Panopticist archives
Panopticist archives by tag











































































































































































































































































































































best of Panopticist

Xenophobia: John McCain and Sarah Palin’s Shocking—But Refreshingly Honest—New Ad Campaign
John McCain and Sarah Palin have been drowning themselves in the toilet for the last several weeks, and it appears…

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….



Panopticist 30 recent posts

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…

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Shot-for-Shot Remake
Here’s an excellent treat, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to find for years. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The…

Splitting the Audio Atom
For the upcoming update to its popular Melodyne audio-processing plugin, the German company Celemony has done the impossible: It has…

Eric Clapton Is All Thumbs
Late last year a Finnish media artist named Santeri Ojala got a lot of attention for a series of hilarious…

iPhone Wallpaper: George Crumb’s Agnus Dei
After living with thwarted technolust since last June, I finally got myself an iPhone on Monday. Verdict: amazing, beautiful, world-historical….

Leonard Schrader’s Astonishing Movie-Poster Collection
From Vanity Fair’s website, an amazing slide show of lobby cards—“the gorgeous promotional posters that were a common sight in…

New on PBS Kids—2 Girls, 1 Cup: The Show
This hit the web a few days ago and hasn’t gone wide yet, which is a surprise, because it’s hilarious….

Trampoline Typography
A music video featuring “trampoline gymnasts simulating typical video effects.” Filmed in one take. I can’t stop giggling when I…

A Tribute to Paul Rand
Here’s a nice little short film about Paul Rand (1914-1996), the brilliant graphic designer most famous for designing logos for…

Lower-case N, Standing on a Hill
Hello. You may notice that I’ve made some subtle changes to Panopticist over the last month or two. I’ve widened…

The Bogeyman Is Coming Up the Stairs
Last month I spent a weekend in my hometown, Bloomington, Indiana, and I finally got my hands on a video…

The World Is a Camera
Check out this astonishing TED presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a Microsoft researcher who is leading the development of…

Hearst vs. Bobby Fischer
Last month I went to Tucson, Arizona, to help my father, Eliot Hearst, celebrate his 75th birthday. After retiring from…





Panopticist site map

» Five-Word Links archive



The Magazine Covers
The Palin Doctrine: Alaska governor Sarah Palin weighs in on international affairs and foreign policy, including globalization, the Russia problem, the China threat, and the arms race
Us Weekly as Harper's
Parents as Penis
Sementeen
Understatement Weekly
Angelina Jolie on the cover of Uterus Weekly
Sylvester Stallone on the cover of Sly
The National Enquirer as Esquire

» see all of the magazine covers

Flickr photos

» go to my Flickr page

Four albums I love beyond all reason
Join Rolf Harris Singing The Court of King Caractacus and Other Fun Songs
Fountains of Wayne, Utopia Parkway
The Postal Service, Give Up
Van Halen I
Four books that rewired my brain
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Robert Caro, The Power Broker
Tibor Kalman, Perverse Optimist

Panopticon
Panopticist sitemap

Home
About
Five-Word Links
Best Of
Blog Archives
Writing Archives
My Music
RSS

What is a Panopticist? Some insight is here.

About Andrew Hearst

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

This site is powered by Movable Type 4.21 and was lovingly hand-coded in BBEdit.

Search results powered by Mark Carey’s Fast Search plugin.

panopticist