Jason Colavito

A Campbell's tomato soup ad featuring three recipes using the soup as a sauce or a condiment, including one presenting sauced steak surrounded by canned green beans as a Christmas wreath.

Christmas is coming, so it's time to start using "Santa Sauce"--sorry, Campbell's condensed tomato soup--on your steak and surrounding it with canned green beans.

The Center for Alternative Rationalities? I guess that seems like an appropriate home base for the head of a UFO the Society for UFO Studies. www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...

It's really kind of amazing that a basic concept from anthropology is suddenly a revelatory new finding and a controversial reevaluation of the past when a historian rather than an anthropologist repeats it.

Free version if you are paywalled: www.msn.com/en-us/news/o...

What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do? The historians who want to know how our ancestors experienced love, anger, fear, and sorrow

An interesting account of historian Rob Boddice's efforts to reconstruct historical emotions. However, he seems to have (re-)discovered what anthropologists already knew: That culture mediates how emotional stimuli manifest within the individual. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

James Dean kisses Sal Mineo in test footage from the Warner Bros. movie "Rebel without a Cause."

Posobiec has been on a 10-hour rant about how Netflix is too gay (because Stranger Things has gay characters) and is going to turn Warner Bros. gay. Apparently, he has never seen a Warner Bros. movie or an HBO show, going all the way back to "Rebel without a Cause."

I have some bad news for Jack about the Looney Tunes.

And then streamers--and here Netflix is to blame--broke the ritual of watching shows on a schedule, weekly, so now shows had low ratings and no cultural footprint. It's no wonder audiences, young one especially, drifted away. There's no audience left to support infinite production.

At one point, there were something like 400+ scripted series airing each year, plus all the unscripted shows, and then everyone wondered why the average show audience dropped below 1 million viewers. No one could watch that much content.

I admit that it's a bit challenging to see how HBO and Netflix will work together after being rivals for so long, but the truth is that Hollywood produced too much content over the past 15 years or so, and the audience doesn't exist to sustain that level.

The problem with this analysis is that WB was going to be sold no matter what, and this will be the result of any other media company buying them. The decline of Hollywood has many causes (YouTube and TikTok among them), so the question is whether this is the least bad outcome.

This was probably the best option from those on offer. At least this way Bugs Bunny won't be making rightwing propaganda for Paramount.

Midcentury Menu's photograph of a Christmas tablescape with a plate of tongue roles stuffed with ketchup, cream cheese, olives, and pickles.

For your Christmas celebration, consider rolling cream cheese, ketchup, olives, and pickles in tongue.

I agree that Rao's and Carbone's are excellent jarred sauces. I'd add one that isn't on their list: The Pasta Queen's marinara is also great and is priced several dollars cheaper than the other two.

A photo of Maine Sardine Tomato Surprise featuring a tomato stuffed with white slop, served on a bed of lettuce with sardines on the side.

"Maine Sardine Tomato Surprise"--tomatoes stuffed with sardines, eggs, and mayonnaise.

A recipe for Maine Sardine-Burgers, fried patties made from sardines and corn flakes, with a picture of the patties on hamburger buns.

"Maine Sardine-Burger," fried sardine and cornflake patties.

Olivia Nuzzi Tears Up and Pauses Interview When Pressed on Unethical Dealings With RFK Jr. | Video Olivia Nuzzi abruptly ended a virtual interview with Tim Miller after tearing up over questions about her alleged relationship with RFK Jr.

Olivia Nuzzi tears up, leaves interview because it is too hard for her to discuss the subject she wrote a book about and is on a media tour to promote. www.thewrap.com/olivia-nuzzi...

A vintage advertisement for Del Monte Tomato Catsup with Pineapple Vinegar along with a recipe for a ketchup gelatin mold.

Ketchup gelatin with a twist: The ketchup is made with pineapple.

Writers largely stopped being interesting around the time they stopped reading deeply and lost any connection to the greats of the past. Everything now is so mannered and self-reflexive, it's become a parody of literature by writers who know only derivatives of derivatives.

Remember when there was a time when reveling in sociopathic cruelty like this would get you shunned from polite society? I guess that died back in the Bush era, when "serious" people promoted torture as a policy goal and pop culture started promoting sadism as entertainment. And now, this.

It consistently amazes me that so many modern authoritarians jump right to terror and oppression without even trying to gain popular support by making life better for the population. Even Hitler had a whole program of improvements and benefits to buy support, not just genocide and terror.

Please let Conde Nast know that I am available to take the job, and I have zero sex scandals and no ethical conflicts of interest. Plus, I can actually write and edit.

There seems to be a fantasy that everyone will grow rich off stock options and sports betting as the economy runs itself.

The University of Oklahoma published my book, "The Mound Builder Myth" (2020), and it is deeply embarrassing that they are now entertaining the idea that a sophomoric paper whose only citation is "God said so" ought to be accepted as a science essay just because the student was offended.

If the workers didn't have to grind away until they die, how would the wealthy feel superior?

I learned today that the Bögbokcirkeln (Gay Book Circle) book club in Stockholm, Sweden read my book, "Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean," this month and held a meeting and discussion about it on Wednesday.

I think it's fairly well-known that the Nazis drew inspiration from America's subjugation of the West during Manifest Destiny, but it's also fairly clear that the current crop of government officials is taking their inspiration more from the Nazis, whose language and imagery they keep appropriating.

It probably would have been a good idea to wait until the tech actually worked before forcing it on the public and poisoning their opinion of it. But the dirty secret may well be that the tech is never going to work.

"High Weirdness" derives from adapting "High Strangeness," one of J. Allen Hynek's categories for the unusualness of UFO sightings. He meant "extremely anomalous," but believers, on analogy with terms like "high adventure," reinterpreted it as "rarefied" or "superior" strangeness.

In restricting nearly the whole film to one house and one family who somehow singlehandedly influence national events, the movie is unfortunately another entry in the genre where the fate of the whole nation or the whole world revolves around the dysfunction of a single family.