Month: November 2014

Matt Besser, co-founder of the Upright Citizens Brigade, chats with Megh Wright about the enduring appeal of cult comedian Andy Kaufman:

[H]e wants to alienate, he wants to fool as many people as possible, and he does the same kind of thing in that Letterman clip [above], which is at one point he says “I don’t know why you’re laughing.” I’m paraphrasing, but he pretty much says “I don’t know why you’re laughing because what I’m saying is serious,” and you can hear the laughter drop out and nervous and uncomfortable tittering, and he does it on both the Letterman clip and that Fridays clip of trying to go into this personal story and it’s all bullshit. I think he talks about his wife in both of them and he doesn’t even have a wife. He’s talking about getting a wife and getting a divorce and on the Letterman bit he’s pretending to be sick, he comes out and he just wants people to believe it, and to me that’s such a weird specific kind of comedy, and part of why you should enjoy this is knowing that other people are not enjoying this.

Besser and Wright further discuss what makes the above Letterman clip so outstanding:

MW: There’s sort of an inverse reaction going on between what the audience laughs at — Kaufman just sitting there awkwardly — and what they don’t laugh at, which is the whole made-up story about his recent divorce and everything. Usually with bits like that there’s a buildup to a big laugh, but it seems more like the opposite with him.

MB: It’s great. My favorite moment maybe out of all these clips is the one where, I think it’s the Letterman one, but it’s the one where he’s talking about getting a divorce and then he turns to the audience and goes “I don’t know where you guys are coming from,” and he’s incredulous like “What’s wrong with you people? I’m telling you about my divorce and you’re laughing at me?” It goes against every comic instinct to tell an audience to stop laughing, and that’s just fucking hilarious.

In an earlier post, Josh Jones also praised Kaufman’s Letterman appearances:

Kaufman sends Letterman into a fit of stammering “uh, oh… ums” and the audience into fits of laughter by looking like he’s just stumbled in from a psych ward and isn’t sure exactly where he is or why. When he finally opens his mouth to speak, at nearly two minutes into the interview, he seems lost, dazed, almost childlike. Which everyone thinks is hilarious, because, well, it’s Andy Kaufman. It must be performance art, right? No matter which Andy Kaufman appeared before an audience, they always had the sense there was another one, or several, underneath, whether they knew his act or not. But you could never know if you’d hit bedrock. …

One might say Andy Kaufman invented trolling, the art of riling people up by impersonating idiots, crazies, and abrasive jerks. And he got away with it for one simple reason; he was authentic—all of his characters had some kind of endearing vulnerability, even at their most deranged.

Emily Eakin covers the increasing popularity of fecal transplants. The logic behind them:

It’s possible that no Americans have gut microbiomes that are truly healthy. Evidence is mounting that over the course of human history the diversity of our microbes has diminished, and, in a recent paper, Erica and Justin Sonnenburg, microbiologists at Stanford, argue that the price of microbial-species loss may be an increase in chronic illness. Unlike our genes, which have remained relatively stable, our microbiome has undergone radical changes in response to shifts in our diet, our antibiotic use, and our increasingly sterile living environments, raising the possibility that “incompatibilities between the two could rapidly arise.”

In particular, the Sonnenburgs stress the adverse effects of a standard Western diet, which is notoriously light on the plant fibre that serves as fuel for gut microbes. Less fuel means fewer types of microbes and fewer of the chemical by-products that microbes produce as they ferment our food. Research in mice suggests that those by-products help reduce inflammation and regulate the immune system. Noting that rates of so-called Western diseases—including heart disease and autoimmune disorders, all of which involve inflammation—are thought to be much lower in traditional societies, the Sonnenburgs write, “It is possible that the Western microbiota is actually dysbiotic and predisposes individuals to a variety of diseases.”

Currently, OpenBiome, “a nonprofit stool bank founded last year by graduate students at M.I.T., ships more than fifty specimens each week to hospitals in thirty-six states.” But that might not last:

In the past year, orders for OpenBiome’s stool have increased at a rate of about eighteen per cent a month. Its success has unnerved biotech companies that are developing stool-based enemas and capsules—or, as they’re known in the field, “crapsules”—for eventual sale on the commercial market. “OpenBiome is selling an unapproved drug without any kind of F.D.A. clearance, so in my opinion they’re breaking the law,” Lee Jones, the C.E.O. of Rebiotix, a company in Minnesota that is developing an enema for the treatment of C. difficile, told me. “They may parade as a nonprofit, but what they’re doing is selling a product to be used on patients.”

When, in a year or two, Rebiotix submits its enema to the F.D.A. for approval, it will have spent tens of millions of dollars on research and trials—costs that are typically factored into a drug’s retail price. OpenBiome charges two hundred and fifty dollars for a treatment, which just covers its costs. “This is a highly unusual situation,” Peter Safir, the lawyer, said. “There’s no question that in the United States we want our drugs approved. We want the F.D.A. to say a product is safe, effective, and is manufactured according to good practices, and that costs a lot of money. But here you’ve got an almost identical competitor that is virtually giving it away, without F.D.A. approval.” Once a company like Rebiotix obtains approval to sell its stool therapy, he went on, it could pressure the F.D.A. to shut down OpenBiome.

Previous Dish on fecal transplants here.

Meet the Black Seadevil, an elusive anglerfish recently captured on film for the first time:

If the anglerfish’s toothy jaw and dead-eyed stare creep you out, take some comfort in the fact that this female fish is just three and a half inches long. Its dainty size, plus its preferences for the dark deep-sea, helps explain why sightings are so rare. “This is the first time we’ve captured this fish on video in its habitat,” says senior scientist Bruce Robison of the Monteray Bay Aquarium Research Institute in a statement. “Anglerfish, like this Melanocetus, are among the most rarely seen of all deep-sea fishes.”

There are more than 200 species of anglerfish, and while some can grow longer than three feet, most are less than a foot, reports National Geographic. The females of all species, however, carry a fishing-pole-like spine topped with a glowing “lure” made of flesh. This feature earns the fish its name, as it uses the lure to attract prey close enough to be snatched up its toothsome jaw.

Erin McCarthy offers a clarification about the sometimes brutal sex lives of anglerfish:

You may have heard how some anglerfish reproduce via the males fusing their bodies to the females’ until they essentially become one; the male loses his eyes, fins, teeth, and some internal organs and, from that point forward, lives off of the female, providing sperm when she’s ready to spawn. Those fish “are members of the suborder Ceratioidei, [or] deep sea anglerfishes, in which some species are known to reproduce by that means,” [American Museum of Natural History curator John] Sparks says. Still, that’s not the norm for those fish—scientists have so far only found parasitic males in 5 of 11 ceratioid families, according to Sparks—and it’s probably not what happens when humpback anglerfish mate, either. “That has not been found—yet—in this species,” Sparks says. “In the family this species belongs to, only loosely attached, non-parasitic, males have been found on females—they still retain their teeth, etc.”

Browse a gallery of other odd-looking anglerfish here.

The Believer asked a bevy of writers about why and what they read. And where:

Alice Bolin: I read in bed or outside on the bench at my boyfriend’s house. I love reading outside.

Teju Cole: Everywhere. How long does it take to pee? Twenty-five seconds? I like to have something in hand even while doing that. (Don’t look at me that way, it’s not such a tricky skill.)

Darcie Dennigan: At a coffee shop is best. That way, if I’m reading something good, something worth reading, it will be ok—I’ll be safe, there will be people around, my life won’t be totally changed because there’s the world going on right there and I can step back into it.

Jordan Ellenberg: I try to quit working at around 11:30 so I can read in bed for a half hour before sleeping. It’s the main time I read. But planes, too, when I’m on one. I’m actually writing this to you on a plane right now and just before I took out my laptop and started answering these questions, I was sort of vaguely alternating between the opening pages of The Man Without Qualities (used paperback, bought I don’t remember when) and the opening pages of Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars (on my phone). Airplanes are for disorganized reading, the bed for organized reading.

Graham Foust: In a chair or on a couch somewhere. In airports and bars. On the bus.

Ruth Graham: I read books in bed, overwhelmingly. Both in the morning and at night. Unless I’m truly engrossed in a book, I find it hard to concentrate on them in other places. Plus, being in bed is so comfy, why not spend more time there?

J. Robert Lennon: On the sofa, in the evening, with my wife. Sometimes in bed, too. I wish there was a train that could take me to work; I’d read on it for sure. I read on planes. Every once in a while I’ll designate a day just for reading and will do it all day long, wherever I happen to be. That’s a rare treat though.

(Photo by Aurelien Breeden)