"Read the Room"? Thanks for the tip, but I'll pass

Lenny Bruce declining to read the room

Long-term readers of my newspaper stuff may remember that back in 2023, I called for the immediate abolition of the phrase “read the room.” It pains me to say that two years later, my call still hasn’t been heeded. Our culture’s self-appointed moral guardians continue to bandy this smug catchphrase around quite freely, almost as if I hadn’t gone to the trouble of mathematically proving, more than two years ago, that it’s a sinister piece of verbal garbage that sorely needs to be put out of its misery. I’ll admit that the phrase once meant something useful, in its original context. But the wowsers and wokesters of today have irretrievably corrupted its meaning. It’s become a mantra for groupthinkers — the mating cry of people who think with the herd, and want you to think with the herd too … or else.

I struck an amusing example of this last week, while listening to “Blood Relatives”, the latest season of The New Yorker’s true-crime podcast In the Dark. “Blood Relatives” deals with the notorious White House Farm murders, which happened in England in 1985 ...

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Why is A.I. So Dumb?

OUR MACHINE OVERLORDS ARE SO THICK THEY THINK BILL MURRAY WAS IN SUPERBAD

Remember that scene in Superbad where Bill Murray helps Jonah Hill buy a case of beer? Or the scene
where McLovin and Bill Murray crash a keg party and try to get laid? No? Neither do I, because Bill Murray wasn’t in Superbad.

Or was he? According to Google’s state-of-the-art A.I. Overview feature, he was. I know this because a few weeks ago, as I browsed my increasingly junk-filled news feed, my eye was caught by a clickbait headline that said something like Here’s the Reason Why Bill Murray Has Never Worked With Judd Apatow. This headline made me curious. Not curious enough to swallow the clickbait, but curious enough to do a quick Google search on the terms “Judd Apatow” and “Bill Murray.” Here’s how Google’s A.I. answered my query ...

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Peace Rage

 DONALD TRUMP AND THE NOBEL PRIZE

Pondering how to write about the week’s biggest news story, I’ve found myself in an ethical quandary. Last week I wrote about the inglorious and sometimes farcical history of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The week before that, I wrote about what a rancid old barbarian Donald Trump is.
This week these two positions of mine collided, perhaps irreconcilably, when the Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to the Venezuelan dissident Maria Machado. 

On the face of it, Machado’s victory seemed well-deserved. Here is a woman who has risked her personal freedom to defend and uphold democratic values in her unhappy native land. “Democracy is in retreat internationally,” said the Nobel Committee, when announcing Machado’s victory. By awarding the prize to Machado, the Committee wanted to give the world a timely reminder that democracy “is the foundation of peace.”

Who could argue with this claim? Who could deny that the Nobel Prize would seem, on this occasion, to have gone to a worthy recipient?

Well, Donald Trump could. In his view, Machado’s victory was a nauseating travesty of justice, because the prize clearly should have gone to someone else – namely, Donald J. Trump himself. After all, Trump has been hailed, by no less an authority than his own White House, as “the peace president”. This is a man who has spent a whole year of his life, off and on, tirelessly and shamelessly angling to win the Nobel, which is more than you can say for Machado. 

Earlier this month, as Nobel season approached, Trump made one last brazen pitch for the prize. On Truth Social, while announcing that he had just masterminded a ceasefire in Gaza, Trump underscored his Nobel credentials by quoting, in all caps and with an exclamation mark, the words of Jesus H. Christ himself. “BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!” he posted ...

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Donald Trump Cures Autism. Again.

IS THERE ANYTHING THE MAN CAN'T DO?

I’ve said some harsh things about Donald Trump in the past. But I like to think of myself as a fair-minded person, and I’m always willing to give credit where it’s due. So when Trump kicks a massive goal for humanity, I think it’s incumbent on all of us – including those of us who believe he’s generally a reckless and destructive dickhead – to step back and applaud his good work.

In this spirit, I want to commend Trump for curing autism last Monday. I use the word “cure” in its fullest sense here. Trump hasn’t just identified a medication that can be used, in his view, to treat existing cases of autism. He has discovered the root cause of the whole autism epidemic.

He announced these breakthroughs at a press conference last week. Technically, the purpose of the press conference was to announce changes to FDA advice about two medications: leucovorin, a form of Vitamin B commonly used to treat cancer patients; and the painkiller acetaminophen, marketed in the U.S. as Tylenol, and known in other parts of the world as paracetamol. From now on, FDA labeling on leucovorin will endorse its use as a treatment for people with autism. And labeling on Tylenol will caution pregnant women against taking the drug, because of its possible (or perhaps definite) links to autism.

Let’s not downplay the magnitude of the breakthroughs Trump has made here. For decades, medical scientists have laboured in vain to determine the causes of autism. For decades, we have imagined that if the case is ever cracked, it will be cracked by someone with long experience in the field – or, failing that, even short experience in the field; someone with medical credentials, a rigorous commitment to scientific methods and ethics, and at least a vague idea of what the fuck they are talking about.

It turns out we have been looking in the wrong direction. When the answer to the autism question finally came, it was delivered by a man with no scientific or medical qualifications whatsoever. And the answer wasn’t boring or hard to understand, as so many medical explanations are. It was amazingly simple. Tylenol causes autism. Taking Tylenol is not good.

Of course, Trump put it in a far more nuanced and eloquent way than that. No. Wait. He put it exactly like that.“Taking Tylenol is not good,” he said at his press conference. “I’ll say it. It’s not good" ...

My full tribute to Donald Trump's sensational medical breakthrough can be read for free over at my Substack page – click here to read it. Substack is the new online home for all my writing. If you like my stuff, check out my archive there and hit the "Subscribe" button for weekly updates. It's all free.