Pareidolia is the human tendency to perceive patterns where they don’t exist. Seeing a human visage on the surface of Mars, hearing secret messages on recorded music, beholding Jesus in a pancake—all are instances of the phenomenon. Pareidolia is usually explained away as a side-effect of the human brain being a pattern-recognizing machine.
A more generalized term, apophenia, applies to perceiving patterns not necessarily connected to misguided sensory input. Examples include lottery ticket numerology, sexuality prediction from hair whorls and digit ratios, meaningless Freudian slips, and the 27 Club.111
SEE ALSO: ANTI-VAXXERS; BACKMASKING; MIMICRY; MONDEGREEN; RORSCHACH TEST
Never bet against eternity. That is the précis of Pascal’s Wager, a logical argument for believing in God. Disbelief in the existence of God, according to the wager, is simply a bad bet.
On the one hand, choosing faith reaps you the heavenly benefits of salvation for eternity. Choosing skepticism, however, might afford some modest earthly gain, but you risk everlasting hellfire and eternal damnation. Faith in God is a simple math game—finite loss versus infinite reward. Or to put it in Vegas terms, God always covers the spread. (Forcing people into such decision trees also creates a tremendous opportunity for psychological manipulation. Just sayin’.)
Blaise Pascal, the precocious seventeenth-century French mathematician, devised this theistic theorem. (He also invented the first operable mechanical calculator, and his heuristic “triangle” still exasperates algebra students today.) His wager was an incendiary gesture because, unlike previous acts of apologetic philosophy, he provided no proof of God. Instead, he adduced a pragmatic choice, based upon probability. For the first time, decision theory (and its cousin, game theory) entered philosophical discourse. “What have you to lose?” he actually wrote.112 One might wonder if you can choose to believe in God. Pascal foresaw this objection. “God looks only at what is inward,” he wrote, before arguing that religious skeptics should associate with believers to inspire faith. By attending religious services, and encountering numinous glory through osmosis, a nonbeliever will eventually become a believer.
In other words, you fake it ‘til you make it into heaven.
SEE ALSO: NOBLE LIE; NOT EVEN WRONG; OMNIPOTENCE PARADOX
When used by sociologists, passing refers to a person of one identity group (usually a minority) altering their social persona to be accepted by another group. The term began in the nineteenth century to describe racial assimilation (“passing for white”) but has broadened to include other gender, class, sexual orientation, and religious identities. The ambiguityinducing term is also sometimes (and more controversially) invoked in less precise situations, as when women are told to “play like men” at work, or when homosexuals abstain from public displays of affection, or when white suburban teenagers watch a few hours of BET and start speaking in a new dialect, or when women get butt injections and lip fillers, or when RACHEL DOLEZAL does whatever she does.
One of the earliest cases of racial passing in literature appears in the Mark Twain novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which two babies—one born white (the master of the house) and one with 1/32 black ancestry (born into slavery)—are switched at birth. As the trope transferred to pop culture, passing began to reflect more class-based issues, such as in movies (Brewster’s Millions, The Talented Mr. Ripley) and reality television (Joe Millionaire, The Swan).
Passing is a knotty topic that sometimes elicits valuable conversations about cultural ownership and the social creation of identity but just as often provokes public outrage. In just one instance that roiled the internet, Mindy Kaling’s brother, who is of Indian descent, revealed in 2015 that he passed as black to gain entrance to medical school. He dropped out after two years and wrote a terrible book about it.
SEE ALSO: DOLEZAL, RACHEL; POPE JOAN; ROCKEFELLER, CLARK
Countless dead rock stars, according to certain conspiratorial hypotheses, were secretly murdered (Cobain, Marley, Eazy-E). Other famous deaths, considered homicides by consensus (Lennon, Biggie, Tupac), were cover-ups of some nefarious variety. Still other dead icons are actually alive (Elvis, Bowie, Tupac again), surreptitiously blending in with us at Costco. Conspiracy theories about dead rockers sprawl from here to Strawberry Fields, but only one celebrity holds the unique inverse position—a living person who is secretly dead. Nope, not Marilyn Manson; the reverse zombie is Sir Paul McCartney.
In 1969, a Detroit DJ started the rumor: After dying in a 1966 car crash, Paul McCartney was clandestinely replaced with the winner of a look-alike contest. Beat-lemaniacs went bonkers, poring over the discography for clues to the rumor. Why exactly the remaining Beatles would disperse evidence of the switcheroo in their oeuvre is murky logic, but the cluesters, as they were called, cared not of rationality. They parsed inscrutable lyrics for covert acrostics, played records in reverse for evidence of BACKMASKING, studied album covers in mirrors—whatever it took to find the Truth. Listening closely, they heard John possibly whisper “I buried Paul” at the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Other evidence required little investigation. “A Day in the Life” didn’t even hide it: “He blew his mind out in a car.”
The rumor initially seemed circumstantial, even whimsical, but as it accumulated populist energy, one conspiracy morphed into another. What if it was all a hoax? Could the Fab Four have planted all this evidence for cluesters to discover? Could it all be a subversive marketing scheme?
As the “Paul is dead” rumor spread (Time and Life magazines helped pollinate the germ), Capitol Records reported a spike in Beatles records sales—“the biggest month in history,” said an executive. Albums released years prior—Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical Mystery Tour—suddenly reappeared on the charts. The surge, the label conceded, was attributable to the ongoing rumor, but they denied having anything to do with its proliferation. Consumers were buying multiple copies of albums, so they could play them backward and forward, sped up and slowed down, synchronously, in search of hidden messages.
If the Beatles were complicit in the “Paul is dead” rumor and had intentionally planted clues for fans, it would mean that in addition to being the biggest rock band in history, they also created the first VIRAL MARKETING campaign. “Paul is dead” might be an even bigger conspiracy than we thought, a plot more baroque than Lost or BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or the New World Order. Perhaps the cluesters really were onto something but mistook the true mystery: The Beatles perpetrated an elaborate marketing scheme.
SEE ALSO: BACKMASKING; THE BUGGS; CAPGRAS DELUSION; KARAOKE; DARK SIDE OF THE RAINBOW; MILLI VANILLI; PAREIDOLIA; TRIBUTE BANDS; VIRAL MARKETING
Phantom limbs are an exemplary instance of the human mind transmitting misinformation.
People who have had a limb amputated often report being able to kinesthetically sense the appendage as though it were still attached. They can feel it itch, feel it hurt, feel it getting cold or warm. Often they can “move” it. This is neither delusion nor malingering—the amputee knows and admits the limb is gone. But they feel it nonetheless.
The sensation is surprisingly common. Approximately 70 percent of amputees experience phantom sensations. It can also occur with other removed body parts, including eyes, breasts, teeth, and genitals.
SEE ALSO: BRAIN IN A VAT; COTARD DELUSION; FREGOLI DELUSION; IMPOSTOR SYNDROME; PHANTOM VIBRATION SYNDROME
By their very nature, conspiracy theories require bold acts of historical revisionism. The Phantom Time Hypothesis might be the boldest of all such acts, erasing entire centuries from recorded history.
There are two distinct variants of this radical hypothesis—Eurocentric and Russocentric. The first version, espoused by German historian Heribert Illig, starts with the simple observation that the Roman Catholic Church forged some documents in the Middle Ages, which sounds believable enough, but then Illig makes a quantum leap. His time anomaly hypothesis starts in the (alleged) year of 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII introduces the Gregorian calendar (the one we use today), replacing the outdated Julian calendar (implemented in 45 BCE by Julius Caesar). The difference between these calendars is minuscule, but the switch corrects a ten-day chronological drift that has accrued over the centuries.113 But when Illig performs his special math, he discovers wildly different numbers—297 years are missing! His phantom time hypothesis posits that the years 614 to 911 CE were added to the calendar by the church. This has enormous consequences, including the elimination of historical figures like Charlemagne and Muhammad, whom the theory dismisses as fabrications.
Despite the radical implausibility of the Eurocentric hypothesis, it is timid compared to the Russian version. Espoused by Anatoly Fomenko, a mathematics professor at the Moscow State University, this crypto-chronology is significantly more elaborate. It posits that most events from the Roman Empire, Ancient Greece, Dynastic China, and Ancient Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages. In fact, human history did not really start until 800 CE, and nearly all ancient recorded events occurred between the years 1000 and 1500. Anything dated earlier than the eleventh century is either falsified or represents a “phantom reflection” of an actual Middle Ages event. Dubbed “New Chronology,” this pseudohistory converges Viking ships, the Egyptian pyramids, Buddha, Plato, Alexander the Great, and Jesus into a tight Medieval matrix spanning a mere few hundred years. Collapsing history like a folding map introduces some fascinating new harmonious anomalies—the New Testament happened before the Old, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun were the same person, da Vinci and Michelangelo forged ancient manuscripts for powerful patrons, and the Trojan War and Crusades were the same historical event.114
Debunking the outlandish theories of Illig, Fomenko, and their comrades should be easy peasy, but their outlandishness makes them difficult to refute. Every bit of counter-evidence (astronomical records, archaeological remains, carbon dating, etc., etc., et cetera) evokes a new plot from a crypto-historian. Each historical refutation requires another for its support, leaving an entire chronological framework susceptible to implosion. No matter how convinced you are that Charlemagne existed, can you prove it? For that matter, can you prove anything that happened before you were born?
Ultimately, the origins of the two phantom time hypotheses belie their veracity. Not so discreetly, the Eurocentric model argues for the elimination of the early Middle Ages—an exceptionally nonspectacular period of European history, which just happens to coincide with a massive Islamic flourishing throughout the Mediterranean and a golden cultural explosion in China’s Tang dynasty. The Russocentric hypothesis, meanwhile, folds all of history into the year 800, around the time that Russian history conveniently commences. Both motives are suspect; each hypothesis rewrites history to its advantage.
That said, declaring BULLSHIT on world history certainly has its appeal. Fomenko opens his seven-volume history opus115 with Orwell’s famous adage from 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” Maybe human history is a fiction assembled to serve the powerful. Maybe Atlantis will still be discovered. Maybe extraterrestrials built the pyramids and Stonehenge. Maybe Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer and Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper. Maybe it’s all been a pack of lies, as Phil Collins said, maybe in a different context. Maybe “history is not what happened,” as Plato claimed, “but what we believed happened.”
But then, when did he say that? Maybe . . . never, or just last week.
SEE ALSO: ALT-HISTORY; BERENSTAIN BEARS CONSPIRACY; FLAT EARTH THEORY; MANDELA EFFECT; MOON LANDING HOAX; RETCONNING; TOMMY WESTPHALL UNIVERSE; WOOZLE EFFECT
Hypovibochondria, or phantom vibration syndrome, is a condition born of living in an age of hyperconnectivity. It occurs when you think the phone in your pocket is vibrating, but your mind is just playing tricks on you. The tactile hallucination is common. According to one study, 89 percent of college students report feeling the phantom vibes.
Similar portmanteaus—fauxcellarm, ringxiety—emerged years prior, for hallucinations involving misheard ringtones. Each era gets the somatic delusions it deserves.
SEE ALSO: CYBORG; PAREIDOLIA; PHANTOM LIMBS
The philosopher’s stone was a mythical substance sought from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance by alchemists who believed it a catalyst for transforming base metals (lead, nickel, mercury) into precious metals (gold, silver). Mercury was at the center of the alchemical project, probably because at room temperature it is a supercool-looking metal liquid. But the element is also a neurotoxin, which likely provoked some of the crazier alchemical notions about the world. (The philosopher’s stone was associated with mystical powers, including as an elixir for infinite life.)
Though rife with hucksters, alchemy was as much protoscience as pseudoscience. The alchemical quest ultimately led to the fields of chemistry, pharmacology, and metallurgy. And eventually we got there—transubstantiated gold exists! But to turn mercury into gold today, you need a nuclear reactor, and the resulting isotope is extremely unstable. A single ingot of transmuted gold would emit enough radioactivity to kill you instantly.
SEE ALSO: RED MERCURY; SODIUM PENTOTHAL; SYNTHETIC DIAMONDS
At first, it was a noun, and a proper one at that. But Photoshop became a Gaussian blur on society because of its verb form: to photoshop.
Digitally altering an image comprises a wide array of actions: cropping, lightening, darkening, sharpening, blurring, airbrushing. Regardless of the software used or the mendacity intended, photoshopping is what we now call any act of image manipulation—especially when the act is controversial.
But the controversy has existed since the dawn of photography itself. When Louis Daguerre announced its invention in 1839, photography was immediately deemed a hoax by many scientists. Their suspicion was portentous, as doctored images began appearing almost immediately. The portrait of Abraham Lincoln later used on the $5 bill, for instance, was originally displayed as Lincoln’s head superimposed on southern leader John Calhoun. And after his death, photos circulated of Lincoln in a casket, even though his corpse was never photographed.
Into the twentieth century, photography became more politically charged, as accusations of manipulation spread to public figures and the media. To learn that totalitarians like Stalin manipulated photos for propaganda is one thing, but seeing the much debated 1994 cover of Time with a heavily doctored mugshot of O. J. Simpson can be more shocking. The modification exposed the dirty little secret of photojournalism, even more true today: All photos are photoshopped, at least to some degree. (Despite what some Instagrammers claim, #nofilter is intrinsically a lie. The camera itself corrects light and color deficiencies.) While photojournalists have guidelines on what constitutes overmanipulation, the boundaries can be, to say the least, blurry.
The fashion industry, too, has faced intense scrutiny for its overuse of “airbrushing,” as it was called pre-Photoshop. While fashion magazines have always admitted to smoothing out blemishes and wrinkles, the degree of manipulation was unclear. But then, in 2008, the website Jezebel published a photo of Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook side by side with the original unaltered image. The stark contrast of the images set off a moral panic about what photoshopping has done to the self-perception of our bodies.
As it courts controversy, photoshopping has become an art form in its own right, with a cultish obsession developing around certain photoshoppers. Pascal Dangin, for instance, has become the most sought-after photo retoucher in fashion’s history. “The obvious way to characterize Dangin,” wrote the New Yorker in a 2008 profile, “as a human Oxy pad, is a reductive one—any art student with a Mac can wipe out a zit. His success lies, rather, in his ability to marry technical prowess to an aesthetic sensibility: his clients are paying for his eye, and his mind, as much as for his hand.”
While popularizing terms like hue, saturation, gradient, contrast, filter, and clone, Photoshop has democratized the act of image manipulation. Whether it’s the faux-selfie atop the World Trade Center with a terrorist-helmed jet flying headlong from behind, or the Muppet character Bart mashed into a photo with Osama bin Laden, or any of the endless ‘shopped memes on websites like Reddit and 4chan, the altered photo is now pervasive.
Once regarded as the epitome of realism, photography has become the most suspicious medium, the form of communications most likely to deceive. Yet again, the fake has upended the real: Manipulated photos now far outnumber the unaltered.
SEE ALSO: AUTO-TUNE; BOTOX; TRUTH CLAIM; TUPAC HOLOGRAM
Placebos are phony health treatments that can have real healing effects. The mysterious mental state induced by these proverbial sugar pills, known as the placebo effect, demonstrates the potential healing power of lies. Study after study has shown that placebos can work, especially when administered for pain relief, depression, and immunity. But their success tends to be short term. There is scant statistical evidence of any lasting clinical effect of a placebo, except for pain treatment and other highly subjective measures.
How exactly placebos work is still something of a mystery, which might explain why Harvard offers a program in Placebo Studies. When administered a bogus pill, the body seems to set self-fulfilling expectations of a drug’s effectiveness and adjusts its biochemistry to produce chemicals that relieve symptoms. While the placebo itself is fake, the body’s reaction is usually a real thing. In one study, a placebo pill presented as a stimulant increased heart rate and raised blood pressure; presented as a sleep aid, the same pill had the opposite effect.
Because the placebo effect can be real, new drugs must be tested with placebos as controls. But while placebos are necessary tools of pharmaceutical research, their use in therapeutic settings is highly controversial. Administering a known placebo clinically introduces deception and dishonesty into the client-patient relationship, making them ethically problematic. (Would you want your doctor to lie to you? What if the lie relieved your symptoms? And what if doctors lying to patients became widely known? It’s an ethical quagmire.)
The term placebo originated in church: Placebo domino in regione vivorum was a phrase used by Roman Catholics at funerals, popularly translated as “I shall walk before the Lord in the land of the living.” Placebo (literally “I shall please”) eventually morphed into a derogatory term for a funeral crasher—a faux-griever who claims a connection to the departed but is only there for free food or drink.
In the nineteenth century, when nostrums and pseudoscientific fads bamboozled America (laying the foundation for what would become the homeopathic movement), the modern definition of placebo took hold. Mocking those consumers of eyes-of-newt and toes-of-frog, Mark Twain spoke of dupes who believe they can “bribe death with a sugar pill.”
A more sardonic figure, the comedian Steven Wright, would later express nihilistic dread in our medical self-deception. “I’m addicted to placebos,” he quipped. “I’d give them up, but it wouldn’t make any difference.”
SEE ALSO: BANANADINE; HYPNOSIS; BOGUS PIPELINE; THE RED PILL; SODIUM PENTOTHAL
Plandid arose from the coy elision of “planned” and “candid.” The oxymoronic portmanteau describes a genre of Instagram photo where the subject seems to be effortlessly unaware of the camera, but the sophisticated staging belies its casual posture. The photo intimates a person captured naturally, en plein air, like a gazelle seen grazing the plains or a galaxy spied through a telescope. The prototypical plandid might depict its carefree subject nonchalantly sitting on their antique kitchen sink, lolling in their skiv-vies and giggling at some off-screen antics, or they might be snapped summering at an upstate Airbnb, innocently stepping out from an infinity pool while glancing over their shoulder, shot from an impossible angle only feasible by drone. Regardless of setting, the subject must always feign sprezzatura, that accidental coolness that coos, Oh I didn’t see you there, did you just take a photo?
Overproduced naturalism is hardly unique to iPhone cinematography. All creative mediums exert great effort to simulate effortlessness. Music producers fiddle knobs until a sheen of spontaneous levity emerges; filmmakers emulate cinéma vérité with bouncing steadicams and intense post-production; abstract painters require immense training to create accidental masterpieces. Artistic authenticity has always been the domain of fastidious engineering.
But plandids differ by measures of degree and style. The culture they emulate is that of the faux celebrity, who themselves imitate the trials of the truly famous. While celebrities endure the paparazzi, the pseudo-famous use plandids to simulate the experience of avoiding exposure. Those paragons of the plandid, the Kardashians, occupy their entire lives pretending the camera is not gazing at them. Sitting in their open kitchen and eating small salads from big bowls, they feign that no one is watching when everyone is watching.
In a bygone era, one looked in the lens and said “cheese,” but in the age of ubiquitous cameras, we pretend they do not exist. Plandids represent the final conquest of celebrity culture: choreographed voyeurism. Just ignore the camera. It’s easier if you pretend no one is watching.
SEE ALSO: FINSTAGRAM; NODDY; TRUTH CLAIM
If clicks on tabloid photo galleries and vitriol on social media were the guages of measurement, plastic surgery might be judged the most divisive subject of the contemporary human experience. And perhaps those are credible yardsticks, as the moral debates of going under the knife are so murky and contentious.
Plastic surgery encompasses a wide range of restorative, corrective, and reconstructive acts, but mostly it is known for boob jobs, butt lifts, liposuction, tummy tucks, and nose jobs. The most socially controversial body modification surgeries include the double eyelid blepharoplasty, in which Asian eyes are reshaped into more Occidental form, and the labiaplasty, which involves trimming a woman’s outer labia. (Sometimes known as the Barbie surgery, labiaplasties are on the rise, with around 12,000 procedures in 2016.) These cosmetic enhancements lie at a contentious cultural crossroads, somewhere between the utopian freedom of an ever-upgradable body and the narcissistic dystopia of a society obsessed with image.
SEE ALSO: BOTOX; CYBORG; PHOTOSHOPPING
Imagine a group of people chained inside a cave their whole lives, facing one direction, toward a wall. Behind the cave dwellers, an eternal flame flickers, casting shadows onto the wall from the outside world. A duck waddles by, or a toddler on a tricycle, but the pitiful shackled troglodytes can see only the shadow puppets of the passing figures against the cave wall. Reality, for them, is but a phantasm.
Finally, a plot: One of the cave dwellers breaks free and escapes the cave! At first, the outside world scares the hell out of him. The vibrant colors and complex shapes are initially freakish, but the escapee eventually recognizes reality for all its splendor. After sneaking in a matinee of Hamilton on Broadway, he returns to the cave to share his discovery with his ol’ lair buddies, who, to his surprise, mock and reject his fanciful three-dimensional world. (To be fair, it may have been envy over the Hamilton tix.)
Doy, this is an allegory, roughly told by Socrates in Plato’s Republic. We are the oafs of the story, trapped in the cave of our experiences; rational thought is the light that reveals detail and complexity. Like feral children, we live futile lives preoccupied with shadow monsters. Only enlightened reason can free us from the enslavement of the shadow world.
But wait—if the colorful objects of the outside world are more real than the bleak shadows of the cave, could something be more real than the colorful objects? For Plato, this more-real place is the realm of the forms, where perfect ideas reside. Like the shadow puppets in the cave, our physical world is merely an array of copies, imperfect reproductions of ideal forms we can only half see. If we were able to shed the shackles of perception, like Neo taking THE RED PILL, or Roddy Piper slipping on magic sunglasses in They Live, or Truman ramming his little boat into the biodome, we would suddenly recognize the world for the artificial pantomime it is.
SEE ALSO: BRAIN IN A VAT; MANDELA EFFECT; THE RED PILL; SIMULISM; TOMMY WESTPHALL UNIVERSE; TRUMAN SYNDROME
A polygraph is a machine that exposes the truth. [Bzzz!] A polygraph is a machine that reveals if a person is lying. [Bzzz!] A polygraph is a machine that reflects what its operator wants to hear. [Ding!]
The first person to study the connection between blood pressure and deception was psychologist William Moulton Marston, whose research in the 1920s set the groundwork for what became the polygraph machine. If his name sounds familiar, you are likely a comic book nerd: Marston also invented the character Wonder Woman for DC Comics.116 The superheroine wields a golden lasso that forces its captors to reveal the truth. Today’s polygraph is similarly weaponized, but more as a cajoling whip than a magical serum.
In addition to blood pressure, the modern poly-graph test adds three physiological measurements: heart rate, respiration, and skin conductivity. A poly-graph examiner, as myriad screenplays recount, interrogates suspects by interspersing control questions (“Have you ever fibbed to a loved one?”) with relevant questions (“Did you drown your wife in her lover’s hot tub? “). Measured by the polygraph, the physiological variance between each response supposedly reveals whether the suspect is a feckless dissembler.
Extensive research has shown that polygraphs are only slightly more reliable than a coin flip. Its results are extremely open to interpretation, and heavily skewed by prior suspicion. False positives can be assigned to honest people who are nervous; false negatives, to dishonest scoundrels who have conditioned their emotions. Poorly implemented polygraph tests have meted out prison terms on the innocent, and exonerated the guilty. Though not officially banned from courtrooms, judges today seldom allow them.117 Police stations, however, are still besotted with the gizmos, mostly as an interrogation tool. While its results are seldom admissible as evidence, polygraph machines can be used to coerce confessions.
Despite their scientific illegitimacy, the lie-detector test still captures the human imagination, especially on film. In Basic Instinct, only evil super-genius Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) can beat the poly-graph, until her lover-nemesis, Detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas), reveals he can, too. In Homeland, stone-cold Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) outsmarts the machine, inspiring Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) to do the same. Too bad none of these characters saw Ocean’s Thirteen, where a dimwit uses the old tack-in-the-shoe trick to crack the test, or for that matter sought information online, where polygraph strategy is plentiful. Movies like to present poly-crackers as emotional savants, but the dirty little secret is that the scribbles from the gyrating pen are partially for show. Good polygraphers can see you biting your tongue or regulating your breathing. They are on the lookout for cheaters. And after the test, when they imply they know something, they are again carefully studying your reaction. The poly-graph machine is a bluff. You are the test results, as much as the scribbly lines drawn by the machine. [Ding!]
SEE ALSO: THE BIG LIE; BOGUS PIPELINE; CONFIDENCE GAME; PLACEBO EFFECT; PONZI SCHEME; RORSCHACH TEST; SODIUM PENTOTHAL; VOIGHT-KAMPFF MACHINE
This fraudulent investment operation starts small, with a promise of high returns for individual investors. And it works! (At first.) Early investors in a Ponzi scheme see high returns (at least on paper) and tell other people about their profits. Each loudmouthed boast brings new money into the racket, which the schemer uses to fund the previous generation of investors. A Ponzi scheme ticks because of the braggadocio of its victims, but the skulduggery eventually fails when new funds cease flowing into the operation.118
The scheme is named after a real person, one Charles Ponzi, an inveterate swindler who in 1920 flagrantly deployed the technique. It wasn’t his idea (even Dickens wrote about similar schemes), but his flamboyant implementation of the scam led to it bearing his name. By promising clients they would double their money within ninety days through a con involving postage coupons, Ponzi swindled $20 million before getting caught.
Ponzi schemes work because each victim believes they are actually the ones bilking the system with high returns. The biggest financial fraud in history—Bernie Madoff’s $65 billion con perpetrated over two decades—was a Ponzi scheme. He notoriously defrauded thousands of clients, including celebrities Zsa Zsa Gabor, Kevin Bacon, Elie Wiesel, Sandy Koufax, John Malkovich, Eliot Spitzer, and Steven Spielberg. He pled guilty to eleven felonies in 2009 and was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
SEE ALSO: BEANIE BABY BUBBLE; MONEY
Was there a crossdressing woman pope? For centuries, most Catholics thought so.
Even before becoming pope in the ninth century, John Anglicus of Mainz was regarded as pious and brainy. But his two-year reign as Pope John VIII came to a shocking end during a procession to St. Peter’s Cathedral. While riding horseback, the pope suddenly grew ill, dismounted, and gave birth to a child. Pope John VIII instantly transformed into Pope Joan I—and was immediately stoned to death by the angry mob who witnessed the birth.
That story appears to have originated in the early thirteenth century and was universally accepted until the late sixteenth century, when religious scholars began to question its veracity. The first tip-off: No record of her reign appeared until centuries later, which is a little peculiar, given she was the first female pontiff and all. Also, other popes had their visage minted on coins, but not Joan. The timeline didn’t add up either—the name “Pope John VIII” was devised later, but there was already a genuine pope by that name who ruled from 872 to 882. (The regnal numbering of popes did not start until the late Middle Ages, and Johns were particularly messy to renumber. One conspiracy holds there is no Pope John XX because Joan was skipped.) In 1601, the Church declared Pope Joan a fraud, and today she is widely viewed as a medieval legend. Though a pretty cool one.
One version of the legend suggests that the Pope Joan scandal spooked the Catholic Church so much that all subsequent popes were physically examined before taking the throne. The story goes that the pontiff-to-be has to sit on a sedia stercoraria—a chair with a hole in it—as a cardinal reaches up and touches his genitals, declaring, “Duos habet et bene pendentes.” Translation: “He has two, and they dangle nicely.”
SEE ALSO: APOCRYPHA; FANFIC; HOMER; PHANTOM TIME HYPOTHESIS; PRESTER JOHN
It seems pretty simple, but pornography is one of humanity’s most confounding by-products.
Resisting classification is its primary act of defiance. What is pornography, exactly? We claim to “know it when we see it,” but only with chagrin, a pragmatic phrase born of an inability to define.119 Is porn a form of storytelling? Is it art? Is it covertly violent? Overtly healthy? Socially dangerous? Pure fantasy? Impure reality? Reality television?
Is it normal? (What is a normal?) (Is anything normal?)
To consider this matter, let us consult an expert—50 Cent. The mogul rapper, in what seems like a lapse of judgment, once told Spin magazine that to avoid extortion, he records all his sexual encounters. “I always tell women, ‘When you come into this room, there is going to be a surveillance camera,’” said the ex-gangbanger of his bedchamber. “And it’s not only for legal reasons. I enjoy watching it, too, if I feel like I performed.”120
For just a moment, pretend you are 50 Cent. You don’t have to envisage being shot nine times in Queens, but try to imagine rigging your bedroom with surveillance cameras. Imagine telling prospective paramours that your lovemaking will be recorded, not just out of litigation anxiety but because you might watch it later, for enjoyment. Can you imagine? If so, here is the question: Are you, faux-Fiddy, creating pornography?121
To address the quandary, we must pause to recognize the issue creating the categorical impasse: What is the role of “the actor” in pornography? With traditional films, we can easily parse the function of the performer, without complication. When Uma Thurman delicately coaxes John Travolta into wiggling the twist at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, or when Bill Murray furtively whispers in Scarlett Johansson’s ear on the streets of Shibuya, or even when Meg Ryan saucily simulates an ORGASM for Billy Crystal in Katz’s Deli—in all cases, there is no confusion about its narrative category. It’s simple: These are the actions of actors, dramatizing roles in fictional movies. But what is going on when porn stars Sasha Grey and James Deen shampoo the wookie on a futon in San Fernando? It’s not fake, exactly, because they, like 50 Cent in his panopticon boudoir, are actually having sex. It is very real—and yet, like so much pornography, it resembles no reality. No one would mistake a porno flick for a dramatic blockbuster, but no one would describe it as documentary either. Like one of those indecisive quantum particles, pornography coexists as both real and fake.122
Erotic matters are preternaturally fuzzy, especially in their taxonomic distribution. Consider the difference between the age-old arts of pornography and prostitution. If you have sex for money, we call it prostitution. If you have sex for money while filming, it becomes pornography. But why? Why does the camera—the recording and distribution—change the classification?
Umberto Eco took up the question of categorization in his essay “How to Recognize a Porn Movie.” Counterintuitively, his theory for identifying smut targeted the nonpornographic scenes—those interminable moments of plot that forestall the real action. “If, to go from A to B, the characters take longer than you would like, then the film you are seeing is pornographic,” he concluded.123 It was probably an accurate depiction of illicit theater-driven porn in 1989, when the semiotician published his treatise, but in the age of widespread internet porn, the designation seems, mi scusi, limp. Technology now disaggregates those scenes, so you can, if you choose, skip right past the cumbersome bits that “take longer than you like.” In the internet age, plot is an optional feature.
Which is not to say that rampant fast-forwarding and incognito multi-tabbing (to say nothing of enormous clip aggregators and secret dark web caches) have expunged storytelling from the erotic arts. Narrative, or fantasy, still pumps the steam of the pornographic engine, even if the denouement is, sploosh, always the same. In fact, it is the narrative realism of adult films, or the lack thereof, that still gets harshly criticized in ethical discussions of internet porn. Those scuzzy websites, the argument goes, create a false sense of actual sex, harming our perceptions of what partners desire. But this appeal to realism demands a delicate rhetorical maneuver. Was accuracy ever the domain of pornography? Did the exaggerated endomorphism of ancient fertility figurines stunt the minds of paleolithic boys?124
The internet has a maxim, known as Rule 34, which tries to explain its abundance of sexual imagery: If you can imagine it, there is porn of it. But if you have imagined it, and someone has made porn of it, then someone has really done it. It exists—there’s no more need to imagine. Rule 34 suggests an eternal libidinous loop, where our most perverse ideas are immediately shown back to us as real. And because someone else did it on-screen, license seems to be granted to re-create the act, leading to the big question: Should sex imitate porn? Is it a guidebook, or should porn be deemed an uninhabitable “other world,” no more desirable than Middle-earth or Arrakis? When should fantasy stay fantasy, and when should it become real?
Mysteriously, pornography seems to accrue power by ignoring the question, by defying classification and straddling categories like a Sybian warhorse. More than sex itself, porn seems resistant to simple linguistic description, possibly because it thrives in the dark, away from our social language. (Even simple action verbs are lacking. We say one watches porn, but that ignores a whole cosmology of interactions and maneuvers.)
For his part, 50 Cent continues to blur the category. In 2016 he was ordered by a court to pay $7 million in damages to Rick Ross’s baby mama for publishing her sex tape. Fiddy did not record or appear in the video, but as part of his ongoing beef with Ross, the rapper superimposed his own face over the gentleman in the video and added a vulgar audio track. Fiddy then dropped his filthy mashup online, just to rankle Ross. After losing the lawsuit, the creator of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ filed for bankruptcy. Now here’s the same question again: Was Fiddy creating pornography? Not even the ontological pragmatism of “I know it when I see it” can help us sort through this one.
SEE ALSO: CELEBRITY SEX TAPES; DONKEY PUNCH; ORGASMS; REALDOLL; SLASHFIC
Potemkin Villages flaunt fake exteriors, disguising shabby conditions behind their showy facades. The term comes not only from Russia but from the queen bee of the empire herself.
In 1783, Catherine the Great’s ex-lover and soulmate, Grigory Potemkin, urged the Empress to annex the peninsula known as Crimea. Her Majesty abided—and then rewarded her confidant with the governorship of the colony. Catherine soon announced a surprise six-month journey to her new annexed territory. The story goes that as the Empress travelled down the Dnieper River through Crimea, Potemkin erected a new “mobile village” on the waterfront of each port, populating it with frolicking peasants. Each night, the village was disassembled and rebuilt downstream at the next stop.
Regrettably, this account of Potemkin Villages is itself likely a Potemkin Village. It probably never happened. Governor Potemkin surely spruced up the riverfront for his Empress, painting facades and stashing derelicts. But there is scant evidence that he constructed entire pasteboard villages. The rumor of Potemkin’s stage management was likely concocted as propaganda by his enemies to make him appear mendacious.125
Crimea would eventually be transferred back to Ukraine (by Khrushchev, of all people), which gained independence in 1991. But in another act of revanchism in 2014, Vladimir Putin notoriously annexed the strategic jewel of Crimea again, for a second time. The same year, just a skip across the Caspian, the Winter Olympics were held in Sochi, Russia. The Olympics have always embodied a type of Potemkin Village—quickly erected architecture, meretricious television staging, superficial city cleanups. But in preparing for these games, Putin intensified the pageantry, making his omnipotence part of the theatrical display, by lashing out at political opponents, rolling tanks into peaceful territories, and jailing journalists. In reannexing Crimea and emblazoning his ostentatious might over the region, Putin seemed determined to erect a new Potemkin Village—this time more symbolic, yet more imperious.
SEE ALSO: CLAQUE; FALSE FLAG OPERATION; GERRYMANDERING; GREEBLES; MOIROLOGIST; TRAP STREETS; TRUMAN SYNDROME; UTOPIA
Who is the most influential fictional person of all time? There are plenty of potent characters from which to choose.
We might start the search for significance in the clouds of Olympus, where a pantheon of classical gods, among them Zeus and Athena and Apollo, clumsily shaped our future literature, art, philosophy, and politics. Or we could turn to a more direct case, like the search for the mythical Holy Grail, told in the lofty legends of King Arthur in medieval Europe, which spurred Christians into the misbe-gotten crusades. Among the influencers, we cannot overlook more intimate figures, including childhood fables like SANTA CLAUS and Cinderella, who probably leave behind some insidious residue in their psychic demise. (The same mystery accompanies the impressions left by those video game and comic book characters—Superman! Wonder Woman!—who dominate our youth.) The outlaw myth of Robin Hood likely did some good, too, affording at least an ounce of philanthropic goodwill to the poor. Big Brother, on the other hand, may have inspired some regrettable technology. Godzilla, some scholar has surely put forth, helped desiccate the Cold War. And just as surely, an actuarial chart buried in a sooty filing cabinet in Virginia has tabulated a kill count from the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel.
All these fictional personas left some impact on history. But one overlooked medieval patriarch might surpass all their influence—Prester John, a mythical king whose awareness reigned for more than 500 years starting in the twelfth century. His closest corollary today might be Superman, in both popularity and potency.
The prester (a title once given to early Christian priests) began as a modest myth, a minor king in the Orient. From humble beginnings, he became a sensation in 1165, when a letter from his hand began to circulate around Europe. In opulent detail, the epistle unveiled his sumptuous Nestorian empire,126 containing such wonders as the Fountain of Youth and the Garden of Eden. The true origin of the letter remains a mystery lost to history, but over centuries it was disseminated across Christendom, embellished with each iteration, until a hundred unique manuscripts flitted around. In some cases, Prester John had accrued magical abilities; others claimed he was a direct descendant of a Magi. His gilded kingdom moved around, too, from India (where Pope Alexander III sent an emissary to find him) to Mongolia (where he was linked to Genghis Khan) to Ethiopia (where his myth finally dissipated when Portuguese envoys could not locate him). Persistent rumors that he was victorious over Muslim armies guaranteed that his notoriety would last for centuries.
By the time his myth was finally debunked (perhaps the Fountain of Youth was a tad too whimsical), Prester John had secured a lasting effect on religion, world trade, exploration, literature, and politics. To devout Christians, he represented evidence that the teachings of Jesus were universal, which turned out to be a handy precondition for colonialism. Believing another Christian kingdom thrived beyond Islamic land, missionaries for centuries expanded their efforts toward Central Asia, Africa, and India. The explorer Bartolomeu Dias became the first European to sail around Africa to the Indian Ocean partially because Portugal’s king wanted to find the mythical ruler. The same request was given to Ferdinand Magellan as he circumnavigated the globe. Not long after, Shakespeare mentioned the legendary king in Much Ado About Nothing, but by then, Prester John had finally become a punchline as a fanciful mythical figure.
Today, the legendary priest-king can be found in Marvel Comics (in issues of Fantastic Four and Thor) and on the Netflix series Marco Polo. Still a minor character, he may have had more impact than all his fictional peers.
SEE ALSO: APOCRYPHA; FANFIC; GOSPEL OF JESUS’S WIFE; HOMER; POPE JOAN; SANTA CLAUS
From the tree line, a figure ambles onto the screen, his head conspicuously pixelated against the conifers. A slide guitar squawks, now instantly recognizable as the slurring intro to “Loser.” The blurred figure finally removes some mysterious headgear, and the pixelation disappears. “In the time of chimpanzees,” the figure raps, “I was a monkey.” At this moment in the 1994 music video, most of the world sees Beck for the first time, but his head is fuzzy for the first few bars of his debut. Years later, we would learn that he was wearing a stormtrooper helmet, which Lucasfilm did not approve of, leading to one of the most conspicuous instances of product displacement—blurring unlicensed material to unrecognizability.127
Avoiding fees for trademarked content is just one rationale for product displacement. The other is that companies often spend exorbitant sums to get their logos inserted into movies or television shows. Accidentally filmed brands that have not ponied up their PRODUCT PLACEMENT fees get pixelated through a process known as greeking. These blurry boxes are so ubiquitous on some reality television (hovering over shirts, hats, posters, cars, websites, cereal boxes, and most ominously, other television screens) that they almost create another character in the room—the Blurry Blob behind the Kardashian.
In one of the most notorious cases of product displacement, brands insisted on being removed from the film that won the Best Picture Oscar in 2008. According to director Danny Boyle, Coca-Cola and Mercedes did not want to be associated with the squalor of Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire. Their logos were digitally removed from the shantytown in postproduction.
Fictional worlds scrubbed of all branding can feel unrealistic, which was used to great effect in Repo Man (1984), set in a disorienting commercial desert that contains only generic products. To avoid the alienation of worlds without marketing, directors will sometimes invent imaginary brands to substitute for real-world ones. This type of product displacement creates a kind of visual rhyming with reality, such as when the protagonists of Scrubs hang at Coffee Bucks, or the employees of 30 Rock reckon with their new owners at Kabletown. Some market researchers speculate these unpaid faux placements might actually be better for the real brand than true product placements. Which is super depressing.
A final type of product displacement might be ad blockers, which remove banners and sponsors from websites. But in this case, it is the consumer who greeks out the brand from view.
SEE ALSO: DEFICTIONALIZED PRODUCT; PRODUCT PLACEMENT; WIPING
Betty Draper beams a rainbow of pride as she introduces each dish at her international-themed dinner party.128 “We are going to take a little trip around the world,” she says, pointing to gazpacho from Spain, rumaki from Japan, and spaetzle from Germany. Still spinning her culinary globe, she moves on to beverages. “We have a choice of Burgundy from France, or a frosty glass of beer from Holland.”
Roger Sterling and Duck Phillips, two of the dinner guests, are nonplussed to hear Betty mention the beer brand. Unwittingly, she is serving one of Sterling-Cooper’s premier clients, Heineken. “[Don] said you were the market, and you are,” Duck says to Betty. At the head of the table, Don just smiles his usual smile, smug and euphoric.
“What an interesting experiment,” Betty enunciates, clearly annoyed she fell for one of her husband’s campaigns. She does not like hearing that she is susceptible to advertising. No one does. Which is why the scene is so ingenious—we are Betty. Heineken is a product placement inserted into Mad Men for a heavy fee. And we, the viewers who just fell for the trick, don’t love falling for it either.
All day we see people using products—cheerily chugging Heinekens, gleefully tapping iPhones, mindlessly raving about their Teslas. So, in theory, a product placement inside a television show (or movie, or video game, or book, or song) should create authenticity. But it often has the reverse effect. Some product placements are clever, like when Dwight from The Office takes a job at Staples. Others seem forced, like every time the detectives on The Wire devour takeout KFC. The unforgettable placements include Reese’s Pieces129 in E.T. and Tom Cruise sporting Ray-Bans in both Risky Business (Wayfarers) and Top Gun (Aviators). They might seem a recent development, but product placements go way back. James Dean swept an Ace comb through his hair in Rebel Without a Cause (1955); Wrigley’s gum appears onscreen for a good thirty seconds in Fritz Lang’s M (1919). But over the past decade, their frequency has certainly intensified. Nearly all broadcast network shows now have paid placements, and movies are steeped in brands—Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) mashed fifty-five brands into 165 minutes, miraculously including Victoria’s Secret and Oreo.
In music, shameless plugging began with Run DMC’s “My Adidas,” which started as a simple unpaid homage but led to a $1.5 million endorsement deal, ushering in an era of product shout-outs in hip-hop. Jay-Z now tops that universe, with more than sixty paid mentions in verse.
Spotting the product placement often takes on the characteristics of sport. One of the joyful (and frustrating) aspects of Mad Men is guessing which placements are paid.130 The series wryly concludes with the “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” jingle, which totally could be a product placement but also seems too brazen to be one. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Like Betty, we all just unwittingly take a swig.
SEE ALSO: DEFICTIONALIZED PRODUCT; FOREIGN BRANDING; MERE-EXPOSURE EFFECT; PRODUCT DISPLACEMENT; SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING; TOYETIC; VIRAL MARKETING
The Protocols purports to be the meeting minutes of the First Zionist Congress, a clandestine conference held in Basel, Switzerland, where Jewish leaders plotted to control the world’s gold supply, to ensnare the population in ruinous debt, and to exterminate gentiles. A sampling from the summit’s anonymous amanuensis:
The goyim are a flock of sheep, and we are their wolves. And you know what happens when the wolves get hold of the flock?
No, tell me more, Grandpa.
First published in 1903 by Russian mystic Sergei Nilus, The Protocols quickly spread in translation throughout Europe but was finally exposed in 1921 by the London Times as a hoax—and worse, plagiarism! (The text contains several passages obviously cribbed from previous anti-Semitic works.) One prominent theory holds that the document was originally composed as a parody of Jewish idealism, but some giddy bigots decided to publish it as though it were real.
Whatever its provenance, noted assembly line maniac Henry Ford can be credited with helping The Protocols gain momentum in America in the early ‘20s. In a series of articles titled The International Jew, Ford defended The Protocols in his weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.131 He also funded the printing of a half-million copies of The Protocols to be distributed around the country.
The story only devolves from here. Ford had an admirer in one Adolf Hitler, who praised the auto-maker in Mein Kampf, had a photo of him in his office, and even awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest honor a foreigner can receive. The Protocols were used as propaganda in the Nazi justification of genocide, and the Führer cited Ford’s International Jew as an “inspiration.”
One of the greatest tragedies in human history may have been ignited by a virulent hoax—an anonymous, fabricated text that scapegoated the Jewish people in an international conspiracy.
SEE ALSO: THE BIG LIE; FALSE FLAG OPERATION; HITLER DIARIES
Events have a way of happening. Either by chance or necessity, incidents just spill out into the universe. A dog barks at a cat. A tree falls in the forest. You chomp into a burrito. A star implodes into a super-nova. Events just happen.
Pseudo-events don’t just happen. Far from inevitable, pseudo-events exist because they have been choreographed, scripted, arranged. A corporation holds a press conference to generate positive news. A politician visits a disaster site “for optics.” A restaurant invites “influencers” to its “grand opening” to “share photos.” A reality TV star hires a CLAQUE to applaud his candidacy for president. Pseudo-events are created.
Pseudo-events are a form of media that creates more media; staged spectacles, arousing attention. Born in the wasteland of advertising and public relations, the pseudo-event has migrated to the fertile fields of politics and media, which are mutating before our eyes into empires of pure theater and entertainment.
The distinction between event and pseudo-event originates with historian Daniel Boorstin. In his 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Boorstin claimed that America was living in an “age of contrivance.” As we master “our arts of self-deception,” fabrications have become a ritualized force in society. “We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions,” Boorstin wrote. “We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.” Public life brims with pseudo-events—counterfeit happenings untethered from reality.132
Arising from dismay over the televised spectacle of the Nixon/Kennedy debates of 1960, Boorstin’s definition of the pseudo-event is almost quaint by the standards of modern media saturation. Since his coinage, we have seen the presidency awarded first to an actor, and then to a reality TV star. Every reason to leave the house is now dubbed an “experience,” and the notion of a “staged event” has become so ubiquitous that it bears no difference from mere “event.” Photo ops (a term forged by the Nixon administration) now occur when anyone pulls out their phone, like insta-kliegs combusted from a pocket. Government emails are stolen and released as “leaks,” and world leaders tweet apocalyptic threats at each other. (Perhaps colleges will one day offer courses in Reality Studies, taught nostalgically like Renaissance Painting or Latin, with a syllabus of non-synthetic experiences. We know just the textbook!)
Pseudo-events are ingrained into the system, indistinct from non-illusions. Unlike propaganda, which intentionally distorts facts, these faux-happenings certify a new reality. Pseudo-events are not necessarily lies, but they always could be, which makes them both irresistible and anxiety-inducing. Because they are pervasive, pseudo-events elude the accusation of contrivance. To the charge “that’s just theater,” the pseudo-event cynically shoots back, “it’s all just theater.” Just as no accolades are bestowed for announcing that air exists, pointing at artificiality goes unrewarded.
In the age of virtual reality and fake news, Insta-gram celebrities and fantasy football, pseudo-events are indistinguishable from reality itself. “We risk being the first people in history,” wrote Boorstin, “to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” The risk is over. What is reality now, but another synthetic sub-category of the pseudo-event?
SEE ALSO: BLACK PROPAGANDA; CELEBRITY SEX TAPES; CLAQUE; PLANDID; REALITY-BASED COMMUNITY; THE TREACHERY OF IMAGES; POTEMKIN VILLAGE; VIRAL MARKETING
It’s November—the day before the election. Your phone rings. Picking up, you hear an automated message:
Hello, this is Max McGovern, your proud candidate for governor. I am calling to remind you to vote tomorrow for the causes that matter to you—job growth, safe communities, and equality.
An hour later, the phone rings again, another political telemarketer:
Hello, this is pollster Bridget Smothers. I am taking a quick public opinion survey about candidate awareness before tomorrow’s election. First question: Did you know that gubernatorial candidate Max McGovern is a convicted pedophile?
The first call from Max is an innocuous (if annoying) campaign advertisement. It likely has minimal effect on your vote. The second call from wily Bridget is also an ad, but one disguised as an opinion poll. Known as push polls, these political dirty tricks feign as innocent surveys, but with the intent of implanting negative (often false) information about an opponent. The push poll is political canvassing that masquerades as research.
Richard Milhous Nixon was a pioneer of the push poll. In 1946, the future president entered his first campaign against Jerry Voorhis, an incumbent for an Orange County seat in the House of Representatives. Throughout the district, voters reported receiving phone calls that began, “This is a friend of yours, but I can’t tell you who I am. Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a communist?” At least one person admitted to phone-banking ads for $9 per day, but the red-baiting attacks could never be directly linked to Nixon.133
Countless candidates have since been accused of issuing push polls. Accused is the operative word, as candidates are seldom caught. Other forms of media can be traced—television ads can be recorded, website campaigns are screengrabbed, direct mail is a physical document. But push polls leave behind scant evidence. Phone calls are ephemeral, and recording them requires some effort. Leaving few footprints, anonymous push polls sit atop the crooked campaigner’s bag of dirty tricks.
SEE ALSO: ASTROTURFING; BARRON, JOHN; BLACK PROPAGANDA; FALSE FLAG OPERATION; FUD; SOCK PUPPET; SWIFTBOATING
111 Attaining membership into the cabalistic 27 Club is an intense two-step hazing ritual that involves [1] being a musician and [2] dying at the age of 27. Given its extensive enrollment—Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, D. Boon, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse are all members—it can be tempting to find significance in the twenty-seventh year.
112 Most of Pascal’s theological work is found in Pensées (1670)—literally “thoughts”—a fragmentary collection published posthumously.
113 Because of the calendar change, ten days of history really did vanish: October 5, 1582, on the Julian side to October 14, 1582, on the Gregorian. Protestant churches resisted the Pope’s witchy decrees, so the English-speaking world ignored the Gregorian switcheroo until 1752, when the United Kingdom and its colonies lost September 3–13. Either way, the phantom time hypothesis is very real—if you count these ten days that non-mysteriously disappeared.
114 New Chronology might have been laughed off as kooky folklore if not for a few notable Russian intellectuals who embraced it, including chess champion Garry Kasparov.
115 History: Fiction or Science? (2004). Cool title.
116 Marston was a complex figure—a Harvard psychologist, a Gillette razor spokesperson, a bondage enthusiast, a huckster, and a polyamorist (he bore children with his wife and her niece, while living with both). He authored several books, including You Can Be Popular (1936) and The Lie Detector Test (1938), but the canonical account of his life can be found in The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014) by Jill Lepore. His peculiar life became a biopic in 2017 with the release of Professor Marston and the Wonder Women.
117 The Supreme Court case United States v. Scheffer (1998) stated, “There is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable.” But some judges still sometimes allow them to be administered when both parties agree.
118 The difference between a Ponzi scheme and a pyramid scheme is a simple matter of transparency. Whereas a Ponzi scheme touts some sort of esoteric investment strategy, a pyramid scheme (e.g., Amway, Herbalife, Mary Kay) unabashedly admits that new capital powers the system.
119 The phrase “I know it when I see it” was famously delivered by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold for obscenity. Often forgotten, he wrote those words in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), which ruled that the Louis Malle film The Lovers (1958) was not obscene.
120 50 Cent spoke these words in the April 2005 issue of Spin.
121 If you are a purist who deems gonzo “sex tapes” inferior products, recall that Paris Hilton’s sex tape, which was marketed as 1 Night in Paris, won multiple AVN Awards.
122 As to the question of “acting” in pornography, when the former porn star Jenna Haze was asked on Twitter why she quit the biz, she responded, “I never enjoyed it. I was acting the entire time.” If After Porn Ends, a 2012 documentary about the industry, is an indication, this aloof stance toward the carnal craft is common, but not universal, among porn actors.
123 The English version of the essay can be found in his collection, How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays (1992). Eco’s statement is effectively the opposite of the old Hitchcock adage, “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.” Porn, according to Eco, puts the dull parts back in.
124 Maybe!
125 Since we are in historical debunking mode, now is a good time to mention that the Russian empress was not a nymphomaniac who fornicated with stallions. Catherine the Great did not die during an equine tryst, as told by legend, but in bed from a stroke. In her sixty-seven long years, she did accumulate twenty-two male lovers, many of them young and handsome. But like an early form of kompromat, the rumors about her sexual voracity were mostly fabricated by enemies.
126 Nestorians were Christians of the East. Today we might think of them as proto-Protestants, as they denied certain Catholic doctrine, including the divinity of Mary.
127 The practice might seem spurious, but these types of trademark lawsuits are not uncommon. Anheuser-Busch sued the studio behind Flight (2012), in which Denzel Washington pilots a jetliner after getting plastered on Budweiser. Emerson Electric sued NBC for a scene of Heroes in which their garbage disposal, InSinkErator, is cast “in an unsavory light, irreparably tarnishing the product.” The producers of Debbie Does Dallas (1978) were litigated because the film involved carnality with a cheerleader whose team is “confusingly similar” to a certain prominent NFL franchise. Sometimes the litigant wins, sometimes the filmmakers win, and sometimes they settle out of court. Quite often, as part of the settlement, the brand is digitally scrubbed from later showings.
128 This Mad Men scene is from “A Night to Remember” (season 2, episode 8), set in 1962.
129 Hershey, the makers of Reese’s Pieces, did not pay the studio directly but spent a million dollars on advertising E.T. in exchange for having the lovable extraterrestrial gobble the coated candy. Steven Spielberg initially wanted M&M’s in the movie, but Mars requested final script review, so the studio offered it to Reese’s instead.
130 Mad Men Placement Cheat Sheet! PAID: Heineken, Cadillac, Utz, US Airways, London Fog, Smirnoff. NOT PAID: Coca-Cola, Lucky Strike, McCann, Jaguar, American Airlines, Dow Chemical.
131 No rinky-dink rag, The Dearborn Independent was the nation’s second-largest paper (due to a promotion imposed on Ford dealers), with nearly a million in circulation. When Ford faced libel charges for the series in 1927, he apologized and shuttered the paper.
132 Counterfeit events breed counterfeit people. A celebrity, as Boorstin defined the species, is “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” The tautology struck a chord, and would morph into the epithet “famous for being famous.”
133 This story derives from “When Push Comes to Poll,” a 1996 story in Washington Monthly.
