated for teaching evolution and not creationism since we covered the Scopes Monkey Trial.”

Scientific American wasn’t alone in endorsing a presidential candidate in 2020. Nature also endorsed Biden in that election cycle. The New England Journal of Medicine indirectly did the same, writing that “our current leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent” and should not “keep their jobs.” Vinay Prasad, the prominent oncologist and public-health expert, recently lampooned the endorsement trend on his Substack, asking whether science journals will tell him who to vote for again in 2024. “Here is an idea! Call it crazy,” he wrote: “Why don’t scientists focus on science, and let politics decide the election?” When scientists insert themselves into politics, he added, “the only result is we are forfeiting our credibility.”

But what does it mean to “focus on science”? Many of us learned the standard model of the scientific method in high school. We understand that science attempts—not always perfectly—to shield the search for truth from political interference, religious dogmas, or personal emotions and biases. But that model of science has been under attack for half a century. The French theorist Michel Foucault argued that scientific objectivity is an illusion produced and shaped by society’s “systems of power.” Today’s woke activists challenge the legitimacy of science on various grounds: the predominance of white males in its history, the racist attitudes held by some of its pioneers, its inferiority to indigenous “ways of knowing,” and so on. Ironically, as Christopher Rufo points out in his book America’s Cultural Revolution, this postmodern ideology—which began as a critique of oppressive power structures—today empowers the most illiberal, repressive voices within academic and other institutions.

Shermer believes that the new style of science journalism “is being defined by this postmodern worldview, the idea that all facts are relative or culturally determined.” Of course, if scientific facts are just products of a particular cultural milieu, he says, “then everything is a narrative that has to reflect some political side.” Without an agreed-upon framework to separate valid from invalid claims—without science, in other words—people fall back on their hunches and in-group biases, the “my-side bias.”

Traditionally, science reporting was mostly descriptive—writers strove to explain new discoveries in a particular field. The new style of science journalism takes the form of advocacy—writers seek to nudge readers toward a politically approved opinion.

“Lately journalists have been behaving more like lawyers,” Shermer says, “marshaling evidence in favor of their own view and ignoring anything that doesn’t help their argument.” This isn’t just the case in science journalism, of course. Even before the Trump era, the mainstream press boosted stories that support left-leaning viewpoints and carefully avoided topics that might offer ammunition to the Right. Most readers understand, of course, that stories about politics are likely to be shaped by a media outlet’s ideological slant. But science is theoretically supposed to be insulated from political influence. Sadly, the new woke style of science journalism reframes factual scientific debates as ideological battles, with one side presumed to be morally superior. Not surprisingly, the crisis in science journalism is most obvious in the fields where public opinion is most polarized.

The Covid pandemic was a crisis not just for public health but for the public’s trust in our leading institutions. From Anthony Fauci on down, key public-health officials issued unsupported policy prescriptions, fudged facts, and suppressed awkward questions about the origin of the virus. A skeptical, vigorous science press could have done a lot to keep these officials honest—and the public informed. Instead, even elite science publications mostly ran cover for the establishment consensus. For example, when Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and two other public-health experts proposed an alternative to lockdowns in their Great Barrington Declaration, media outlets joined in Fauci’s effort to discredit and silence them.

Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, is a longtime critic of gain-of-function research, which can make naturally occurring viruses deadlier. From the early weeks of the pandemic, he suspected that the virus had leaked from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Evidence increasingly suggests that he was correct. I asked Ebright how he thought that the media had handled the lab-leak debate. He responded:

Science writers at most major news outlets and science news outlets have spent the last four years obfuscating and misrepresenting facts about the origin of the pandemic. They have done this to protect the scientists, science administrators, and the field of science—gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens—that likely caused the pandemic. They have done this in part because those scientists and science administrators are their sources, . . . in part because they believe that public trust in science would be damaged by reporting the facts, and in part because the origin of the pandemic acquired a partisan political valance after early public statements by Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo, and Donald Trump.

During the first two years of the pandemic, most mainstream media outlets barely mentioned the lab-leak debate. And when they did, they generally savaged both the idea and anyone who took it seriously. In March 2021, long after credible evidence emerged hinting at a laboratory origin for the virus, Scientific American published an article, “Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth.” The piece compared the theory to the KGB’s disinformation campaign about the origin of HIV/AIDS and blamed lab-leak advocates for creating a poisonous climate around the issue: “The proliferation of xenophobic rhetoric has been linked to a striking increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. It has also led to a vilification of the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] and some of its Western collaborators, as well as partisan attempts to defund certain types of research (such as ‘gain of function’ research).” Today we know that the poisonous atmosphere around the lab-leak question was deliberately created by Anthony Fauci and a handful of scientists involved in dangerous research at the Wuhan lab. And the case for banning gain-of-function research has never been stronger.

One of the few science journalists who did take the lab-leak question seriously was Donald McNeil, Jr., the veteran New York Times reporter forced out of the paper in an absurd DEI panic. After leaving the Times—and like several other writers pursuing the lab-leak question—McNeil published his reporting on his own Medium blog. It is telling that, at a time when leading science publications were averse to exploring the greatest scientific mystery of our time, some of the most honest reporting on the topic was published in independent, reader-funded outlets. It’s also instructive to note that the journalist who replaced McNeil on the Covid beat at the Times, Apoorva Mandavilli, showed open hostility to investigating Covid’s origins. In 2021, she famously tweeted: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” It would be hard to compose a better epitaph to the credibility of mainstream science journalism.

As Shermer observed, many science journalists see their role not as neutral reporters but as advocates for noble causes. This is especially true in reporting about the climate. Many publications now have reporters on a permanent “climate beat,” and several nonprofit organizations offer grants to help fund climate coverage. Climate science is an important field, worthy of thoughtful, balanced coverage. Unfortunately, too many climate reporters seem especially prone to common fallacies, including base-rate neglect, and to hyping tenuous data.

The mainstream science press never misses an opportunity to ratchet up climate angst. No hurricane passes without articles warning of “climate disasters.” And every major wildfire seemingly generates a “climate apocalypse” headline. For example, when a cluster of Quebec wildfires smothered the eastern U.S. in smoke last summer, the New York Times called it “a season of climate extremes.” It’s likely that a warming planet will result in more wildfires and stronger hurricanes. But eager to convince the public that climate-linked disasters are rapidly trending upward, journalists tend to neglect the base rate. In the case of Quebec wildfires, for example, 2023 was a fluky outlier. During the previous eight years, Quebec wildfires burned fewer acres than average; then, there was no upward trend—and no articles discussing the paucity of fires. By the same token, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center, a lower-than-average number of major hurricanes struck the U.S. between 2011 and 2020. But there were no headlines suggesting, say, “Calm Hurricane Seasons Cast Doubt on Climate Predictions.”

Most climate journalists wouldn’t dream of drawing attention to data that challenge the climate consensus. They see their role as alerting the public to an urgent problem that will be solved only through political change.

Similar logic applies to social issues. The social-justice paradigm rests on the notion that racism, sexism, transphobia, and other biases are so deeply embedded in our society that they can be eradicated only through constant focus on the problem. Any people or institutions that don’t participate in this process need to be singled out for criticism. In such an atmosphere, it takes a particularly brave journalist to note exceptions to the reigning orthodoxy.

This dynamic is especially intense in the debates over transgender medicine. The last decade has seen a huge surge in children claiming dissatisfaction with their gender. According to one survey, the number of children aged six to 17 diagnosed with gender dysphoria surged from roughly 15,000 to 42,000 in the years between 2017 and 2021 alone. The number of kids prescribed hormones to block puberty more than doubled. Puberty blockers and other treatments for gender dysphoria have enormous potential lifelong consequences, including sterility, sexual dysfunction, and interference with brain development. Families facing treatment decisions for youth gender dysphoria desperately need clear, objective guidance. They’re not getting it.

Instead, medical organizations and media outlets typically describe experimental hormone treatments and surgeries as routine, and even “lifesaving,” when, in fact, their benefits remain contested, while their risks are enormous. In a series of articles, the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir has documented how trans advocates enforce this appearance of consensus among U.S. scientists, medical experts, and many journalists. Through social-media campaigns and other tools, these activists have forced conferences to drop leading scientists, gotten journals to withdraw scientific papers after publication, and interfered with the distribution of Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book Irreversible Damage, which challenges the wisdom of “gender-affirming care” for adolescent girls. While skeptics are cowed into silence, Sapir concludes, those who advocate fast-tracking children for radical gender therapy “will go down in history as responsible for one of the worst medical scandals in U.S. history.”

In such an overheated environment, it would be helpful to have a journalistic outlet advocating a sober, evidence-based approach. In an earlier era, Scientific American might have been that voice. Unfortunately, SciAm today downplays messy debates about gender therapies, while offering sunny platitudes about the “safety and efficacy” of hormone treatments for prepubescent patients. For example, in a 2023 article, “What Are Puberty Blockers, and How Do They Work?,” the magazine repeats the unsubstantiated claim that such treatments are crucial to preventing suicide among gender-dysphoric children. “These medications are well studied and have been used safely since the late 1980s to pause puberty in adolescents with gender dysphoria,” SciAm states.

The independent journalist Jesse Singal, a longtime critic of slipshod science reporting, demolishes these misleading claims in a Substack post. In fact, the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria is a new and barely researched phenomenon, he notes: “[W]e have close to zero studies that have tracked gender dysphoric kids who went on blockers over significant lengths of time to see how they have fared.” Singal finds it especially alarming to see a leading science magazine obscure the uncertainty surrounding these treatments. “I believe that this will go down as a major journalistic blunder that will be looked back upon with embarrassment and regret,” he writes.

Fortunately, glimmers of light are shining through on the gender-care controversy. The New York Times has lately begun publishing more balanced articles on the matter, much to the anger of activists. And various European countries have started reassessing and limiting youth hormone treatments. England’s National Health Service recently commissioned the respected pediatrician Hilary Cass to conduct a sweeping review of the evidence supporting youth gender medicine. Her nearly 400-page report is a bombshell, finding that evidence supporting hormone interventions for children is “weak,” while the long-term risks of such treatments have been inadequately studied. “For most young people,” the report concludes, “a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” In April, the NHS announced that it will no longer routinely prescribe puberty blocking drugs to children.

Scientific American has yet to offer an even-handed review of the new scientific skepticism toward aggressive gender medicine. Instead, in February, the magazine published an opinion column, “Pseudoscience Has Long Been Used to Oppress Transgender People.” Shockingly, it argues for even less medical caution in dispensing radical treatments. The authors approvingly note that “many trans activists today call for diminishing the role of medical authority altogether in gatekeeping access to trans health care,” arguing that patients should have “access to hormones and surgery on demand.” And, in an implicit warning to anyone who might question these claims and goals, the article compares today’s skeptics of aggressive gender medicine to Nazi eugenicists and book burners. Shortly after the Cass report’s release, SciAm published an interview with two activists who argue that scientists questioning trans orthodoxy are conducting “epistemological violence.”

There’s nothing wrong with vigorous debate over scientific questions. In fact, in both science and journalism, adversarial argumentation is a vital tool in testing claims and getting to the truth. “A bad idea can hover in the ether of a culture if there is no norm for speaking out,” Shermer says. Where some trans activists cross the line is in trying to derail debate by shaming and excluding anyone who challenges the activists’ manufactured consensus.

Such intimidation has helped enforce other scientific taboos. Anthony Fauci called the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration “fringe epidemiologists” and successfully lobbied to censor their arguments on social media. Climate scientists who diverge from the mainstream consensus struggle to get their research funded or published. The claim that implicit racial bias unconsciously influences our minds has been debunked time and again—but leading science magazines keep asserting it.

Scientists and journalists aren’t known for being shrinking violets. What makes them tolerate this enforced conformity? The intimidation described above is one factor. Academia and journalism are both notoriously insecure fields; a single accusation of racism or anti-trans bias can be a career ender. In many organizations, this gives the youngest, most radical members of the community disproportionate power to set ideological agendas.

“Scientists, science publishers, and science journalists simply haven’t learned how to say no to emotionally unhinged activists,” evolutionary psychologist Miller says. “They’re prone to emotional blackmail, and they tend to be very naive about the political goals of activists who claim that scientific finding X or Y will ‘impose harm’ on some group.”

But scientists may also have what they perceive to be positive motives to self-censor. A fascinating recent paper concludes: “Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists.” The authors include a who’s who of heterodox thinkers, including Miller, Manhattan Institute fellow Glenn Loury, Pamela Paresky, John McWhorter, Steven Pinker, and Wilfred Reilly. “Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups,” they write.

Whether motivated by good intentions, conformity, or fear of ostracization, scientific censorship undermines both the scientific process and public trust. The authors of the “prosocial motives” paper point to “at least one obvious cost of scientific censorship: the suppression of accurate information.” When scientists claim to represent a consensus about ideas that remain in dispute—or avoid certain topics entirely—those decisions filter down through the journalistic food chain. Findings that support the social-justice worldview get amplified in the media, while disapproved topics are excoriated as disinformation. Not only do scientists lose the opportunity to form a clearer picture of the world; the public does, too. At the same time, the public notices when claims made by health officials and other experts prove to be based more on politics than on science. A new Pew Research poll finds that the percentage of Americans who say that they have a “great deal” of trust in scientists has fallen from 39 percent in 2020 to 23 percent today.

“Whenever research can help inform policy decisions, it’s important for scientists and science publications to share what we know and how we know it,” Scientific American editor Helmuth says. “This is especially true as misinformation and disinformation are spreading so widely.” That would be an excellent mission statement for a serious science publication. We live in an era when scientific claims underpin huge swaths of public policy, from Covid to climate to health care for vulnerable youths. It has never been more vital to subject those claims to rigorous debate.

Unfortunately, progressive activists today begin with their preferred policy outcomes or ideological conclusions and then try to force scientists and journalists to fall in line. Their worldview insists that, rather than challenging the progressive orthodoxy, science must serve as its handmaiden. This pre-Enlightenment style of thinking used to hold sway only in radical political subcultures and arcane corners of academia. Today it is reflected even in our leading institutions and science publications. Without a return to the core principles of science—and the broader tradition of fact-based discourse and debate—our society risks drifting onto the rocks of irrationality.

[ Via: https://archive.today/j03w3 ]

==

Scientific American now embodies the worst of far-left anti-science nonsense.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Aaron Rupar and Stephen Robinson at Public Notice:

By Stephen Robinson

Donald Trump has downplayed the $130,000 hush payment made on his behalf to adult film performer Stormy Daniels as a “simple private transaction.” In reality, it may have changed the course of US history. Trump, of course, is now on trial in New York for charges related to the October 2016 payoff, including falsifying business records with an intent to unlawfully influence an election. Arguably, the New York indictment is the least headline-grabbing of the four he faces, in part because the hush money scheme pales in comparison with stealing classified documents, inciting an insurrection, or trying to overturn an election. Politically, however, it can’t be overstated just how large a role the Daniels payment played in helping Trump squeak his way into the White House. Instead of getting lost in the legal weeds, it’s important to take a step back and examine the context surrounding the payoff and why it was an existential matter for Trump in the weeks leading up to his victory in November 2016.

Why Trump desperately needed to hush Daniels

About a month out from election day 2016, the Trump campaign was on the ropes. The infamous Access Hollywood tape that showed Trump boasting about groping women in September 2005 was the ultimate October surprise. In the wake of its release on October 7, a number of prominent Republicans withdrew their support, and swing state voters were abandoning him in droves. Days before the tape’s release, Trump had a narrow one-point lead in Wisconsin among likely voters. The first polling conducted after the poll’s release showed Hillary Clinton ahead by six points, and by October 10, her lead had grown to 19 points.

CNN’s Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake wrote on October 11 that “the 2016 electoral map is rapidly slipping away from Donald Trump.” Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were all “lean Democrat,” and Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina were tossups. Cillizza and Blake estimated that “if the election were held today, Hillary Clinton would win 341 electoral votes to Donald Trump's 197.” Unfortunately for us all, the election wasn’t held on October 11, and less than a month later, Trump would sweep all six of those states. This improbable comeback is usually linked to FBI Director James Comey’s October 28 letter that publicly announced the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into Clinton’s private email server use. The emails were only tangentially related to the FBI’s investigation into Anthony Weiner’s illicit text messages to a 15-year-old North Carolina girl, but this added an extra salacious element to the story, which soon appeared on the front page of the New York Times and dominated the news cycle.

Behind the scenes of the Daniels payoff

The Daniels affair wasn’t the only extramarital tryst Trump was trying to keep under wraps in the months before the 2016 election. In June 2016, a month before the Republican National Convention, Karen McDougal, an actress and former Playboy model, tried to sell her story about an alleged affair she had with Trump from 2006 to April 2007. (Trump married Melania in 2005 and their son Barron was born in March 2006.) The National Enquirer secured the rights to McDougal’s account for $150,000 but had no intention of publishing the story. National Enquirer publisher David Pecker confirmed last week during his testimony in Trump’s criminal trial that this “catch and kill” tactic was specifically done to benefit Trump’s campaign, bolstering federal prosecutors’ case that the McDougal deal was meant "to suppress [her] story so as to prevent it from influencing the election."

But with Trump’s campaign on the ropes in the wake of the Access Hollywood bombshell, Daniels became an urgent concern. She told National Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard on October 8 that she was willing to go on the record about her alleged affair. This was the day after the Access Hollywood tape’s release, so the timing of a new scandal about Trump having an affair with an adult film actress might have been fatal to his political hopes. Trump was spinning the Access Hollywood recording as merely “locker room talk” — not something he’d actually do in real life — but Daniels, like McDougal, claimed that Trump cheated on his wife who’d given birth to their son just a few months earlier. This revelation that Trump was cheating not only on his wife but on his mistress with an adult film actress would have solidified Trump’s sleazeball image with the undecided voters he needed to swing his way.

[...] Republicans and right-wing media have spent the past three years whining that suppression of the New York Post’s “blockbuster Hunter Biden laptop story” cost Trump the 2020 election. The utterly shameless Rep. Elise Stefanik claimed at a House select subcommittee hearing last year that “according to polling, of the people who were made aware of the Hunter Biden laptop story, 53 percent would have changed their vote, including 61 percent of Democrats. This is the definition of election meddling … it’s collusion, it’s corruption, and it’s unconstitutional.” It’s also a blatant lie, as PolitiFact gave Stefanik’s statement a “false” rating.

In the immediate aftermath of the release of the 2005 Access Hollywood tape in which Donald Trump infamously was caught bragging about sexual assault, Stormy Daniels sought to tell her story to the National Enquirer… only for them to kill it from being publicized.

Had that fact been publicized before the voters in 2016, it would have been a fatal blow to the Trump campaign. Alas, that didn’t happen, and Trump won in 2016.

[mariacallous]

In Jesse Eisenberg’s new film, a pair of American Jewish cousins on a heritage tour of Poland sneak back onto a train they already had tickets for, after getting off at the wrong stop.

“It’s the principle of the thing,” says Benji, played by Kieran Culkin. “We shouldn’t have to pay for tickets in Poland. This is our country.”

“No it’s not,” says David, played by Eisenberg. “It was our country. They kicked us out because they thought we were cheap.”

It is an exchange that encapsulates the mix of pathos, humor and fast-paced banter that Eisenberg brings to “A Real Pain,” which he wrote and directed in addition to stars in.

Eisenberg, 41, loosely based the script and characters on a composite of real people and experiences, including a 2008 visit with his now-wife to what was once his great-aunt’s house in Poland until 1939 — back when the Eisenbergs were still “Ajzenbergs.”

“I was at this house, I was standing in front of it, and I was expecting to feel something specific and revelatory, and nothing came,” Eisenberg said in a Zoom interview. “That feeling of emptiness kind of stayed with me for a long time. I was trying to diagnose the emptiness, and I was wondering: Is it because I’m an unfeeling person? Or is it because it’s really just impossible to connect to the past in an easy way, in a kind of external way?”

All these years later, “A Real Pain,” which hits theaters Friday, seeks to ask those questions, Eisenberg says: “How do we reconnect to the past? And how do our modern struggles connect to the struggles of our families?”

Eisenberg, best known for his cerebral, often neurotic turns in “The Social Network,” the FX limited series “Fleishman is in Trouble” and a number of Woody Allen films, has returned to the Holocaust as a subject in a number of projects. In 2013 he wrote and starred in “The Revisionist, an off-Broadway play about a Polish survivor of the Holocaust.” In 2020 he took part in a staged reading at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage of “The Investigation,” Peter Weiss’ documentary play about the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963-1965. That same year he played Marcel Marceau in “Resistance,” about the famed mime’s role in the French resistance.

As in “Treasure,” a movie released this year in which Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry star as a daughter and father who travel to Auschwitz, “A Real Pain” is about the main characters’ evolving relationship and about the legacy of the Holocaust on American Jews now two generations removed from the genocide.

In Benji and David Kaplan, viewers are introduced to two very different expressions of trauma: Benji feels everything and has no filter and an ability to get people to open up, while David is overly cautious, analytical and takes medication for obsessive-compulsive disorder.

They set out for Poland while reeling from the death of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, joining a tour group of adults much older than they are. The group is led by facts-obsessed guide James (Will Sharpe), and includes Marcia (Jennifer Grey), whose marriage recently fell apart, as well as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan).

Egyiawan’s character is based on a real person, Eloge Butera, who converted to Judaism because, Eisenberg said, “the only people he felt connected to were older Jewish people who could relate to the experience.” Eisenberg and Butera have stayed in touch since meeting at a wedding years ago, and Eisenberg said he had always thought Butera’s story made him an interesting model for a trip participant.

“As I was writing, of course, it occurred to me that it does this other thing, which is allow the audience to broaden out their perspective,” Eisenberg said from Indiana, wearing the same red Indiana University baseball cap his character wears throughout the film. (Eisenberg dropped out of Hebrew school in his native New York City but has recently begun attending a synagogue in Bloomington, Indiana, where he lives with his family.)

He added, “It allows me to bring in other stories of trauma in a way that’s not kind of academic, but actually in the physical presence of this man who is a survivor.”

As the movie’s characters reckon with their personal and collective trauma, the main characters’ differences come into stark relief. Benji wisecracks his way across the brittle terrain, while David deals with a sense of guilt for ever having felt like his own problems were legitimate.

On a walk with the group, the cousins briefly imagine what their life would be like if the Holocaust didn’t happen. They would probably be religious Jews, Benji thinks, and have beards, and not touch women, according to traditional interpretations of Jewish law. Bottom line: They would likely still live in Poland.

That’s a scenario with some appeal for Eisenberg, who developed such an affection for the country while filming there that he decided to seek citizenship, an option often available to descendants of Polish Holocaust survivors. He will become a citizen this month and formally mark the occasion at the Polish embassy in Washington, D.C., which will also screen the film.

“I think of myself as a New Yorker through and through, because I go to Broadway shows and I was born here, but the reality of my lineage is that we were Polish for a lot longer,” Eisenberg said. “There’s something so kind of sad about the way things can end so abruptly and be forgotten so abruptly, because to remember was so painful, because of the war and because so many people were killed. And so the way I think about it is I’m trying to reconnect.”

Filming in Poland, Eisenberg said, allowed him to experience the generosity of the people living there who worked to tell his family’s story and preserve the memory of the Holocaust, defying his expectations of contemporary Polish cultural attitudes toward the Holocaust.

In 2018, the Polish government, led by the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice Party, passed a law criminalizing speech blaming Poland for crimes committed by the Nazis, part of a broad effort to demand pride in Polish history. (The party was ousted from power last year.) The law created a chilling effect for some stewards of Holocaust history, curbing a public reckoning about the degree to which Poles collaborated with the Nazis.

The crackdown on “unpatriotic” accounts of Polish history also caused a shakeup at the Polin Museum, Poland’s national Jewish museum, where “A Real Pain” had its international premiere in May. A museum leader was pushed out when he sought to stage an exhibit about a wave of antisemitic persecution in 1968. When the museum recently marked its first decade, Eisenberg spoke virtually at the gala.

Eisenberg said the political tensions over Holocaust memory did not encroach on him as he filmed on location, including at the interior of the Majdanek concentration camp, which remains remarkably preserved.

“I’m aware of it in a kind of intellectual way, but my experience there was just the exact opposite,” he said. “I was working with a crew of 150 people who were all eager and working their asses off to try to make my personal family story come to life.”

In gaining permission to film at Majdanek, Eisenberg said he benefited from telling a story that is rooted firmly in the present, even though the camp uniquely lends itself to filmmaking set in the past because it remains in roughly the same condition as it was in when the Nazis operated it.

“A few things were in our favor: Most movies want to shoot in Majdanek, and they want to turn it into 1942 Auschwitz, and they want to have 100 extras in Nazi uniforms running around with guns. We were trying to do the opposite,” Eisenberg said. “What we were trying to do was depict Majdanek as it is now as a tourist site, in an attempt to do the exact thing Majdanek is trying to do itself, which is to try to bring awareness to this, to the horrors that occurred on these grounds.”

He said he had ended up becoming close with a number of young scholars on the staff at the camp memorial. “Our relationship started off with suspicion,” Eisenberg recalled, “and wound up as a beautiful meeting of the minds.”

Eisenberg said he believed that collaborating with others around his age — removed by generations from direct connection with the Holocaust — enabled “A Real Pain” to channel a fresh approach to grappling with the past.

“I’m in a younger generation,” he said. “I have enough distance to go to Poland … and not feel the kind of visceral memories of pain, but going there with an open heart and mind and meeting people who I love and who are contemporaries and friends and who are working to make the world a better place.”

[bracketsoffear]

Stranger Leitner Reading List

The full list of submissions for the Stranger Leitner bracket. Bold titles are ones which were accepted to appear in the bracket. Synopses and propaganda can be found below the cut. Be warned, however, that these may contain spoilers!

Ames, Alison: It Looks Like Us

Benton, Jim: The Frandidate Berger, Terry: The Haunted Dollhouse Blish, James & Robert Lowndes: The Duplicated Man Bradbury, Ray: Marionettes, Inc. Brooks, Mike: Alpharius: Head of the Hydra

Calvino, Italo: If On A Winter's Night A Traveller Campbell, John W.: Who Goes There? Christie, Agatha: Dead Man's Folly Crowley, Nate: The Twice-Dead King

Dahl, Roald: The Witches Damico, Gina: Wax Dick, Philip K.: A Scanner Darkly Dick, Philip K.: Upon the Dull Earth Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The Double

French, Tana: The Likeness

Gaiman, Neil: Coraline

Hendrix, Grady: How to Sell a Haunted House

Ito, Junji: The Enigma of Amigara Fault Ito, Junji: Uzumaki

Jensen, Ruby Jean: MaMa

King, Stephen: Battleground King, Stephen: The Outsider Krulik, Nancy E.: Katie Kazoo, Switcheroo (series)

Lovecraft, H.P.: The Outsider

Martin, Ann M. & Laura Godwin: The Meanest Doll in the World Miles, Lawrence: This Town Will Never Let Us Go

Nettel, Guadalupe: El huésped (The host) Nix, Garth: The Ragwitch

Peck, Richard: Secrets of the Shopping Mall Poe, Edgar Allen: William Wilson Pratchett, Terry: Maskerade

Rayner, Jacqueline: EarthWorld Robinson, Justin: Everyman Ross, Louise: Collective Imagination: Goncharov (1973) (2022) as a Model for Communal Filmmaking

Schwartz, Alvin: Harold Scroggs, Kirk: Tales of a Sixth-Grade Muppet Sleator, William: Among the Dolls Sleator, William: The Duplicate Spark, Muriel: The Only Problem Spatola, Mike: The Monstrous Makeup Manual Springer, Nancy: Possessing Jessie Starling, Caitlin: Last to Leave the Room Stevenson, Robert Louis: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde Stine, R.L.: The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight Stine, R.L.: Night of the Living Dummy

Topping, Keith & Martin Day: The Hollow Men

Vida, Vendela: The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

Wells, H.G.: The Invisible Man

Ames, Alison: It Looks Like Us

Shy high school junior Riley Kowalski is spending her winter break on a research trip to Antarctica, sponsored by one of the world’s biggest tech companies. She joins five student volunteers, a company-approved chaperone, and an impartial scientist to prove that environmental plastic pollution has reached all the way to Antarctica, but what they find is something much worse… something that looks human.

Riley has anxiety--ostracized by the kids at school because of panic attacks--so when she starts to feel like something’s wrong with their expedition leader, Greta, she writes it off. But when Greta snaps and tries to kill Riley, she can’t chalk it up to an overactive imagination anymore. Worse, after watching Greta disintegrate, only to find another student with the same affliction, she realizes they haven’t been infected, they’ve been infiltrated--by something that can change its shape. And if the group isn’t careful, that something could quickly replace any of them.

Benton, Jim: The Frandidate

Franny K. Stein, Mad Scientist, has always had her eye on world domination, and she has to start somewhere...like her class elections! If people vote for her, they’ll be giving her all the control she wants.

But Franny’s platform doesn’t have the same appeal as her competitors who are offering new playground equipment, so she creates The Frandidate. Made of DNA samples from a dog, a chameleon and a parrot, along with a scrap of carpet (so she’ll know where people stand), Franny’s special suit helps her say and do exactly what people want! But when The Frandidate starts making promises she knows she can’t keep, Franny realizes she might have gone too far…

Berger, Terry: The Haunted Dollhouse

On her thirteenth birthday, Sarah wishes that she would wake up inside of her dollhouse -- and her wish comes true. The book follows her throughout her day, with pictures that show the increasingly disturbing nature of the world in which she now exists.

Blish, James and Robert Lowndes: The Duplicated Man

The central premise of this novel concerns a cloning device that requires six different people, one for each duplicate to be created, to be hooked into the machine. Turns out while the memories are copied the personalities and appearances are affected by the subjective views of the various individuals. E.g., one copy is actually a bit shorter and more cowardly than the original because that's how its creator perceived the original while another due to her hero worship was a physically and mentally perfected version of the original.

Bradbury, Ray: Marionettes, Inc.

A man acquires a robot to stand in for him at home while he goes away. (A very sophisticated robot that eventually develops sentience, but still one that, if you place your head to the chest, you can hear a clock ticking instead of a heart beating.) However, the robot decides that he likes the original man's life and doesn't want to be stored away in a box in the basement. The solution? He betrays his owner by locking HIM in the box forever while he (the robot) lives the life of the owner, his family completely unaware of the switch. Meanwhile, another man considers doing the same, only to discover that his wife has already replaced herself.

Brooks, Mike: Alpharius: Head of the Hydra

As this post--https://www.tumblr.com/bracketsoffear/718600953914327040/wasnt-here-in-time-for-the-stranger-poll-but--says, "Alpharius is the Primarch of the [...] Alpha Legion, and aside from the ones that have been fully expunged from all Imperial records, he's the primarch we know the least about. We're fairly confident he's actually two twin brothers pretending to be the same guy, Alpharius and Omegon, and that he specializes in infiltration. Beyond that, all bets are off. Literally every event in his life has at least two versions that have been printed in official books and directly contradict each other. The book that compiles his backstory in a neat and sensible manner that doesn't have any internal or external contradictions opens with the blatant admission that all of it is a complete fucking lie. Supposedly, he died at the battle for Pluto, but then he is reported to have been killed several centuries later somewhere else by a completely different guy. Only complicating matters is that pretty much every member of his legion undergoes extensive plastic surgery to look exactly like him. Most of them introduce themselves as Alpharius. It might very well be that both of the times he supposedly died, it was actually just a body double and he's still out there, pretending to be a normal legionary. Every single member of the Alpha Legion is Alpharius, and an alarming number of them actually believe themselves to be him." Anyway, this is the backstory book in question.

Calvino, Italo: If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

The book is a story about reading the first chapters of multiple books that appear to be If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, but are not.

Campbell, John W.: Who Goes There?

A group of American researchers, isolated in their scientific station in Antarctica towards the end of winter, discover an alien spaceship buried in the ice, where it crashed twenty million years before. They recover an alien creature from the ancient ice. Thawing revives the alien, a being which can assume the appearance, memories, and personality of a living thing it devours, while maintaining its body mass for further reproduction. Unknown to them, the alien immediately kills and then imitates the crew's physicist, a man named Connant; with some 90 pounds of its matter left over, it tries to become a sled dog.

The crew discovers the dog-Thing and kills it midway through the transformation process. Pathologist Blair, who had lobbied for thawing the Thing, goes insane with paranoia and guilt, vowing to kill everyone at the base to save mankind; he is isolated within a locked cabin at their outpost. Connant is also isolated as a precaution, and a "rule-of-four" is initiated in which all personnel must remain under the close scrutiny of three others. The crew realizes that they must isolate their base and therefore disable their airplanes and vehicles, yet they pretend that everything is normal during radio transmissions, to prevent any rescue attempts. The researchers try to figure out who may have been replaced by the alien (simply referred to as the Thing), to destroy the imitations before they can escape and take over the world. The task is found to be almost impossibly difficult when they realize that the Thing is shapeshifting and telepathic, reading minds and projecting thoughts. A sled dog is conditioned by human blood injections (from Copper and Garry) to provide a human-immunity serum test, as in rabbits. The initial test of Connant is inconclusive, as they realize that the test animal received both human and alien blood, meaning that either Doctor Copper or expedition Commander Garry is an alien. Assistant commander McReady takes over and deduces that all the other animals at the station, save the test dog, have already become imitations; all are killed by electrocution and their corpses burned.

Everyone suspects each other by now but must stay together for safety, deciding who will take turns sleeping and standing watch. Tensions mount and some men begin to go mad, thinking that they are already the last human, or wondering if they could know if they were not human any longer. Ultimately, Kinner, the cook, is murdered and accidentally revealed to be a Thing. McReady realizes that even small pieces of the creature will behave as independent organisms. He then uses this fact to test which men have been "converted" by taking blood samples from everyone and dipping a heated wire in the vial of blood. Each man's blood is tested, one at a time, and the donor is immediately killed if his blood recoils from the wire. Fourteen men, including Connant and Garry, are revealed to be Things. The remaining men go to test the isolated Blair, and on the way, see the first albatross of the Antarctic spring flying overhead; they shoot the bird to prevent a Thing from infecting it and flying to civilization.

When they reach Blair's cabin, they discover that he is a Thing. They realize that it has been left to its own devices for a week, coming and going as it pleased, as it is able to squeeze under doors by transforming itself. With the creatures inside the base destroyed, McReady and two others enter the cabin to kill the Thing that was once Blair. McReady forces it out into the snow and destroys it with a blowtorch. Afterwards, the trio discover that the Thing was dangerously close to finishing the construction of a nuclear-powered anti-gravity device that would have allowed it to escape to the outside world.

Christie, Agatha: Dead Man's Folly

So, the entire propaganda section for this one will be a spoiler because to explain why this book works as a stranger Leitner is to reveal a major plot twist. So as a start here is the book's description from goodreads:

Whilst organising a mock murder hunt for the village fete hosted by Sir George and Lady Stubbs, a feeling of dread settles on the famous crime novelist Adriane Oliver. Call it instinct, but it's a feeling she just can't explain...or get away from. In desperation she summons her old friend, Hercule Poirot -- and her instincts are soon proved correct when the 'pretend' murder victim is discovered playing the scene for real, a rope wrapped tightly around her neck. But it's the great detective who first discovers that in murder hunts, whether mock or real, everyone is playing a part.

In this novel a young girl Marlene is killed during a village fete at Nasse House, a home owned by Sir George Stubbs and his wife Hattie. After the murder, Lady Stubbs goes missing just in time for a visit from her cousin, whom she hasn't seen in years. At the end of the novel, it transpired that both Sir George and Hattie were not who they seemed. Sir George being a fake identity of James Folliat, son of the family that owned the Nasse House for centuries, who was thought to be dead. His mother, Amy Folliat, introduced him to the original Hattie, a wealthy but naive girl. James stole Hattie's money and had her killed and replaced by his actual wife, who later spent years pretending to be Hattie with only Amy Folliat aware of the replacement. Due to the news that real Hattie's cousin, who could uncover the ruse, was going to visit. Fake Hattie again transformed to blend among the tourists that came to the fete. To me, this works great as a stranger Leitner due to the book antagonist both pretending to be somebody else and the strong element of kill and replace.

Crowley, Nate: The Twice-Dead King

Fundamentally about alienation from one's own sense of self and how in order to become yourself you have to become someone else; the main character goes through a major identity crisis and it involves flaying people and wearing their skin

Dahl, Roald: The Witches

A dark fantasy, the story is set partly in Norway and partly in England, and features the experiences of a young English boy and his Norwegian grandmother in a world where child-hating societies of witches secretly exist in every country.

Damico, Gina: Wax

Wax is a young adult mystery novel by Gina Damico (author of Croak). It was published in 2016.

It takes place in the fictional town of Paraffin, Vermont. Our hero is Poppy Palladino, a teenage girl who wants to be an actor, but is haunted by memories of being humiliated multiple times in the past, especially by a bully named Blake Bursaw. Paraffin is home to the Grosholtz Candle Factory, a popular tourist site. While taking a tour in the factory, Poppy wanders off into a secret workroom where she meets Madame Grosholtz, an eccentric maker of wax sculptures. Soon after, the factory mysteriously burns down, but not before Poppy is given a living wax sculpture, who she names Dud, and a candle engraved with a strange message.

Things just get stranger from there, and Poppy must save the entire town from a sinister conspiracy that stems from hundreds of years ago. She becomes unsure of who she can trust, but with the help of Dud, her best friend Jill, and her school theater club, she must make a plan.

***

Paraffin, Vermont, is known the world over as home to the Grosholtz Candle Factory. But behind the sunny retail space bursting with overwhelming scents and homemade fudge, seventeen-year-old Poppy Palladino discovers something dark and unsettling: a back room filled with dozens of startlingly life-like wax sculptures, crafted by one very strange old lady. Poppy hightails it home, only to be shocked when one of the figures—a teenage boy who doesn’t seem to know what he is—jumps naked and screaming out of the trunk of her car. She tries to return him to the candle factory, but before she can, a fire destroys the mysterious workshop—and the old woman is nowhere to be seen.

With the help of the wax boy, who answers to the name Dud, Poppy resolves to find out who was behind the fire. But in the course of her investigation, she discovers that things in Paraffin aren’t always as they seem, that the Grosholtz Candle Factory isn’t as pure as its reputation—and that some of the townspeople she’s known her entire life may not be as human as they once were. In fact, they’re starting to look a little . . . waxy. Can Poppy and Dud extinguish the evil that’s taking hold of their town before it’s too late?

Dick, Philip K.: A Scanner Darkly

"The main character, Bob Arctor, leads a double life as an undercover police agent infiltrating a drug dealing ring. As a part of his cover he starts taking the drug and becomes addicted, and the drug causes the hemispheres of his brain to function separately leading to the emergence of two separate personalities - 'Bob' when he is a drug dealer, and 'Fred' when he is a police agent. both of these personalities do not recognize each other, so for example when he is reviewing footage of him as Bob, he thinks he is spying on some other man. Also, in this world there are 'scramble suits' - special coats that make it impossible to distinguish anything about the wearer's appearance or their voice, and the protagonist is required to wear one of these when he is not undercover. That worsens his split personality, as he has no one who remembers his appearance as 'Fred', and he forgets he was undercover at all and just starts acting as a genuine drug dealer. The distortion of memories, erasure of appearance and the personality swap from Fred to Bob reminds me strongly of not!them. Fred not!themmed himself."

Dick, Philip K.: Upon the Dull Earth

Short story in which a woman dies, and her boyfriend makes a deal to bring her back. Trouble is, he brings her back... too much. It'd be a funny old world if we were all the same, wouldn't it? Link

Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The Double

In Saint Petersburg, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin works as a titular councillor (rank 9 in the Table of Ranks established by Peter the Great[3]), a low-level bureaucrat struggling to succeed.

Golyadkin has a formative discussion with his physician, Doctor Rutenspitz, who fears for his sanity and tells him that his behaviour is dangerously antisocial. He prescribes "cheerful company" as the remedy. Golyadkin resolves to try this, and leaves the office. He proceeds to a birthday party for Klara Olsufyevna, the daughter of his office manager. He was uninvited, and a series of faux pas lead to his expulsion from the party. On his way home through a snowstorm, he encounters a man who looks exactly like him, his double. The following two thirds of the novel then deals with their evolving relationship.

At first, Golyadkin and his double are friends, but Golyadkin Jr. proceeds to attempt to take over Sr.'s life, and they become bitter enemies. Because Golyadkin Jr. has all the charm, unctuousness and social skills that Golyadkin Sr. lacks, he is very well-liked among the office colleagues. At the story's conclusion, Golyadkin Sr. begins to see many replicas of himself, has a psychotic break, and is dragged off to an asylum by Doctor Rutenspitz.

***

Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially succesful version of himself, who abuses and victimizes the original. As he is increasingly persecuted, Golyadkin finds his social, romantic and professional life unravelling, in a spiral that leads to a catastrophic denouement.

French, Tana: The Likeness

A detective assumes a dead woman’s identity and moves into her shared house, believing one of the housemates to be her killer. She is accepted as the victim (!!!) and becomes obsessed with her doppelgänger, trying to stay in character and live the life that she would have lived. She ends up getting psychologically consumed by the part she’s playing, losing track of her own identity. Once she’s completely confused, only person knows for sure who she is—the killer.

Gaiman, Neil: Coraline

The presence of another world that resemble the one you know but different, the Other Mother whole deal and the fact that she spies on people using dolls and sews buttons in place of her victim's eyes.

***

A short novella that focuses on 9-year-old Coraline Jones as she fights to restore her family from the clutches of the evil Other Mother.

Hendrix, Grady: How to Sell a Haunted House

Synopsis: "When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.

Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she’ll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it’ll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market.

But some houses don’t want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them…"

Ito, Junji: The Enigma of Amigara Fault

You see the hole which perfectly matched you. It haunts you. You can’t resist the urge to climb inside.

It’s your hole, it was made for you.

Once you enter, you keep going, and your limbs begin to lengthen and contort. At the other side of the mountain, you emerge. Miserable, in pain, and spaghetti’s to the point you barely look human.

It’s your hole, it was made for you. But you have to be changed to fit inside. And you will.

(People have been memeing this story but it’s actually excellent body horror. Highly recommend!)

Ito, Junji: Uzumaki

It’s about a town cursed by spirals that corrupt you and drive you mad, but can’t be ignored forever

Jensen, Ruby Jean: MaMa

Once upon a time there lived a sweet little dolly. Her porcelain like face was so smooth, just like a baby. Her mouth even had a tiny hole so she could eat and breathe. But her one beaded glass eye gleamed with mischief and evil. She had waited a long time in the attic for someone to set her free...

Once upon a time there lived a sweet little girl. The only place she was happy was in the attic with her dolly. If she could have seen her little doll's legs kick, she would have been frightened. If she could have felt her little doll's arms squeeze, she would have been shocked. But if she could have read her little doll's thoughts she would have run from the attic forever--for her sweet little dolly only had killing her on her mind...

King, Stephen: Battleground

A toymaker gets his revenge on his killer with a battalion of toy soldiers that invade his apartment.

King, Stephen: The Outsider

An eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad.

As the investigation expands and horrifying answers begin to emerge, King’s propulsive story kicks into high gear, generating strong tension and almost unbearable suspense. Terry Maitland seems like a nice guy, but is he wearing another face? When the answer comes, it will shock you as only Stephen King can.

Krulik, Nancy E.: Katie Kazoo, Switcheroo (series)

Katie is an ordinary third-grader-except for one very extraordinary problem! She accidentally wished on a shooting star to be anyone but herself. But what Katie soon learns is that wishes really do come true-and in the strangest ways... When the magic wind blows, watch out! Katie switches bodies with someone or something else and hilarity and havoc ensues.

Lovecraft, H.P.: The Outsider

There's nothing I can say here that won't ruin the twist. Link: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/o.aspx

Martin, Ann M. and Laura Godwin: The Meanest Doll in the World

Annabelle Doll and Tiffany Funcraft are two dolls who have been best friends since they met in Kate Palmer's house at 26 Wetherby Lane. In this sequel to The Doll Peopl e, they hitch a ride in Kate's backpack and find themselves in the biggest adventure of their lives, a day at school! But when an attempt to return home lands them in the wrong house, they're in far deeper trouble than they imagined. Along with a host of new doll friends, they also encounter Mean Mimi, the wickedest doll of all. Mean Mimi is mean-really mean-and she's determined to rule all of Dollkind or else destroy it. Will the world ever be safe for dolls again?

The main horror aspect of this series is the threat of 'Permanent Doll State' -- a divine punishment that will transform violaters permanently into nonliving dolls, though possibly with their sentience still intact.

Miles, Lawrence: This Town Will Never Let Us Go

This is the source material of Tiffany Korta: ""Pop star. Her image was carefully maintained and groomed by her bosses, the skull-masked Executive/Faction Paradox. She became haunted by the concept of her uber-self, the variety of ways in which her image was used -- officially and otherwise -- and the impassible divide between her identity and the perceptions that other people had of her. She began to see her image on screens moving out of sync with her, or saying things that she could not remember saying, as the image she presented to the world evolved beyond her comprehension and control. Eventually, when she confronted the Executive about their plans for her, they destroyed her and replaced her with a different version of herself that went on to destroy her credibility, Not!Them-style. Meanwhile, other versions of her went on homicidal rampages around the world."

Nettel, Guadalupe: El huésped (The host)

A story about a girl who feels she has a "sister" that lives within her. She haunts her constantly and devastates her life. We never know whether that sister is real or not, but the mere thought of her drives the girl to paranoia and madness. Her main goal is to destroy her, and to do that, she must become just like her.

Nix, Garth: The Ragwitch

Ten-year-old Paul and his sister Julia are on vacation at the beach one day when they find a shell midden on the shore. When they climb it, they find a crow's nest with a creepy little ragdoll in it. Paul distrusts it immediately, but Julia is entranced, and brings it home, where their parents don't seem to be able to see it. The next morning, Paul hears someone moving around, and follows the sound out to find his sister, possessed by the doll, building a strange blue fire on top of the midden. She freezes him helplessly in place, then jumps into the fire and disappears. Paul rebuilds it and follows Her through, determined to rescue his sister.

So begins a quest to stop the Ragwitch and save his sister (and maybe the world he finds himself in on the side). Throughout, the narrative switches between Paul's journey and Julia Fighting from the Inside despite the Ragwitch's attempts to control her mind.

Peck, Richard: Secrets of the Shopping Mall

Trying to escape the vicious King Kobra gang and troubled life at home, eighth graders Barnie and Teresa flee the city. With only four dollars between them, they hop a bus, hoping to find a new life at the end of the line. Destination: Paradise Park. But Paradise Park turns out to be a cement-covered suburban shopping mall--not quite the paradise they had hoped for.

With no money and no home to retum to, they are forced to stay. And paradise park takes them in--in more ways than one. Barnie and Teresa spend their days and nights in the climate-controlled consumer paradise of a large department store. And just when they think they can live there unnoticed forever, Teresa and Barnie find that even Paradise Park has its secrets. Even in the dead of night, they are far from alone...."

(Spoilers: It's not actually living mannequins, but dispossessed and mildly insane teens who dress as mannequins and stand perfectly still all day to avoid detection! Which... I'm not sure is much better.)

Poe, Edgar Allen: William Williamson or William Wilson

The story of a doppelganger. A man with William Wilson's same name and face. A man who begins to act and sound more like him over the years. A man who becomes hostile. A man who haunts him.

***

William Wilson is about a man named William Wilson (or something similar to it) who meets a man with the exact name as him. Gradually, the double begins to resemble him more and more. The double keeps being a general nuisance to him until eventually he kills his double. Only to look in the mirror to see “ mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood”.

"In me didst thou exist—and in my death, see ... how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

To me, William Wilson is a perfect example of a Stranger Leitner because it conceptualizes the fear of the other through fear of the self. There is no stranger more unknowable than the stranger in the mirror, staring back at you.

***

The story follows a man "of noble descent" who goes by William Williamson because, although denouncing his profligate past, he does not accept full blame for his actions. William meets another boy in his school who has the same name and roughly the same appearance, and who was even born on the same date. William's name embarrasses him because it sounds "plebeian" or common, and he is irked that he must hear the name twice as much on account of the other William. The boy also dresses like William, walks like him, but can only speak in a whisper. He begins to give advice to William of an unspecified nature, which he refuses to obey, resenting the boy's "arrogance". One night he steals into the other William's bedroom and recoils in horror at the boy's face—which now resembles his own. William then immediately leaves the academy and, in the same week, the other boy follows suit. William eventually goes to university, gradually becoming more debauched and performing what he terms "mischief". For example, he steals from a man by cheating at cards. The other William appears, his face covered, and whispers a few words sufficient to alert others to William's behavior, and then leaves with no others seeing his face. William is haunted by his double in subsequent years, who thwarts plans described by William as driven by ambition, anger and lust. In his latest caper, he attempts to seduce a married noblewoman at Carnival in Rome, but the other William stops him. The enraged protagonist drags his "unresisting" double—who wears identical clothes— into an antechamber, and, after a brief sword fight in which the double participates only reluctantly, stabs him fatally. After William does this, a large mirror suddenly seems to appear. Reflected at him, he sees "mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood": apparently the dead double, "but he spoke no longer in a whisper". The narrator feels as if he is pronouncing the words: "In me didst thou exist—and in my death, see ... how utterly thou hast murdered thyself."

Pratchett, Terry: Maskerade

‘There’s a kind of magic in masks. Masks conceal one face, but they reveal another. The one that only comes out in darkness …’

The Opera House in Ankh-Morpork is home to music, theatrics and a harmless masked Ghost who lurks behind the scenes. But now a set of mysterious backstage murders may just stop the show.

Agnes Nitt has left her rural home of Lancre in the hopes of launching a successful singing career in the big city. The only problem is, she doesn’t quite look the part. And there are two witches who would much rather she return home to join their coven.

Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg have travelled to Ankh-Morpork to convince Agnes that life as a witch is much better than one on the stage. Only now they’re caught up in a murder mystery featuring masks and maniacal laughter.

And the show MUST go on . . .

Rayner, Jacqueline: EarthWorld

Synopsis: "Anji Kapoor has just had the worst week of her entire life, and things aren't getting any better. She should be back at her desk, not travelling through time and space in a police box with a couple of strange men.

The Doctor (Strange Man No. 1) is supposed to be returning her to Soho 2001 AD. So quite why there are dinosaurs outside, Anji isn't sure. Sad sixties refugee Fitz (Strange Man No. 2) seems to think they're either in prehistoric times or on a parallel Earth. And the Doctor is probably only pretending to know what's going on — because if he really knew, surely he would have mentioned the homicidal triplet princesses, the teen terrorists, the deadly android doubles (and triples) and the hosts of mad robots?

Anji's never going to complain about Monday mornings in the office again... "

Why it's Stranger: The setting alone is uncannily bizarre -- a theme park on one of Jupiter's moons devoted to Earth history, with research drawn from mistranslations, myths, and popular fiction. Sinister androids populate the place, and everyone is hiding the most terrible secrets. Meanwhile, Fitz Kreiner is having an identity crisis about being a clone, which is only made worse when he has to battle an Elvis impersonator to the death.

Robinson, Justin: Everyman

Ian Covey is a doppelganger. A mimic. A shapeshifter. He can replace anyone he wants by becoming a perfect copy; taking the victim’s face, his home, his family. His life. No longer a man, but a hungry void, Ian Covey is a monster.

David Tirado is a massive, hideous colony organism, a gestalt entity. The sum of Covey’s discarded parts. A roiling, chaotic patchwork of vast and varied personalities, memories, and physical forms that used to be a man − many men − David Tirado is a monster.

Sophie Tirado’s identity has been eroded by the tides of a long relationship, and now the man she gave herself up for has been stolen away and replaced by a mimic. Caught between the Doppelganger and the Gestalt Entity, she will try to save her husband, but there might be nothing left of him.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask, and evil a thousand faces.

Ross, Louise: Collective Imagination: Goncharov (1973) (2022) as a Model for Communal Filmmaking

Schwartz, Alvin: "Harold," Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill your Bones

Two cow farmers, Thomas and Alfred, were bored with their monotonous work one day, so they decided to make a scarecrow out of old sacs stuffed with straw. They based its appearance after another farmer they both hated, even giving it the name: Harold. They tied it to a pole and made fun of it, doing impressions of what his crazy voice might sound like or even just taking their cruelty out on him by kicking or punching him, or smearing food over the sac that was its face. One day they heard a grunt that could only have come from Harold. Thomas suggested throwing him in the fire, but Alfred insisted it was nothing to worry about. Then, Alfred noticed that Harold was growing bigger, but again told themselves it was just their imagination from being in the mountains too long.

Then one day, Harold stands up, walks out of the hut in front of Thomas and Alfred, then climbs up onto the roof and starts stomping around on it like a horse on its hind legs. Terrified and wanting to get away from Harold, they leave with their cows that same day, but halfway there they realize they forgot their milking stools and have to go back. The farmers convince each other that there really is nothing to be afraid of and draw straws to see who will go back. It is Thomas who drew the shorter straw, and now has to go back to to the hut, telling Alfred that he will catch up with him later. When Thomas does not return, Alfred returns to look for him, and sees Harold on the roof of the hut laying out Thomas' skinned corpse to dry in the sun.

Scroggs, Kirk: Tales of a Sixth-Grade Muppet

It's a series where a boy turns into a Muppet, and things only get wilder from there. It only really hits proper mind and body horror by book 4, as the entire world begins to undergo MUPPETMORPHOSIS!

Sleator, William: Among the Dolls

When her parents give her a gloomy old dollhouse for her birthday instead of the ten speed bike she's expecting, Vicky is disappointed. But she soon becomes fascinated by the small shadowy world and its inhabitants. The hours she spends playing with the dolls is a good way to escape from her parents's arguments. As Vicky's life becomes more troubled, she starts to take out her frustration on the dolls, making their lives as unhappy as hers. Then one day, Vicky wakes up inside the dollhouse, trapped among the monsters she's created. Bewildered, Vicky is sure she's dreaming. Can she find her way out of this nightmare world?

Sleator, William: The Duplicate

When David finds a mysterious machine that can copy living things, he thinks his problems are over. Now he can be in two places at once: at his grandmother's and out on a date. While the other David is in school, the real one can spend the day at the beach. The possibilities are endless. And they turn terrifying. David's duplicate has a mind, ideas, and desires of his own--and one of them is to see the real David dead.

Spark, Muriel: The Only Problem

So, in this novel, the main character, Harvey Gotham's estranged wife, Effie, apparently joins a terrorist organisation, which causes no end of problems for him. One of the problems being that Harvey refuses to believe that the person in the organisation really is Effie. When shown photographic evidence and even when shown her corpse he remains doubtful that it's her. Nobody else, with the sole exception of his semi-crazy aunt, has any doubts that Effie really is terrorizing Europe. This could be explained by Harvey lying to himself for various reasons or maybe... maybe Effie was replaced by the Stranger and only Harvey can tell. I propose that The Only Problem is really a Stranger's Leitner describing the torment Harvey suffered at the hand of the Stranger.

Spatola, Mike: The Monstrous Makeup Manual

Springer, Nancy: Possessing Jessie

Quiet, cautious Jessie had always lived in the shadow of her dynamic younger brother--her mother's clear favorite. His recent death leaves Jessie and her mother numb with grief. That is, until the morning Jessie cuts her hair and dresses in Jason's clothes, swaggering out of the house in an uncanny imitation of her brother. Her mother is visibly cheered, and for once Jessie is the center of attention at school. But each day Jason takes over Jessie more and more. Can she escape his power?

Starling, Caitlin: Last to Leave the Room

The city of San Siroco is sinking. The basement of Dr. Tamsin Rivers, the arrogant, selfish head of the research team assigned to find the source of the subsidence, is sinking faster. As Tamsin grows obsessed with the distorting dimensions of the room at the bottom of the stairs, she finds a door that didn’t exist before - and one night, it opens to reveal an exact physical copy of her. This doppelgänger is sweet and biddable where Tamsin is calculating and cruel. It appears fully, terribly human, passing every test Tamsin can devise. But the longer the double exists, the more Tamsin begins to forget pieces of her life, to lose track of time, to grow terrified of the outside world. As her employer grows increasingly suspicious, Tamsin must try to hold herself together long enough to figure out what her double wants from her, and just where the mysterious door leads…

Stevenson, Robert Louis: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson's masterpiece of the duality of good and evil in man's nature sprang from the darkest recesses of his own unconscious—during a nightmare from which his wife awakened him, alerted by his screams. More than a hundred years later, this tale of the mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll and the drug that unleashes his evil, inner persona—the loathsome, twisted Mr. Hyde—has lost none of its ability to shock. Its realistic police-style narrative chillingly relates Jekyll's desperation as Hyde gains control of his soul—and gives voice to our own fears of the violence and evil within us. Written before Freud's naming of the ego and the id, Stevenson's enduring classic demonstrates a remarkable understanding of the personality's inner conflicts—and remains the irresistibly terrifying stuff of our worst nightmares.

Stine, R.L.: The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight

Evil scarecrows terrorize a small farm.

Stine, R.L.: Night of the Living Dummy

Lindy Powell finds a mysterious ventriloquist's dummy and Lindy decides to call him Slappy. Lindy uses her dummy to gain popularity, and her sister Kris quickly becomes jealous. Lindy and Kris's parents ask the two girls to share the dummy. However, when Kris tries to take Slappy from Lindy, Slappy hits Kris in the face. The next morning, Mr. Powell reveals that he has bought a ventriloquist dummy for Kris from a pawn shop. She decides to call him Mr. Wood. Various strange incidents of Mr. Wood apparently doing horrible things happen, which are eventually revealed as a prank by Lindy. She was tired of Kris being a copycat, so she decided to pull this big prank on Kris. Kris finds a small card in Mr. Wood's pocket that reads, "KARRU MARRI ODONNA LOMA MOLONU KARRANO,". After reading the card out loud, Kris thinks she sees Mr. Wood blink. That night, the Powell's elderly neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Miller, come to visit them. Lindy and Kris's parents ask that their daughters perform a ventriloquist act for their neighbors. Lindy decides to go first, and hers is a success. Before Kris can perform her act, Mr. Wood begins to insult the elderly couple, making fun of their appearances and their breath. Because of this, Kris is grounded but still allowed to attend the school's spring concert the following day. At the concert, while Mrs. Berman is adjusting a microphone for Kris, Mr. Wood begins to insult the teacher for being overweight. Mrs. Berman demands an apology, but Mr. Wood responds by spewing a green substance on the teacher and the audience. Mrs. Bergman tells Kris that she will be suspended from school for this, possibly for life. Mr. Powell announces he will return the dummy to the pawn shop on Monday. Kris locks Mr. Wood in a closet and goes to sleep. Kris is awakened by the sound of footsteps. When Kris decides to investigate, she discovers that Mr. Wood is alive. Mr. Wood tells her that she and Lindy are now his slaves and that the magic words brought him to life. Kris tries to fight the dummy, but Mr. Wood hits her fiercely in the stomach. Kris crawls away from Mr. Wood and screams for help. Lindy hears her sister and goes downstairs to find out what has happened. While Kris tells her sister that the dummy is alive, Mr. Wood surprises the girls. Lindy manages to pin the dummy to the ground and keep him from fleeing. When the girls' parents arrive, Mr. Wood stops moving. Lindy and Kris try to explain what has happened, but their parents refuse to believe the girls. Mr. and Mrs. Powell begin to question Kris's mental well-being, suggesting that they should take her to a doctor. As soon as the parents leave, Mr. Wood comes back to life, insisting that Lindy and Kris are his slaves. The girls try to decapitate the dummy, but they are unable to harm him. Next, the girls trap Mr. Wood in a suitcase and bury him in the backyard. Since they are exhausted, Lindy and Kris go to sleep. When the girls wake up the next morning, they discover that Mr. Wood has freed himself and is waiting for them. Lindy and Kris seek help, but their parents have gone out. To show how serious he is, Mr. Wood begins to choke Barky, the family dog. In an attempt to separate the two, the girls drag Mr. Wood and Barky outside. When Mr. Wood releases Barky, the girls chase the dummy into the path of a nearby steamroller being used for construction at the house next door. Mr. Wood dodges the first steamroller and tells them that both will be his slaves forever. He doesn't notice the second steamroller, however, and it crushes Mr. Wood. A mysterious green mist rises from the smashed dummy's body. The alarmed driver of the steamroller rushes out, thinking it was a kid he ran over, but the kids assure him it was nothing more than a dummy. Lindy, Kris, and Barky return home. When the girls get to their room, they find Slappy waiting for them. Slappy asks if the other dummy is gone.

Topping, Keith & Martin Day: The Hollow Men

Well to start with, doctor who aside, doesn't the title just sound like a stranger leitner? And getting into the plot, it heavily features animate scarecrows made from people. And the main reason I'm submitting this is because it fucked me up real bad. It's thematically way darker and more mature in content than I was expecting from a doctor who novel when I read it at the tender age of 14.

Vida, Vendela: The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

The whole plot is about a woman who goes on vacation, loses her documents and decides to roll with it, acquiring new identities through a series of questionable decisions. She gets someone else's passport and credit cards, moves into a different hotel, gets hired as a double of a famous actress, introduces herself with false names, and is very paranoid about being found out. We never learn her actual name, but we do learn that she has always disliked her face and has always tried to choose activities that would draw attention away from her face, so she can pretend it's not even there.

Wells, H.G.: The Invisible Man

The opening of "The Invisible Man" focuses on outside perspectives of the titular character, and the narrative itself refers to him simply as "the stranger". His looks are unusual: he wears large clothes and covers his eyes with tinted glasses, and underneath those, he's covered in bandages, as if he's had some sort of horrible accident. His behavior is strange, too. He's rude and reclusive, holed up in his at an inn and working with bizzare chemical concotions, causing accidents and damage constantly.

Throughout the story, the man, Griffin, becomes increasingly erratic. His attempts to reverse his condition all fail, but the things he can do when he goes unnoticed are increasingly violent and cruel.

When he finally becomes fed up with everything, he reveals himself to the proprietors and patrons of the inn, who are prepared to see anything under the bandages, any manner of injury or disfigurement, but instead, run screaming from the establishment, when he reveals nothing at all.

***

The way other characters interact with Griffin the Invisible Man really reminds me of The Stranger. Throughout the plot he's treated as some sort of impostor/invader/not human anymore. Doubly interesting since we see the uncanny-valley-assigned person's POV, meaning it could work even better as a Leitner that makes a statement giver experience something similar

[vague-humanoid]

@quasi-normalcy @el-shab-hussein @dirhwangdaseul

A side of the story of Jeffrey Epstein’s creation and maintenance of a pedophilia ring and sex trafficking operation among the wealthiest, most famous, and most powerful Americans seems to have been forgotten. This is the fact that he was constantly surrounded with notable and influential members of the scientific community. 

One scientist, who remained anonymous, told Slate about lavish parties Epstein would host at his Upper East Side apartment. These parties often mixed the scientists with individuals from the world of high fashion, including many young models. “Sometimes he’d turn to his left and ask some science-y questions,” claimed the anonymous scientist, “Then he’d turn to his right and ask the model to show him her portfolio.” 

Epstein hosted this particular party in 2010, after he had been convicted for soliciting prostitution from a minor. In attendance was John Brockman, a literary agent who has represented Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Jared Kahneman, among other scientists turned authors. According to Slate: “At one point, a young female staffer stepped into the room to give Epstein a massage, rubbing his neck as he talked and listened.” “I have only two interests,” Epstein once said to a long time friend, “Science and pussy.” Indeed, when Epstein convened a meeting of 21 physicists on his private island in 2006, he “was always followed by a group of something like three or four young women,” according to one participant.

One of the physicists in attendance was none other than Stephen Hawking, who rode in a submarine specially modified by Epstein for Hawking. According to Epstein’s LinkedIn, Hawking is among the many “well known luminaries” Epstein financially contributed to in his role as a “science philanthropist.” Keep in mind that many of the legal documents produced in the course of Epstein’s trials alleged that photos of naked girls decorated the walls of his property. Professor Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, who organized the conference, has said that it, “wouldn’t have happened if Epstein hadn’t funded it” and that Epstein supported “some of the work at my institute.” Krauss remained close with Epstein during and after he was sentenced to prison for his pedophilia. “As a scientist,” Krauss told the Daily Beast in 2011, “I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.”

Alan Dershowitz, a member of the legal team which helped negotiate a “non-prosecution agreement” to rescue Epstein from prison in 2008, alleges that Epstein once steered a lunch conversation between the two of them toward the issue of improving human genetics. Dershowitz claims he was appalled due to the similarity of what Epstein was proposing to Nazi rhetoric used to justify the Holocaust. Apparently it didn’t offend Dershowitz too much, as the two continued to work together. In fact, Dershowitz was named in court documents as one of the many men who participated in the rape of girls trapped by Epstein on Little St. James.

Epstein’s embrace of transhumanism and eugenics was also overtly Malthusian. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker claims that while at a Harvard meetup of scientists Epstein was critical of projects meant to promote healthcare or feed the hungry, warning that this would lead to overpopulation. The fear of “overpopulation” has a long history among bourgeois eugencistists and is rooted in the logic of imperialism. 

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 4.23

Beer Birthdays

Anton Schwartz (1853)

Christian Kazakoff (1971)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Valerie Bertinelli; actor (1960)

John Oliver; comedian (1977)

Max Planck; German physicist (1858)

Sergei Prokofiev; composer (1891)

William Shakespeare; writer, playwright (1564)

Johann Adam Stamm; wagonmaker (1702)

Famous Birthdays

David Birney; actor (1939)

Shirley Temple Black; actor, ambassador (1928)

Blair Brown; actor (1949)

James Buchanan; 15th U.S. President (1791)

Steve Clark; rock musician (1960)

Cow Cow Davenport; jazz pianist (1894)

Sandra Dee; actor (1942)

Joyce DeWitt; actor (1949)

J.P. Donleavy; writer (1926)

Stephen Douglas; politician (1813)

Tony Esposito; Chicago Blackhawks G (1943)

Jim Fixx; jogger, writer (1932)

Boris Godunov; tsar of Muscovy (1598)

Virgil "Gus" Grissom; astronaut (1926)

Halston; fashion designer (1932)

Estelle Harris; actor (1936)

Art Hoppe; writer, columnist (1925)

Jaime King; model, actor (1979)

Joanna Krupa; model (1979)

Lee Majors; actor (1939)

Edwin Markham; writer (1852)

Ngaio Marsh; writer (1899)

Michael Moore; documentary filmmaker (1954)

Roy Orbison; pop singer (1936)

Kal Penn; actor (1977)

Warren Spahn; Boston/Milwaukee Braves P (1921)

J.M.W. Turner; artist (1775)

Herve Villechaize; actor (1943)

[dandelionh3art]

In June of 1967, at the same time as Israel was starting to enact its military dictatorship over the West Bank and Gaza, the biggest athlete of his time and one of the most famous and recognizable icons of his era, Muhammad Ali, was sentenced to five years in prison for his refusal to join the US military and serve in the Vietnam war.

Two months earlier, on April 28th, his boxing license was suspended, and he was stripped of his heavyweight world champion title and arrested: 3 times his name was called at a Military Entrance Processing Station in Houston, and 3 times he would not step forward.

Before and after that day, he was active and speaking against the war to American students in universities, in rallies throughout the country, in press conferences, and interviews.

He never once buckled under pressure, and crafted some of the most memorable and popular quotes of the Vietnam era like "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong", or

"Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years."

-

Choosing wisely, the American state did not destroy Ali. Ali came back to the ring after 3 years of forced absence, reclaimed his title, and, beating all the best heavyweights of the time, created an unmatched legacy in all of sports history.

-

Almost 60 years after that, it is impossible to even imagine, say, Lebron James or Stephen Curry talking with anything similar to that clarity and conviction about, say, a certain genocide and their country's support for it. It's inconceivable. They see themselves as nothing but earners and entertainers.

I often think about the timeless greatness of Ali, being not only the greatest boxing champion of all time but a great formidable political spirit as well. Ali who did not succumb to fear and pressure and risked his career, freedom, many millions of dollars, and even his life (in a country notorious for lone assassins) by consistently refusing to join a war the American public was still overwhelmingly for at the time.

And what do we have today? Complete craven silence. All the great athletes, rock stars, actors - deafening silence.

Not one of them has as much to lose as Ali did, at the height of a singular career in global sports. Not one of them risks jail time, fierce public hate, or financial ruin. Still, they find no courage to speak up.

They all count their dollars and likes in the dark, psychologically broken, and morbidly anxious stars of nothingness.

-

Nearly 6 decades after he willingly put everything on the line for his principles in a spectacular act of real-time political nonconformity, The Great One still shines as a huge beacon of light in a sea of rancid complicity. An inspiration and a role model like no other.

-

The absence of an Ali-like figure of our times tells a sad and uniquely poignant story about the triumph of capitalism and conformity over the human spirit in America in the post-Vietnam era; it also tells us how much of a giant Ali really was.

Alon Mizrahi

[thatcheeseycandle]

//TW FOR CANDLES, FIRE, AND SOME SWEARING!! (being the swear word in the crap post tag)

Thought I'd go off with a bang and make an intro post

Greetings all genders, I'm Cheese but you can call me Nix and Loco as well! I'm also a minor to note and I basically just love my sillies, and I also do gacha, writing, and animating! Hope to post more :]

-—————-

Gender & Pronouns?:

Genderfluid Masculine, any pronouns!

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Sexuality?:

Biromantic Demisexual! (still questioning)

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Nationality?:

Filipino/Philippino (partly Chinese) (PST)

🇵🇭🇨🇳

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Favorite Songs?:

Weight of the World - Shayfer James

Brand New City - Mitski

Soul of Steam - leo.

Towards the Sun - Rihanna

Tardigrade Song - Cosmo Sheldrake

Dr. Sunshine is Dead (2020) - Will wood and the Tapeworms

James the Really Splendid Engine - Headmaster Hastings

Trust me not (Hero and Villain Duet) - Backseat Vagabond

The Wolf - SIAMES

Everything Moves - Bronze Radio Return

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Favorite Characters?:

Taw "Dotti" Valley (TTTE/Young Iron)

Stephen/Stephen's Rocket (TTTE/CGI)

Mettaton (Undertale)

Boco (TTTE/Model Series)

Henry (TTTE/RWS)

Bittern (TTTE/Young Iron)

Grampus (This is Tugs)

Hiro (TTTE/CGI)

Daisy (TTTE/CGI)

Toby (TTTE/CGI)

-—————-

TTTE (mainly YIAU and CGI)

MCYT (Hermitcraft S7/LS)

This Is Tugs

An Unlikely Fandom (TTTE)

Minecraft (I PLAY ON BEDROCK!!)

PonyTown (mainly cos and hangs)

Hazbin Hotel

SIX (Divorced, Beheaded, LI-I-IVEEE)

Animation VS Minecraft

Redstone Community

(May update!!)

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#cheesy/shit posts -crap/shit posts basically

#cheesyversial rants -basically my ranting tag even though it isnt controversial

#candlelit storytime -fanfic/story talk in a sense

#cheesy-yt -Mcyt talk except turned into a cheese pun

#cheesey designs -gacha, art, etc

LIGHTS PENS AND CAFFIIIEEENNNEE

-writing tag cuz it describes the three important things I need whenever I write

#cheesarama drama -basically the true controversial rant tag

#stretching the cheese -basically my reblog tag

#YIAU: Reviews of the Readers -Reader Reactions to a YIAU chapter :]

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[natequarter]

what one modern thing would make various past english monarchs feel better, or at least improve things somewhat? a list:

edward the confessor: divorce

harold godwinson: safety goggles

william the conqueror: duolingo

william ii: health and safety regulations

henry i: open marriages. i mean clearly he practiced this but he could do with a better model than just semi-accepted cheating

stephen: baby name websites (so that he doesn't end up calling his poor son eustace)

henry ii: birth control

richard i: france. i mean technically it existed already but it would still definitely help

john: therapy. this probably applies to everyone on this list though

edward i: prison

edward ii: gardening centres

edward iii: wii sports, or some other form of distraction which will stop him wasting all his time on invading france

henry iv: wider selection of hats

henry v: honestly all of them needed modern healthcare but i'm choosing to bestow it upon henry v

henry vi: not being king from the age of baby. i think this should be fairly easy to achieve don't you

edward iv: better brothers

richard iii: self-discipline workplace sessions

henry vii: excel spreadsheets and candy crush. i know i said one thing but i lied

henry viii: the pope using homophobic slurs

edward vi: secularisation. alternatively, debate clubs. i don't think this would improve things for him, per se, but he needs some sort of outlet for all that teenage rage

mary i: summer barbecues

philip i (better known as philip ii of spain to you): stilts. or high heels. either works really

james i: sex toys

charles i: fucking hell. therapy again

charles ii: open marriages (yes, again...)

james ii: coldplay (especially viva la vida)

george iv: divorce. oh my god. a fucking divorce please

and that's all i have the inspiration for. yes, i did miss people out, no, i do not care.

[ulkaralakbarova]

An orphaned boy raised by underground creatures called Boxtrolls comes up from the sewers and out of his box to save his family and the town from the evil exterminator, Archibald Snatcher. Credits: TheMovieDb. Film Cast: Archibald Snatcher (voice): Ben Kingsley Eggs (voice): Isaac Hempstead-Wright Winnie Portley-Rind (voice): Elle Fanning Fish / Wheels / Bucket (voice): Dee Bradley Baker Lady Cynthia Portley-Rind (voice): Toni Collette Lord Portley-Rind (voice): Jared Harris Mr. Trout (voice): Nick Frost Mr. Pickles (voice): Richard Ayoade Mr. Gristle (voice): Tracy Morgan Herbert Trubshaw (voice): Simon Pegg Oil Can / Knickers (voice): Nika Futterman Fragile / Sweets (voice): Pat Fraley Clocks / Specs (voice): Fred Tatasciore Sir Langsdale (voice): Maurice LaMarche Sir Broderick / Male Workman 1 / Male Workman 2 (voice): James Urbaniak Boulanger / Male Aristocrat (voice): Brian George Female Aristocrat (voice): Lori Tritel Shoe / Sparky (voice): Steve Blum Female Townsfolk 1 / Female Townsfolk 2 (voice): Laraine Newman Background Boy (voice): Reckless Jack Baby Eggs (voice): Max Mitchell Film Crew: Screenplay: Irena Brignull Director: Graham Annable Adaptation: Anthony Stacchi Novel: Alan Snow Music: Dario Marianelli Animation: Travis Knight Screenplay: Adam Pava Animation: Stephen Bodin Animation: Malcolm Lamont Animation: Matias Liebrecht Animation: Brian Leif Hansen Animation: Payton Curtis Animation: Joon Soo Song Animation: Adam Lawthers Animation: Shane Prigmore Animation: Chris Tootell Animation: Kyle Williams Animation: Mike Hollenbeck Animation: Danail Kraev Animation: Kristien Vanden Bussche Animation: Adam Fisher Animation: Anthony Straus Animation: Sean Burns Animation: Mael Gourmelen Animation: David Vandervoort Animation: Dan MacKenzie Animation Supervisor: Brad Schiff Animation: Kevin Parry Adaptation: Phil Dale Producer: David Bleiman Ichioka Animation: Jon David Buffam Animation: Rachelle Lambden Animation: Gabe Sprenger Animation: Philippe Tardif Animation: Ian Whitlock Animation: Daniel Alderson Animation: Charles Greenfield Animation: Jason Stalman Casting: Mary Hidalgo Line Producer: Matthew Fried Sculptor: Toby Froud Visual Effects Coordinator: Jeremy Fenske Choreographer: Nicole Cuevas Visual Effects Coordinator: Claudia Amatulli Sculptor: Benjamin William Adams Set Designer: Emily Greene Additional Editing: Ralph Foster Visual Effects Editor: Todd Gilchrist Set Designer: Carl B. Hamilton Sculptor: Scott Foster Production Design: Paul Lasaine Production Coordinator: Jocelyn Pascall Editor: Edie Ichioka Art Direction: Curt Enderle Editorial Coordinator: Dave Davenport Art Department Coordinator: Zach Sheehan CG Supervisor: Rick Sevy Music Supervisor: Maggie Rodford Music Editor: James Bellany Songs: Eric Idle Visual Effects Supervisor: Steve Emerson Costume Design: Deborah Cook Production Manager: Dan Pascall Additional Writing: Vera Brosgol Post Production Supervisor: David Dresher Editorial Manager: Trevor Cable Visual Effects Supervisor: Brian Van’t Hul Additional Editing: Christopher Murrie Director of Photography: John Ashlee Prat Set Designer: Polly Allen Robbins Visual Effects Producer: Annie Pomeranz Sound Re-Recording Mixer: Ren Klyce ADR Voice Casting: Barbara Harris Gaffer: James WilderHancock Modeling: Paul Mack Publicist: Maggie Begley Sound Re-Recording Mixer: Tom Myers Production Design: Michel Breton Prop Designer: Alan Cook Animation: Paul Andrew Bailey Assistant Art Director: Phil Brotherton Executive In Charge Of Post Production: Ben Urquhart First Assistant Director: Samuel Wilson Layout: Daniel R. Casey Layout: Simon Dunsdon Orchestrator: Geoff Alexander Set Dresser: Duncan Gillis Third Assistant Director: David J. Epstein Animation: Anthony Elworthy Animation: Dan Ramsay Animation: Jan-Erik Maas CG Animator: Carolyn Vale Digital Compositors: Daniel Leatherdale Digital Compositors: James McPherson Foley Editor: Thom Brennan Production Illustrator: Ean McNamara Sound Effects Editor: David C. Hughes Finance: Erin Baldwin Finance: Jason Bryant CG Animator: Jeff Croke Con...