A Listicle Without Commentary

• The Anti-Establishment Democrat Who Invented Donald Trump
• My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it’s not Orwell, he warned, it’s Brave New World
• How Rousseau Predicted Trump
• How America’s First President Predicted Donald Trump

• Political science professor forecasts Trump as general election winner
• Professor who predicted 30 years of presidential elections correctly called a Trump win in September
• How George Orwell Predicted Donald Trump
• Social Media Predicted Donald Trump’s Victory When Few Polls Did
• 5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win
• Back from the future
• How ‘Doonesbury’ predicted Donald Trump’s presidential run 29 years ago
• This 1979 Stephen King novel is a chilling prediction of Donald Trump’s rise
• H.L. Mencken predicted Donald Trump 96 years ago.
• Donald Trump Would Run A Great, Great Country

Back-catalog sales numbers of note from Nielsen SoundScan.

The definition of “back catalog” is: “at least 18 months old, have fallen below №100 on the Billboard 200 and do not have an active single on our radio.”

Big week for blond white people. Lady Gaga performed at the Pepsi Zero Sugar-branded Super Bowl halftime show, and despite everyone’s pleas, she did NOT drag Tony Bennett out on stage to sing a duet. But all her records saw a huge spike. Fame sold a whopping 16,808 copies, which is more than Metallica’s black album on its best week. Fame was an incredible record, and generally speaking the back catalog doesn’t lie—no one remembers Artpop, or the Fame Monster 8-track CD (why).

Something’s going on with Eminem! Well two things: 1) he called Trump a bitch on his verse on Big Sean’s “No Favors,” from his latest album, I Decided; and 2) some superfans discovered that if you play “My Name Is” backwards you can hear him saying, “It’s Eminem.” Personally I think the bigger burn on that verse was Eminem telling Trump he would “make his whole brand go under,” but what do I know about rap battles.

Finally, did you know there’s Christian hip-hop? Me neither. It’s called NF. Short for Nate Feuerstein, which is short for Nathan Feuerstein. I don’t see any reason why you can’t be a rapper called Nathan Feuerstein, but whatever. Enjoy:

1. LADY GAGA FAME 16,808 copies

2. LADY GAGA BORN THIS WAY 6,375 copies

8. EMINEM EMINEM SHOW 3,611 copies

12. EMINEM CURTAIN CALL 2,847 copies

17. BENNETT*TONY & LADY GAGA CHEEK TO CHEEK 2,338 copies

21. EMINEM MARSHALL MATHERS LP 2,186 copies

27. LADY GAGA ARTPOP 1,998 copies

34. EMINEM RECOVERY 1,872 copies

35. EMINEM SLIM SHADY 1,849 copies

57. LADY GAGA FAME MONSTER (8 TRK) 1,501 copies

110. NF MANSION 1,117 copies

(Previously.)

Wow

Three Busy Debras are lounging on a white polyfiber throw in their hothouse discochamber when the lightbulb goes out. What are they gonna do? Succumb to their circumstances? Instead of normalizing the darkness, they decide to keep a body-positive outlook, and figure out how manage the crisis with the power of their sistren.

Inspiring.

Also, the existential query of our time

Why does every day seem worse than the one before? Philosophers down the ages have never successfully answered this question, because until now it has never quite been the case. Things were good or bad, or good and bad, or bad and good, or bad for a long time and then suddenly good, but never just bad, worse, oh my God so bad, how could it still be bad, please don’t even ask anymore because the answer it just going to be “bad,” it seems impossible for things to be so bad for so long, etc. It is one of the few truly new mysteries to solve in an era where everything is a tired echo of something else.

But you came to me for an answer, so I will try to give you one. Now let me state here at the outset that I am no philosopher. I am a simple man with a simple mind. The only difference between you and me is I have a website where no one can tell me to stop saying the simple-minded things that pop into my simple mind. Even though you are still reading this you are smarter than I am. And yet sometimes the wisest solutions come from the most shallow of sources. So you ask me, Why does every day seem worse than the one before? Why do I wake each morning with a deeper sense of dread, a weight that is increasingly more difficult to bear pressing down on my chest and never lifting? And as best I can figure, thinking it over and running through all the possibilities, the answer is this: Because you are still alive. Nothing else really makes sense, does it?

Now that we’ve got that settled, here is a remix of the amazing Arthur Russell from the great Andy Stott. Pitchfork applauds its “sensation of a euphoric elsewhere,” which I am pretty sure we would all like to go to if such a thing were possible. This will have to be enough for now. Enjoy.

★★★★ The wind that had pounded on the building through the night was still pounding at dawn. Ragged purple wind-shredded clouds were in the west. Plastic garbage thrashed in the tree branches. The remaining snow had hardened into ice. Wet hair stiffened. New snowflakes, fat but sparse and aimless, began drifting around. The wind shoved the body through the hairpin turn into the subway entrance. A heavy and durable-looking covering of clouds was shoved away in the course of a quick uptown ride.

What else have you got going on right now?

This is a little bit of alright for an afternoon that needs a whole lot of it. Please do enjoy.

Talking about drinking with sarah miller.

Our second installment of the revived Awlcast is here! In this episode, we talk about how to read about, buy, shop for, and taste wine, hopefully without sounding like a complete dickhole.

You can read the rest of Sarah’s columns here.

How long can this charade really last?

The first thing I noticed about February’s “Fearless Flyer” was that there was no theme, no volume or issue number. It’s almost as if without holiday themes, there’s nothing to live for. (What about Valentine’s Day, guys? Or Black History Month? Or Presidents’ Day?) The front page is a testament to this: Organic Tomato Basil Marinara, Organic Tricolor Quinoa, and Roasted Almonds with 50% Less Salt. You couldn’t write a better parody of a Trader Joe’s newsletter if you tried. And try they did not.

Almonds are exactly the kind of snack food you can eat by the handful without ever realizing you’ve gone overboard. Just imagine yourself at a party or a picnic, almonds within reach… before you know what’s happened, the bowl is empty and you’re left holding the bag. Whether directly out of the bag or from a bowl, these nuts have that great nutty flavor that just keeps you coming back for more. We understand your pain, er, pleasure. And really, since nuts contain the best fats and are great sources of protein, the biggest potential downside to eating all these almonds is the salt.

Enter Trader Joe’s 50% Less Salt Almonds. As their name clearly states, Trader Joe’s 50% Less Salt Almonds have 50% less salt than our regular version of the same nuts.

these nuts have that great nutty flavor

As their name clearly states…

When was the last time column inches were so readily available that you saw this kind of circumlocution, repetition, and wordiness? Before I know it I’m holding the bag? Where did the bag come from? I was eating almonds straight out of the bowl, and ate so many of them that the bowl was empty and suddenly a bag magically appeared in my hands? Did I go into the kitchen at this party and get the bag the almonds came from? This must really be what happens when you eat all the almonds because no one in history has ever eaten that many woodchips. Almonds are a great snack, don’t get me wrong, but it is physically impossible to eat THAT many almonds. It’s like the gallon challenge. Your body would just reject it. “No, sorry, too many woodchips in here. No more allowed.”

First there was rice. You know, in the Bible. The Bible of Trader Joe’s (old testament). Rice begat rice made from non-rice and it was like rice but not quite like rice but it was still called rice because it was made from a ricer. On a side note, have you ever thought about rice and just said to yourself “Ah, yes, one of the main things about rice is its monochrome hue?” No, me neither. Sure, you might think if pressed in a family feud-type situation, of the words “white” or “beige” or “brown.” But you probably didn’t say “chromatically speaking, there was only one lambda, or wavelength, if you will.”

Something I think about from time to time is how daunting it must be to write a book. It’s just SO MANY thousands of words. But now that I’ve read enough Fearless Flyers, I think, eh, big deal. You just say the same thing over and over but with fifteen words where you otherwise might use two, and pretty soon you’ve filled twenty-four pages full of recycled newsprint printed with soy-based inks, “For mental consumption only.”

Another bone I have to pick with this edition of Trader Joe’s “Fearless Flyer” is the inconsistency in effort in the headlines. Some of them are very utilitarian, and some but not all choose to include the price for no apparent reason other than perhaps taking up extra space:

Organic Baguette • $1.99
Steak & Stout Pies
Coconut Water (weirdly not filed under the Four Ways to Coconut section on page 12???)
Dutch Tulips • 10 Stems • $4.99

Others are a little too familiar, almost like the copywriter saw a headline on The Washington Post once:

Oatmeal. In a Cup. That is all.
Pizza. Delicious. Dough.
Reduced Guilt. Mac & Cheese—Believe It.

Some of them are puns that make no sense

Red with Envy
A Little Saucy Something
A String of Good Luck
Musings on Muesli (structurally speaking this one is confusing because it’s not about muesli, but about being about muesli, which is both meta and not parallel construction)

These two are uncategorizably odd:

Organic Stone Ground Blue Corn Tortilla Chips

Htwi Pstourde Hnmaatra, Onaqiu, & Haic Deess

It’s an anagram, congratulations.

Fantastic Cookies and Where to Find Them

“Could we stop right there, with the headline?” the blurb asks. No? It’s not clear that anyone here is aware that this is a Harry Potter reference, made only more widely known because of last year’s spinoff movie, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Nothing about the writeup suggests anyone cares anyway. The blurb takes two hundred words to explain that “Quadruple” refers not to the number of almonds in each cookie but to the number of almond products in each cookie. Thanks for clarifying.

There is one feature of note in this month’s newsletter and it is a promise, which I cannot imagine will be upheld but will watch closely anyway:

Ah yes, remember 2014? Maybe March’s newsletter will have a MailChimp reference. I cannot imagine that what lies at the end of this scavenger hunt will be a free box of Trader Joe’s-brand cinnamon toast crunch, but you can bet I’ll be reading ever-so-closely to find out if 2017 is really the year we figure out once and for all that Adnan did it.

Listen to your guts

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, scientists have evidence that the microbes in your gut may be directly impacting things like fuckability, fertility, and overall health. All of the organisms in your digestive system form an ecosystem that’s specific to factors like your genes, your immune system*, and your diet — and depending on who you have hanging out in there, you might be more or less predisposed to a lot of situations:

1. According to Moises Velasquez-Manoff, an experiment that fed a probiotic microbe from human breast milk to a test group of mice found that “the animals grew unusually lustrous fur… elevated testosterone levels and oversize testicles.” In other words, adding different microbes to their gut ecology made the mice sexy. And not just the males, either. Females saw heightened “levels of a protein… which helps to prevent inflammatory disease and ensure successful pregnancy,” as well as a spike in oxytocin, the hormone our brains use to build bonds. So having more microbes in their digestive system seemed to positively impact… pretty much all of their other systems. Nice.
2. New research from Lund University in Sweden shows that intestinal bacteria can impact the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Again looking at mice, they were able to determine that “mice suffering from Alzheimer’s have a different composition of gut bacteria compared to mice that are healthy.” A control group who had no gut bacteria found themselves with less of Alzheimers’ signature plaque in their brains than some of the others, so in other words: the microbes in our guts seem to somehow play a role in how intensely diseases like Alzheimer’s manifest in individuals’ bodies. They can help and they can hurt. So, ostensibly, diversifying our gut bacteria might be a part of how we keep healthy and prevent disease.

What’s really romantic, though, is that we’re designed to be attracted to people whose microbial background is different than ours. Our bodies want us to diversify our gut portfolios. According to Velasquez-Manoff:

In one classic Swiss study, women were asked to sniff T-shirts previously worn by men and rate their pleasantness. The women tended to prefer shirts from men whose immune-system genes were most different from their own, and with whom they’d most likely produce the fittest offspring. Their noses led them, unawares, to the best genetic matches.

So in a way, kissing is like getting a vaccine. And eating a yogurt could be the hormonal equivalent of a red sports car. :’) Romantique.

Now get out there and smooch somebody (for your gut health).

____

*which colds and flus and diarrheas you’ve caught over the years

Sex between ghosts.