Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To

Tag: the atlantic

A Memo From The Editor

Dear All,

Yesterday, I wrote you about our decision to hire Will Kevinson. In that note, I mentioned my belief that Will would represent an important addition to our roster of ideas columnists, and I addressed the controversy surrounding some of his past tweeting and writing. I expressed my belief that no one’s life work should be judged by an intemperate tweet, and that such an episode should not necessarily stop someone from having a fruitful career at Thoughts on the Dead.

Almost immediately after yesterday’s note, however, information came to our attention that has caused us to rethink this relationship. Specifically, the subject of one of Will’s more intemperate tweets was the centerpiece discussion of a podcast he appeared on. As it turns out, Will’s tweet of “Let’s set all the kikes on fire” was not, in fact, an off-the-cuff and ill-considered remark, but instead his deeply held beliefs. While in tweet form, “Let’s set all the kikes on fire” can be decontextualized and possibly misconstrued, his three-hour-long diatribe in which he listed specific Jewish-Americans by name and then ranked them by “burnability” cannot be. The language he used was violent and, while we as a good liberals respect his right to hold these views, we feel that Will’s values do not align with those of Thoughts on the Dead.

After hearing the podcast, we were also notified of Will’s 2011 book published by Regnery, entitled Kike-Burning for Complete Idiots; slightly later in the day, we were reminded by our assistant that Will (who, it must be said, is incredibly prolific and was nothing but professional) was wearing a tee-shirt that read ASK ME ABOUT BURNING KIKES.

In hindsight, it seems that out vetting standards were lacking. This is our fault and we will do better next time.

We here at Thoughts on the Dead aim to be a big-tent publication, where all ideas are valued and opinions from all over the political spectrum are heard. We are sorry that it did not work out with Will Kevinson, and have higher hopes for our brand-new conservative hire, Guy From The Bus Stop Covered In Animal Feces And Screaming About The Mexican Computers.

Thanks!
The Stupidest Fucking Jew In New York

 

After this bullshit.

Call It Sleep

Erwin Schrödinger, the Nobel-prize-winning Austrian physicist, was able to make major contributions to the fields of quantum mechanics, general relativity, and color theory during his lifetime. There was only one caveat: He was not able to make those contributions … in the morning.

“He couldn’t work in the mornings at all,” his wife, AnneMarie, said in an interview. “The [Max] Planck lectures—as you know, it was 30 or 40 years ago that Planck was in Berlin—were given in the morning from nine to ten. When he got this very, very honorable call to Berlin, he wrote first thing and said, ‘I’m very sorry, but I can’t keep the lecture hours because I can’t work in the morning.’ … They understood, and changed it to the afternoon—two lectures, one after the other—on two days.” – “The Four Types of Sleep Schedules,” Olga Khazan, The Atlantic 2014

“Will the lectures take place, Herr Schrödinger?”

“Yes and no.”

And so on.

That article recounts a new (at the time) bit of social science, which is that some people are neither night owls nor early-risers; instead having energy all day and night, or being sleepy constantly. Leaving aside the question of whether the social sciences qualify as a science (nope), the fact remains that the scientists (giggle) behind this study (snicker) have left out several different types of sleep schedules.

TotD presents now The Other Kinds Of Sleep Schedules:

DaVinci Sleep Known from Seinfeld, this somnambulance plan has you up for three hours, followed by a 20-minute nap. Repeat.

Caravaggio Sleep: Paint three hours, nap for 20 minutes, stab someone for insulting you, flee town. Repeat.

Afternooniacs Night Owls love the evenings, and early-risers go for the dawn, but these folks prefer the period between lunch and dinner. No Afternooniac has ever enjoyed a vacation to Spain.

Friskies This newly discovered chronotype sleeps for 16-18 hours a day, interspersed with sudden and frenetic outbursts of energy, and then shits in a box, and is a cat.

Kanye Sleep KANYE SLEEP IS THE BEST SLEEP. I AM THE BEST SLEEPER AND NO ONE WILL RECOGNIZE THAT. I PUT MY OWN MONEY INTO MAKING NEW BEDS AND FASHION PILLOWS AND THE SLEEP WORLD LAUGHS. KIM INVENTED SLEEPING. I INVENTED KIM. I INVENTED SLEEPING.

Narcolepsy This is a medical disorder, and it’s not funny.

Pretending To Have Narcolepsy And Collapsing Onto Children At Chuck E. Cheese That shit’s funny as hell.