The People v. McRib

Posted on January 25, 2026 by Will Moss

The press bites on a sandwich lawsuit

Here’s a possibly controversial theory: Lawyers are just specialized PR people.

I can hear my lawyer friends clenching their jaws, but hear me out. Contracts are communication. Courtrooms and arbitration hearings are communication. Demand letters are communication. And class action lawsuits are definitely communication, often written both to advance a legal argument and to generate press attention.

Here’s a fun example: “Le, Lynch, Baker and Wilson v. McDonalds Corporation.” The complaint is entertaining, and the first two paragraphs set things up better than any summary I could write:

  1. “The McRib is back!” is a phrase recognized across the United States, stirring excitement among McDonald’s customers eager for the limited-time sandwich offering. For decades, McDonald’s has cultivated a sense of anticipation around the McRib, leveraging its scarcity to drive sales across its many locations. Fans eagerly await each return, trusting that the sandwich they’re biting into is exactly what the name implies: a sandwich crafted using pork “rib” meat, which is prized by consumers for its high fat content and rich flavor.
  2. The reality, however, is far from what McDonald’s advertising and branding suggest. Despite its name and distinctive shape—its meat patty has been deliberately crafted to resemble a rack of pork ribs—the McRib does not contain any actual pork rib meat at all.

The italics are in the original, just to make sure you get it.

If the McRib isn’t rib meat, what is it? I’m glad you asked, and so are the lawyers who filed the suit!

Instead, [the McRib’s] meat patty is reconstructed using ground-up portions of lower-grade pork products such as, interalia, pork shoulder, heart, tripe, and scalded stomach.

“You sold people a sandwich marketed as a ‘McRib’ that contained no rib meat” isn’t Love Canal-level on the harm-o-meter, so the gross-out line is there as a lure for the press and social media posters. Did it work? You bet it did! Here’s the New York Post:

The primary ingredient of the sandwich, which has found a cult following thanks in part to its on-again, off-again status on McDonald’s menu, is restructured pork composed of parts like shoulder, heart, tripe and scalded stomach, the complaint alleges.

The alleged ingredients also get repeated by CBS Chicago, NBC Chicago, USA Today, MSN and Newsweek, among others. I love that the Newsweek article has a breathless, Axios-style “Why It Matters” section for a sandwich lawsuit. But why settle for that when you can read the actual Axios article? Naturally, someone on Bluesky invoked Upton Sinclair’s gross-out labor classic, The Jungle…

Read the rest on Substack

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Rocketship to Planet Urologist

Posted on December 31, 2025 by Will Moss

Getting older, one awkward gland at a time

It’s been getting harder to pee.

It’s not that I can’t pee. That would be time to rush for the emergency room and get catheterized, something that (so far) I have not had to do. But for several years the stream has been getting thinner. There is also turbulence in what should be—forgive me for this—a smooth, laminar flow.

I’m told that this is a normal part of male aging. The prostate enlarges. The urethra is compressed. Take it in stride, like hair growing from your ears or junk mail from the AARP. Fair. I’m pushing 60 and I count myself lucky that, other than back pain, I haven’t had to manage chronic health issues. It couldn’t last forever.

Reduced flow has led to some embarrassing moments. Once this happened at Changi Airport in Singapore as I was waiting with my family to board a 15 hour flight back to the U.S., an awkward moment to low-key wet yourself. I’ll often sit to pee if that is option. Most men’s bathrooms at public venues have a high urinal-to-stall ratio, so this can be a pain. I know that women have lived with this inconvenience since the Greeks invented theater 2500 years ago. But also, as you’ve suspected, men are filthy.

I like to think that I am an intellectual, above comparing myself to other men in superficial ways. But when I’m squeezing out a thin stream and the guy one stall over sounds like he’s emptying a margarita pitcher into the bowl, I can’t help but think, fucking large-bore show-off, I hope you get hit by a Cybertruck and dragged three blocks before the driver notices. Uncharitable, I know.

In one of the most traumatizing rituals of American life, I recently had to switch health insurers. For thirteen years I’d been with an HMO, where the insurer is also the provider and all the costs are internalized, so you are made to go through elaborate rituals and attestations before you can see a specialist. This saves money for the HMO and you’re never going to get a surprise bill, but the failure mode is death because they missed a problem.

I had raised the slow cinching of my prostate with two doctors at the HMO a few years ago. Neither felt it was worth escalation, which was probably correct at the time, though I did get my inaugural digital rectal exam. It was quicker and less mortifying than I had feared. Societies have all sorts of rituals for welcoming young men into adulthood, from the bar-mitzvahs of Brooklyn to the bullet ants of the Satere-Mawé. But we all get ushered into old age with a finger up the ass.

My wife thinks this is hilarious. When I sulked about it, she reminded me that I haven’t had a lifetime of pelvic exams and mammograms. “At least you don’t get the speculum,” she said. Implied: you wuss.

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The Kiss-Cam of Resurrection

Posted on December 27, 2025 by Will Moss

Born Anew in the New York Times

Remember the Coldplay concert kiss-cam disaster of last July?

The CEO of software company Astronomer, Andy Byron, and the head of human resources, Kristin Cabot, were caught in a suggestive embrace by the “kiss cam” at a Coldplay concert. Both of them radiated such instantaneous and intense shame that the video became a TikTok sensation and both subsequently left the company.

I wrote about the PR implications in a post called “The Kiss-Cam of Annihilation.” This was about why the implied affair was a reputational problem for Astronomer, and also an opportunity to have a go at Coldplay because I am a hater. No regrets. I have my own musical shame.

Five months later, Cabot has launched a rehabilitation tour with simultaneous profiles in the New York Times and the U.K. newspaper The Times.

Once upon a time, if you’d been disgraced, you might have re-emerged with a soulful TED talk that you’d deliver right after Malcom Gladwell explained something counterintuitive about spaghetti sauce. Today, the New York Times, America’s sole surviving general-interest daily, is platform of choice for post-crisis reputation laundering. Wait a graceful interval, and then make yourself available for a (hopefully) soft-focus profile.

Former New York Magazine political journalist Olivia Nuzzi took this approach last September, with a 3000 word Style section profile that was one part rehabilitation for her sexting affair with RFK, Jr. and one part memoir launch. Nuzzi’s campaign incinerated after jilted fiancé Ryan Lizza—2025 finalist for the Nobel prize for being That Fucking Guy—nuked her with a tell-all Substack on the eve of her book release. Lesson: for a rehabilitation campaign, there needs to be no more dirty laundry left to air. Especially if there is someone out there who is motivated to air it. Also, it helps if the memoir is not apparently 100,000 words of weapons-grade cringe.

Read the rest on Substack

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Ward 86: Growing Up in the Time of AIDS

Posted on November 24, 2025 by Will Moss

My father’s memoir of the terrible epidemic of the 1980s

My parents separated in 1973, when I was six years old. I sometimes think the amazing thing is that they got together in the first place. They are very different people. My mom is tightly wound, organized and meticulous, the daughter of Jewish bourgeoisie from the Philadelphia suburbs. My dad is shambolic and improvisational, a dreamer and aspiring revolutionary, the child of British leftists.

But when I look at old photographs of them together I see it. She’s the American anglophile abroad in London, waif-slim in a peacoat and ‘60s bangs. He’s raffish and good looking, a Hampstead rebel, pouting and restless. They look beautiful and intense, youth on the threshold of a new era.

They came to San Francisco in the late sixties, had two kids while still in their early twenties, me and my younger brother, and then it all fell apart. Then it fell together again for one more kid, my youngest brother. Then it all fell apart again in 1975 or 76, this time for good. My mom moved down to Palo Alto with my brothers. But my parents wanted to keep me in the same school I’d been going to, so I moved into my dad’s recently acquired ramshackle Victorian in the Castro.

In the late ‘70s, the school bus used to drop me off at 17th and Clayton, at the top of the hill between Cole Valley and the Castro. I would walk down 17th Street to Castro, and then up Castro to Liberty Street, where my dad’s house was. By then, the Castro had supplanted Polk Street as the epicenter of late ‘70s transgressive gay culture, and my walk took me right through the heart of it. This was the era of leather boys in assless chaps and chains, spilling out of the Phoenix bar and onto the sidewalk. I used to go into Mainline Gifts, next door, because they had an R2D2 cookie jar I was infatuated with. They also sold marzipan cakes shaped like giant dicks out of their glass deli case. That was the Castro in the late ‘70s. Also, I like marzipan. Make of that what you will.

A great thing about being a kid is that the neighborhood is just the neighborhood. I took the weirdness for granted, and nobody ever hassled me. But behind the good times and sex a contagion was lurking, about to devastate the generation of young men I walked past every afternoon.

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My parents in England in August, 1966.

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In Space, No One Can Hear You Spin

Posted on November 9, 2025 by Will Moss

Crisis PR for science fiction’s most evil company

Note: Minor spoilers for the recent “Alien: Earth” series.

I was eleven in 1979 when my dad took me to see Ridley Scott’s Alien at the Geneva Drive-In, in South San Francisco. I watched from the back seat of the car, peeking over the front seats and retreating to the safety of the footwell when things got too intense. I saw about half the movie, by which I mean about half of the screen at any given moment.

46 years and endless sequels later, we forget how revolutionary the alien was as a cinema monster. The face hugger. The elongated head, ooze and dento-phallic jaws of the final form. It was a psychosexual nightmare rendered in latex and KY Jelly.

Alien fucked up my head for years. Well into adulthood, if I was stressed out about something the alien would stalk my nightmares. At some point I started kicking its ass and it fucked off from my dreams, to be replaced by other stress proxies, like the nightmare I had last week where I couldn’t navigate Spotify. I preferred the monsters.

Alien is my favorite movie of all time. I still have the complete set of trading cards, two copies of the Heavy Metal magazine comic adaptation of the movie, a vinyl of the original soundtrack, and the photo book of the film. Relics of me, age 11.

Unstoppable Horror! (#76 in a series.)

It is a truism that most science fiction is about the present, using fantasy and extrapolation to tell stories about contemporary society. Alien takes place on a spaceship, but it’s a 1970s labor movie from the cinematic era of Norma Rae, Blue Collar and F.I.S.T. Seven schlubby, grease-stained astronauts fly a grimy, long-haul space tug while dealing with contractual issues and an employer so cold and remote that it is only referred as “the Company.”1 The first intelligible dialogue in the movie is the engineers bitching about their poor pay relative to the other, whiter-collared crew members.

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Triumph of the Wankers

Posted on October 11, 2025 by Will Moss

Stadium Concerts and the Iconography of Totalitarianism

I am going to start with something polarizing. I like the band Oasis.

When people who don’t like Oasis find out that you do like Oasis, they will often try an intervention, like they discovered you’re in a cult where everyone wears white Skechers and signs a suicide pact. People who are musically inclined will explain that your taste is basic, and start suggesting bands that use weird time signatures and exotic modes. If I wanted to listen to King Crimson, I would just listen to King Crimson.

Plenty of Oasis’ music is simple. “Columbia” is A-D-C in a loop for five minutes. But AC/DC proved fifty years ago that there is a bottomless appetite for three-chord party rock, and I think it comes down to branding. Britpop produced a lot of interesting and thoughtful bands—Stone Roses, Suede, James, arguably Radiohead—and then there were Liam and Noel Gallagher, a two-headed wrecking-ball of surly Manchester sex-appeal.

This branding divide was captured in the short-lived but intense Oasis vs. Blur Britpop rivalry of the mid-nineties:

Blur:

Oasis:

Behold your revealed preferences.

The Gallagher brothers famously despised each other and the band broke up in acrimony in 2009, years after their creative peak. But the shimmering aura of money has magical healing properties, like an amethyst chandelier, and the brothers embarked upon a reunion tour this year.

My family and I lucked into tickets to the concert at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena last month. The Gallaghers could remember at any moment that they hate each other and tumble back into violence, so we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see them together as it might never happen again. We had a great time.

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Imagethief Turns One

Posted on September 13, 2025 by Will Moss

Looking back at hits and misses as we enter blog toddlerhood

September 3rd was the first anniversary of this joint, so I thought I’d do a quick year-in-review. There will be a small amount of navel-gazing, but not too much. I write this blog for fun, and I presume you read it for the same reason.

The Stats!

Thanks to all 4651 of you who subscribe as of this writing! I am obviously not a threat to the Substack leaderboard, but I appreciate every subscriber and I still get a little thrill every time someone signs up. (I also want to walk into the ocean every time someone unsubscribes, which is just typical being-a-writer.)

Some of you subscribe to 200 newsletters or more. This is not an exaggeration – I get the stats for each new subscriber. I am inbox-zero person and that would make me insane. I assume most of those are symbolic subscriptions, a sort of extra-vigorous “👍”, but I still appreciate it!

Subscriber growth tends come in clumps when I drop a particularly successful post, or when Bill Bishop, my #1 cheerleader here and an old friend from our mutual days in China, gives me a boost. (Subscribe to Bill’s excellent Sinocism newsletter if you are at all interested in China or geopolitics!)

Page views have trended steadily up, which is nice. The open rate is about 45%. I am inconsistent about promoting my posts on social media, but the best referring platform by far is (brace yourself) LinkedIn, followed by Bluesky, which is a recent artifact driven by some big-V reposts, and Facebook because I’m old. Everything else is rounding errors. I don’t post on Twitter anymore and only rarely on Threads. The one time I got good traffic from Threads is because I got into an argument with someone over my “Return to Commuterstan” post. The algorithm loves conflict.

I’ve aimed for a post roughly every two weeks and I managed 29 over the first year, which was more or less on target what with an all-consuming job, kid, etc.

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Growing Popularity of Alien Brain Squids Fuels Controversy

Posted on August 31, 2025 by Will Moss

Squid-wearers call for mankind’s extermination, but some say we should hear them out

DES MOINES, Iowa—Aug 31, 2025—Debate raged today over the sudden popularity of head-worn squids in this normally sedate midwestern city.

First noticed in social media posts from a handful of local residents demanding the immediate and unconditional surrender of humanity, the unconventional headwear has since become widespread. Students, professionals, and even the mayor have flaunted the oozing accessories.

The appearance of the social posts and tentacular headgear was first reported in “Obvious Shit More People Should Be Talking About,” a newsletter written by Rachel Kaplan, a Des Moines-based independent journalist.

At first confined to this historic agricultural capital, the trend has since spread to other cities in the region, with people in Cedar Rapids, Omaha and St. Louis sporting so-called “brain squids”.

The new fashion is linked with an emerging set of beliefs based on the conquest of all human life and its subjugation to the demands of a mysterious authority figure sometimes referred to as “the supreme mollusk.”

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Red Packets in the USA!

Posted on August 23, 2025 by Will Moss

Evaluating a New York media scandal on the international beer metric

Twenty years ago last March, I wrote my first blog post about PR in China. I had been living and blogging in China for nine months, but my early posts focused on daily life and had titles like, “I successfully speak Chinese to people,” and “I shop,” and so on. These are real titles, not jokes. I was delirious with culture shock.1

When I finally wrote about work, I started with a post on a China PR practice that I found deeply weird. This was the “transportation claim,” the practice of giving every reporter who attended a press event an envelope of cash. Coming from obsessively Windexed Singapore, where I had started my PR career, this seemed sketchy. But my colleagues assured me that it was standard practice.

In those days the going rate was 200RMB (then about US$25) for a Beijing print reporter who had come from in town. There were different rates for television crews and out-of-town reporters.

Was giving a modest envelope of cash to a reporter who worked for state-owned media a violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? I didn’t know! But the leadership of the Beijing office of the big U.S. PR firm I worked at didn’t seem concerned, so, 🤷.

I jokingly titled that old post, “A scholarly analysis of the economics of PR in China.” In it, I used beer, the PR pro’s favorite commodity, as a unit to assess the value of the transportation claim on a purchasing-power parity basis. In 2005 you could get a tall Yanjing or a pint of Beijing Asahi for RMB3 if you knew where to drink. Deducting the average cost of two typical Beijing taxi rides from the transportation claim, I calculated you’d have about RMB150 left over, or enough for up to fifty beers.

In Singapore, which was my frame of reference, I calculated you’d need an envelope with a minimum of SGD$270 (about USD$180 at the time) to achieve the same thing.2 Hand a lot of those out and you would be at real risk of a sweaty afternoon in the basement of the Corrupt Practices Bureau.

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The Life and Death of a Cool Phone

Posted on July 25, 2025 by Will Moss

That time we tried to make the Moto X in the U.S.A.

I’d been working for Burson-Marsteller in China for nearly six years when I got poached away by our client, Motorola. Jumping from agencies to clients can be tricky, but my boss at Burson gave me her blessings. Maybe she thought it would be good to have an alum as the client. Or maybe she was just happy to be rid of me and my obnoxious blog.

This was 2010 and the iPhone was popular, but not yet the Greatest Consumer Product of All Time. Smartphones hadn’t changed the world, but you could feel the change coming and everyone wanted in on the action.

I’d been smitten the first time I handled an iPhone, in 2008, and I’d bought a first-generation model shortly thereafter, on a work trip to San Diego. At the time, all iPhones were U.S. only and locked to AT&T. I had to jailbreak mine when I got it back to China so I could use it on China Mobile. This was terrifying, like performing brain surgery on your child with kitchen implements. I was sure I was going to lobotomize my new $600 superphone.1

Amazingly, the patient lived. I promptly abandoned both my Motorola Razr V3 flip phone and my Burson-issued China Mobile Blackberry, which looked like a prop from the old Adam West “Batman” TV show. This lasted until I got a nastygram from Burson’s IT department scolding me for using an “unauthorized client.” Reluctantly, I shifted my work email back to the Bat-Berry. But I used the iPhone for everything else.

No regrets! As small and slow as early models were, touchscreen smartphones were obviously going to revolutionize mobile computing and change our experience of the world. I’d known that the moment I saw the New York Times home page microscopically rendered on a 3 1/2 inch display, and again the first time I saw the map application tracking our location in real time while in a car. The only thing I regretted was losing the tactile snap! of slamming the Razr shut. Hanging up on someone would never be as satisfying again.

I was in love with smartphones and when Motorola came calling, I was ready. Motorola was still a behemoth in 2010, but activist investor Carl Icahn was cleaving the company in two. Motorola Mobility, the new smartphone-focused business, had lured Sanjay Jha away from Qualcomm to be CEO. Jha was all-in on Android, and Motorola had launched the first Android smartphone in China, the lozenge-shaped XT800. I shelved my iPhone for an Android-powered handset, a goony Motorola Milestone with a slide-out keyboard. The future was wide open and the smartphone market was there for anyone to seize!

In theory.

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