The newest installment of Facepalm Pilot, my technology-driven column for McSweeney’s, focuses on grammatical structures and the way they influence our understanding of the world.
As a thought experiment, let’s examine in extremely close detail a set of iterative changes that can be made to a single simple grammatical structure.
Here is a new installment of Facepalm Pilot, my McSweeney’s column about technology and stupidity, with an interactive data visualization which attempts to analyze the nutritional characteristics of the various cartoon characters used to advertise sugary breakfast cereals to kids.
When frazzled parents finally concede defeat on the daily battlefield that is breakfast, their kids are often delighted, since they are unable to steel themselves against expert marketing campaigns for which they are the coveted target demographic. Television aimed at children is funded primarily with ads in which brightly colored cardboard boxes are hawked by brightly colored cartoon characters during commercial breaks between shows featuring slightly different brightly colored cartoon characters. But there may still be a partial compromise on the horizon: by assessing the nutritional profiles of the mascots being used to sell the cereals, perhaps we can begin to understand underlying patterns by which we can help keep children healthy while also indulging their mascot preferences.
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I’ve somehow ended up with a new column for McSweeney’s called Facepalm Pilot, in which I’ll fiddle around with “the intersections of technology and stupidity.” There are many of these! So, data-driven satire, I guess?
First up, an interactive graphic exploring scientific and ethical conclusions based on zombie sociology.
It is very hard for me to bring myself to say this very silly phrase, but: I wrote a very short piece of fiction about pretzels for McSweeney’s. It’s part of their snarky reviews of new food series, to which I also contributed a Grape Nuts feature a few years ago.
When I bite into a Snyder’s of Hanover York Peppermint Pretzel Sandwich Dip, I get the sensation that I’m about to die in a ditch and my rotting corpse will be picked apart by raccoons before anybody finds me. more
I have finally been published by McSweeney’s. Twenty-seven twenty-six more things to do before I die.
(As more are added, you’ll need to scroll farther down to read my submission, or else you can search the page for my name to jump right to it.)