The Disco Craze Started with a Lie and Ended with an Explosion

So now you had a nationwide craze over a genre of music that barely existed (having just broken off from Motown and R&B), based on a piece of long-form journalism that was entirely fictional and a movie made by people with no real connections to the original disco scene.

That Time That We All Decided to Feel Good about Ourselves, but Somehow It Didn’t End Poverty and Crime

While people sometimes make bad decisions because they feel bad about themselves, the truth is that people make bad decisions for all sorts of reasons, including because they feel excessively good about themselves.

No, Brainwashing Isn’t a Thing. So I Guess Your Problems Are Your Own Fault.

If anyone could engage in brainwashing, it’s the God of the universe, and he doesn’t. Which probably tells you . . . something.

Why Were Comic Books So Bland and Silly in the 1950s? Moral Panic, Obviously.

Stories that pretend horrifying, disturbing, and immoral things simply don’t exist tend to ring hollow. 

In 2000, the Internet Was the Future, until Every Internet Company Went Broke

Nobody really had the answers to these questions about the internet, but it was clear there was a lot of venture capital to be raised by pretending you did.

I Promised Myself I Wouldn’t Talk about “Cancel Culture” Here, but Then Crime Scene Happened, so I Guess I Have To

The reality is that the whims of the internet mob are, at best, only occasionally guided by moral clarity and a sense of true justice.

Kilroy Was Basically Everywhere, at Least until World War II Ended

Kilroy graffiti was something of a liturgy: a ritual that reshaped hearts and minds into parallel forces striving toward the same goal.

We Never Quite Figured out What “Political Correctness” Is, but We’re Still All Pretty Sure It’s a Bad Thing

By the late eighties, though, the American right had discovered political correctness, and—well—that crowd has never met a phrase it couldn’t turn into an insult.

Why Seventeenth-Century French Noblemen All Looked Like Grandmas

Giant, poofy white hair—something those of us alive today all associate with grandmas—somehow, for nearly a dozen generations, became a symbol of male power and virility. How did this happen?

For Several Decades Quicksand Was the Most Dangerous Thing on TV and Movie Screens…and Exactly Nowhere Else

If quicksand is really so dull, though, how did it become such a popular trope in cinema? And how did it disappear just as quickly?

So You Just Found Out You’re in a Cult: A Socratic Dialogue

Wait! Conspiracies happen all the time! Why are people so down on conspiracy theories these days?

No, Y2K Wasn’t a World-Ending Disaster. It Also Wasn’t a Silly Hoax.

Of course, as overblown as much of the Y2K panic was, the it-was-all-a-big-hoax assessment wasn’t really accurate either.

Maybe the Real War on Christmas Was the Friends We Made along the Way

The backlash against O’Reilly’s 2004 fabrication of “The War on Christmas” was as swift as his declaration of it to exist.

The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of 3D Cinema

When you factor in the higher costs, the uncomfortable glasses, and the headaches, it was probably only a matter of time before the novelty wore off.

We All Should Have Seen the Beanie Babies Crash Coming, but We Didn’t

For anyone who didn’t live through the nineties, it’s difficult to explain how big a deal Beanie Babies were.

You Will Probably Not Be a Rock God, and Neither Will I: Some Deep Thoughts on Bill and Ted Face the Music

We’re not, it turns out, a civilization of rock gods and their devotees; we’re all connected, and we all depend on each other.