jasoncolavito.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Researchers discovered the original photograph Stanley Kubrick used for the famous final shot in "The Shining." I'll save you the time reading the article: It was a photo of a Feb. 15, 1921 party at London's Royal Palace Hotel. airmail.news/issues/2025-...

submitted 6 hours ago • 1 comment

Spam-and-Macaroni Loaf, with broccoli, "a harmonious taste blend."

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

I'm betting they were flooded with tips about Elon and Melania.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

How much you want to bet that when they refuse to spend ad dollars on Pride, it won't count as "political considerations" in this corrupt quid pro quo of right-wing bribery.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

This kind of shortsightedness frustrates me to no end. They're treating CNN like the cable channel is the key asset, justifying cuts to newsgathering. But newsgathering is the asset that can be monetized across platforms the company had an ounce of creativity. puck.news/what-zaslavs...

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

This is another review of "Hollywood High" by Bruce Handy, but the book, while entertaining, is a cherry-picked, unmethodical survey with a bizarre vendetta against James Dean and "Rebel without a Cause." Handy's conclusions warrant a serious rebuttal, not uncritical repetition.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

This YouTube video about James Dean's male lovers from "Top Expedition" is full of fake stories and misinformation. A long section is devoted to my book, and it manages to misunderstand what I wrote and also misinform viewers by mixing up facts. www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-m1...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Turns out it's all part of a media campaign to promote a new book about the golden era of the Simpsons. slate.com/culture/2025...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

I wonder what would happen if we banned pundits from using vague umbrella terms like "The Left" and "The Right" for a week and they were forced to actually grapple with the real organizations and individuals driving the political and media agenda.

submitted 3 days ago • 16 comments

One gets the feeling that the writers at the Atlantic stopped paying attention to pop culture in 1990s. This piece is a Gen X nostalgia trip but has little to say beyond, "Hey, old person: Do you remember this?"

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

If you are interested in medieval Arabic accounts of ancient Egypt and where the names of the (imaginary) kings in them came from, I've translated and annotated Ahmed Kamal's interesting but uneven 1903 analysis. www.jasoncolavito.com/arabic-names...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

John Calvin believed that wealth and success were signs God had predestined a person for salvation, while poverty and disease were signs of predestined damnation. The pernicious influence of this miserable philosophy has long justified the callous amorality and indifference to suffering of the rich.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Warner Bros. Discovery finally admits that the merger of WB and Discovery was a failure. The company will split up next year, with WB offloading the former Turner networks onto the old Discovery but keeping HBO. www.wsj.com/business/med...

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

In 1966, for $4.99 you could get and "Electronic Computer Brain" that could balance a checkbook, calculate satellite reentry, and solve riddles and tell fortunes. "Fun at parties!"

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

The thing is, when you destroy knowledge, you also destroy your own power in the long term because the exercise of power is contingent on having accurate information and the intelligence to use it. Even an all-powerful god-emperor can't do much more than fume and rage randomly without knowledge.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Film critic Kyle Smith, writing in The Wall Street Journal, labels "Rebel without a Cause" a "fairly terrible teen soap" in his review of Bruce Handy's "Hollywood High." He nevertheless centers the film in his summary of Handy's teen movie survey. www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

I thought it would be easy to put together a page on the weird fragments of the largely unknown writer Bruttius/Bouttios, but it turned into a ridiculously complicated odyssey through decades of scholarly arguments about who he was and if he existed. www.jasoncolavito.com/fragments-of...

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

No surprise: Queer characters are disappearing from TV and insiders say it's "100%" due to fear of Trump and the GOP. theankler.com/p/crisis-for...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

I have consistently had the problem that, when asked to translate text, it will start off translating accurately, but the longer the text, the more it veers off partway through and starts fantasizing fake material that isn't in the original.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

So, if I understand correctly, "abundance" is just "trickle-down economics" pretending to be liberal?

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

A new documentary claims to have discovered the true location of Atlantis and producers promise to reveal where Atlantis is when the film premieres later this year. They say they have found underwater ruins that exactly match Plato. But (see next post)... southseriesfest.com/en/atlantica...

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

At this point, we would be better off assigning leadership roles by random lottery. At least then there would be a chance for competence.

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

This is so sad and horrifying and infuriating.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Is it really feedback if no one reads it? The students who did not write their papers are certainly not reading the feedback. Indeed, most evaluations and feedback only exist so administrators can justify grades if sued and can meet arbitrary accreditation guidelines.

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

I stumbled across another account of the Pillars of Wisdom and the Watchers that I had not seen before. Nominally written by Symeon Logothete in his Chronicle (c. 948-960 CE), this passage is believed to be copied from a lost sixth or seventh century original. My trans.:

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

I am the first to say how awful the current climate has become but let us not forget what it was like to be LGBTQ in the middle 20th century. That was a type of all-pervasive terror that today's oppressive goons only aspire to emulate.

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

After seeing Luke Caverns appear on the Joe Rogan Experience, former "America Unearthed" host Scott Wolter, in an attempt to gain back the spotlight, is posting appeals for Rogan to invite him on to discuss the Knights Templar, and Wolter's fans are posting, too.

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

This line from a book I'm reading is so true of so much scholarship, not just this one particular case. "Scaliger continues to be cited by modern scholars, although the latter have a regrettable habit of quoting him secondhand and thus not always correctly."

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

Some questionable dialogue from Robin in a 1966 issue of Batman.

submitted 15 days ago • 2 comments

Nielsen found that Squid Game was the most-watched TV series of the 2024-2025 U.S. season, with 27 million viewers. That means that the most-watched series attracted fewer than 8% of Americans. In other words, nobody is watching anything you are watching. variety.com/2025/tv/news...

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

It's really an indictment of the whole corporate internet that they have filled it with so much A.I.-generated slop in just two years that there is no longer enough new human writing to train A.I. with.

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

The context is a discussion of Camus, so he probably misspoke and meant existentialism, not stoicism. But still, discovering that Kennedy is a fan of Camus and follows existentialism explains a lot about his bizarre ideas.

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

I wrote up some thoughts about Joe Rogan's rants about "arrogant" archaeologists in his podcast with guest Luke Caverns today. www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/joe-rog...

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment