The Podcast

My longform podcast about the Kennedy assassination, Ghosts of Dallas, is now essentially complete. Episodes 1-20 are available wherever you get your podcasts. 

I've been asked whether there will be any further episodes. There may be, if the assassination comes into the news again — as it did last year, when Donald Trump sought to reveal the "hidden" truth about the assassination by releasing all the remaining classified government files about it. (The upshot, of course, was that the files revealed nothing important about Kennedy's murder that we didn't already know.) 

But for the most part, I've done what I set out to do in the podcast — i.e., I have told the true story of the Kennedy assassination, and I've traced the origins of all the untrue stories that flourished in its wake. I've answered, as well as I can, all the questions I set out to answer: Why is it that more than half the American population has always believed there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy's death? How did JFK conspiracy theory get started? How did it become an industry? How did six decades of myth-making about Kennedy's murder set the scene for the conspiratorial presidency of Donald J. Trump? And why did Jack Ruby bring his favourite sausage dog along on the morning he shot Lee Harvey Oswald?

Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. 

  

"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 ...

Read the rest of this piece for free here, over at my Substack.

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 ...

Read the rest for free over at my Substack.

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 ...

The rest of this article can be found over at my Substack page [click here to read the whole thing].