For years, rear view mirrors have urged us to be aware that "objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear." And if you think about it, that's a pretty heady statement for a piece of automotive equipment -- reminding drivers that nothing in reality is exactly what it seems. That was certainly the case for a bunch of despondent youngsters and…

It's a new year, and at least one of us at JOURNOS is celebrating Dry January. But what is this strange holiday? What are its origins? And how are booze brands evolving to adapt to the selfish preferences of those who forswear drinking for an entire month? The hard seltzer White Claw offers some answers here, as it unleashes a zero-alcohol product,…

We're introducing a new feature here on JOURNOS: a sort of journalism detective agency. You've got a question, we do journalism on it and find the answer. (I should say that the term "do journalism on it" has had a mixed reception.) Our first question comes from friend and guinea pig of the show, Janet Varney, who asks a pretty simple little questi…

Suggested new phrase for the confusing pace of modern life: "It's like having chopsticks stuck in your brain." Not, of course, the song (we would never be so basic). No — literal chopsticks, but lodged in such a way that you can still go about your business ... just, everything just seems a lot harder. One man unwittingly has become the symbol for …

Is the universe a simulation? If so, is there someone twisting the dials or is the universe a big computer running itself, a program that includes things like the coati and those sneakers with wheels in them? It's a big question (the biggest, really), and in this episode we dig into it with Dr. Melvin Vopson. Melvin is an Associate Professor of Phy…

This Spooky Season, two twisted tales ... In the first fearsome fable, an old monster returns: drugs in the Halloween candy. Fear not, because while there are terrifying candy-looking drugs out there, they're not aimed at kids. But the familiar holiday myth is a reliable zombie, dumb yet unkillable. To address the misnformation, we dress as wet, se…

It's mankind versus nonhuman invaders in this episode of Journos! Stephen's big talk about pant legs gets Brandon thinking about a Washington Post story on rat-hunting that reads like a newspaper version of a snuff film ... only with rats. What's with WaPo's obsession with the city's rats? Our sleuths dig into the last few years of coverage to sort…

After some discussion of one of the lesser-known markers of climate change (sticky leather seats), we kick off this episode by introducing you to a new guest host: Hondo! Then it's on to the question of how we endure crises. First, the unfortunate recent diarrhea incident that forced a Delta plane to turn around. Then, we talk about a recent study …

In this episode — stories of small towns, starting with a moral quandary for Stephen in the smallest town of all: the open ocean(?) What would he do if a rogue otter tried to steal his surfboard? From there we get territorial on two country songs that are topping the charts of the culture war: Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town" and Oliver An…

It's the season of unions, and we've found a union story that's nearly mythic. In February, performers at the Buena Park, CA, location of the Spanish-chivalry-dinner-theater-experience Medieval Times went on strike. They claim dangerous working conditions, low pay, sexual harassment, and unacceptable treatment of the horses all contribute to a work…

The news media is a pretty literal biz. It regularly reports on only two metaphors: One is what that groundhog does every February. The other is what the Doomsday Clock does every January. The Doomsday Clock is that thing that has been ticking intermittently toward (and sometimes away from) midnight (AKA the end of the world) since it was created i…

(UPDATE: Here's Valerie's story.) Hold on to your brain stems: Elon's in the news again. This time, it's because the FDA approved Musk's company Neuralink to begin human trials for its brain implants, which he's claimed will do everything from curing paralysis and autism to turning us into web-surfin' cyborgs. But on this episode, our second-time g…

Used to be, we had forest spirits and talking animals and whatnot. But those days are long over, and now the closest to a mythology we moderns have is celebrities — those magical sprites that materialize in a puff of self-regard and vanish in a flash of cameras. It's not Grimm, but it is grim. The Great American Fairy Tale added a new chapter recen…

In this episode, two stories about trying to figure out what’s on someone’s mind. In the first, we ogle the news media's obsession over the story of a woman who may or may not have had a "full-body orgasm" during a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 at the LA Philharmonic Orchestra. The only folks who hope the music moved her to sexual ecs…

Sometimes a story isn't a story at all. It's a ball that interested players use to score points in whatever game they're playing — politics, cred, likes, lols. In this episode, we're talking about one such story. In San Francisco, a man named Bob Lee, a tech luminary, was murdered in the early morning hours of April 4. He'd been stabbed and left fo…

In our last episode, we talked about the hows and whys of engineering dogs to look like humans, and the consequences of monkeying around with nature. That got us thinking of an interview we did back in 2021 with Suzanne MacDonald, a psychologist at Toronto's York University who studies animal intelligence. She's become, for better or worse, an expe…

Conspiracy abounds in this episode! We consider the not-so-secret breeding programs of the elite, who have for centuries manipulated the very laws of genetics themselves to produce ... cuddly-wuddly faces that you could JUST PINCH AND PINCH AND PINCH UNTIL THEY HAUL YOU AWAYYY Yes. This episode is about dogs. Specifically, America's newest number O…

Future shock? Who's got future shock? In this episode, we dig back into our Official Topic of 2023: the AI Revolution. OpenAI just dropped a shiny new chatbot, GPT-4. This delighted tech journalists, who turned a product launch into lofty thinkpieces and listicles about all the things GPT-4 can do, from diagnosing illness and generating Madonna jok…

In this episode, Stephen (who, by the way, used to be a high school teacher) strikes off on his own to discover what went wrong during his wayward teenage years. Well, not really. But he does track down San Francisco-based therapist Denis Barron, MFT to learn more about what makes young minds tick. Barron has spent his career working with adolescen…

In this episode, we ask: Must a story be told? What happens if it isn't? Could we be better off? Brandon & Stephen are somewhat boggled by the existence of a story that seems out of journalism's primordial past. Not a "man bites dog" story, but an even more ancient piece of news: "dog bites man." We consider a story about how, when dogs attack mail…

In this episode, Brandon has an idea with multimillion-dollar potential: Lowercase numbers! We, humans of the 21st century, are the proud consumers of such a huge variety of products and experiences that it would make a cornucopia blush. And yet ... we're all just resigned to one single way to write numbers. What's the deal? So, yeah, we blow our h…

(When you finish this episode, listen to us solving the mystery of "teenagers" over at The JV Club!) Few have plumbed the depths of the teenage experience more deeply than Janet Varney. For 11 years, she's interviewed actors, artists, comedians, scientists, and other creative types for her podcast, The JV Club. She's amassed quite a lot of research…

Before you head off into your weekend, do you pull loved ones aside and tell them you've accidentally polluted a rainforest, or defrauded retirees, or contributed to a massacre? If so, you might be a popular corporation or politician! In this episode, we're talking about a venerable American institution: the news dump. If you absolutely have to tel…

(After you listen to this episode, make sure you listen to the second part, over at We Got This!) How hard is it to have a conversation these days? When it comes to politics, it is very, very hard. It ranks just below "Talking about your grandparents' sex life," according to an official totally made-up Journos survey we just conducted. So! We need …

It’s the last episode of 2022, and in the spirit of auld lang syne, we’re taking it all the way back to the 9th millennium BCE, to a region found in modern-day Turkey. That’s because it’s there we find what archeologists and artsy types are calling the “oldest known depiction of a narrative scene.” But watch out — this neolithic masterpiece is a bi…

As stories go, it was pure, uncut catnip to news media around the world: San Francisco, that bastion of liberal values, was giving police the go-ahead to use KILLER ROBOTS on its enlightened middle-class citizenry of young moms, tech bros, recent immigrants, and people who like to drink coffee on steep hills. There was hand-wringing on the left and…

Innovation is weird. One moment, you’re an early human spending half the day chewing raw, possibly tainted meat. The next, you’re sending your prehistoric carp back to the waiter because it “just wasn’t the same as last time.” Let’s talk about technological breakthroughs, and let’s do it through the lens of two stories that dropped, seemingly in sy…

We awaken from troubled naps into the existential horror of clickbait. Two stories in particular caught our attention recently: the sad tale of the "World's Dirtiest Man" who lived and died in Iran, and a restaurant for dogs in San Francisco. Like angry media-addicted teenagers, Brandon & Stephen ask: why were these stories even born? Is it just go…

It’s late October, winter is fast-approaching, and there’s one big question on everyone’s mind: What the heck is going on with COVID? Compounding this confusion was President Biden’s declaration that the pandemic was over — despite the fact that the virus is still significantly deadlier than the flu. (This was later walked back, as the public healt…

Let's take a look at things in places where they shouldn’t be, the illusory nature of reality, and bringing mammoths back from the dead to save the world. First up, truck spills — the story that America just can’t quit. Not too long ago 150,000 tomatoes were strewn across the road from a big truck in California. Then — that very same week — thousan…

News from the "Wrongs Righted" Desk ~~ Adnan Syed, imprisoned for a murder he didn't commit, was released after 23 years in prison. If you've heard of Syed, it's from the podcast "Serial," which kick-started the ... trend? genre? industry? ... of longform podcasting. But is it good journalism? After "Serial" premiered in 2014, questions arose about…

Say what you will about the Vikings, but one thing’s for certain: They had a strong brand. So strong, in fact, that it’s easy to draw a pretty clear through line between their insatiable appetite for conquest and the relentless march of tech companies into our personal and private lives. The only difference? Nobody back then would ever agree to a V…

For every season, there is a boogieman. Once upon a time, it might've been vampires, and your average British nobleman might've felt protected by an ornate, classy vampire-killing kit. Ah, but times change. Boogiefolk change. Nowadays, the monster might be something more hip & modern, like wolves. Wolves! Unleashed by environmentalists! In which ca…

What makes life worth living? What kind of cake does the Mona Lisa prefer? What does a chair made of avocados look like? Art, in its many forms, seeks to answer all of the above. And for years, humans have enjoyed a near monopoly on creating it. But things are changing — and fast. Here, we take a look at people, our penchant for environmental destr…

Is this our first real "summer" type summer since the pandemic? The signs of a returned normalcy are there: people traveling, people complaining about traveling. People are even going on cruises again, which is normal, and having threesomes on those cruises, which is presumably also normal, and those threesomes are leading to 60-person battle royal…

Proving that all the good science has already been found out and all that's left is the weird, gross stuff, Brandon & Stephen return from hiatus to tackle the recent discovery of a mite that lives on our face, where it has sex, and where it's gotten so good at having sex on our face that it doesn't know how to live independently anymore. At a time …

We did it! If you’re reading this, you’ve made it to the present day, and may have noticed that many erstwhile promises of science fiction have been delivered on. That's not great: Most sci-fi books and movies of yesteryear — with the notable exceptions of Star Trek and The Jetsons — spell out a blighted future for humanity, and among the most famo…

We begin with a mystery: What does it mean when a pair of sexually aroused river dolphins engage in rough play with an anaconda? Science has no definitive answers, but the media — from Business Insider to The New York Times to BroBible — will happily cover the confusion. So begins an exploration into pareidolia, that cognitive quirk where we see fa…

Some interesting experiments around transportation cropped up lately: In one, a study of big art projects painted on the streets cut down on "incidents" involving drivers and pedestrians. In another, a state called Utah lowered the legal limit for drunk driving while offering more ways for the intoxicated inhabitants of the desert to get home. The …

Elon bought Twitter. (You may have heard.) The analysis, hand-wringing, and general worrywart-ery about how bad it might be for media has been great for media, giving journalists and pundits lots to fill up pages and airtime. And to tweet about, of course. It's a lot to take in, but for us, it helps to think about the whole thing as a visit to a ma…

For AriZona Iced Tea, the 99 cent price printed on the festive southwestern design of its big old cans might as well be carved into tablets lugged down a mountain. Marketing-wise, it's word-of-God stuff. So the company's decision not to raise prices in 30 years became a fun story republished all over the place during the volatility of this inflatio…

Some conflict in this episode: Brandon wants to talk about a new study that suggests black holes have quantum "hair" and Stephen wants to at least take a moment to discuss why the great minds behind the science didn't think a little harder about the branding of their hypothesis. Chortling aside, the hairy black hole story is interesting to us for a…

Stephen said this episode was about "diagnostics," but no one's going to listen to an episode about "diagnostics." Even a diagnostician is going to pass on a diagnostics episode in favor of some vintage white-lady killings on "My Favorite Murder." So! This episode is all about things infiltrating systems, which is much more interesting. Check it --…

Well, would you? You don’t have to decide now, but be aware that lawmakers in Texas have introduced legislation to bring back privateering in order to empower citizens to seize the yachts of Russian oligarchs docked in American harbors. Ahoy. In this episode, Brandon and Stephen take a look at forms of protest and resistance in solidarity with and …

Brandon's on vacation ... a cruise, actually! Which some people might consider work, but after a few dozen piña of coladas, he's feeling philosophical... ... And that's right when Stephen tracks him down to talk about, what else?, shipwrecks, because they're topical and because Stephen isn't reading the room. Still, it was interesting to talk about…

Among the tiny relics dotting the timeline of Christian history, few items pack a bigger punch than the holy prepuce. For the uninitiated, that’s fancy-talk for Jesus’ foreskin, and the provenance and authenticity of numerous specimens purported to be the one-and-only bit of flesh have been questioned for years. That’s just the tip of the proverbia…

In this solo outing, Brandon talks about the big business of personalized, AI-generated music. Companies with names like Spotify, Amazon, and Apple want to suck up all your valuable biorhythms and kick out the jams, while startups like Endel want to use artificial intelligence, and Grimes, to create a soundtrack for your mind because, as the compan…

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine loomed, Brandon reached out to his colleage, journalist Valerie Demicheva, to see if she'd be interested in writing a piece for WhoWhatWhy. Valerie talked to Ukrainians in the days and hours before the invasion to understand their feelings on Russia (and Russians) and how they were preparing. We talked to Valerie …

How should we feel about city officials blasting pop songs to disperse protesters? Better than tear gas, but more disturbing that they're trying to weaponize our precious "Macarena?" Big Brother's DJs were in effect in Wellington, New Zealand's capital — where protesters, inspired by Canada's own anti-vax demonstrations, took to the streets. The We…

In this episode, we start by reflecting on the mystery that is "Gazpacho Police." It's either a flub by Marjorie Taylor Greene, or the stunning reveal that the US Capitol Police's jurisdiction includes soups. Mistake or political ploy, it gave the news media something to freak out about, and the Right something new to fundraise around, probably. Bu…