Journos

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, turning its seltzer into ... seltzer. It is an absurd miracle of form following func...

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 question: "What is consciousness?"

Brandon & Stephen hunted far and wide and interviewe...

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 this new symbol, a man who got chopsticks lodged in his brain ... and didn't even kn...

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 Physics at the UK's University of Portsmouth, and he's made news for his work studying t...

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, sexy vampires and go in search of truth ... or treats.

In the second sinister story, a ...

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 out whether the city's paper of record really really loves rats, or really really h...

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 the journal Science that posits the human population went through a bottleneck suc...

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 Anthony's "Rich Men North of Richmond." Both songs are big conservative talking points...

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 environment that is (might as well just say it) medieval. 

In this episode, we talk ...

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 in 1947 by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a publication launched by Albert Ei...

(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 guest, Valerie Demicheva, takes us through Neuralink's history of animal-welfare viola...

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 recently when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were involved in a post-gala paparazzi pursui...

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 ecstasy more than the press? The LA Phil, no doubt.

The story hinges on the frustrating ...

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 for dead. It was game on for commentators in the world of tech and elsewhere, like perp...

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 expert on one species vying with humans for control of our cities: the raccoon.

In this e...

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 One dog — the French Bulldog. The Frenchie toppling the 31-year-reign of the Labrador ...

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 jokes to making it easier for everybody to sue everybody.

As AI continues its siege of t...

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 adolescents, and has some great insights on everything from the reasons teens do the crazy sh...

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 carriers, sometimes whole neighborhoods lose delivery service. It seems that, indeed...