Mitch Wagner

For the lonely, a blurred line between real and fictional people

In lonely people, the boundary between real friends and favorite fictional characters gets blurred in the part of the brain that is active when thinking about others, a new study found.

Researchers scanned the brains of people who were fans of “Game of Thrones” while they thought about various characters in the show and about their real friends. All participants had taken a test measuring loneliness.

Who picked Petyr Baelish or Sandor Clegane as their imaginary bestie?

I Was a Pop-Tarts Taste Tester. Writer Laura Holson remembers her family regularly received mystery boxes when the product launched 60 years ago.

I did not like them,” said my sister Mary. They didn’t appeal either to my sister Gondie, but gave her bargaining power on the school playground. “You could eat one Pop-Tart and trade the other for a candy bar,” she said of the two-pack. For my part, I would eat them only if my mother cut the edges off, leaving a ravioli-size square of frosted raspberry jam.

Maybe it’s not surprising that none of us eat them now. “But it was a great memory,” said my brother Michael.

Long gone, DEC is still powering the world of computing. Digital Equipment Corp. was a computing giant that declined until it essentially disappeared in the late 1990s. But its technology legacy continues. By Andy Patrizio at Ars Technica.

How magical combat can win the next election

For the last half-century or so, the main US political parties have spent all their time and energy ranting about the bad things that the bad people in the other party are doing, and neglected to offer any positive vision of their own.

Stormtrooper Syndrome has seduced the West.

The West has a bad case of “Stormtrooper Syndrome”—utter faith and certainty that we are the Good Guys, the Good Guys always win, the Bad Guys are incompetent buffoons and we’ll just think our way out of crises like climate change at the last possible moment.

This syndrome is exacerbated by elites who never, ever suffer consequences of their actions.

Irish people not being superstitious. I am not posting this to ridicule Irish people. I feel the same way about superstition.

Congressional Term Limits Might Break Congress. Jamelle Bouie makes a case against legislative term limits.

We have legislative term limits here in California and it’s not great. You end up with government by bureaucrats and lobbyists. The solution to legislative calcification is to make challengers more viable. Make incumbents have to work to get re-elected.

Fervently hoping friends and business associates in Israel remain safe.

The Long History of Jewface

A wonderful, playful look at more than a century of Jewish ethnic humor in Hollywood, triggered by the minor (and silly) controversy over Bradley Cooper, who is not Jewish, portraying Leonard Bernstein while wearing a prosthetic nose.

Author Jody Rosen, writing in The New Yorker notes that much Jewish ethnic humor, particularly at the turn of the 20th Century, gave gentiles an opportunity to ridicule Jewish immigrants, often cruelly. But this form of humor was different from other minstrelsy in that it was often performed by Jews, and Jews themselves loved it.

People are saying “whom of which” now. Alrighty then.