People with interesting brains:

 This week's podcast is such inside baseball metapodcasting, but it's one where I've literally emailed the podcasters asking for it, and apparently so did many other people. Bad Hasbara has finally, finally covered the fall of Jesse Brown in "A Jesse Brown Christmas ft. Rachel Gilmore." (I've linked to the video here in case you want to see dogs that I assume appear on screen at some point; here is another audio link).

Of all the public figures who got October 7th brain, Jesse was the saddest for me personally. He was someone I respected a lot as a journalist. He broke the Me to We scandal, which I'd been on about for years, he broke the Jian Ghomeshi story, which friends of mine who are in media circles had been whispering about for years without the clout to speak up, and as the show details, he produced "Thunder Bay," which is one of the best journalistic deep dives that this country's media has done in ages. If anyone could be relied on to be sensible and level headed and critical, it was him. Until his brain melted.

I've had personal correspondence with him (to his credit, he does read everything you send to him and responds, in detail) and that just made me sadder, because as they describe here, a younger Jesse would have eviscerated older Jesse for his backwards logic. In fact many of the journalists he helped make prominent do exactly that, including the fantastic Robert Jago, who you hear at the end. He never really struck me as a person who started from a conclusion and worked backwards to find (or fabricate) evidence, so even when he did questionable shit, like interview people who were against safe injection sites or insist that an immediate return to school during a covid spike was a good idea, I at least listened to what he had to say. Unfortunately, his post-Oct. 7 brainworms throw all of his earlier reporting into question.

This podcast, featuring one of his main targets, is over 2.5 hours long and doesn't even get into everything. (The specific incident I wrote to him about isn't mentioned.) It's really good. Mostly it's very cathartic as a story about someone you thought was cool turning out to, in fact, not be very cool at all, and how you cope with that. I seriously hope he's listening and reflecting.