ICYMI…

• Greta Rainbow started beaucoup discourse with her piece on braided essays

• We published Brittany Leitner’s essay on the whale costume that helped her escape poverty. Brittany was the runner up of our “the way we work” essay contest in collaboration with Lux. The story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project’s James Ledbetter Fund.

• We announced our third podcast THE DESIRE QUESTION. The vibe is what if Esther Perel had a book club. You can learn more here. 💘

TOP NOTES

On October 30th we gathered with a small group of Dirt contributors to celebrate Halloween and conscript our guests into a perfume guessing game. We had two scents by Pearfat Parfum on hand to test, and sent everyone home with samples of Only a Witch Cat and Be Very Afraid.

Visit Dirt’s Instagram for more photos from the night.

THIS WEEK ON TASTELAND

Nick Susi joined us to talk about Cheeto dust, brand wars, and why we can't stop checking our phones. We dive into his viral essay about monoculture and conflict, the friend.com marketing spectacle, and whether going viral is actually good for anyone anymore. Nick also breaks down his obsession with the War of the Worlds radio broadcast.

Read an excerpt of our conversation below, or keep scrolling to listen to the full episode. 

Nick Susi: So some context for those not familiar. Orson Welles in 1938, almost 100 years ago, gave this radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, this adaptation of the H.G. Wells book about alien invasion. And instead of presenting this as a fictional story through the radio, he presented it as if it was live news.

And as the story goes, allegedly people heard it and believed that aliens were invading the earth—mass hysteria and panic, fleeing their homes, jumping out of windows, committing suicide, all the tales. And then Orson was subsequently mini-cancelled by 1938 terms and apologized and then went on to become one of the greatest Hollywood directors of all time. That's kind of the story that I hear a lot.

When I was working on this piece, I was asking a lot of friends and peers, like, are you familiar with the story? And every American said yes.

Francis Zierer: My mother, when I was a kid, told me a story about her father working at a gas station at that time and observing people panicked, coming and buying gas and such.

NS: I still hear this story frequently referenced, even more so now because it is one of these early stories of fake news before we had a word for it. So it feels very much in the cultural conversation. And it wasn't until about a year ago that I was actually doing more reading about this story and came to realize that the story that we've been telling for a hundred years is kind of wrong.

What actually happened was, at this point in time, 1938, it was a very historically significant moment. Middle of the Great Depression, horrible economic times of hardship. It was the year before World War II started—a lot of geopolitical tension and fear, Nazis and fascism spreading across the world. And it was when the radio as this new technology became more of a mainstream consumer object. The radio was invented prior, but it wasn't something in people's homes. Now you see photographs from then where the family's in the living room and they're sitting around the radio and listening to whatever. It was then that that was starting to happen.

And all of those things combined—the newspaper industry was taking a beating. More people were buying radios, listening to the radio for the news, buying less newspapers. Advertisers do what advertisers do—they follow the people to the radio broadcasters away from the newspapers. And it's the middle of the Great Depression. So all those things combined, the newspaper industry was doing worse.

And for that reason, the newspaper industry hated the radio broadcasters and they were doing as much as they possibly could to make the lives of radio people a living hell, especially in government. They were throwing their weight around, trying to get all of these laws and regulations put in place to cancel the radio, ban the radio, destroy the radio. And they were quite successful for a number of years putting real laws in place where the radio broadcasters were very restricted in being able to share the news, basically. They could only share news for like five minutes a day. They had to direct people to buy the local newspaper for more news. These were real laws.

And so it did so happen that Orson Welles gave this radio broadcast of War of the Worlds saying that aliens were invading the earth and people did hear it, but the scale of it was very relatively small. It was out of this CBS broadcasting station in New York. I think people probably around New York and New Jersey and maybe some other places heard it. We're talking like a few thousand people. And then the amount of people that heard it and were genuinely like, "fuck, aliens"—that was probably quite small.

However, the newspaper people heard this story and were like, "Aha, what a golden opportunity," and ran the story across every newspaper around the country, saying that this new evil magical radio technology was brainwashing people into believing that aliens were invading the earth as another step in their attempt to ban the radio.

And so that is the story that went viral by 1938 standards and is the story that we've been repeating and remembering a hundred years later to today.

I'm so fascinated by the story for so many reasons, because it says so much about our current relationship with media specifically, but also just—every level of this story, every layer of the story mirrors so much of today. Are we heading towards a recession or economic depression? Are we on the verge of World War III? Is TikTok going to be banned? People are worried about people believing everything they hear on social media and podcasts, widespread panic and hysteria about AI psychosis. It's all the same shit over and over again.

And I'm so tickled by the fact that there's so many lessons in this story and the only thing that we remember and keep repeating is that aliens were invading the earth. I think that says a lot about human beings. To me, this is a story about the human condition.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Mrs. Meyer’s is finally on the fig train (Good Sillage)

• Sharks scale geometrically (Quanta)

• Andrew should answer Epstein questions in US, Democrats say (BBC)

• The witch economy is booming (WSJ)

• Woody Allen’s New York—and mine (The Nation)

• Weatherizing Salem (The Paris Review)

• The Interview Assassin (CJR) 

Visit CLONE.FYI for hourly updates on culture and technology.