Credulous headline, but more nuanced subhed than Time’s breathless treatment. Also, squeeeee! Look at that adorable little foof! (Warning: adult wolves significantly less foofy.)
But wait, like a late night TV ad for Ginsu knives (shout out to Gen-X), there’s more! Here’s Wired, on the same day:
Hmm. “Scientists claim…” And a probing subhed. The new Wired goes hard, you may have heard, and won’t just lap up your glitz.
Never mind! Here’s three hours of Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm on Joe Rogan’s podcast, also on April 7th. I’ll spare you the screen cap. Also, there was no way I was going to listen to three hours1 of this. I write this blog for free and there are limits to what I will endure for a wolf gag.
Way back in the early nineties, there was a popular sitcom called “Murphy Brown” set in a TV newsroom. The plot device of the lead character’s single motherhood offended then vice president Dan Quayle1, and he gave a speech in which he criticized the character by name, almost as if she were a real person.
Delighted by the gift they had been handed, the writers duly wrote the remarks into the next season opener and nuked the vice president from orbit. Weeks later, America elected Bill Clinton2 president.
Look, there are lots of reasons why the Bush/Quayle ticket went down. Among them were that Bill Clinton radiated white-hot sex (too much for his own good, tbh) while George H.W. Bush radiated Yalie barbershop quartet and surplus initials. But Quayle linking the recent LA riots to a sitcom didn’t help, and it enshrined a truism of modern public relations: don’t go to war with a TV show.
We live in a different media era. Network sitcoms aren’t the vanguard of culture they were back in the nineties (the era of Seinfeld, Friends3, etc.), and the modern equivalent of that truism might be, “don’t go to war with a meme.”
And, whatever you do, don’t go to war with a meme based on a popular TV show!
Twenty years ago, I wrote a post on this old China blog, “Sanitized for My Protection,” in which I discussed my approach to self-censorship. The post was prompted by a reader comment asking me how I thought about the risks to myself as a resident foreigner blogging about China. The truth was, I hadn’t thought about it systematically, and it was interesting to give some shape to the risks and decisions that defined my writing.
I never felt like I had the luxury of shooting my mouth off with complete abandon. This was mostly professional caution. As I wrote last September, in the post inaugurating this Substack, my boss at the PR agency I was working for was not a fan of my blogging. She was a former Chinese diplomat, well attuned to Chinese government sensibilities, and conservative in matters of public expression.
I did get her into trouble once, in 2008. This was not through a blog post, but through a quote I gave to a reporter from The Guardian on China’s “50 Cent Party” (五毛党) of Internet propagandists. This is what ran in the story:
According to popular lore, and a number of Chinese bloggers, each post made pays 50 Chinese cents or five mao. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a lucrative occupation. William Moss, an account director at the public relations agency Burson-Marsteller, calculates that a post needs to be made every four minutes during a gruelling 72-hour working week if you are hoping to earn the bare minimum wage in one of the country’s bigger cities.
“Pocket money? Maybe. But I wouldn’t plan on sending the kids to college that way,” says Moss.
Sounds like me.
My sin was to imply that China’s nationalist astroturfers might not be receiving a living wage for their work in the service of the state. CIPRA, the government-linked China-International Public Relations Association, gave my boss an earful and she, in turn, gave me an earful. I probably laid low for a while after that, but, idk. It was a long time ago and I’m a fool.
Settling a score with style on America’s biggest stage
When I was in elementary school, there was a kid who teased me about my first name, which is Diccon. I’ll call him Eddy McNair. This is a made-up name because he’s probably a wonderful family man now and was just doing what ten year old kids did to other ten year old kids with funny names.
Imagine that I bore a grudge, and wanted to get back at Eddy with the biggest dis possible. The most epic dis in the history of epic disses.
I could work diligently my entire life to put myself in a position to become president of the United States. This would take decades of going to law school, clerking for some asshole judge, running for local office, clawing my way up to state Attorney General, being “tough on crime,” running for governor, serving a successful term or two with no major scandals, and then campaigning successfully for party nomination and the presidency.
Against all odds, this works! I’m no Obama, so let’s say I make it when I’m in my fifties. I’m inaugurated and give a moving speech of national reconciliation. They tell me how to use the nuclear “football” and read me in on all the secrets. I get to see the frozen alien corpses. I bring peace to the Middle East; guide the nation though transition to renewable energy; save the whales, the bees and whatever your favorite threatened animal is. I find homes for all the abandoned kittens of the world. I win the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Kitten Prize, which is not a thing, but should be. I donate the honoraria to a charity that makes little prosthetic legs for landmine-sniffing rats that have had unfortunate accidents. Not once do I host the Kansas City Chiefs at the White House. I am a saint.
Two terms come and go. It is time for my final State of the Union address. Before a joint session of Congress and televised live to a national audience, with my adoring family and invited guests—authors, actors, statesmen—gazing on from the VIP box, I stride to the podium. I gaze across the crowd, and toward the camera, into the eyes of a grateful nation. In my most sonorous and comforting baritone, I deliver my message:
“My fellow Americans, members of Congress, honored guests. Today I stand before you, at the twilight of my career, to say just one thing.”
I pause dramatically and everyone leans in. Whatever is coming next is huge…
“Eddy McNair is a total dick. Fuck you, McNair! You know what you did.”
I tear open my suit jacket to reveal my “Ed McNair is a Total Dick!” T-shirt. Then I raise two middle fingers to the camera, and several huge “Eddy McNair is a dick!” banners drop from the rafters along with a cloud of a red, white and blue balloons. I Crip Walk2 off stage and all the way to the limo to the sounds of a John Philip Sousa march because that is how we roll now.
If this all worked flawlessly, I’d still have accomplished only one percent of what Kendrick Lamar pulled off on Superbowl Sunday a week ago.
When do the old rules of political communication become obsolete?
Note: There are two things that have been on my mind as I observe everything happening in U.S. politics right now. I am using this space to think through them out loud. This is the first topic. Second to follow when time permits. I am not sure how well this holds together. Feel free to debate!
On January 28th, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded just over a minute after lift-off. This was one of the defining, “where were you when…?” moments of my youth. I remember stapling my eyes to the television in a common area at my dorm at UC Santa Cruz.
Later that day, President Reagan addressed the nation from the Oval Office. I’ve never been what you’d call a big Reagan fan—he wasn’t popular in the bong-littered halls of Porter College—but it’s good. A classic of public solace, delivered to a traumatized nation. Go watch it if you have five minutes.
Welcoming the year of the snake by remembering my weirdest pet
The following is the first chapter of a memoir I have been writing about my doomed attempt to co-found an internet game company in Singapore in 1995. It is snake-themed and, with the year of the snake arriving this Wednesday, I thought I’d publish it here.
1995
I had to get rid of a python.
This was not straightforward. The snake was thirteen feet long and weighed as much as a Rottweiler. You couldn’t just tape up a note with a bunch of tear-away phone-number tabs in the Peets Coffee down in the Castro. Home wanted for large snake. Loves baths. Eats live rabbits monthly. Hazardous to pets and small children. Or put her in a padded box on the corner like you would a litter of kittens. None of my friends had any business caring for a Burmese python. I had no business caring for a Burmese python, but I’d been doing it since my then girlfriend, Michelle, had gifted it to me.
That conversation, three years previously, had gone like this:
Her: “Hey, my friend’s son has a Burmese python that he can’t take care of any more. I know you like snakes. Do you want to adopt it?”
Me (trying to recall how big Burmese pythons get and playing for time): “Can I think about it?”
The next day I came home from grad school and the snake was in my apartment, in a much too small enclosure, with an infestation of some kind of snake lice and an unshed scale obscuring one eye.
I took the BART train from San Francisco across the bay to Berkeley, where there was an exotic reptile store, and bought a paperback guide to Burmese python ownership. The first paragraph boiled down to, “You, an idiot, should not own this snake.” I also bought a brick of frozen rats, stuck together like miserable, furry burritos, and lugged it home. I was still not the weirdest person on BART.
I’m back in Taiwan this week. Since the beginning of September I’ve spent more than a month here, spread over three trips. In general, it’s been a delight! And a welcome opportunity to dust off my appallingly decayed Mandarin.
But, man, am I struggling with traditional characters.
I was never what you’d call literate in Chinese. But I could navigate everyday situations, signs, instructions, menus, bank transactions and the like. That was generally enough to get me through life. With time to spare, and a dictionary, I could even manage the occasional lightweight newspaper article.
I started studying Chinese in Singapore and then lived in China, both of which use simplified characters for everyday purposes. This is not the case in Taiwan, which still uses traditional characters, and I’ve found myself catapulted back into more or less complete illiteracy.
The long tradition of shady PR knife work in dark alleys
A few years ago, I had the exquisite experience of having my emails read back to me by lawyers.
There had been a snafu involving disclosure of financial information at my then employer. In handling the communications aftermath, I had emailed with several people involved. The lawyers were doing due-diligence so they could be prepared for any legal consequences, and a number of us had these meetings. I wasn’t in trouble. I wasn’t being deposed. I hadn’t written anything wrong or embarrassing. But it was still uncomfortable.
What did you mean in this part?
Was this line a joke?
To whom were you referring here?
This was a valuable experience. When we train people in communication, we stress that you should write every email, chat and text message imagining it being read back to you at a deposition. All these communications are subject to legal discovery and “attorney-client privilege” in the header isn’t a magic incantation, though people sometimes treat it as one. An internal investigation is a reminder that the lawyers you have friendly chats with in the cafeteria aren’t your lawyers1 and, by the way, the company sees everything you do on your work computer, and someday it might be opposing counsel reading your emails back to you.
Two weeks ago, Brian Thompson, CEO of big health insurer United Healthcare, was gunned down in New York. This created an epic amount of Discourse on social media, aggravated by the mysterious nature of the killer and his temporary escape. This week, a suspect named Luigi Mangione was arrested. He turned out to be a bit of a snack, which is causing weird undulations in the fabric of the media continuum.
The trajectory of the social discourse was amazing. Immediately after the news broke, there was a wave of gleeful social media posts. That was followed by a second wave scolding those making jokes and celebrating Mr. Thompson’s death. Completing the ouroboros, there was then a wave scolding the scolds for not acknowledging the depth of popular hatred of big health insurers.
If a prominent executive in your industry is gunned down on a sidewalk and the public response is party-poppers and dancing in the streets, you should ask yourself some hard questions!
I surrender to the inevitable, plus a state-of-the-newsletter update
In 2004, in one of the great over-reactions of my life, I moved from Singapore to China because I was bored. This was a giant adventure and a hazardous level of culture shock. One of the ways I processed the experience was by writing about it.
This wasn’t new. I’d written for fun since high school and for money since college. I’d kept an infamously public journal of the experience of my ill-fated games startup in Singapore, which lasted from late 1995 until early 1997. This was the early days of the web and all of that, along with the rest of my “world wide web-site” (fancy!) was hand coded.
That journal is no longer online. It’s super cringe and very embarrassing. It is, however, a useful historical document and is providing the feedstock for a slow-gestating memoir of the game startup that I have been working on for a few years. This will also be cringe, but hopefully a bit more sophisticated. Maybe I’ll eventually publish it here, but I am currently stuck in the “why my parents’ divorce was responsible for everything” chapter. I’ve been stuck there for eighteen months.
Trans-Pacific spin doctor. Head of Global Media Relations at TSMC. Occasional writer of humor and PR analysis. This is a personal blog and opinions are my own. More information at “About Imagethief“.
Also on Substack (where full posts live now), Bluesky, the usual places.
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