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Sarah Palin Makes the Cover of Foreign Affairs Weekly
This Sarah Palin nomination is going great! And now she’s laid out her geopolitical philosophy in the new issue of…
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Now With Hot Girl-on-Girl Action
From Flesh Gordon to The Sperminator, spoofs of mainstream cultural offerings have long been a staple of the porn industry….
Mad Men Gets All the Details Right—Except One
Mad Men is a terrific show for lots of reasons, and it’s rightly been praised for its obsessive re-creation…
The Scandalous Origins of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours
There’s no current hook for this post about a little-known Hollywood scandal. It’s just something I’ve been meaning to…
There Is Something Weird Going on With the Clock on 24
Okay, I am a TOTAL FREAK for having noticed this weird typographic pattern on 24. You have been warned….
A Bully Gets Bullied: Why Rush Limbaugh Never Became the Next Oprah
In 1990, a year or two before he became super-famous, Rush Limbaugh guest-hosted Pat Sajak’s short-lived talk show. It didn’t…
Gawker Media Sold to The New York Times Company? The Truth Behind the Rumor
Yesterday Gawker expressed bafflement regarding Russ Smith’s assertion in The New York Press that Gawker Media has been sold to…
Panopticist Gold: Greatest Hits
Added this weekend: a Best Of archive that brings together about 30 of my favorite Panopticist posts from the…
Judy Miller Finally Goes Off the Deep End
I had no idea how bad things had gotten for Judith Miller until I saw the Ethicist column in this…
Steve Jobs Announces the Latest Addition to the iPod Family: the iPod Harper’s Special Edition
At a joint press conference yesterday at 666 Broadway, Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs and Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham announced…
Joe Frank, Radio’s Brilliant Purveyor of Postmodern Noir, Has Been in the Hospital
The great Los Angeles-based radio artist Joe Frank has been struggling with health problems over the last few months….
Container Store Cosmology
This weekend I had to go to The Container Store in Chelsea to return something, and it reminded me of…
Seven-Year-Olds Can’t Write Upside Down
Children of the 1970s who read this site: Did any of you make plates like this in art class? You…
Best “Waltzing Matilda” Ever
My mother is Australian, but I wasn’t raised with much awareness of Australian culture. My mom occasionally served us Vegemite…
William Orbit, King of the Knob Twirlers
One evening in 1994, my friend Nina sat me down and played me “Water From a Vine Leaf,” an…
The Surprisingly Retro Design of Sylvester Stallone’s New Magazine
Pea-brained thespian Sylvester Stallone has a new magazine out. Who would’ve guessed they’d go with such an allusive design? I…
If Janice Min’s Magazine Looked Like Lewis Lapham’s
Because sometimes I play around with Quark when I’m bored. You can see more stuff like this via the magazine…
If You’re Nervous and Hungover, Do Not Go on Live TV
The thought of being interviewed on live TV scares me, because I’d probably end up doing something like this: As…
Microsoft Caught in Sinister Copyediting Conspiracy!
One of the weirder style sheet idiosyncrasies I’ve noticed in recent years is Slate’s use of superscript for ordinal suffixes—e.g.,…
Entry Points
In case you’re wondering, some giant media conglomerate beat me to the domain name hearst.com, so that wasn’t a possibility….
John McCain and Sarah Palin Break the U.S. Lying Record; Potus Illustrated Has the Scoop
This week’s issue just arrived in the mail, and it’s a keeper: (Yes, I made this. For more stuff like…
McCain’s Lies, and Obama’s Unbruised Fists
I’ve been trying to hatch another Palin-related magazine spoof, because it’s fertile ground and I’m confident I’ll be able…
Remarkable Photos From Iceland
Via coudal.com, two photos from a gorgeous slideshow of Iceland images by San Francisco-based photographer Tim Gasperak. I’ve always wanted…
Alice in Wonderland: The 1976 Musical-Comedy Porn Spoof
People likey the porn spoofs, so here’s footage from an incredibly odd artifact I discovered during my search for Kubrick…
Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers: A 1957 Documentary
I visited Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers during a visit to Los Angeles in 1994 and was utterly awestruck. Rodia’s sui…
A Late-’50s Clip of 14-Year-Old Jimmy Page Playing Skiffle
This awesome clip shows a barely pubescent Jimmy Page playing skiffle on a British TV show in the late ’50s….
New Websites: Clive Thompson, Matthew Price, Peter Dizikes
I’ve been designing websites for a few good friends recently, including the book critic and former Lingua Franca and…
Fringe Typography: J.J. Abrams Still Loves Big Words That Move Toward the Camera
I swear I’m interested in things other than text and numerals that appear onscreen during television shows, but this…
The New Electric Company: A Sneak Peek
As The New York Times reported in May, Sesame Workshop is preparing a new version of the classic ’70s children’s…
I’ve Switched to a Different Web Host
My longtime web host, pair.com, shut down Panopticist for two hours yesterday afternoon because of the burst of traffic I’ve…
A Children’s Book About Animals—and Group Sex
Or so it might seem. One doesn’t have to have one’s mind completely in the gutter to think that maybe,…
What the Hell Is This Weird Dingbat?
All Macs come bundled with a handful of dingbat fonts that most people never use, including Apple Symbols, Webdings,…
Sarah Palin Makes the Cover of Foreign Affairs Weekly
This Sarah Palin nomination is going great! And now she’s laid out her geopolitical philosophy in the new issue of…
Sarah Palin’s Daughter’s Pregnancy: A Possible Scenario
By now you’ve probably heard that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant. Given the mounting evidence that…
Audio: A Track From Al Green’s Amazing New Album
Well, it’s not that new: Lay It Down was released in late May. But it’s one of the best…
Audio: The Curious Pronunciation of the Word “Shit” in Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary
I grew up in southern Indiana, where a joke circulated that “shit” could be pronounced with four or five…
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Now With Hot Girl-on-Girl Action
From Flesh Gordon to The Sperminator, spoofs of mainstream cultural offerings have long been a staple of the porn industry….
Hot Deals! Subscribe to X-Acto!, Boot Lick, Bathroom Stall Digest, Professional Award Judge, and Other Advertising-Industry Magazines
In the late ’90s, I occasionally did freelance typesetting for a small firm that designed annual reports for AOL,…
Mad Men Gets All the Details Right—Except One
Mad Men is a terrific show for lots of reasons, and it’s rightly been praised for its obsessive re-creation…
Panopticist, Now With Tags and Search and Much Larger Graphics
Hello. As of yesterday there have been some major changes around here. I’ve spent the last two weeks adding a…
High-Def Backyard Shootout
Amateurs are doing amazing things these days with consumer-grade high-def camcorders, especially Canon’s HV30 MiniDV unit (which retails for about…
Spike Jonze’s Skateboard Detonations
This fantastic slo-mo video sequence, in which top skateboarders ride through a postindustrial landscape rigged with explosives, is the intro…
Mikhail Gorbachev: Smiter of Zombies, Bringer of Twinkies
I guarantee this is the weirdest and yet most rewarding thing you’ll see all day. It’s a video for a…
Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, One of the First Pornographic Cartoons Ever Made
Created anonymously by a group of professional animators in about 1929, the silent short Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure is…
The Y2K Empire State Building Flash-a-Thon
For its latest cool project, the merry pranksters of Improv Everywhere arranged for hundreds of people to stand along the…
The Scandalous Origins of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours
There’s no current hook for this post about a little-known Hollywood scandal. It’s just something I’ve been meaning to…
Photos of Boston, Massed
A guy in Boston took 3,000 photos over the course of three days and then stitched them together into this…
Best End-Credits Blooper Reel Ever
Here is Peter Sellers in the hilarious outtakes sequence at the end of Being There, the 1979 Hal Ashby film…
Cool Photos From the Set of Lost
Brad Smith of The Big Noob went to Hawaii for a vacation in January, and his Flickr set has a…
Surveil Yourself
A Brooklyn-based photographer named Izaz Rony is offering a new kind of portrait service: You tell him where you’re going…
Eno’s Sydney Opera House projections.
Van Halen’s underwhelming original logo.
Billy Bob Thornton’s really high.
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I’m Andrew Hearst, a New York-based writer, editor, designer, musician, and gadabout. You can learn a bit more about me here.
Email: hearst@nyc.rr.com
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