This just in

[Pogo]

Matt Taibbi

Well, I can’t interview the gorilla.

If President Bartlet can take time out his busy schedule for a gorilla, I don't see what's stopping you, Mr Reporter.

[Constantine the Great]

Rats Are Us

In the late 1990s, Jaak Panksepp, the father of affective neuroscience, discovered that rats laugh. This fact had remained hidden because rats laugh in ultrasonic chirps that we can’t hear. It was only when Brian Knutson, a member of Panksepp’s lab, started to monitor their vocalisations during social play that he realised there was something that appeared unexpectedly similar to human laughter. Panksepp and his team began to systematically study this phenomenon by tickling the rats and measuring their response. They found that the rats’ vocalisations more than doubled during tickling, and that rats bonded with the ticklers, approaching them more frequently for social play. The rats were enjoying themselves. But the discovery was met with opposition from the scientific community. The world wasn’t ready for laughing rats.

[Diane Arbus]

The Kate Middleton Photo That Was Too Good to Be True

Stare at any meaningful image for too long and you will eventually end up in the back yard with Lee Harvey Oswald, taking measuring tape to shadows, trying to strike that strange backward-leaning pose, looking like somebody’s patsy.

[James Madison]

What Might the US Owe the World for Covid-19?

The sum of the evidence – and the absence of reliable evidence pointing to a natural origin – adds up to the possibility that the US funded and implemented a dangerous GoF research program that led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and then to a worldwide pandemic. A powerful recent assessment by mathematical biologist Alex Washburne reaches the conclusion “beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab…” He also notes that the collaborators “proceeded to mount what can legitimately be called a disinformation campaign” to hide the laboratory origin.

[Allen Ginsberg]

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness and devotion to The Guardian, which ain't what it used to be.

Once upon a time, belonging to a group you reported on was considered a conflict of interest; now it’s a requirement. The fertile combination of postmodernism and social justice led to the idea that since true objectivity is a myth—or a tool of oppressive forces—lived experience trumps expertise. Everyone is biased, so the correct bias must be embedded. This leads to journalists scrutinizing the things they should accept, and accepting the things they should be scrutinizing.