This week President Obama’s appearance on Between Two Ferns took an unexpected turn.
Why haven’t you closed Gitmo and tried the prisoners? There’s no due process and inmates are tortured.
That’s a complicated question, Zach. I thought we were going to just talk about the website and make some friendly jokes.
Save that crap for Steve Kroft. I want answers. Why do you support policies that allow torture? Are you turned on by it?
What kind?
Stuff being done to genitals.
Consensual?
No.
No, that’s not sexy.
When we return from the break, we’ll talk about the U.S. non-response in Crimea and the death by drone of innocent families.
- Abe Lincoln didn’t appear on Between Two Ferns, but he officiated cockfights.
- Old Print Articles: A South Pacific settlement based on nudity and coconuts fails (1905) + A struggling carpenter becomes a Manhattan “messiah” (1892) + Americans try to cure diseases by snapping their fingers (1896).
- Featured Videos: Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks we may be too stupid to answer the hard questions + Art Linkletter and Timothy Leary argue on TV (1977) + Public-access cable ad for erstwhile sex club Plato’s Retreat (1977) + William Shockley brings his quackery about IQ to William F. Buckley (1974) + The complete version of The World of Buckminster Fuller (1974) + Continental Airlines offers passengers Electronic Pub Pong (1970s) + Gore Vidal taunts President Carer and demonstrates a waterless toilet on the Tonight Show (1977).
- Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: Stoner found physics textbook + Did someone in your family, or perhaps a pet, die recently? + No, I hadn’t heard anything about a missing airplane.
- Composer Robert Ashley was Andy Williams’ Martian doppelganger.
- We may be the first species on Earth to extinct ourselves.
- Two great Aeon essays: Robots become automated and prison becomes infinite.
- Older technologies made us passive, while newer ones make us active.
- 25 years after creating the Web, Tim Berners-Lee does an Ask Me Anything.
- Is an economic output tax an answer to an automated society?
- The Pew Research Center released its “Digital Life in 2025” report.
- In the unlikely event that the Mars One blasts off, moral questions abound.
- The Grinder subculture isn’t waiting for science to meld human and machine.
- News disseminated by algorithms might be concerning, perhaps.
- Oil boomtown Williston, North Dakota, isn’t Deadwood, but it has problems.
- David Remnick disagrees with Seymour Hersh’s view of the bin Laden raid.
- Disney theme parks are using electronic wrist bands to track visitors.
- Smart vending machines want more than just your coins.
- Robert Duvall states opinions about America’s political landscape.
- Baseball’s next-level analytics are always evolving.
- A surfeit of information may be infusing us with a sense of ennui.
- Has the era of the Great American Novel permanently passed?
- The Birth Control Pill has changed America in a myriad ways.
- Steve Jobs wanted the new Apple Campus to resemble old California.
- A brief note from 1898 about a lucky man.
- A brief note from 1899 about a severe toothache.
- A brief note from 1856 about a double talker.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.