#i’m just getting hit with a lot of feelings about ace rep tonight and i need to rant about at least one of them

[jester-step]

thinking about jonathan sims being asexual. thinking about how most ace/ace-coded characters in media are represented as cold, distant, unfeeling, too busy, smart, or ambitious for sex, “barely human”, sometimes literal robots or aliens. thinking about jon, who first comes off as cold and rude but who we gradually discover to be compassionate, anxious, kind of a dork, funny, lonely, stubborn, brave. who struggles so much with his own humanity. thinking about the aces who feel different, disconnected, broken, who lack or have a complicated relationship with “the thing that makes us human.” thinking about jon, who even in his worst moments, cares so much and loves so deeply. who, on the surface, embodies the asexual stereotype of a character who’s too cold and inhuman for sex, and yet who subverts that stereotype over and over again by being a complex character struggling with his disconnection from other people in a way that beautifully ties into the unfortunately common asexual experience of feeling broken and yet who remains so very human, despite everything. thinking about how jonny probably didn’t consider all this when he wrote jon as asexual but fuck it it’s 3am and i’m emotional over the jarchivist. uh, in this essay i will-

#this is absolutely incoherent but i’m a bit sleep deprived and emotional so forgive me #i’m just getting hit with a lot of feelings about ace rep tonight and i need to rant about at least one of them #yall are lucky i’m not going off about fitzroy maplecourt (my beloved) rn #anyways enjoy this rant i’m going to sleep #the magnus archives #tma #jonathan sims #asexuality #ace #ace spectrum #i have Other Things to say about jon’s ace rep some less positive but i’m feeling emotional about the good parts of it ok #anyways i’m biro ace like him so i can say whatever i want and yall have to listen /j

[rwbyconversations]

RWBY Volume 7 Review

Two weeks out from Volume 8 and I finally cared enough to write this. Go team I guess. 

Part of it came down to my feelings on Volume 7. It’s a complicated season that’s made me realize a lot of my overall feelings on RWBY as a series, particularly a lot of the less flattering feelings. Volume 7 is just... frustrating in general, as for all the good that it does have, and it does have a lot of great elements to it, it’s let down by a frustrating script and writing choices that feel distinctly amateurish, especially as the series moves on and gets better and better looking each year. There’s elements and kernals here of great character writing, season-wide arcs that land in a really good way and get me emotionally invested in the characters. But on the other... Ren only has two hundred words the entire season and you can tell! 

Volume 7 is a season of dizzying highs, some of the best moments of the entire franchise... and some of the series lows. It’s a season where there’s no production reason for its shortcomings... it just comes down to an awkward script that focuses on the wrong elements far too often. Let’s talk about that. In a very long and drawn out manner.

Thanks to @jamesbranwen​, @h-e-m-o-goblin​ and @retro-riffraff​ for help with GIFs and consultation on this review.

1) The Good Stuff!

A) Atlas is very pretty!

I cannot stress enough how on a set level, Volume 7 is leaps and bounds above the other seasons in sheer environmental detail and setting dressing. Mantle has a great atmosphere with its New York influences, the smog covered backgrounds and oppressive streets and alleys. Ironwood’s office which is deliberately designed to evoke astronomy themes to represent James’ love for the stars. The cold oppressive atmosphere of the Schnee Manor and how Jacques has begun warping it to glorify him with only lip service paid to Nicholas in public. Penguins! 

There’s a lot of great set design work that went into this season and the crew deserve props for it. Genuinely. 

B) Ironwood’s arc is the best character arc in the entire franchise

Yeah just wearing my heart on my sleeve there, I fucking love Ironwood and his character arc here in Volume 7 is the best written arc of the show. I simp for the tin man who just wants to do the right thing. This one season of content is better than a lot of the series-wide material being honest. I went back to James’s big volumes in the last month to rewatch the show and it’s interesting to see the early seeds in retrospect for where his arc goes. His need to protect everyone he can and the brutish measures he considers necessary for such an act, his conflicting loyalties towards Ozpin that manifest in both frustration at Oz’s seeming apathy to the growing conflict, but also desperate desire for validation from Ozpin that what’s he doing is the right call. After the Mistral seasons set up James as going off the deep end following Volume 3, having him open the season with an earnest smile, an immediate apology for the team’s arrest and trusting them with his plans for Amity and Salem is a jarring but pleasant surprise. He’s not been slacking off, he’s been trying to keep the world together in the way he thinks is best. He lets his guard down around the heroes and we see the good man underneath, which makes the moments where he raises his walls hurt all the more. While Em and Merc are still probably my favorite characters period, James is absolutely my favorite character in Volume 7 and Top 5 favorite characters series-wide. I’m very eager to see where he goes from here. He also rocks the beard and fixed his T-Rex arms so James came out of the washing machine that is Volume 7′s costume design. He truly is the Best Boi, and I cannot give Jason Rose enough credit for his performance this year. He hit every note of Ironwood’s character perfectly and I wish the fandom would give him more credit for giving James as much life as he does.

Oh, and as the obligatory comment on mlm rep that I am known for getting obsessively weird anon hate over: IronQrow hug nearly had me crying on a convention floor from how goddamn soft it was. Remember conventions? Ah good times.

This just... hits me... ya know? Seeing him lower his guard so much to come in for a hug just shows how isolated he’s let himself become to let himself have this moment of contact... Godamnit James. Also this is the second time after Martial Arcs that two guys hug and I really liked their ship for the following hiatus. 

C) Soft Qrow hours are nice

Qrow’s a good guy, he went through a lot of bad stuff in Volume 6 but now he’s on the other side and purged his voice of the demon within. I think Volume 7 was a very good year for Qrow overall. It was great to see him interacting with more characters his age and lowering his own guard. His moments of letting the facade drop around James and Clover especially are great expansion for his character. Jason Liebritch hit the ground running as Qrow and gave him a far more dynamic range than I think Vic could. While I wish Qrow going off alcohol had been given more of a focus as it’s kind of done off-handedly that he’s gone cold turkey and otherwise doesn’t get brought up barring his revulsion at the wine in the Schnee Manor, he overall had a great year. And trust me I’ll get to the fights later, I have a lot more I can say about the bird boi there. 

D) I liked the Ace Ops! 

I was ambivilent towards the Ace Ops on first watching. They’re kinda underdeveloped in the context of the season at large and most people immediately pegged them as a miniboss squad/fodder for Salem to kill. But in rewatch they do still get to shine, if not as brightly. They’re very enjoyable. Clover especially is just really fun in retrospect, I love cocky fighters in general, and he was infectiously enjoyable (I’ve already covered the FG stuff in the past, not doing it again). Marrow came a close second because... well it’s Marrow, he is The Best Boi. Harriet got points for being a punchgirl which is always cool, I liked how her Semblance was shown and being cocky while being able to back it up is always a win. Elm and Vine are tied for dead last, I like the body diversity Elm introduces with her muscles and Vine... existed... but overall I think with the time they had, they did get to establish themselves well. I wish I could say that about their relationship with Team RWBYORNJ but this is the Nice Section so we’ll leave it there for now.

This is one of the best shots of the entire season. I adore it. God I like the Teryx design.

E) God the villains rocked this year! 

I am a villain whore. I own that. I will embrace that monkier. But when they’re as cool as this, I feel validated in this Chilli’s tonight. Watts and Tyrian really make the season shine and don’t have a dud scene all season. They have great chemistry together, shining bright in even the weakest or most mediocre episodes. Watts went from “Oh yeah you exist” tier to “Oh yeah you rule” tier. His vendetta against Ironwood feels so real and pre-established, even though this season is the first time it’s ever come up. Watts just ozzes style in everything he does. The animators bring him to life and make every step, every flick of his twist and even just how he moves his eyes all bleed contempt. He’s such a rat and I love him! Chris Sabat finally gets to stretch his wings after a few years playing Watts as just Evil Scientist Guy, and he makes the most of it. 

And Tyrian remains an absolute treat. He didn’t get much in V6 but here he takes center stage with Watts and also gets so much impact because of it. All the little twitches, and tilting of his heads, and dramatic gestures, he’s still just so goddamn cool to watch and we even get a little backstory of him. I know he’s irredeemable. But I just want to watch Tyrian kill people and scream. Like hot damn his line “THE GRIMM SHOULD HAVE DESTROYED OUR ENEMIES, NOT MADE THEM FRIENDS!” is so fucking raw. He’s having fun destablizing a nation with his boyfriend! 

“You want more chaos than a Grimm invasion?” “If anyone on Remannt can do it, wouldn’t it be you?” There is no heterosexual explanation for how these two look at each other and yes this is me outing myself as a Nuts and Volts fan.

Watts and Tyrian really do become the absolute highlights of the season alongside James. They have a great dynamic and even during their more slower moments there’s so much care and thought put into their every mannerism. Animators, seriously, great job, I love what you did. And their fights... we’ll get there. But they’re so goddamn good. 

Look they even run the same! They’re soulmates! 

Honorary mention to Salem by the way. She’s only in two scenes but her presence is felt throughout Ironwood’s arc and his growing fear of her and she damn well delivers when she shows up. That shot of her arriving in person is a killer shot to end on as well.

Oh and I guess Cinder and Neo exist don’t they? Eh, we’ll come back to them. 

F) Oscar got a character arc!

Finally! He did it! He got an arc that began, continued and ended all onscreen! It only took four tries! 

But yeah Oscar had a really good set of scenes in Volume 7. I like him being the first to confront Ruby on the Ironwood lie, bringing up the hypocrisy after their condemning of Ozpin just last season. I like him having a more forward role (outside of not getting to be part of the celebration in episode 4 what the hell guys), and that he’s the big link between RWBY and Ironwood was a great call. Having Ozpin shelved for one more season so Oscar can take center-stage was an inspired choice. I love his dynamic with Ironwood, and how James closing himself off emotionally gets reflected in how he begins slipping in how he refers to Oscar, starting off as treating him and Oz as separate, ending with him gunning Oscar down as he doesn’t care anymore to differentiate the two.

My big issues with Oscar’s arc are that I’m first of all annoyed at the lack of followup on the Oscar stuff from V6, I’m still waiting for Qrow to apologize for punching Oscar guys! I also really wish Neo’s first attack wasn’t offscreen. CRWBY’s cliffhanger fetish meant I got to break out the Offscreen Pine jokes again. And of course, the Neo hallway punch was a bit bullshit.

G) (Most of) The fights are amazing

There’s no punchline. These fights are great, two of them are in my Top 10 Series Wide fights list and at least the duds aren’t Volume 5 bad.

If you’d told me before Volume 7 that Watts would get an extended firefight with James, I’d have felt that a bit cheap as Watts to me doesn’t feel like a fighter, more a planner who hides behind armies of mechanical soldiers. But damn if they didn’t sell me on Watts “You’ve yeed your last haw” Watts whipping out a Glock just to spite James. 

This is another one of my favorite shots in the entire series.

Ironwood vs Watts is potentially my favorite fight in the entire series, and if it’s not, it’s easy Top 3 alongside Yang vs Mercury and Pyrrha vs CRDL/Mercury. It makes great use of Amity in the abandoned gravity biome meant for SSSN vs JNPR, with Ironwood and Watts deftly moving around in a manner that very easily could have been difficult to track with the constantly shifting gravity, but the crew do their best to keep it coherent as to who’s where. The credits showed their dedication also stretched into visual continuity, as James and Arthur’s route throughout the Arena was carefully considered so they’d loop around organically. 

This is what I mean when I say the crew went above and beyond to keep things clean.

Ironwood vs Watts could have easily failed to impress, given its lack of choreography on the level the series usually does, but the team’s efforts went instead into showing a situation that lets Watts get a dragged out battle: James wins whenever he closes the distance here, so Arthur’s constantly on the run and being forced to tamper with the arena. Great camerawork, a GOD TIER song from Caleb Hyles that I’m still listening to today, and two characters with a fantastic history coming to blows makes for easily the best fight of the season and a series-wide highlight. Watching it develop from storyboards, to mocap, to animations and the full version is a delight to see. This is what CRWBY can do when everything comes togehter. The orchestra’s all tuned. It’s a goddamn symphony.

THIS is my favorite shot of the season.

Tyrian also gets to shine with his two battles this year. His alley fight with Qrow, Robyn and Clover is short but sweet, the corvid and the scorpion especially trading brutal blows in the cramped space. Qrow goes full Devil May Cry with his style-switching here, Harbinger being swapped between sword, tonfa and gun forms freely alongside Qrow applying The Power of Punching. His 1v1v1 with Clover and Qrow though is the true highlight of the season in terms of choreography. It’s lighting-fast, and has some impeccable shot work. Qrow gets to use his scythe with deliberate nods to the Red Trailer, Clover gets to shut up everyone who doubted his weapon, and Tyrian is just along for the ride and he makes the most of it. It’s frentic, it’s heart-pounding, it’s everything a fight should be. 

Honorary mentions as well go to Ace Ops vs the Geist, which is just really fun and has a great backing music choice, the opening battle with Sabre having Ruby’s obligatory ten seconds of fighting that come at the start of every new era of the series, and the Ace Ops vs RWBY fight which has some good choreo in places.

H) Winter and Penny have good chemistry

I don’t have a ton to add here, I just like their dynamic and how they advance each other’s arcs. It’s nice writing. I also like Winter apologizing to Penny when she’s angry at Jacques and takes it out on Penny by accident with the “You wouldn’t understand” line.

Penny as a Maiden is a nice idea, I think her new design is cute. Penny says trans rights.

Those are a lot of my favorite things about Volume 7. It’s a killer season when it’s firing on all cylinders but unfortunately... it often misfires in frustrating ways, many of which are unfortunately due to core emblematic problems with the series that won’t go away.

2) The Bad Stuff

A) The costumes

It’s been a over year. It’s low hanging fruit. I don’t care. Most of them are still not good and they’re ludicrously over-designed.

Blake’s in a fetish suit and I wonder how she even goes to the bathroom. Weiss just looks like an abino Sabre alt, Yang is what a Halloween costume site would describe as “Sexy UPS Driver,” (why does she have a thigh window) Ruby... looks fine, it’s one of her better costumes. Jaune’s hair is silly, Ren’s model has lost some muscle definition and he looks like an e-boy, Nora’s costume really doesn’t fit the Atlas visual design and looks like a rejected Kingdom Hearts costume. Cinder’s is too black and I actually can’t track her in darker scenes because of it (which is kinda bad during... a fight scene... where I need to know where she is...), Neo looks like a Ren Fair cosplayer doing a bit for her OnlyFans, Winter’s is anatomically weird with super skinny arms and legs, and Blake’s hair is a fucking hate crime. 

Qrow’s is one I liked at first but in retrospect it does feel like a downgrade. To quote @h-e-m-o-goblin​ from a Discord chat:

in a show like rwby, where color is such a vital defining aspect of every character, a cohesive colorscheme goes a long way. qrow's original outfit works great in this regard. neutral tones. greys, whites, and blacks, with red accents that pop against the otherwise sparse color. it's good! it's distinctive! it doesn't feel cluttered and it doesn't look like a clown vomited on him! the subdued colors really lend themselves to the grey, cynical energy qrow seems to carry with him. a literal lack of color in his life. the outfit itself feels like something he would wear; a combination of "clearly trying to look cool" and "a little disheveled and laid back." the design breathes, it isn't cluttered. let's contrast this with his vol 7 outfit. a lot of outfits in vol 7 suffer from this problem, but first and foremost it doesn't look like something he would wear. where his old outfit had a casual feel to it, his new look feels like someone dressed him up for a family christmas dinner. it's too... tidy. now of course you could argue this is him "cleaning up his life," but i dont feel like you have to sacrifice his own personal style in order to convey that. if that's really what they were going for, they easily could have just, oh i dont know, given him a cape that isn't tattered???

remember how i said qrow's original outfit really made his colors pop? how less is more when it comes to having a character with a specific color theme? vol 7 butchered that. we suddenly have articles of clothes that are tinted with greenish blue tones, browns, and with gold trim? on TOP of the old colors he already had in his design. it's muddy. it's ugly. the burgundy vest is fine, if they wanted to work more color into his outfit they should have done it that way throughout, shades of grey and different tones of RED. his COLOR. it just feels like they tacked so much on there without a second thought and i really think he deserves better. its just. such a mess.

The ones I did like were Watts’ new coat (I like the puffy hood), Penny’s is fine, the Ace Ops look great, Ironwood’s new outfit is stellar (those last six are great examples of how to do a lot with just primary colors of white and red), Neon’s Jolyne cosplay is cute and Flynt is slick. Otherwise, Volume 7 feels like it’s taken a lot of the wrong lessons from the costume design of the earlier seasons. Less is often more but now it feels like they have a pathological aversion to empty space on the costumes, leading them to feel like... costume vomit for lack of a better word. I didn’t love the Mistral outfits, but their modifications at least were carried by how many of them called back to the Fall of Beacon and emphasized the themes of loss in Volume 4. The new Atlas outfits... don’t have that shared theme. It feels like a hodgepodge of different design influences without trying to find a way to unify them. It’s like putting Baki the Grappler beside My Little Pony, they just fail to mesh.

Also for fuck’s sake already CRWBY just give the girls muscles already.

2) JNR suck and Ren’s arc is glorified character assassination

I don’t love JNR. They’re fine, but the show has arguably not needed them for a while and while I’ve liked them all at different points, it’s never been adoration outside of Ren in Volume 4. I was cool with the idea of them staying in Argus to help cover Mistral after its Huntsmen were wiped out, and Volume 7 has... made me wish they did that.

Jaune is just comic relief, and it kinda blows for later reasons but the big one is that he’s just not very funny. His big role in Volume 7 is basically to crosswalk some kids so we can have a joke scene during the Mantle Battle where Jaune uses his tactical genius to teach people to walk in single file. I feel like at this point Miles is just actively trying to kill Jaune’s fandom out of spite for how badly Jaundice was received. He’s never allowed to be cool or try and redeem himself. His hatedom aren’t going to stop hating Jaune because he gets more comedy guys. They’re going to stop when you write Jaune well. It’s a bummer he got some genuinely great upgrades for his sword and shield and never gets to use them outside of the opening. 

Nora exists. She got a surprising amount of focus this season in that she got focus of any kind. I liked her confronting Ironwood over his choking of Mantle because we know she was once the kind of person Ironwood would have been stifling. I like her being the one to realize the loophole in Jinn’s “You can’t” line. I don’t like much else about Nora this year, or at least the Nora the writing team are pushing. She’s not funny like Jaune but Nora just absorbs so much screentime in the first half with her constant shrieking. Sam Ireland has good range but making Nora into Discount Harley Quinn is pushing her out of it. She sounds shrill, making Nora sound like she has no heart outside of the election rally. A shrill voice is one thing. A shrill voice that never lands a single joke? Yeah that character is tainted by association. 

And Ren... oh God Ren what happened to you.

The Volume 7 commentary confirmed a suspicion of mine that Ren’s arc was heavily cut down from what was planned. Even watching V7 I could tell his arc was bare-bones at best, and it’s downright character assassination in places. Why is he suddenly so cold to Nora? Why is he now so obsessed with training? Why does he side with Ironwood for all of... one line which is this last between episodes 7 and 11. Ren only has two hundred words of dialoge in Volume 7 and they feel so weird in places. Ren goes from seemingly disliking Nora, to kissing her, to never referencing the kiss, to partaking in the Worst Scene Of The Season, all with no consistency. It’s not even threadbare. Ren’s arc just has no connecting tissue for so much of it! It’s insane how badly Ren was hurt by this, and I shudder to wonder how bad his Volume 8 arc will be because you know that was one of the first plotlines they cut down on when they inevitably overreached again. 

I don’t know how they made Renora kissing feel unearned? But by God they found a way with how much of a trainwreck Ren’s writing is in regards to tainting this. 

If Ironwood is an example of RWBY doing character writing well, Ren is the mirror image of how badly they can do. JNR really suffered from Volume 7 (also fun fact, Ren has about 200 words of dialogue? Ironwood has 4400). Maybe not to the level of irredeemable dislike? But very close to being on the same tier as Cinder of “Just go away already.”  I’m not looking forward to their content in Volume 8. 

3) RWBY themselves are poorly handled in Volume 7

It’s unfortunate that the actual title characters of the series are also some of this season’s weaker links. RWBY feel... superfluous to this season in a way they’ve never felt before. It’s baffling how much of the season doesn’t change if you just don’t include them, and apparently Volume 7′s first draft? Was even worse.

The commentary says that many of the RWBY moments were added later in production. Stuff like Ruby and Renora at the rally, Blake and Yang’s talk with Robyn and Ruby and Qrow’s chat were all either added in near the end of the writing or were “low priority” enough that they could have been cut which is... veyr alarming that’s stuff even the main protags have to worry about! 

Ruby feels half-baked. I was looking forward to her in V7 after how V6 gave her a more dynamic personality and the focus she got in Brunswick, and having Penny’s return had me interested in seeing Ruby grapple with her emotions about it. She watched Penny die, how would it influence her to see Penny back and OK? Good question, we never get to see it. Ruby’s just OK with Penny’s return, the one time they touch on it Penny immediately glosses over it. Ruby just goes back to her old happy go lucky persona where any and all negative emotions are immediately forced down instead of confronting them and growing from them. I’m getting a little tired of Ruby bottling her grief and being teased about finally getting her snapping like a Twix Bar. We finally got her crying and it lasted all of ten seconds. And it doesn’t help that Ruby’s still getting shafted for fights. Her scythe choreography has no excuse being as flacid as it is now after Qrow vs Clover showed they can do scythe fighting! Why is Ruby being upstaged by (let’s be real) a supporting character! Why is she being limited to ten seconds of good combat then nothing for the rest of the season outside of flimsily swinging it or shooting. It’s disappointing, especially after how good V6 Ruby was.

I swear, Gravity’s not just my favorite episode of the season just because Ruby finally cries in it.

Weiss was kinda just done dirty though. At least Ruby has a good outfit. Weiss confronting her father has been a long standing plot thread for the series, it’s been Weiss’s Big Thing since the White Trailer. And when Jacques finally appears, he’s very... bland. He’s just evil corporate dude who exists less as an obstacle for Weiss and more just a roadblock for the plot through the election. Weiss finally gets a chance to take her father down and work to redeem her family name... but instead of earning said victory and it being treated with the same gravitas and emotional weight as Blake defeating Adam... Weiss has her victory handed to her. And it’s played for comedy by her abusrdly attractive mother. 

Listen, I like I Willow Schnee. I think she’s a fascinating character and I like the idea of a person who is aware of the harm they’ve done by accident but is too broken to fix the issues she accidentally left. I love her calling Weiss out on her treatment of Whitley. But she is absolutely a Deus Ex Machina that exists to get Jacques out of the plot as fast as possible. You mean to tell me Hackerman Watts never once made sure Jacques had hidden cameras? Or that none of the staff found Willow’s cameras and reported them under the assumption they were White Fang spies? It’s so... convenient. It’s handing Weiss her victory on an unearned platter. Which sucks. I was really looking forward to Weiss beating Jacques. Instead she just gets given the plot device while JNR engage in the Worst Scene of The Season in that Whitley food stunt.

Me whenever I’m asked to rewatch Cordially Invited

Blake and Yang have much the same problems, in they never separate. I know they’re going to be together. I know CRWBY are making it canon (get it over with already). I still would like Yang and Blake to have individual character scenes. I’d like Blake and Marrow to talk about being a Faunus Huntsman in Atlas (another thing that got cut thanks to Robyn Hill). I want Yang and Ironwood to discuss their PTSD and have Yang thank Ironwood for his trust in her that he commissioned the arm despite Yang attacking Mercury. I want Blake to be well animated in fight scenes so she’s doing more than just jobbing so Yang looks better. I want Yang to stop hogging all the good Team RWBY choeography. I want them to interact with other characters and continue to grow instead of feeling like two halves of one character. And no, making a meta joke of how Blake and Yang don’t talk to other people doesn’t make it OK. It just means you’re self aware about your own faults. 

(Also give Yang better merch or quit the favoritism. If you’re gonna milk her, put effort into it beyond crapply overpriced flannel. RT’s merch store is actively making me hate Yang.)

Team RWBY’s biggest contribution to the season is the Ironwood Lie which is... a can of worms. They certainly had a point in withholding some of the bigger truths from James but I feel by Pomp and Cirumstance he’d proven himself truthwrothy enough to warrant being told the truth about Salem. But then when he’s finally told the truth, it’s offscreen’d and the consequence isn’t “Why didn’t you tell me earlier” but “Fucking Ozpin man.” Gravity has it bite them in the ass, but it’s more an accessory to Yang and Blake telling Robyn about the Amity tower. I wish more had been done with the team disagreeing on whether the lie was a good choice or not, maybe have Yang be hardline against it due to her own “No more lies and half truths” policy instead of... having Yang tell more lies and half truths (Commentary confirms she never told Ruby and Weiss about the Robyn stuff BTW). But that’s a wider problem where RWBY aren’t allowed to disagree beyond surface level “I don’t know if this is the right call” dialogue. There’s never a threat of one of them cracking and just spilling the beans to James, everyone just blindly trusts Ruby and Qrow tells the audience “No this is different from when Ozpin lied. Trust us.” 

This is the most RWBY get for content in the season finale: Ruby just nuking Cinder with no difficulty after having trouble with the eyes three episodes ago. Kinda lame tbh.

Team RWBY are just disappointing in Volume 7. They’re not given good animation, their story roles are largely insignificant, the impact of their roles on the story is threadbare and... well most of their costumes suck don’t @ me even CRWBY have admitted Blake and Weiss’s haircuts looked bad. It’s a whole barrage of a letdown for the main girls. And it’s really sad that the best scenes of the season... are usually the ones where RWBY are nowhere in sight.

Why the hell didn’t Yang get to keep the sunglasses come on guys. One job.

4) Robyn, the election plot, and the Happy Huntresses

Oh God, Robyn Hill is... not great. I could and likely will write a full meta on her character and how they bungled it but I’ll just be blunt here: I don’t like her design, the colors don’t mesh well, he head’s too small, Christina Vee is sleeping through the role and her weapon’s lame. Introducing her in a scene where she threatens to attack our heroes, and her agents are actively sneaking up on them to do it, is not a great first impression for a hometown hero. And that the commentary thinks she’s meant to be the hero in that scene is... staggering. 

RWBY’s greatest threat yet is a wine mom Karen and her Home Owners Association army. 

The election plot is less a misfire and more the engine just exploding. There’s so little good content between when it’s introduced and concluded, with it usually being individual scenes that are more good in spite of their connection to the plot (such as Tyrian’s massacre). It drags in pacing, going on for nearly half the season between episodes 5 and 10, and it purely exists as a roadblock to keep RWBY spinning their wheels while Watts and Tyrian keep going with the main plot. I don’t know why CRWBY went for this plot. They could have easily had something else fill the gap that also allowed for a lot of the character beats (such as Marrow and Blake’s talk and Ren’s entire arc) to shine, or at least condensed it to the important elements instead of letting it become bloated. It ends in such an unsatisfying way where Willow just shows up and goes “We have four episode left, here’s the plot device to beat Jacques, get back ot the main plot.” If they wanted to do the election plot, the best route would have been to give Volume 7 more episodes or stretch out its events to two seasons, but neither is realistically possible while RWBY lives off the teat of AT&T. 

Jacques and Robyn are just boring. Evil corporate man and a lame adaptation of Robyn Hood who only has fans because of thirst who also like downplaying Robyn making a racist remark at Marrow (to say nothing of that weird subsection of Robyn fans who make her a Fox Faunus who cut her tail off to join Atlas Academy which is... certainly a creative choice especially when Marrow and Neon are punching holes in that angsty BS backstory). They can’t carry this plot and the artifical attempts to make it seem more exciting with the two cliffhaners ending on Mantle under riot or Grimm attack are laughably cut short by the next episode in each case opening the morning after. On binge watch it becomes weirdly funny more than anything and that’s not a good reaction. The dual cliffhangers being cheaply resolved is a short but succint example of V7′s pacing issues, and they almost always loop around to the election plot being too bloated, slow and just boring.

Also the Happy Huntresses are just... lame. I like their Semblances but that’s it. Fiona’s OK because she gets some screentime but May’s just “the surly one” and Joanna doesn’t even get her Semblance or much dialogue (oh wow she really is just a female Sage Ayana isn’t she). Robyn should not have been leading the HH and running for Council. That’s really stupid. And kind of wrong. Having May or Fiona be running instead while Robyn leads the team in relief efforts would have been better and could have split the focus more effeciently instead of leaving May and especially Joanna feelng like roster padding. There’s also some delicious irony in the show trying to frame the HH as the resistance fighting for the people and representing individuality, only for them all to have the same boring outfit and weapons (I think even the exact same model just with different sizes) while the Ace Ops are meant to be the military drones who are “Just following orders,” only for them to be more racially diverse, more diverse body-type-wise, and have more unique weapons. It’s another one of those odd creative dissconnects between what the writers wanted and what the artists/animation teams chose to do. 

The election plot is overall toxin for Volume 7, and Robyn in my opinion, has one of the worst introductory scenes of any character in the franchise (and CRWBY have tacitly admitted that V7 had a character they were surprised at how controversial they were, which has to be Robyn). In a year where they were already juggling so much content and characters, adding in this bloated subplot was something I don’t think anyone wanted, especially now that we know we lost so much content on the sacrificial altar for this. It’s a black mark on the season and I don’t really care for the return of the Happy Huntresses or Robyn in Volume 8. None of them are interesting enough to care for outside of meta reasons like “cute.” 

Also fuck you Fiona, can’t believe you got a shirt before Ironwood. 

5) Cinder and Neo sure exist

To be fair, this is one of Cinder’s best years, easily her best since Volume 3 but that’s more because Cinder in the Mistral era was crap. (And if I wanna be cruel, because Cinder wasn’t in two thirds of the season)Her fans were finally vindicated after years of telling anyone who dunked on Cinder that “nooooo she has a super covert backstory that’s gonna be amazing when it’s revealed! You’ll see!” And well they finally got it. All of one line during a fight about how Cinder “refuses to starve.” 

It’s still something so I guess we have to take it. Seriously... how do we still not have Cinder’s backstory. 

There’s just not a ton to say about Cinder and Neo in V7 barring I that don’t think they needed to be here. They feel very superfluous and just here to have a big boss fight in Cinder’s case alongside continuing her streak of ending the odd numbered seasons fighting a female side character... which for me became an exercise in tyring to find during Cinder during the damn fight.

And this is why when most people saw Cinder’s V6 outfit they went “It’s gonna be hard to see her in darker environments,” then were vindicated when it became legit difficult to see Cinder in this scene. God if they at least just made the inside of the cape red it’d be easier.

Neo is Neo, which means she makes funny faces and mocks Cinder (I like that), but she doesn’t get a super good fight which uh... we’ll get to. I’m interested to see her finally exploding at Cinder and going for a backstab, but really Neo in V7 was kinda hit hard by the double whammy of the Oscar Hallway Punch and how humiliating ORNJ vs Neo was for ORNJ. Cinder’s definitely had far worse years and after how aimless she was in Mistral this feels like a sep in the right direction, but at this point CRWBY just need to shut up and tell us her deal. It’s been seven years guys. Come on. At least make her interesting if she’s gonna say around. They’ve had worse years, but unfortunately Cinder and Neo’s role in the finale leads into...

6) Some of the fights weren’t good

I wanna be clear, I like most of Volume 7′s fights. It’s just a bummer the worst ones are back and back and make up a chunk of the finale. ORNJ vs Neo is just crap. It’s the worst fight since the Battle of Haven. There’s nothing else I can say, it’s poorly animated, paced, choreographed and written. JNR especially are made to look like complete jokes after they spent all season training, to the point where it looks like V2 Yang could solo V7 JNR after this. Oscar I expect this from because he’s not allowed to have fun stuff onscreen after accidentally stealing the Haven budget for his fight with Hazel, but JNR were just done dirty. There were ways to make the fight work in a way where Neo still won but JNR looked good. They went for the worst possible outcome that just leaves Neo looking like she got fan-wanked and JNR looking like they’re just not allowed to be cool due to Miles’ spite at the Jaune-Self Insert stuff (and that’s not even getting into JNR being forced to run from lame rent a cops who can’t even handle a single Grimm). Cinder vs Winter and Penny isn’t much better, with her dark outfit making it very hard to track the fight because she blends into the background too well. It’s not a great showing for Winter or Penny given their earlier feats but, hey, some random female character had to fight Cinder in this odd numbered volume, carrying on Glynda, Pyrrha and Raven’s tradition. It’s at least better than ORNJ vs Neo, but that’s really not saying anything. At least Cinder’s VA work isn’t too bad this time but this fight commits the cardinal sin of a finale fight: It’s just not super interesting because we know Cinder can’t kill both Winter and Penny and she’s not becoming a Maiden, while Winter’s been too blatantly set up so it has to be Penny.

RWBY vs the Ace Ops also gets a dishonorable mention due to the choreography on display here... and the lack of it for Weiss, Blake and Ruby. Ruby never once swings Crescent Rose the entire fight and is just reduced to getting the tar kicked out of her by Harriet. Weiss barely gets to use her sword and largely just sticks to her summoning and glyphs which makes for a very visually uninteresting fighting style at the best of times. Blake just swings around and gets caught by the bad guys so Yang is motivated to fight stronger. She never dual wields (again) and her best moves are just setting up Yang to do all the hard work while Yang gets to personally KO two of the Ace Ops. There’s a lot that can be said about whether or nor RWBY earn the win, but while the animation team try to sell the Ace Ops landing heavy hits, having only Blake’s Aura even flicker really undercuts the idea from the commentary that this wasn’t meant to be a stomp for RWBY and they had to work together and be in synch to win.

Which is why Yang solos two of the Ace Ops whle Blake plays support, Weiss beats Marrow alone and then kill steals Harriet from Ruby, all while the song playing is an extended diss track from RWBY to the Ace Ops about how badass they are now, and the commentary itself says the Ace Ops are hard carried by Clover’s Semblance (because you gotta love basically saying four POC were only competent because a white guy led them, and then have them lose because said white guy wasn’t around to carry them!). Great job guys, you really sold it.

And talking of Clover, I feel it worth mentioning Qrow vs Clover vs Tyrian. It’s animation wise near perfect, but unfortunately I do feel it would be remiss to not mention that I feel the writing really has to bend over backwards to justify this fight. A lot of it is stuff I would say in that hypothetical Robyn essay, but I feel Robyn, Qrow and Clover all have to become massive idiots for this specific sequence of events to occur, and for Clover especially every retroactive attempt to explain why he prioritized Qrow over Tyrian just sounds more and more desperate. Between the references to MCU Captain America (a person whose entire arc is about learning when it’s OK to defy bad orders) or the attempt in the commentary to say “Oh Clover thought it would be easier to take out Tyrian alone instead of Qrow,” none of them land and just further drive home how much the plot had to stretch and reach to get that moment of Tyrian killing Clover. I like the fight. But I hate the road the show took to get there.

Some of the misc fights are also weak like ORNJ vs FNKI and elements of the Mantle Grimm battle, but those are the big offenders. Otherwise, again, the fights are largely good. 

7) The soundtrack wasn’t... great

I mean the vocal songs only, don’t crucify me. Trust Love is just lamer Let’s Just Live/Triumph, Celebrate and Let’s Get Real are so boring I thought they were the same song until the OST dropped, Brand New Day is boringly peppy and Jeff’s vocals are dreadful. I completely forgot Touch the Sky until I was checking the tracklist to make sure I didn’t forget any songs. War has good singers but tries to sell the RWBY-Ace Ops bond as way deeper than it was. The lack of a villain song did really sting though, those are always the highlights.

There are good songs. I really like Fear, I feel it encapsulates the themes of the volume well and serves as a good condemnation of Ironwod’s mentality. Until The End is finally the Ruby song I’ve waited for since Red Like Roses 2 and I enjoy that she got a melancholic song, and Hero is easily, hands down, best track of the record and probably best RWBY track, full stop. Caleb killed it, I loved the second verse, opening opera was strong, guitar riffs were a plenty. Stellar work all around for that one.

The OST has great work from Jeff and Alex as usual, but the Jeff and Casey songs are really starting to lose their appeal. Going for a peppy feel this year didn’t help cover the cracks that are beginning to show with RWBY’s vocal songs (especially Jeff’s vocal range), and while a few standouts remain such as Fear and Hero, they are the slim minority in an otherwise very boring vocal tracklist that barely scrapes above Volume 5 for weakest set yet.

8) It wasn’t as funny as it thought it was

Comedy is subjective but man a lot of these jokes didn’t land. RWBY really needs to realize that does work in traditional 2D does not translate into 3D and just comes off as making official reaction GIFs for your Twitter account. Making characters SUDDENY SCREAM LOUDLY is not good banter. Please stop making Nora into Harley Quinn. Marrow was probably the most consistently funny character but that was it. Also I dunno why CRWBY thought Forrest was funny or what the deal was with that FRWBY crap. 

“Honorary” mention to the JNR food scene in Cordially Invited which is genuinely one of the worst scenes in the entire show and I hope whoever animated it has their save files deleted for a game where they were about to beat the final boss. Nothing sums up JNR’s pointlessness in the series more perfectly than this.

C) Conclusion

See what I mean about Volume 7 being frustrating? 

It’s weird that I overal think of Volume 7 as a mid-tier volume. There’s so much here I genuinely adore, with some of the best stuff to do with the show coming out of this season (barring lame, overpriced merch that feels like clothing gacha), but simultaneously the whole thing is let down by outside circumstances that unfortunately are ones the show can’t ever really recover from. Put bluntly, Volume 7 is the most technically proficient season of the show with the best lighting, backdrops, (some of the) character models, etc. CRWBY definitely didn’t slack off this year, but the problem isn't with them. It’s with the writing. A wider reaching problem is just that Miles and Kerry can’t really improve to the level that the series now requires. Eddy and Kiersei’s first season could have gone far worse, but it definitely was notable whenever they took over. Volume 7’s core problems are fourfold: The comedy is terrible and none of the jokes really land, the season focuses on the wrong plots and gives them too much effort, too many episodes are spent building up to new plots only for them to be weakly resolved (especially the Mantle Riot/Grimm attacks that are shoved off-screen), and the character bloat strikes hard here and leaves a lot of the cast feeling like dead weight. CRWBY don’t need more writers. They need more editors willing to tell the team what has to go instead of them hemming and hawing themselves on if they if they can include a plotline. The election never should have gotten past its first draft, there was too much already in this season before adding that.

When this is an unironic shot in your series... you’ve got character bloat issues.

At this point, I think JNR need to go. The show had no idea what to do with them throughout the season, leading to Jaune just being comic relief while Ren and Nora became characters I actively dislike. Renora was the easiest ship in the show to land, and they still managed to blow the engines and ram at least three icebergs just to prove that RWBY can’t romance to save its life. Team RWBY themselves are little better, with Ruby’s feelings about Penny’s return being shelved, Weiss’s victory against Jacques feeling un-earned and undercut by comedy, while Yang and Blake are benched for the volume and become a singular entity with how tied at the hip they are. Maria basically yeeted herself out of the show and I didn’t notice, Pietro is just a death flag, and while the Ace Ops had a good intro, it was undercooked by how they had to play the villain role to give RWBY something to do in the final hours. Cinder and Neo didn’t need to be here. Robyn had one of the worst introductions for a character I’ve ever seen, I never enjoyed her moments and it genuinely feels like she only has a fandom because RWBY’s community are in fact that desperate. 

On the brighter side, Ironwood’s arc is fucking perfect and Jason Rose deserves all the love. Great fight, great song, great design, love the beard, it was a perfect downfall for Volume 7’s true protagonist. Qrow had a fun volume and I loved his dynamic with Clover (I don’t see the ship stuff but that’s more because I’m an IronQrow main so my blinders were on). Clover was also way cooler than I remembered. His fights stood out but the guy’s just really cool at the end of the day, with Chris doing great work as a VA. Oscar even managed to do stuff this year which was a shock and a half, but a welcome shock and a half. I didn’t mention it, but the Ozpin fear monologue is one of my favorite scenes in the entire show and it and the Ironwood/Oscar confrontation in the vault save the finale. And of course, Watts and Tyrian were the MVPs. I don’t have a bad word about either of them, they fucking nailed their roles and I can’t wait to see them again. 

And that’s kind of what I mean when I say Volume 7 flummoxes me. It’s frustrating at times with how it handles seemingly easy tasks and drops the ball. Renora went from “everyone liked that” to wondering how badly Ren’s stuff got butchered for him to be the way he is. RWBY themselves could be almost entirely cut and so little would change, and the fact that the finale basically hinges its entire emotional stakes on Winter, Penny and Oscar is a staggering call. And it really feels like the season was compressed beyond necessity because they decided going in that Volume 7 had to end on Salem’s arrival. There’s two volumes worth of material here, and maybe it would have been best to have broken up these events. Volume 7 does too much in too little time, and RWBY especially suffered from it. But when it works… it’s good. Never close to the highs of Volumes 6 or 3, but there’s genuinely good material here. The fights are mostly getting better with far less missteps than previously, the acting (mostly) continues to improve and it’s obvious that RWBY is a very good looking show at this point. Ironwood’s arc is franchise-wide highs, I loved Clover, and Marrow remains the best boi. But it’s frustrating that despite all the tech advances Volume 7 has made, it still makes such threadbare, rookie writing mistakes in cast management, comedy and character arcs. I’m glad Miles and Kerry finally realized that they needed more writers, but it won’t mean anything if the show just continues to circle the drain on the core mistakes it’s been making since 2013. Volume 7 has good in it. But I can see where it could have been great.

Thanks for reading, stan IronQrow and please get Whitley a therapist.

And for the love of God already make an Ironwood vs Watts shirt! 

#rwby #rwby analysis #rwde #james ironwood #Arthur Watts #qrow branwen #Tyrian Callows #ruby rose #weiss schnee #Blake Belladonna #yang xiao long #Jaune Arc #lie ren #nora valkyrie #Renora #clover ebi #marrow amin #ace ops #robyn hill #happy huntresses #cinder fall #neopolitan #penny polendina #winter schnee #willow schnee #Whitley schnee #Jacques schnee #Salem #harriet bree #vine zeki

[arse-crack-thistle]

rwrb winterfest - day 18 - music

@rwrb-fests​ 

in which my dear princess bea needs a little comfort at christmastime (ace rep)

Bea always has a hard time around Christmas. 

Part of it has to do with her father. She seems to find new pieces of him to miss every day. Today, it’s his laugh—the deep chuckle he lets out when David jumps on his lap and licks his face or when he’s had a little too much brandy and Bea says something sarcastic and rude about her grandmother. 

She misses how the family used to gather around a table in one of the sitting rooms in Kensington and play gin rummy at Christmastime. The tree would stand tall in the corner. Their father insisted they decorate it themselves, despite Philip’s disapproval. It looked sloppy covered in tinsel and an assortment of colorful lights and ornaments. The star at the top tilted towards the left, but at least the tree filled the room with a delicate pine scent. The fire burned at a soft glow, and everyone around the table laughed and wore paper crowns from their Christmas crackers. It didn’t matter who they were, they were just a normal family.

Now, the room feels cold, even though the fire cracks across from her. In the corner, the bare tree sags. She hasn’t had the energy to decorate it herself since Henry’s been in New York, and while she and Philip have reconciled their differences, he’s never really liked this part of their family’s traditions. Her mother works a ton since stepping up as the heir apparent, so Bea didn’t want to bother her either. Her cat meows next to her on the couch.

Christ, she wants a hit. She wants something to wipe her memory and just let her be. She just might reach for the brandy on the liquor cart. Why did she convince Henry she could handle it being here? Or that she could handle him leaving?

No, he needs to live his life without her, even if she misses him. The hardest part about being ace is watching her people find their person.

She’s happy for Henry and she loves Alex, but she’s lonely when they’re gone. And with loneliness comes dark thoughts. And the chance she will relapse multiplies. 

Bea should call her sponsor. Or Henry. Or literally anyone. She knows they’ll answer. She knows she’s loved. But the only person she wants to hold her and make Christmas special again can’t.

She really misses her father.

Bea leaves the room. She puts as much space between her and the brandy as she can. When her fingers itch for something, she must fill them, and the best remedy is music.

Her favorite room in this place looks exactly how she left it the day before. The piano sits, awaiting Henry. The mismatch of rugs were her idea—benders with musicians in Galway inspired her, or what she remembered of them did. The cat finds her way to her spot on the brown settee. 

Before picking up a guitar, Bea passes tchotchkes from their travels on an antique side table. Nesting dolls from Russia. A Statue of Liberty figurine from their first trip to the U.S. A toorstag from Henry’s month in Mongolia. A coconut bra from Bea’s drunk cruise in the Caribbean. She’s since become a more sensitive and culturally-minded traveler. 

She sits with the instrument on the floor, her back against the settee. This particular guitar was a gift from her father on her fourteenth birthday. It was handmade for her, and her initials sit just below the artisan’s label under the sound hole. The koa wood has a rich, dark finish; Bea likes to drag her finger across the wood grain when she’s deciding what to play next or when she’s lost in her thoughts in between songs. When her father first gave it to her, the sound was bright and lively, but in the time since, it’s become mellow and warm. Perfect for fingerpicking.

She plays a few chords as she tunes it. Her cat purrs behind her ear. Crystal from the chandelier above her twinkles. She settles in the quiet moment and plays.

But there’s no heart in it.

Bea thought if she changed her scenery, if she gave herself something to do, she’d get out of this riptide. But every song, every passing minute, pulls her further and further out.

If no one’s around to hear her play, is it really music?

Is this her safe space if no one’s here to create its harmony with her?

She’s so lonely.

And the tune is as frozen as she feels.

It’s times like these she wishes she wanted her grandmother’s happily ever after—marry a man, pop out a couple of kids, and be a dutiful royal. But she can’t. The thought of marrying someone, of making and raising children, of being a mindless princess puppet actually nauseates her.

If only she had her own community of people like her, she might be able to rely on Henry less. Her other married friends wouldn’t feel so bad for her. She could just go on ignoring her grandmother and Philip, when he gets to be too much. Her mother wouldn’t worry as much.

And not that she wouldn’t miss her father less, but maybe she wouldn’t feel so empty without him here.

Maybe the soul could find its way back into her music.

So Bea snaps herself out of it just enough to text Pez and ask for his Instagram login. She has a plan that her handler—and her grandmother, for that matter—would definitely disapprove of.

But fuck the crown.

Bea needs to take her life in her own hands and demand more for herself. She needs help to feel better, but she has to be the one to initiate. If Henry could do it, so could she. 

Part of the AA mantra is to have the courage to change the things she can. 

She’s got it, and she can do it.

Pez responds quickly and without question, of course. She sets her guitar to the side and downloads the app. After she logs in, she leans forward and rests the phone against the floor pouf in front of her.

Bea takes a deep breath and starts a livestream, and the viewer count immediately skyrockets. Her grandmother is really going to hate this.

“Um, hello,” she says. “I’m sure you all weren’t expecting to see me, but our friend, Percy, was kind enough to lend me his account for a short while. I hope that’s all right.”

She shifts a little uncomfortably. She never minded the spotlight as long as she could control it, but even now, she feels more venerable than ever. Last year’s Christmas pajamas hang loosely on her. Surely, her reindeer bottoms will go viral, as she sits with her legs crisscrossed in full view of the camera. Her cat mews.

“Yes, thank you for that, darling,” She says to her and then looks to the camera.

“I just wanted to come on here to talk to you all. See, as we’re in the holiday season, it’s all a bit overwhelming, isn’t it? And in all of this hustle and bustle, one finds they get a bit lost along the way.

“I’ve noticed this in myself every year, but this time it’s more frustrating. I’ve just been feeling rather lonely lately, as one can during this chilly time, so I thought maybe you lot have experienced that as well. I wanted to connect with people like me. I don’t mean, like, I want to wallow in my problems—or that I have especially difficult problems—I mean I know I’m very fortunate—I just—um. Let me—let me straighten this out.”

She sighs. This could be a disaster. She could come off entitled and whiny if she doesn’t focus more on her words.

“It seems the people in my life all have a partner, and I am so happy for them, truly. But I don’t want a partner or a relationship of any nature other than friendship. And so during this time of year—and, I suppose, other times as well—I find myself the odd woman out.

“For example, here I am, alone in this place, with only my cat, with whom you’ve already become acquainted. Now, I know I’m very lucky to have this, but it’s empty houses that can lead people down a dark path, isn’t it?”

Bea needs to say the words. She needs to make it very clear. She watches the screen flood with comments and hearts. Hundreds of thousands of people are watching, and tomorrow she’s going to be on every media outlet.

“I’m aromantic and asexual, if that wasn’t clear. I can’t and don’t want to fall in love, and not that it’s anyone’s business, I’m not even faintly interested in sex. And that may be confusing for some of you, but for me, it makes my life, my mind, make sense.”

She’s slowly but surely finding her way back to shore now.

“For years, I thought there was something wrong with me, but there’s not. I thought the only way I could be happy was to be in a relationship, but it’s not. And if you yourself are ace as well, I want you to know you’re not alone.

“This is the real reason why I did all of this. I was lonely and sad tonight, and I wanted you all to know that if you feel that too, it’s okay. I hope I can learn about and grow in the ace community—not to replace my happily coupled friends, but to explore new friendships with people who can understand what I and some of you are going though.

“We’ve been taught that there’s one way to be happy, and I just don’t think that’s true. And I’m willing to prove it if you’ll help me. Starting now.”

Bea reaches for her guitar and places it in her lap. She finds the first chord of “Horchata” by Vampire Weekend. A text notification from Henry pops down.

HOLY SHIT I LOVE YOU!!!!!!

A smile creeps up her cheeks.

“Something I love to do when I’m down is to pick out a little tune. If it’s all right with you, I thought I’d play a round for us. Maybe answer a few questions if you’ve got any.”

Bea picks the first note, and the tone is perfect.

She feels warmth grow in her chest and travel around her arms and down her back.

Like her father hugging her from behind, arms crossed over her shoulders.

Just like he used to do many Christmases ago.

#okay wow i hope ya'll like this #so it’s pretty cheesy what can i say?? #and yes i know it's SUPER late but i needed to post it #princess bea #ace rep #rwrb #rwrbwinterfest2020 #rwrb fest #my writing #rwrb fanfic #red white and royal blue #pez okonjo #henry fox mountchristen windsor #alex claremont diaz #june claremont diaz #nora holleran #president ellen claremont #oscar diaz #rafael luna #casey mcquiston #firstprince #queer lit #music #fanfic

[loquaciousquark]

Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E58 (Apr. 16, 2019)

Gooooood evening, everyone! @eponymous-rose may have social obligations she was actually looking forward to tonight, but I had a birthday party I was desperately trying to get out of, and so I am here, and Henry is also here, looking immensely put-upon at this human flopped on his pillow.

Tonight’s guests: Liam O’Brien & Taliesin Jaffe. Liam’s shirt is remarkably Tal-ish tonight. Rep it, boys.

Tonight’s announcements: New campaign journals available at therooktheraven.com/criticalrole. They’ll be at Denver Pop Culture Con next week MONTH! sorry!--Ashley will be there too! It’ll be the first time everyone’s been at a con together...possibly ever! Liam: “Four years in the making.” Everyone’s sick & Brian took Nyquil thirty minutes ago. This should be an interesting evening. Three days left in the Kickstarter campaign! Earlier today, they cracked $10 million, which means Travis’ll be filming himself traipsing through a haunted house. Good heavens. This Thursday, about half an hour after CR ends, Joel Hodgson from MST3K will be coming on the show to hang out with the guys & celebrate.

And now...Episode 58: Wood & Steel

CR Stats: briefly derailed by accusations that Brian’s hair looks like a shark fin. Caleb’s spent 1475 gold on paper and ink so far. Liam: “God, grad school, man.” Caduceus has used Eyes of the Grave 13 times. “It’s a little panic spell, really. Every now and then it helps. It’s nice to be able to walk into a room and go, ‘hey, is there anyone undead in here?’“ This episode was Yasha’s first natural one stealth check. “Not Ashley’s, though.” “No.”

Tal’s shoulder is still peeling from Ashley’s roast of Sam pre-show last episode. Neither Liam nor Tal think Sam was really prepared for it, and now Sam’s working overtime to make up for it. The president we deserve, honestly.

Re: Cad’s check on Fjord: “Clay loves these people. On the other hand, he also has a sense about what an addict is. I love you, I trust you, and I’m gonna go through your wallet real quick.” He was trying to validate his own trust in Fjord just in case he needed to stop him doing anything dumb later.

Taliesin is REALLY excited (one might say gleeful) about making Travis’s haunted house experience as terrible as possible. Brian suggests tasers in case Travis starts barreling through walls in panic.

Caleb is feeling as if he’s blown a bit of his cover lately; the filthy disguise that he’s maintained for so long is pointless now. He’s expecting someone to come “knocking at the door soonish.”

The whole idea of consecution really, really messed Caduceus up. “Clay doesn’t know what to think. This is definitely a...bedouin monk having someone try to explain the flying spaghetti monster to him. It feel offensive and yet harmless...something’s rubbing him the wrong way and he doesn’t know what it is yet. He’s not really about the souls--that’s not what his order is about. His order is about flesh & what happens to the remains; the souls are the souls’ business--that’s what the Raven Queen is for. He’s not sure if it’s his own prejudices.”

Caleb has to think of Nott as a totally different person now. He doesn’t know what she wants, if she wants to run off with her husband now. His feelings for her haven’t changed. He thinks they were codependent for a long time, but now he’s faced with the reality that she doesn’t need him nearly as much as he needs her anymore. He hasn’t even had a chance to talk to her lately “because he’s not even sure if the script is the same.”

Marisha bombs the set with a laser pointer nerf gun. I am so happy I’m not kidding.

They discuss who did the laser pointer addition (Christina) and attempt to shoot off Brian’s hand. It misses & hits a plush. Brian: “You almost hurt Molly. Oh, wait.”

Clay hasn’t quite figured out the interpersonal relationships of the group yet. He’s kinda noticed the Caleb/Nott relationship (although it doesn’t make much sense to him), but he has figured out he and Yasha have the most in common. He first thought he’d get along most with Jester because they were both clerics, but now knows they’re completely different people who heal for completely different reasons (one out of enjoyment of healing, one forced). He really wants to keep Fjord & Caleb on the straight & narrow, and he sees his relationship with Yasha as more straightforward “I’ll help you, you help me.” Brian’s interested in hearing what Cad thinks Caleb’s right path should be. Me too!

Tal talks about how when they’re traveling at cons, he sits & thinks about other people’s characters and how he/Clay relates to them.

GIF of the Week! Big Shaft. What more needs be said, really. The winner gets a Cobalt Soul journal which Brian says is available on shop.critrole.com as well as the UK store which is A STRAIGHT UP LIE, BRIAN, THEY ARE 100% SOLD OUT, I LOOKED EARLIER TODAY, WHY DO YOU TAUNT ME WITH THESE LIES. >:((((((

Caleb didn’t ask Waccoh about dunamancy because it wasn’t the right time. Cad is very interested in the staff. Liam likes the Ring of Evasion.

What did Tal think of Fjord’s very Percy-esque intimidation in the last episode? “Take it! Run! Murder them all!” Percy loves the dodeca & would have loved to play with it. Both Liam and Tal marvel at how easily threat came to Travis.

In terms of the broken sword, Cad’s hoping for a lemonade-out-of-lemons situation. Brian & Liam switch seats so Liam can pet Henry. Understandable, really. He feels like it’s the world communicating to him that it is meaningful. “He always moves forward to something that feels meaningful. His job was to speak to people about their lost loved ones. He ran a funeral home. So while he doesn’t entirely understand how people relate to one another, he understands how people function, and he’s fascinated by that.” Tal constantly has to weight if his decisions are based on gameplay or something about Cad’s observations. He’s very acutely aware of the difference between his intelligence and wisdom scores.

Liam dabs & regrets it. Then he talks about how that’s why Cad makes Caleb nervous. It’s like talking to a human lie detector. Tal keeps talking a bit about how Cad sometimes spooks Caleb, but I’m 100% distracted by Henry jumping up & sitting between Brian & Tal. Poor Liam.

Everyone worries a bit about Ashley’s low AC, except Liam, who worries sarcastically. Ya jerk.

Liam answers an interesting question about Caleb’s selfishness--is his generosity this last episode a show to prove to the group that he’s a team player or is he just genuinely caring more about the entire group? Porque no los dos--he’s trying to keep them alive and working well together, and now he has different reasons to do what he’s doing. “Everything’s changed for him” over the last few episodes.

Everyone discusses how motivations change slowly over time and how it’s not a smooth journey--sometimes they’re selfish one day and selfless the next, and sometimes the “shitty purpose on the macro scale” still has “good happening on the micro scale.” It’s not a straight road and people can backslide. Taliesin: “I love something that’s complicated.” Liam talks about how Percy freed Whitestone and did some very dark things on the way there. Dani: “It’s all part of being one person with lots of facets.”

Fanart of the Week! I really hope it’s that GoT video! Ahh, it’s @morphenominal12′s portrait of Yasha. Okay okay okay, this is pretty good. Respect. At least Liam doesn’t taunt me with a journal I can’t buy. Why do I keep thinking it’ll stop saying “Sold Out” if I keep refreshing the page?

A question points out that all three of Taliesin’s characters come from large families (even if those families are dead or adopted). Tal says he doesn’t know much about being an only child & is from a large family himself. It’s part of starting from what you know, and he likes having a few pre-built relationships that he or the DM can build on later. He says maybe being an only child will be his next challenge.

Very, very belatedly, the crew adds a graphic of dollar signs falling from the top of the screen. They do it three times before everyone realizes it’s because Tal said he’d do only-child plots for money. “And on this show, we spend five minutes deconstructing a bad joke from the tricaster.”

Cad doesn’t know how he feels about consecution. They’re not undead...but what are they? It’s making him a little queasy but he can’t put his finger on it. He’s spent a lot of time thinking about how a nature cleric relates to larger heroic destiny, and about his need to see the kiln.

They tuck in a sleepy Henry. I would die for this dog.

Liam signs us off with all of Brian’s catchphrases. What a nerd.

And we’re out! Is it Thursday yet?

#critical role #critical role spoilers #talks machina #talks machina spoilers #i want that darn journal #how rude #long post for ts

[soysaucevictim]

Final week of current program and challenges.

A bit late to post, but oh well.

-

May 16

I woke up before noon, today.

After a lil bit of the usual, I made today’s Hello Fresh meal. Salsa verde enchiladas. Another dish that everyone enjoyed. Only real/constructive criticism was it could use more cheese, and I can completely agree. Still very enjoyable and well worth a reprisal.

After some dishes + YouTube, I got my exercise in.

First, today’s DD. 1′ raised leg elbow plank with EC (30″/30″). Took some willpower to get though it.

Second, Day 55 of the 60DoC. Level 3, 1′ rest. This was just a bit more breezy to get through. Not much to comment on, this time.

Third, Day 25 of the C&AC. 5x push-ups to failure. My numbers were 26-20-20-16-14. Did increment up a little, but also probably could’ve hammered the form better.

Last, Day 25 of the DSC. Nothing fancy again.

Much of the remaining day was spent chatting about useful stuff and gaming afterwards. Though still in the red, I did get to bed 2 hours earlier than night before. *Shrugs.*

-

May 17

I woke up around same time as yesterday.

First, today’s DD. 2′ o-Pose with EC. As always, it was a fun and meditative exercise to do. The focus on positioning and breathing is pretty zen - despite it still makes one tremble from muscle fatigue! :,D

Second, Day 56 of the 60DoC. Level 3, 1′ rest. Yep, those jacks hit the bliss ful space I love them for. So though I was a bit winded and worked up a seat, this was a very enjoyable workout!

Third, Day 26 of the C&AC. 7x20 shoulder taps. This was a bit more intense, but mission accomplished.

Last, Day 26 of the DSC. Like most days, just jab+crosses and swapping stance at 50. Nothing fancy, but also fun.

I spent some time chatting, listening to Sawbones, and working on some art. Got to bed later than yesterday... oh well.

-

May 18

Woke up about the same time, again.

Spent some time setting up a new monitor (to hopefully make streaming easier), chatting, made some dinner, before doing today’s exercise.

First, today’s DD. 100 jumping jacks with EC. This was well within my wheelhouse

Second, Day 57 of the 60DoC. Level 3, 1′ rest. I enjoyed this entirely because it was mostly half jacks (funnily, I think the DD was a good warm-up today)). Did reach that happy state and chased it with 3 more sets of bouncing on the spot. My calves will probably remember this. But still, it was quite fun! :D

Third, Day 27 of the C&AC. 5x push-ups to failure. 28-22--20-18-16. Just about manageable, although a tiny bit sloppy. :P

Last, Day 27 of the DSC. Same old, same old. Still fun, though.

Spent some time watching YouTube and getting some more work done tonight. Got to bed late, but a bit earlier than yesterday.

-

May 19

Similar time again, I suppose.

One of the first things I did today was the DD. 1′ plank punches with EC. I counted about 52 reps by the end. A pretty fun but a little awkward for clothing reasons to do.

I grumpily tried to help with DMV stuff and did some dishes after that. Was feeling really shitty and unmotivated as I did them.

Lost a lot of motivation to get things done. Overate pizza and whatnot... partly emotional eating, I’m sure...

But one thing that was nice was a sort of double-feature movie night with a friend. It was Turkish Star Wars (he hadn’t seen it yet) followed by The Princess Bride (I hadn’t seen it yet). A wild juxtaposition - but I enjoyed it as a welcome distraction.

Got to bed late again. I partly blame the very full stomach... but that was my doing. So, whatever.

-

May 20

I woke up after 1PM, today.

Meet with case manager today and talked with a peer advocate... which did feel like a nice emotional balm to start my day off. After some food and YouTube, I got going with today’s exercise.

First, today’s DD. 30 single leg deadlifts with EC. Pretty breezy, more-or-less.

Second, Day 58 of the 60DoC. Level 3, 1′ rest. Probably overate again before hand, but I think I waited long enough to manage this workout. Split jacks were probably the only real reason I kind of didn’t want to do it yesterday (what with bad headspace.) But oh well, done.

Third, Day 28 of the C&AC. 7x22 shoulder taps. Just about manageable.

Last, Day 28 of the DSC. Nothing new, but I do still enjoy it as a closer.

Spent a bit of time chatting, watching YouTube and working on some art.

Since the internet cut out... i did manage to get to bed on time. So that was nice.

-

May 21

I woke up before 1PM.

First, today’s DD. 30 knee crunches with EC. I changed how my legs crossed at 15. This was just about manageable work.

Second, Day 59 of the 60DoC. Level 3, 1′ rest.

Third, Day 29 of the C&AC. 5x push-ups to failure, last push-ups to failure day. I capped things at 30-24-20-18-16, this time around. This was pretty brutal, but I could manage.

Last, Day 29 of the DSC. Accidentally did an extra 20 punches because I swapped later (60) this time. That got notably tougher thanks to all those push-ups.

Like yesterday, I spent a bit of time chatting, watching YouTube and working on some art again. Got to bed obscenely late, but I felt productive!

-

May 22

I woke up a bit before 1PM, today.

One of the first things I did was some dishes and made the next Hello Fresh dinner for today. Chicken over garlic Parmesan spaghetti. Everyone loved this one. I think this one warrants reprisal, too! =w=

First, today’s DD. 2′ extended swings with EC. I counted 206 reps by the end, managed to count more for first half/side. This was a pretty fun one.

Second, Day 60 of the 60 Days of Cardio Program. Level 3, 1′ rest. Not gonna lie, I didn’t think this was going to be quite as winding as it turned out to be! But mission accomplished (Was listening to a The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audiobook, which was fun)

Third, Day 30 of the Chest & Arms Challenge. 7x24 shoulder taps. Very manageable.

Last, Day 30 of the De-Stress Challenge. Nothing fancy and no over-counting this time. Fun work!

Did some cleaning, some gratitude journaling, and used a crisis text line… I was not feeling okay.

I got to bed exorbitantly late.

-

Summary of Experience:

A day late, but I finished my current regimen in May 22.

I rather liked the 60 Days of Cardio Program. Mostly since it was a good variety of impact/intensity levels, in terms of structure. I managed Level 3 and kept my rests to under 1′ the whole way through (with following breakdown)!

12 days with no/minimal rest

16 days with 30″

32 days maxing at 1′

The Chest & Arms Challenge was a good opportunity to focus on push-ups again. My final failure numbers were 30-24-20-18-16. Though it did get a bit intense, I think I did good enough in terms of form. (I opted not to swap the shoulder taps for renegade rows, this time around... might try that next time!)

The De-Stress Challenge, was very enjoyable! I did find myself looking forward to this one each day, that’s for sure! Most days I just did jab+crosses, swapping at 50. Occasionally just threw jabs or crosses 50/50, too.

#adventures with fitness #adventures with hello fresh #family shit/

[agirlnamedally]

Come on girl, share your Taylor thought breakdown with us please and thank you

haha okay this is what i sent:

He already knows rep and lover really well (better than me) but not so much the older albums, so those are the ones i went through. He was planning on listening to each album and I said I’d give him my recommendations, going backwards in chronological order so as not to overwhelm him immediately with young Tay country world haha.

Red

Red (this song makes me feel like driving somewhere and once you know the chorus it’s the most fun to sing along. Great bridge)

Treacherous (I only re-realised yesterday what an incredible song this is. Favourite lyrics: “all we are is skin and bone, trained to get along”. AMAZING bridge at 2:55. Also feels like a car belt out song. Another great lyric: “nothing safe is worth the drive”)

All Too Well (widely known as one of he lyrically best songs ever, it was originally 15 minutes and had to be cut down. This bridge hits the soul: “YOU CALL ME UP AGAIN JUST TO BREAK ME LIKE A PROMISE, SO CASUALLY CRUEL IN THE NAME OF BEING HONEST”. Damn. Truly one of the best bridges of all time and so satisfying to sing. So honest and vulnerable. Also love the imagery of “here we are again in the middle of the night, dancing around the kitchen in the refrigerator light”)

Holy Ground (this song is underrated in my opinion, it feels like meeting someone for the first time and having an immediate connection, “spinning like a girl in a brand new dress, we had this big wide city all to ourselves” it’s those moments when you feel like your life is a movie)

Starlight (my friends don’t care for this song at ALL but it means so much to me. Written when she was dating Connor Kennedy - JFK’s grandson - and heard stories from his grandma Ethel about their love, so wrote this song from her perspective. It’s so sweet and sparkly about love in 1945. Favourite lyric: “he’s talking crazy, dancing with me, we could get married and teach them how to dream”

Speak Now (my current fave TS album)

Mine (one of my ALL TIME FAVOURITE Taylor songs. Brings back the happiest memories. Not sure if this would be counted as Too country but it’s just so pure and love-filled. “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter”

Sparks Fly (mostly for the bridge, “keep on keeping your eyes on me… just wrong enough to make it feel right // I’m captivated by you baby like a firework show)

Dear John (this one is on par with All Too Well as one of her best written, most vulnerable. Hard to listen to as a Mayer fan but it’s just the perspective of a 19 year old who got in too deep. Incredible bridge [shocking]: “you are an expert at sorry, and keeping lines blurry, never impressed by me acing your tests. All the girls that you run dry, have dried lifeless eyes cause you burned them out. But I took your matches before fire could catch me, so don’t.. look… now…. I’m SHINING LIKE FIREWORKS OVER YOUR SAD! EMPTY! TOWN!!!!!!”

The Story Of Us (fun, upbeat, cute, very early Taylor Swift which is somewhat similar to Lover the album. Fairytale kinda love)

Enchanted (SUCH A GOOD SONG OMG. The imagery in these lyrics is amazing. This song builds so much it’s practically the definition of a granger. “Please don’t be in love with someone else, please don’t have somebody waiting on you”. Feels like meeting someone in a fleeting moment, locking eyes and needing to see them again.

Better Than Revenge (A petty, fun song. Written after Joe Jonas broke her heart and dumped her in a 30 second phone call and then wrote an awful song called Much Better about his new girlfriend. Super tongue in cheek and a little immature but when you’re a teenager and you feel like someone stole your boyfriend you gotta write it out. We stan.)

Last Kiss (a song for if you’re still in love with someone. I don’t listen to this as much but it’s beautiful. I have a playlist called “that July ninth” because of it)

Long Live (one of her best songs ever. So much amazing imagery again. Typical American high school nostalgia for a time I never lived through. An incredibly unifying, empowering song. Dedicated to her band and team, so it holds a lot of love. Amazing song to hear live. “Long Live all the magic we made” is a lyric I wrote on my arm for one of her shows. Gorgeous bridge in this too - shocking, I know.

Fearless.

The Other Side Of The Door (super country song, feels like a fight in the first relationship in small town Pennsylvania or wherever she’s from, sO fun and the most iconic bridge of all time: “with your face and the beautiful eyes, the conversation with the LITTLE! WHITE! LIES! And the faded picture of a beautiful night, you CARRY ME FROM YOUR CAR TO THE STAIRS. I broke down crying, was she worth this mess?? After everything and that LITTLE! BLACK! DRESS! After everything I must confess, I neeeeed you”

Fearless (my favourite song ever, from 2008 til about 2015. So cute. “We’re driving down the road, I wonder if you know, I’m trying so hard not to get caught up now. But you’re just so cool, run your hands through your hair - absentmindedly MAKING ME WANT YOU.” Also the bridge “well you stood there with me in the doorway, my hands shake, I’m not usually this way, but you pull me in and I’m a little more brave. It’s the first kiss, it’s flawless, really something - it’s fearless.”

Hey Stephen (one of my other favourites of all time)

You Belong With Me (I’m sure you know this one. Absolute bop. Best music video with a steamy feature from love of my life Lucas Till).

Tell Me Why (never fully appreciated violins until I heard this song. Great song if you’ve been wronged by someone or been in a toxic relationship and can’t understand it. “I take a step back, let you go. I told you I’m not bulletproof, now you know”.)

Forever & Always. (People love to critique Taylor or blaming relationship breakdowns on the other person, but almost all of her breakup songs are her questioning what she did wrong. This is an example of that. “Was I out of line? Did I say something way too honest?” She wrote this about Joe Jonas too.

Change. (SUCH A POWERHOUSE SONG. A song to unify, unite and empower. “Tonight we’ll stand, get off our knees, fight for what we worked for all these years. The battle was long, it’s the fight of our lives, but we’ll stand up - champions tonight.”)

Omg I forgot The Story Of Us which has some of the best lyrics ever including “you held your pride like you should have held me”

Taylor Swift

The only song you need to listen to from her first album right now is I’m Only Me When I’m With You. It’s so great and beautiful. “Friday night beneath the stars, in a field behind your yard, you and I are painting pictures in the sky. Sometimes we don’t say a thing, just listen to the crickets sing, everything I need is right here by my side.”

and that concludes the Taylor Swift discography review you never asked for.”

he said “Man, I love your insight. You think and appreciate things on a whole other level to anyone else I’ve met” 

if he plays his cards right i’ll give him an education on the jonas brothers too

[jeroldlockettus]

Freakonomics Radio Live: “Jesus Could Have Been a Pigeon.”

Angela Duckworth and Stephen Dubner test a memory athlete’s skills. (Photo: Lucy Sutton)

Our co-host is Grit author Angela Duckworth, and we learn fascinating, Freakonomical facts from a parade of guests. For instance: what we all get wrong about Darwin; what an iPod has in common with the “hell ant”; and how a “memory athlete” memorizes a deck of cards. Mike Maughan is our real-time fact-checker.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is an edited transcript of the episode. 

*      *      *

As you know, Freakonomics Radio is primarily an interview show, based on extensive research, in which we explore various issues, often quite complicated ones, in some depth. But we need a break from that now and again. Don’t you need a break from that now and again? Of course you do. And so, may we present the following episode of Freakonomics Radio Live — not recorded in some somber radio studio, but in a pub, in front of a live audience. It’s a little game show we like to play, called Tell Me Something I Don’t Know. It’s got the same D.N.A. as Freakonomics Radio, but in reverse.

If you’d like to attend a future show or be on a future show, get tickets here. We’ll be in New York on March 8th and 9th, at City Winery; and in May, we’re coming to California: in San Francisco on May 16th at the Nourse Theater, in partnership with KQED; and in Los Angeles on May 18th at the Ace Hotel Theater, in partnership with KCRW.

*      *      *

Stephen J. DUBNER: Good evening. I’m Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio Live. Tonight we’re at Joe’s Pub in New York City. And joining me as co-host is the University of Pennsylvania psychologist and author of Grit, our good friend, Angela Duckworth.

Angela DUCKWORTH: Hi, Stephen. Hi, everyone.

DUBNER: Hey, Angela. So happy to have you back. Angela, here’s what we know about you so far. We know that you are founder and C.E.O. of the Character Lab.

DUCKWORTH: Correct.

DUBNER: That you are a MacArthur Genius Fellow who has advised the White House, the World Bank, N.F.L. teams, and more.

DUCKWORTH: Previous White House, but yes.

DUBNER: Previous White House. That was the — Truman?

DUCKWORTH: After Truman, before Trump.

DUBNER: Anyway, great to have you back on the show. Please tell us something we don’t yet know about you.

DUCKWORTH: I was born in Cherry Hill, N.J., home to the very first real mall in America.

DUBNER: Were you a mall kid?

DUCKWORTH: I was a total mall kid. Every time I go to a mall with a food court, I feel like I’m home again.

DUBNER: I have always had a theory — I’ve never been able to substantiate it — the secret to success in life is massive consumption of Orange Julius during teenage years.

DUCKWORTH: That is correct.

DUBNER: What did you do at the mall?

DUCKWORTH: Wandered around and around and around until my parents picked me up.

DUBNER: Because you had grit!

DUCKWORTH: Maybe that was the seed of the idea.

DUBNER: Angela, it is so nice to have you here to play Tell Me Something I Don’t Know. Here’s how it’s going to work: Guests will come onstage to tell us some interesting fact or idea, or maybe just a story. You and I can then ask them anything we want. And at the end of the show our live audience will pick a winner. The vote will be based on three simple criteria. No. 1, did the guest tell us something we truly did not know? No. 2, was it worth knowing? And No. 3, was it demonstrably true?

To help with that demonstrably true part, would you please welcome our real-time fact checker, Mike Maughan. Mike is Head of Global Insights at Qualtrics, and he’s a co-founder of 5 for the Fight, a campaign to eradicate cancer. Mike, we know Qualtrics calls itself an “experience-management company” and that you’re always doing interesting research there. What have you learned lately?

Mike MAUGHAN: So we’ve done a series of pain indexes looking at different industries and the experiences that people want. I think the most interesting one is a hotel pain index where we found that a third of guests who frequently stay at five-star hotels have cried because of a bad hotel experience. I think that probably says a lot more about the demanding, fragile, unresilient, non-gritty state of spoiled people than it does about anything else.

DUBNER: All right, then, Mike, it is time to play Tell Me Something I Don’t Know. Would you please welcome our first guest, Colin Jerolmack. So Colin, I understand you are a professor of sociology and environmental studies at N.Y.U., which sounds like an interesting combination. I’m ready, as are Angela Duckworth and Mike Maughan. What do you know, sir, that’s worth knowing, that you think we don’t know.

Colin JEROLMACK: I would like to ask you: what animal is most responsible for inspiring Darwin’s theory of evolution?

DUCKWORTH: Finches.

DUBNER: Well, we’re supposed to say the finches, and you’re going to tell us the finches were not —

JEROLMACK: Everybody thinks it’s the finches. And the thing is, the finches of course were — they have these different beaks. Some are short, some are long, some are curled, some are straight, depending on which island they were on, and they evolved these different beaks to be able to eat the seeds and the fruits that vary by islands. But Darwin didn’t figure that out when he was on the H.M.S. Beagle — he didn’t figure that out till decades later. He thought that these were different birds that were somehow related, but he didn’t think that they were the same species.

DUBNER: So you’re here to tell us that Darwin wasn’t so bright.

JEROLMACK: Well, it took him a couple decades to figure it out.

DUCKWORTH: But there is an animal that did inspire him, right?

JEROLMACK: Yes.

DUCKWORTH: And it is not the big turtle-like things that are not turtles but they look like turtles?

JEROLMACK: No we’ve gotten further away.

DUBNER: Is it a fast animal?

JEROLMACK: I would say medium.

DUBNER: Is it a delicious animal?

JEROLMACK: I’m vegan, so I’d say no.

DUCKWORTH: Is it a bigger-than-a-breadbox animal?

JEROLMACK: No.

DUCKWORTH: Smaller than a breadbox.

DUBNER: Is it a breadbox?

JEROLMACK: No.

DUBNER: Alright, tell us what the animal is.

JEROLMACK: The pigeon. The humble, lowly rock pigeon that we see outside this very studio. So, Darwin kept pigeons for 12 years or more, and he was fascinated by them, because you could breed them. And there were so many different breeds. In Victorian England there was hundreds of different breeds of pigeons. But the idea at the time was that all these different breeds came from multiple species. So he bred them and wanted to figure out how plastic they were, and over generations he discovered that if you mix them all together, you get the same pigeon that was walking around on the street. He thought these must have all come from the same species, not multiple species.

If some of you may remember, if you actually read The Origin of Species, this is why he spends the first 70-plus pages on pigeons. And he gently guides you through all the variation, all the different breeds, how tall you can make them, how fat or small you can make them. And then he hits you with the bombshell and he says, “If I can do this breeding pigeons in just a couple of years, imagine what Mother Nature could do over millions or hundreds of millions of years.” And he says Mother Nature is the selecting hand, right? So first he says, “I’m the artificial hand of breeding,” but Mother Nature is the selecting hand.

DUCKWORTH: So why is this amazing fact so unknown? Like, what — finches are just too — they’re sexier than pigeons?

JEROLMACK: Pigeons got a bad rep. Pigeons are — I think if I were to ask people what they think of pigeons, many people say, “I think they’re rats with wings,” or, “I call them rats with wings,” as if they thought of that themselves. But to be honest, I’m not totally sure because I ask my class, “Who’s read The Origin of Species?” and they all put their hands up, and I say, “What are the first 50-70 pages about?” and nobody—

DUCKWORTH: That’s because they didn’t read it

JEROLMACK: I think the real answer to your question is that nobody’s actually read The Origin of Species.

DUCKWORTH: I think that’s probably the answer.

DUBNER: So can you tell us more about how popular pigeons were in Darwin’s day, and to what end? They were used in obviously messengering, but were they used in warfare, and all this kind of stuff?

JEROLMACK: Definitely. So yeah, during the time that Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, there was something of a pigeon craze in Victorian England. People were breeding hundreds of varieties — they had shows like the Westminster Dog Show. And they still have these today actually, they’re just not as popular. The Queen of England kept pigeons, still has a racing pigeon loft today. So everybody had pigeons and was breeding pigeons and making fancy pigeons as ridiculous as the clothes that people were wearing. And actually, when Darwin wrote The Origin of Species and gave it to his editor, the editor said, “Man, this stuff about pigeons is amazing,” and people loved pigeons so much—

DUBNER: “Let’s just make a pigeon book.”

JEROLMACK: That’s what he said. Just get rid of speculative stuff about evolution, and if you make this just about pigeons, it will be a coffee table book. Everybody in England will buy it and it will be a bestseller.

DUBNER: So what you’re really here to tell us is that the publishing industry is exactly the same today as it was then.

JEROLMACK: It hasn’t changed much. That’s right.

DUBNER: When was peak pigeon?

JEROLMACK: Probably around that time, late 1800’s, early 1900’s. So what happened after that is, we used to actually love pigeon crap. We domesticated pigeons 5,000 years ago because their feces was such valuable fertilizer. And then we also realized you can eat them — so squab, if you’ve ever eaten squab, that’s pigeon.

DUCKWORTH: Oh, that’s pigeon. God!

JEROLMACK: And then, as Stephen alluded to, they served as messengers. Genghis Khan sent pigeons throughout his empire to send messages. Also, Reuters was launched on the back of pigeons, on messenger pigeons. But then after the turn of the century, nitrogen fertilizer replaced pigeon feces, chickens replaced pigeons, you could breed them much fatter, much quicker. And obviously we don’t need them for messages anymore, either. So they’ve kind of become, from society’s terms, useless.

DUBNER: If they can do all that stuff — carry messages by having a homing instinct, if nothing else — are we to assume that they’re relatively smart, especially for birds?

JEROLMACK: Yeah, they’re not bird-brained. You’d be surprised. Pigeons pass the mirror test. There’s very few animals that pass the mirror test.

DUCKWORTH: What’s the mirror test?

JEROLMACK: Looking at oneself in a mirror and understanding that they’re looking at themselves.

DUCKWORTH: So walk me through — a pigeon is in front of a mirror. How do you know that the pigeon knows that it is itself?

JEROLMACK: You put the animal to sleep, and you put a red dot on its forehead, and then you notice if it does things to try to get rid of the red dot. Like pecking at it — so the pigeon will peck at the mirror and kind of shuffle about and do things that indicate that—

DUCKWORTH: To get the red dot off of its mirrored image.

JEROLMACK: Yeah. I could tell you some other things that make them rather intelligent. So they can be trained to tell the difference not only between cubist and impressionist paintings, but between a Monet and a Picasso, or if you’re giving them some other Cubist or Impressionist painting, but that is not a Monet or a Picasso.

DUBNER: So, would you call yourself a pigeon advocate?

JEROLMACK: Yes. They got me tenure.

DUCKWORTH: It’s not bad.

DUBNER: Alright. So I don’t expect an honest answer from you on the following question, but: how do you know that the pigeon is actually so smart — as opposed to being the bird that was popular and therefore was trained a lot? Could I take a seagull, could I take a dove, etc.?

JEROLMACK: And do what?

DUBNER: Train it to carry messages.

JEROLMACK: Oh gosh, no. Come on. Are you serious? No way.

DUCKWORTH: Wait, a dove? Isn’t a dove — it’s like a pigeon.

JEROLMACK: So, I’m glad you brought that up, because this actually gets the Stephen’s question about the bad rap that pigeons have.

DUBNER: So a dove is all peace and purity, and a pigeon is a garbage eater.

JEROLMACK: That’s right. And there’s many languages that don’t even have a different word for pigeon and dove, and a lot of — if you’ve ever gone to a wedding or to the Olympics and they release doves, these are white homing pigeons that will leave and fly away and go back to the owner who’s bred them and trained them to fly. I argue that a lot of religious iconography of Jesus as the spirit descending — Jesus could have been a pigeon. We don’t actually know whether that was a pigeon or a dove.

DUBNER: Mike Maughan, fire up your Google. We’re going to need to know if Jesus was indeed a pigeon. Let me ask you this: Why are they the one bird that I know of at least that walk among us in cities?

JEROLMACK: Yes. So first of all, in terms of literally walking, they’re ground feeders. That’s why they walk and they don’t hop — birds that hop mean they feed in bushes or flowers or trees. Pigeons are ground feeders. So pigeons were the first bird to be domesticated, over 5,000 years ago. And as I mentioned, we domesticated them for agriculture, for the fertilizer, and to eat them. But they’ve actually co-evolved with humans — when we moved to cities, we brought pigeons with us. They, at this point, have been living in cities since cities were around.

Today, unfortunately with climate change and urbanization, species basically have two routes: they go extinct or they survive, and the survival route usually means adapting to living amongst people and actually changing your evolutionary trajectory, and pigeons have done that. They are generalist eaters, so they — we leave a lot of garbage around, tons of garbage around for them to eat, and they can pretty much eat almost all of it. And we feed them as well, and because their natural habitat is actually cliffs and rocky ledges, even in terms of walking amongst us — I like to call them pedestrian animals — they literally walk on the sidewalks and sit on benches and ledges because they prefer them to grass, shrubs, or trees. It’s more like their native habitat.

DUBNER: Has anyone ever seen a baby pigeon?

DUCKWORTH: Yes, I have. I saw one growing up on a window ledge in a hotel a few months ago. Why do you ask that question?

DUBNER: Because I’ve never seen a baby pigeon. Tell us a little bit about pigeon family life. Do they — are they monogamous-ish? Honestly here’s what I thought, when I first moved to New York years ago: I would see pigeons all over, but never babies or even adolescents. But I somehow imagined that pigeons would be a couple. I don’t know if they are. And they would — when they were with child, they would go to the ‘burbs and have the kids there and then the adults would come back when they wanted to go to the theater.

DUCKWORTH: Send them to good schools, and they can ride their bikes.

JEROLMACK: That’s an interesting hypothesis. You’re not entirely wrong in terms of they actually do what I think at least many humans aspire to: they mate for life and they’re monogamous. And they’re also pretty good on gender equality. They both sit on the eggs, and they both feed the young. If you’ve ever seen pigeons that appear to be kissing, the male is actually throwing up into the female’s mouth to demonstrate that he can produce the crop milk to feed the babies.

DUBNER: That is sweet.

JEROLMACK: That seals the deal. She’s like, oh yeah.

DUBNER: But what about from birth to adulthood? Where are — why don’t we see the young?

JEROLMACK: It’s kind of hilarious if you get to see it. The mother and the father will sit on the baby until it’s fully grown. So they don’t fledge the nest.

DUBNER: They are like people, actually.

JEROLMACK: Yeah, they don’t fledge until they have gone to college and come back home. I’ll give you a tip if you would really like to find baby pigeons: any time you’re walking pretty much anywhere, but say particularly under an awning, listen for these really high-pitched squeaks, and that’s a baby pigeon. And if you listen and look around, you’ll find them.

DUBNER: Mike Maughan, Colin Jerolmack has been telling us much more about pigeons than I ever thought any of us would want to know, and I personally found much of it fascinating. I believe him because he—

DUCKWORTH: He’s a tenured professor at N.Y.U. He’s like a professor of pigeons.

DUBNER: And also, he’s got khakis and a braided belt, and I there’s something about that that just says verity.

JEROLMACK: I got to thank my wife for that.

DUBNER: So I find no reason to distrust anything he said. But you’re the man with the Google over there.

MAUGHAN: So, a few things — you don’t have your wife to thank for a braided belt. You should be mad at her. No. 2, you said that pigeons were like humans because they’re monogamous and mate for life. That’s not true. Humans don’t do that.

JEROLMACK: Oh I see. I said humans aspire to that.

MAUGHAN: Next, you and Angela were debating which animals are the sexiest. Just a quick warning: don’t Google that on your work computer. So a few things. It’s not very helpful, but a publication called City Lab New York City said that this city is believed to have between 1 and 7 million pigeons. Really great range there, so thank you.

It’s interesting to know that in the past 20 years in China, there’s been an amazing boom in young money, and this self-made billionaire crowd has chosen pigeon racing as their sport of choice. The most expensive champion racing pigeon sold for almost half a million dollars.

Lastly, I just want to say you all know Crocs, the little rubber shoe. So I think it’s important to recognize that pigeons are a lot like Crocs, they’re more functional than they appear, but still super weird to have with you in any situation.

DUBNER: Thank you, Mike, and thank you Colin Jerolmack. Would you please welcome our next guest, Ben Orlin. Hi there, Ben. It says here that you are a math teacher and author of the new book, Math With Bad Drawings, so I’ll assume you’ve got something a little math-y to tell us tonight. The floor is yours.

Ben ORLIN: Yeah, that’s right. My question for you is: who’s likeliest to buy lottery tickets?

DUBNER: Is this another finch-pigeon — we’re supposed to say, “Low-income people who squander too much money on this ridiculous, state-supported racket where they skim 40 percent off the top and then leave you with your shallow winnings to weep in your latte that you’re also buying and shouldn’t be.”

MAUGHAN: Stephen, how do you really feel?

DUCKWORTH: I think the lotteries are evil. Don’t they prey upon people’s lack of numeracy, effectively, right?

DUBNER: The other thing that I don’t like about lotteries, just since we’re getting it out there—

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, do it. Go for it.

DUBNER: —is that if you play the slots, what’s the rake on a slot machine? You’re a math guy.

DUCKWORTH: It’s very small.

DUBNER: Seven percent, maybe?

ORLIN: Yeah, I think it’s in that range.

DUBNER: A parimutuel — you go to a horse track, the track is maybe taking 12, 14 percent.

ORLIN: Yeah, maybe closer to 20, but yeah, in that range.

DUBNER: But the state — what’s the average for state lotteries?

ORLIN: Close to 50 percent — 40 percent or so.

DUBNER: So you’re here to tell us something, however, within this —

DUCKWORTH: Diabolical system —

ORLIN: Yes, so I’m a math teacher, so it’s not my place to decide how the state should cheat people out of their money. But who are they cheating out of their money? It turns out, actually, so the state where the most lottery tickets are bought is Massachusetts, my home state — a lot of very educated, wealthy people in Massachusetts. And it turns out, Gallup did a poll, 2016, so not that long ago, and people making more than $90,000 a year are actually likelier to buy lottery tickets than people making below $36,000 a year.

DUBNER: Do we call 90 and above high income, or we call that middle-high? What do you want to call that?

ORLIN: I’m impressed, I think 90 is pretty good.

DUBNER: You are a math teacher. But you would call 36 pretty good too as a math teacher, would you not?

ORLIN: 36 is below national median.

DUBNER: Okay. So you’re saying more people in that bracket were —

ORLIN: Yeah, that’s right, people who are higher income are actually likelier to play than people who are low income, and similarly, people with bachelor’s degrees are actually likelier to play the lottery than people with no college education.

DUBNER: So you’re saying that this general idea that the lottery is disproportionately popular among lower income is not quite right.

DUCKWORTH: So how many lottery tickets are they buying?

ORLIN: Yeah, that’s a good question. So Gallup doesn’t have data on that. In the same sense also that if someone making $36,000 a year buys a lottery ticket, and someone making $100,000 a year buys a lottery ticket, the person making less has just spent a much larger percentage of their income on lottery tickets. So even if they’re buying the same number, we can still call it a regressive tax.

DUCKWORTH: So wait, let me just make sure I understand. You’re saying that people who make a lot of money buy more tickets per person on average.

ORLIN: They’re more likely to participate, yes. Per person, I’m not sure. But more likely to buy a ticket, at least.

DUCKWORTH: More likely to buy a ticket.

DUBNER: And what share is that? Let’s say 90 and above. Are we talking 30, 60 percent? Where are we?

ORLIN: It is basically about 50 percent, across pretty much every income group.

DUBNER: And then $36,000 and below —

ORLIN: So yeah, we’re looking at 46 percent or so. So it’s not a huge difference. When it comes down to it, about half of people play the lottery.

DUCKWORTH: That itself is — half of people play the lottery?

DUBNER: But play the lottery means what, one ticket in the past 12 months?

ORLIN: Yeah, it’s played in the last year. Although, if you look at Massachusetts, that’s the state where we have sort of the highest spending, it’s about $800 per person per year. So the average person is buying two lottery tickets a day — that’s probably not evenly distributed. I don’t think — I mean I don’t know, unless my wife has been sneaking off and buying way more lottery tickets than I think.

DUCKWORTH: Wait. The average Massachusetts citizen is buying $800 of tickets per year, or the average person who is buying a ticket —

ORLIN: So the total amount spent, if you divide by the number of people in Massachusetts, you get $800 per year. Yeah.

DUCKWORTH: $800 per year!

ORLIN: Yeah.

DUBNER: So let me ask you this. Let’s just pretend that Angela and I have decided that we think playing the lottery is a bad idea.

DUCKWORTH: Let’s pretend.

DUBNER: Let’s just pretend that. But then, let me introduce — let me just say well, let’s say the expected value is very low, relative to what I can do with a dollar, $10, elsewhere. But what about the entertainment utility? Has anyone ever measured that? Do we have any idea?

ORLIN: I mean, the measure of entertainment utility is that people keep doing it and they seem to do it very gladly and in great quantity.

DUCKWORTH: It could be — people could be buying tickets because it’s fun, or they could be buying tickets because they are legit thinking that they are going to win the lottery and that they’re gonna be lucky.

DUBNER: Let’s say this, Mr. Math Teacher. Let’s say that Angela I change our mind. We think, “Hey, we’re going to play the lottery because we think we can win because we know a smart guy named Ben Orlin, who’s a math teacher who’s interested in the lottery, and he can help us not cheat, but cheat.” So what are some things that we could do to increase our chances of winning? For instance, I’ve read that — let’s say you have a pick of numbers that go from zero to 100, that if you pick numbers above 31, let’s say, that at least if you do win, that you’ll have a bigger payout because so many people play their birthdates, for instance. Does that work?

ORLIN: Yeah, this is true. So there are certain numbers, numbers that show up on fortune cookies, or numbers that are birthdates. It’s not a good idea to pick those. Because if you win on that number, you’re going to be sharing with all the other people who had that fortune cookie.

Stephen, you mentioned expected value, which I think — someone who’s taken a probability class or a math class, I think the assumption is, expected value is sort of what you should be looking at. So right now, for example, the Mega Millions just went up to the highest it’s ever been, $1.6 billion right now. Expected value is basically just the long run average — if you are to buy tons and tons and tons of tickets, how much would the average one be worth? So for Mega Millions, there’s only about 300 million possible tickets. It’s worth $1.6 billion. So the average ticket should be worth more than $5, and they only cost $2. So in theory, it sounds like a good idea. The problem is, if you go out and buy a ticket you’re going to just lose your $2.

DUCKWORTH: Why don’t you just buy every possible combination?

ORLIN: Right. So this is very hard to do with Mega Millions. It’s actually happened in 1993, the early days of state lotteries. Virginia — the prize went up all the way to $28 million because no one had won it for a while. There were only 7 million tickets for $1 each. There was actually a syndicate, a group of people in Australia, who said, “Okay, we’ll just buy them all, that’s the easy money right there.” Which sounds like easy money but it’s not that easy to go and buy seven million lottery tickets.

DUCKWORTH: Oh that’s right, because you have to go to so many delis.

ORLIN: So what they did — this team in 1993 placed a lot of big orders with grocery store chains and convenience store chains. But even that didn’t work out that well for them — there’s actually one chain that had to return $600,000 to them for tickets they weren’t able to print. By the time of the drawing, 7 million tickets out there, they had actually purchased 5 million of them. So there was a two-in-seven chance they were going to wind up losing all that money.

DUCKWORTH: Okay, well then what happened?

ORLIN: What happened was, two weeks went by, and the state knew that they’d sold the winning ticket, but no one could find it, because they had 5 million tickets they needed to look through. And then about two weeks later they surfaced and they did win the money. The state lottery commissioner was furious and issued this sort of — like a villain at the end of a heist movie as though he knew he’d been beat but he swore he would never get beat that way again. And actually since then it’s become much harder to do those kind of bulk purchases. Most states have passed laws against that. And if you wanted to try it on Mega Millions right now — if you could do it it’d be great to get all 300 million tickets, but there’s just no feasible way to do it.

DUBNER: Mike Maughan, Ben Orlin is telling us that pretty much a lot of people love to play the lottery, and it’s not what we expect in terms of income. What more can you tell us about that?

MAUGHAN: So, here are a few things that are more likely to happen to you than winning the lottery: giving birth to identical quadruplets. Getting killed by a falling coconut or having a vending machine fall on you. And the kicker, you’re more likely to be elected president of the United States. But we’ve already shown that anyone can do that.

DUBNER: Thank you, Mike, and Ben Orlin, thank you for playing. Would you please welcome to the stage Kate Sicchio. Kate is an assistant professor of dance and kinetic imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University. Kate, why don’t you tell us something we don’t know please.

Kate SICCHIO: Sure. I can tell someone’s emotional state when they’re using their smartphone just by looking at them without seeing what’s on their screen or what they’re reading. How?

DUBNER: By how hard they’re weeping?

SICCHIO: No.

DUCKWORTH: Without looking at their face, and without seeing what’s on their phone?

SICCHIO: Correct.

DUCKWORTH: From their body posture, is it from that?

SICCHIO: Getting there. Yeah.

DUBNER: Does this have to do with what you do professionally?

SICCHIO: Yes.

DUBNER: You are a professor of dance and kinetic imaging — what is kinetic imaging? We’ll start there.

SICCHIO: So kinetic imaging is like media arts

DUBNER: That is a way more impressive word for it. Cause I’ve always thought, media arts, ugh, but kinetic imaging—

SICCHIO: Right, it’s exciting.

DUBNER: So you observe their movements, and because you’re a dance professor you can tell how they’re feeling?

SICCHIO: Yeah.

DUBNER: Oh, okay. Bingo.

SICCHIO: So in choreography, we have different tools of analysis. And in particular there’s this thing called the Laban Effort Graph. And what it does is, it allows you to look at movement in three different categories. One is time: is the movement sudden or sustained? One is space: is the movement direct or indirect? And another is force: is it strong or light? And when you combine these three things you start to get gestures — so a strong, sudden, direct movement is a punch. Right?

DUBNER: So when I punch my phone, you know I’m feeling —

SICCHIO: I know you’re angry.

DUBNER: I wouldn’t have figured that out without my kinetic imaging degree.

DUCKWORTH: But that’s the thing. Like with the phone, I mean, how much range is there when people are on their phone?

SICCHIO: Right. So one of the things we do a lot on our phone is, we do things like mindless surfing. Well, that gesture is what we call a flick. So it’s indirect and light and sudden, right? And that means that yeah, you’re not really being conscientious, you’re not paying that much attention, you might be bored.

DUCKWORTH: So what does sadness look like on an iPhone, in terms of my using it?

SICCHIO: Usually sadness is like, light, but it’s usually more sustained. Right? And it’s usually indirect.

DUCKWORTH: So not quite a flick.

SICCHIO: Right. Not quite a flick. One of my favorite ones is Tinder. So when we’re using Tinder, we’re doing this really careless gesture. And of course that’s where you meet people to hook up, not someone you’re going to care about in the future.

DUBNER: So do that gesture again, because that’s good for radio. And give me something that’s the opposite of that.

SICCHIO: Right. So another app that I use is one called a Hotel Tonight, and in order to book your hotel —

DUBNER: That sounds not that unlike Tinder to me.

DUCKWORTH: They go together.

SICCHIO: But to book your hotel you have to do a very direct, sustained movement. It’s much more of a commitment to get your hotel room than to find a date. You have to actually trace the shape of a bed on the phone. So it’s this really direct movement that you have to do in order to purchase.

DUBNER: Are there practical applications of this observation?

SICCHIO: Yeah, I think that you could make things more direct and more sustained so people would think about it more. Maybe we want news apps to be more like that, so people are actually careful about what they’re reading and thinking about what they’re digesting in terms of the content.

DUBNER: Mike Maughan, Kate Sicchio is saying that you can tell how people are feeling by looking at how they interact with their phones — true?

MAUGHAN: Yes. So we hear that Tinder is this hookup app, right, because it takes so little effort, and you’re just swiping left and right. Now, that may be true at the beginning of a relationship, but it doesn’t tell us a ton about what it takes to get into a relationship. Because by the time people are able to actually meet and hookup, they will have had to have engaged in some more committed behavior like texting, phone calls, et cetera.

What appears is that it’s not necessarily the results of how much effort someone takes throughout the time to get together, physical or otherwise, but rather it’s how the relationship starts. Something that may indicate what that means for us, The Atlantic has reported that couples who cohabitate before marriage tend to be less satisfied and are more likely to divorce. So the issue with Tinder may not be the human movement overall, but rather what the human movement says about the desire for commitment from the very beginning of the relationship.

DUBNER: Angela, does that make sense to you?

DUCKWORTH: I mean I think that when you say that people who live — maybe I’m taking this personally. But anyway, why would someone who lives together with another person be more likely to — is it divorce, is that the fact?

MAUGHAN: Yes. As a certified non-marriage counselor — I think the idea is that if things start out without a deep level of commitment, then the research shows that we’re less likely to stick to it. You’re the person that studies grit, passion, and perseverance, so I’m not going to fact check you on whether people stick with things or not.

DUCKWORTH: So I’ll just say this: whenever you find a correlation, like people who drink Diet Coke live — like, you have to worry as a scientist that like, lots of things are correlated with the decision to live together, and those may be the things that are driving the marriage statistics also. So what we really need is an experiment where half the people get assigned to live together before they get married —

DUBNER: Let’s do this half of the room.

DUCKWORTH: Right. And then we’ll know.

MAUGHAN: Speaking of spurious correlation, though, I do think it’s important to note that the number of people who die becoming tangled in bedsheets almost perfectly correlates with per capita cheese consumption.

DUBNER: Mike, thank you so much for that, and Kate, thank you for playing Tell Me Something I Don’t Know.

*      *      *

DUBNER: Before we get back to the game, we have got some FREAK-quently asked questions for Angela Duckworth. You ready to go?

DUCKWORTH: I’m ready to go.

DUBNER: You are best known for having written the book Grit. The Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League have a new mascot called Gritty. Was that your doing?

DUCKWORTH: Okay, that was 100 percent not my idea. It’s awful. Have you seen it?

DUBNER: It’s like an orange alien.

DUCKWORTH: No, I had nothing to do with it.

DUBNER: Do you know if the people who invented and named Gritty are fans of yours?

DUCKWORTH: I do not. They have not been in touch.

DUBNER: Do you think it’s a dereliction-of-royalty issue for which they have not been in touch?

DUCKWORTH: I am not suing the Philadelphia Flyers for their use of the word gritty because I don’t think I — can you own a word? I don’t think you can own a word, can you? Do you own Freakonomics?

DUBNER: I do own Freakonomics. Angela, I know you’re working on a new podcast about the work of the Character Lab, which advances the science and practice of character development. Why a podcast?

DUCKWORTH: So I think it’s the case that people like these things that they’re listening to where they get to actually talk to people like Stephen Dubner, and I thought, maybe there are a lot of parents out there and teachers who would like to talk to me about the science of how kids grow up to thrive.

DUBNER: And lastly, a family grit question: Can you give an example of something particularly un-gritty that someone in your family has done?

DUCKWORTH: Well, okay, a certain person would like throw themselves into various projects like metal detecting and then like stamp collecting, and then vending machines, and weight lifting, and like one thing after the other. And when you do that, then you’re not being gritty.

DUBNER: I didn’t know vending machine was a hobby.

DUCKWORTH: It can be. Short lived, it turns out, in this case.

DUBNER: Angela Duckworth, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much. It is time now to get back to our game. Would you please welcome our next guest, Philip Barden. Philip is a professor of evolutionary biology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, as well as a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. So that sounds very promising. What do you have for us, Philip?

Philip BARDEN: So, what does a hell ant and an iPod have in common?

DUBNER: May we in turn ask you what the hell is a hell ant?

BARDEN: Yeah, well, that’s a whole — okay, so that’s a decent question. So I work on fossil ants. That’s my niche. This is about as myopic as you might think you could get. Turns out there are as many fossil ant species as there are fossil dinosaur species.

DUCKWORTH: If that helps.

BARDEN: And among the oldest fossils that we know about, about 100 million years old, trapped in amber, are these ants called hell ants. And they have all these bizarre adaptations that we don’t see in any modern ants and in fact no modern insect. So what we see is these big scythe-like mandibles that jut out of the face and come up towards the forehead.

DUBNER: A mandible is a jaw?

BARDEN: The jaw, yeah, exactly, the jaw, the mouthparts. Modern ants have mouthparts that articulate horizontally. So if you take your arms and you kind of go to hug somebody, it’s sort of like that. This would be if you took and put your elbows together and you kind of went to jut yourself in the forehead with the tips of your fingers. Those are hell ants, right? Hell ants, it turns out, Dlussky, who’s this Russian paleo entomologist, named the genus for the first time in the 90’s, Haidomyrmex — haido meaning Hades, and myrmex, which is Greek for ant. And the common name is hell ants.

DUCKWORTH: Why hell ants? Other than, it was good branding.

BARDEN: It was just real spooky cool, just badass thing to name an ant.

DUCKWORTH: Oh, it was branding. It was just a badass name for a species of ant.

BARDEN: Exactly. Yeah, hado-myrmex, it just sounds — really truly, I mean, there are 13,000 species of modern ants, and this is the — it sort of breaks the mold.

DUBNER: And your question was what do a hell ant and an iPod—

BARDEN: —have in common. I should say one other thing, which is that there are some hell ants that also have horns that come out of their forehead. We named one last year — we named it after Vlad the Impaler. And the reason is this: we C.T. scanned it, we looked through X-ray imaging, and found that these ants actually looked like they sequester metals into the middle of this paddle. What we think is happening is to prevent themselves from running themselves through their own forehead, they’re actually capturing prey and puncturing them and drinking their hemolymph, which is insect blood. So that’s why we named it after Vlad the Impaler.

DUBNER: Were they the size roughly of modern ants?

BARDEN: They were about a centimeter — so like your pinky.

DUBNER: So how is it possible that an ant that tough didn’t make it?

BARDEN: Well this gets into the thing — I’ll just give it to you.

DUBNER: Give it to me.

BARDEN: So, one of the reasons why we think that hell ants went extinct is potentially because — and they are extinct, and all their close relatives are extinct — because they are too specialized. They effectively painted themselves into a corner. some of the evidence that we have strongly suggests that they specialized on prey that also went extinct. This is an interesting thing in evolution, right, where we get into these scenarios where your adaptations work really, really well until all of a sudden the bottom drops out and they don’t. And they actually persisted for about 21 million years. We know about them from amber in Myanmar, France, and Canada.

DUBNER: So what they have in common with the iPod is, they were too specialized and we don’t need them anymore.

BARDEN: Perfect, nobody buys iPods anymore.

DUBNER: Okay, so they’re a species that went extinct because, you’re arguing, of overspecialization, they were tough. There were certain prey that they could beat up, but otherwise they weren’t whatever, good enough to go on. But what about — aren’t there like — what good is the platypus for? Is that not a specialized thing and why is it still around?

BARDEN: Well, so anything that is around today, it’s working, right? We always think about evolution as being this sort of game of winners and being the best or whatever, and it’s really just the best in that moment in time, in that particular slice. Right? So everything, including humans today. Right? If you put two humans two billion years ago, there is no oxygen in the atmosphere, game over, it’s hard. And in fact something like oxygen turns out to be another thing that sort of changed the game. So the earliest life on our planet — oxygen was catastrophic for it. There was no oxygen in the atmosphere. And then we start to get photosynthesis. All of a sudden having that adaptation of being anaerobic, that is, surviving without oxygen, becomes really terrible. And now we have this big massive extinction event because of something like oxygen. Now of course we all love oxygen. But it turns out that wasn’t really the case in the beginning.

DUCKWORTH: So let me ask you a human-centric question.

BARDEN: I don’t think about humans.

DUCKWORTH: So are we over-specialized or are humans the opposite? Because we can learn anything.

BARDEN: Humans are incredible generalists. This is one of the reasons why we are highly, highly successful. And in fact — I’m just gonna bring it back to ants. And the reason why I bring it back to ants is because they are —

DUCKWORTH: Because you study ants.

BARDEN: Because I study ants, and they are my comfort zone. But really, they are tremendously successful, and in many places they outweigh the biomass of all vertebrates, including humans, in some environments. And the most successful ants are also generalists, right, so they can capitalize all kinds of resources. They don’t rely just on one particular food source. And humans are very much the same way, although we have some other kind of funny things going on, this culture thing. And the ability to rapidly pivot.

DUBNER: Aren’t modern ants said to be quite social?

BARDEN: They are, they’re all eusocial, exactly. Yes.

DUBNER: And do you think that part of the hell ant’s problem was a lack of some kind of socialization?

BARDEN: This is a great question. So, we thought about this. We really thought that maybe it was that the earliest ants really weren’t social, and they were actually out-competed by their highly communistic counterparts who are alive today. And in fact, what we’ve found is that that’s not the case — the earliest ants, including hell ants, are highly social. There’s no such thing as a solitary ant. All 13,000 species today and all 700 fossil species so far as we know all were social. So, for example, if you look at all the different amber deposits in Earth history, starting at 100 million years ago, ants never make up more than one percent of all insects in amber, and yet we find many aggregations of them together. We calculated on the back of a napkin — we’re not mathematicians — but we figure that it’s something like one in a trillion. The idea of finding 20 worker ants in one piece, when you have less than one percent abundance.

DUBNER: Are high or low income ants more likely to buy lottery tickets?

BARDEN: There should be an ant lotto.

DUBNER: Let me ask you this. Will science and technology allow you to bring back the hell ant? And if so, whose picnic would you send it to?

BARDEN: Oh, this is a great question. So, not biologically, no. But, in fact, where I am now, we have some great industrial design students — we have C.T. scanned these and we’re now modeling them, we’re digitally bringing them back to life to figure out how the mechanics of these would work.

DUCKWORTH: That is cool.

BARDEN: Yeah, this is a great tee-up, by the way, for N.J.I.T., where I work now, and I do not have tenure, and I’d like to have tenure. And we’re also printing and constructing giant molds that are motorized, so we can use these for outreach, we’re taking them to schools and museums, potentially for museum exhibits also, because we really don’t think about insects as part of the fossil record, but they are. Today, 75 percent of all species that exist are insects.

DUBNER: Mike Maughan, Philip Barden has been telling us about the extinct hell ant. What do you have to add?

MAUGHAN: So I think a lot of people here misunderstood — when you say hell ant, we all think about our aunt from hell who is always trying to set us up.

DUCKWORTH: That’s just your aunt from hell.

MAUGHAN: So ants have lost a lot of things over the years — they lost the Impaler. They don’t have lungs, they don’t have ears, they can’t swim. They do have two stomachs. It’s interesting to see though that ants have lost a number of things, we as a culture of lost many things, some good, some bad, we’ve lost answering machines, pagers, Velcro wallets. We no longer have decent politicians. We’ve lost MySpace, which was a terrible tragedy. And if you haven’t yet lost Nickelback, do yourself a favor.

DUBNER: Thank you Mike. And Philip Barden, thank you so much for playing Tell Me Something I Don’t Know. Would you please welcome our final guest of the evening, Livan Grijalva. Livan works in data analytics here in New York. He is a memory athlete, and currently holds the title of fifth best memory in the United States. I would like to apologize to our audience that we could only get the fifth-best memory athlete in America. But Livan, that sounds awesome and I can’t wait to hear what you have to tell us, so the floor is yours.

GRIJALVA: So, have you ever been sitting in your living room on the couch and you remember that you need to get something from the kitchen? You get up, you walk to the kitchen, and as soon as you get there, you just completely forget what it is. So my question is, why does walking from one room to another cause you to forget?

DUCKWORTH: Because you are — like place memory, right? You are activating the memory representation in one place and that has all these cues, and then you go to another place and those cues are absent?

GRIJALVA: That’s basically it. So it’s something called the doorway effect.

DUCKWORTH: Sorry, I’m a psychology professor.

DUBNER: No, that’s really good.

GRIJALVA: What happens is, when you’re sitting on your couch, you are thinking of something and you inadvertently, maybe you’re looking at the T.V. or you’re looking at the shelf and that idea somehow gets tethered to that location. So as soon as you walk to the next room, when you’re no longer looking at that, you seem to have forgotten what that is. And what happens is, as soon as you sit back down on your couch, it just comes right back to you, which is actually what memory athletes do in a way. We use a technique called the Memory Palace, where we place information that we want to memorize in specific locations in different rooms, and then we’re able to recall them later on like that.

DUBNER: And you said it’s called the doorway effect?

GRIJALVA: The doorway effect.

DUBNER: Meaning you pass through and you lose it. Hey, can I just ask you, my thought before Angela figured it right out was, I thought of something I think it was Arthur Conan Doyle once said about how the memory is like an attic, and if you fill it up with junk, then when you have something valuable to put in it, you don’t have room. And what it made me think of is, if you walk into another room, you’re just hit with all the new stimuli there, and they somehow hurt your being able to summon the memory because there’s only so much RAM that we all have going on. That’s not an issue?

GRIJALVA: Actually, I love Sherlock Holmes, so I know that quote really well, and what I thought was really interesting was that he’s saying that your brain has a limited amount of space, which believe it or not, I mean, as far as these memory athletes are concerned, we can pretty much memorize large, large amounts of information. I don’t think anybody — if there’s any scientific studies that show that there is a limit — like, this person has hit the limit of it all they can memorize. So, while it’s sort of true, I don’t know if that’s exactly it.

DUBNER: Just a side observation: you say the phrase “memory athlete” as if we think that is athletic.

DUCKWORTH: Takes training, right? Takes practice.

DUBNER: I’m not saying it’s not, but I’m curious, was that said originally in jest and it got real?

GRIJALVA: No, that’s a very good question. Mnemonist is another name for it, but I guess, yeah, we just call ourselves memory athletes or mental athletes.

DUCKWORTH: So I want to know more about this thing that you do — so can you give me some examples of things that you’ve memorized or competitions that you’ve been in?

GRIJALVA: Sure. So there’s lots of competitions all over the world every year. And basically people like myself get together and they try to memorize as much information in the shortest amount of time possible. So some of the events are, let’s say, memorizing hundreds of random digits, binary digits, names and faces, abstract images, lines of poetry. And one of my particularly favorite events is basically memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards in under five minutes if possible. So it’s basically after all these events, scores are tallied up and then you get a champion.

DUBNER: So you’re obviously very good at this. I’m curious, do your fellow competitors — do you all pretty much use the same methods?

GRIJALVA: They pretty much do. As I was mentioning before, the memory palace is the main technique that we use, which is an ancient Greek technique where you basically construct places in your mind. So at a smaller level, you might imagine your apartment as a memory palace. You might imagine your front door as a location No. 1, and you walk through and your living room would be location No. 2. Your kitchen could be location No. 3, the bathroom No. 4, and finally your bedroom, No. 5. So what you’ve done is, you’ve created a mini journey that you can close your eyes and walk through it. So on a much larger scale, this is what memory athletes do. We just have hundreds and hundreds of palaces and different ones, yeah.

DUCKWORTH: Are they real, or are they imagined palaces?

GRIJALVA: So they can be either one. I tend to like to use real locations. I just came back from Ecuador. So on my trip, I tried to stop in a few different museums and stuff like that and try to build memory palaces along the way. But I also used to play a lot of video games, first-person shooters, so I would actually take the environments in the game and also turn those into memory palaces. Basically anything that you can imagine yourself in. It’s so much easier though if it’s real places — like humans are really good at navigation. So it’s pretty easy to build palaces wherever you go.

DUBNER: So you actually go to new places in order to create memory palaces from them afterwards, yes?

GRIJALVA: Yeah. And usually I will take notes or take photographs of different places. It makes it so much fun too, because you could actually close your eyes and be in these places. A lot of times when I’m memorizing in competitions, it’s so strange but also really relaxing to be able to walk through all these places in your mind.

DUCKWORTH: So why do you do this? I actually admire this. Very gritty. But what do you get out of it? And do you think you’ll still be doing this 10 or 20 years from now?

GRIJALVA: So I originally was a magician, so I would do a lot of stuff with cards. And obviously as magicians we pretend to memorize a deck of cards to do tricks, but then I found out people were actually memorizing them, and I thought to myself, “Well, as a magician, as somebody who loves cards, I have to be able to do this.” So I started training myself to just do that. But it turned out it was so much fun to actually be able to do this. Just being able to achieve faster speeds. The first time I ever memorized a deck of cards for a magic trick, it took me three hours. Now it takes me 32 seconds. I mean, the sheer amount that you can cut down is just so interesting. And even four years into competing, I’m still finding that there’s things about the brain and how memory works that I didn’t know before.

DUBNER: Can you just give us an example of, let’s say, a deck of cards memorizing. And obviously you don’t have them — or do you have a deck of cards on you, by chance?

GRIJALVA: I do. So I can give an example, because unfortunately, seeing a memory competition is not that exciting. It’s just a bunch of people sitting there with headphones and dead silence as they run through.

DUBNER: So just imagine how exciting it will be to listen to people seeing a memory competition.

GRIJALVA: So basically what it is is, the technique — I already mentioned the memory palace. In my mind I have a location that I’m set to go when I want to memorize. Cards are abstract. It’s hard for you to remember them because they have no real meaning. So what we do is, we turn every card into somebody or into something that’s more meaningful. So in the technique that I use, I’ve turned every card into a person and an action associated with it. So let’s say the 10 of hearts is Homer Simpson.

DUBNER: Because why?

GRIJALVA: So originally — this is the hard part. Building the system requires things — you have to sort of make it up. Like here’s an easy one. So the six of hearts is Michael Jordan, and that one makes sense because Michael Jordan won six championships, and I say he’s got a lot of heart. So it’s very easy for me to memorize that. The ace of spades is James Bond, and I think of the highest card in the deck as being James Bond when he plays poker. So, some of them are easy to associate.

DUBNER: Okay, so each memory athlete creates their own mnemonic for each card. Correct?

GRIJALVA: Yeah. There is a slight variation. So my system, like I was saying, uses two cards. So let’s imagine that — I mentioned that the ace of spades is James Bond and the 10 of hearts is Homer Simpson. So if I was memorizing — if the cards were in that sequence, let’s say ace of spades, 10 of hearts, I would take my first location. Let’s imagine the front door. And I would take the first card, the ace of spades, and imagine James Bond standing at the front door. But the second card is the 10 of hearts, Homer Simpson. But it also gets confusing because later on, when I’m remembering it, I’m like wait a minute. Was it James Bond and Homer Simpson, or Homer Simpson and James Bond? So what we do is, we modify the technique to create a hierarchy. So the first card is the person. The second card would be an action. So it would be James Bond drooling, which is an action that Homer Simpson does. So if it was the other way around, if was 10 of hearts, ace of spades, it would be Homer Simpson drinking a martini.

DUBNER: And you do all that for 52 cards in how many seconds?

GRIJALVA: So my current competition best is 34 seconds. My personal best is 32 seconds.

DUBNER: What do you think you can do right now?

GRIJALVA: I’m not sure, I’m a little bit out of practice.

DUBNER: Do we shuffle them?

DUCKWORTH: I feel like we should shuffle them.

GRIJALVA: So we’ll do about half the deck, only because regurgitating 52 cards might be a little boring. I’m going to try to go through a few of them and see what we get.

DUBNER: Angela, should we narrate a little bit? It’s very dramatic. There’s a man on stage looking at cards.

MAUGHAN: You’re making this so hard for him.

GRIJALVA: So you can verify that I got them right. So first, I’ll say the cards and I’ll say what I’m looking at. So the first card should be the nine of spades, which would be a girl that I know named Lily. The second card should be the seven of spades, which would be a samurai sword. Then it’s the ace of hearts, which is Johann Sebastian Bach, with a nine of diamonds drinking tea, the next card would be the six of diamonds, which is a friend of mine called Six, who is freezing, so it should be the five of hearts. Then it’s Old Boy from the film Old Boys, so it should be the seven of diamonds, followed by the ace of clubs, which is hanging upside down. Then it should be the four of diamonds followed by the six of spades, I believe, then the queen of spades, six of clubs, nine of hearts, five of clubs, eight of hearts, two of hearts, 10 of — Homer Simpson, so it should be the 10 of hearts, doing yoga, which is Queen of Diamonds, followed by Clint Eastwood spray painting, so it should be ace of diamonds, four of hearts, followed by Sharon with sheep. So it’s three of spades, jack of hearts, followed by — this is Reggie Miller doing — so it’s the king of spades. Is he eating spinach? Five of spades? Jack of spades, five of spades. Is that all?

DUBNER: So, that was remarkable. I’ve read about people who do exactly this, and it’s impressive, obviously, when you read it. But that was absolutely remarkable. Thanks for doing it for us.

GRIJALVA: Thank you.

DUCKWORTH: Can I ask you this: which is more important to you, beating the four memory athletes who are ranked higher than you, or beating yourself?

GRIJALVA: I’ve actually — when I first started I didn’t know any of the memory athletes. So I thought to myself, I’m going to come in and I’m going to try to beat everybody. Because at the time, the U.S. wasn’t very well ranked among the world. Like the top countries were, I think, China and Germany. But by coincidence, the same time that I started competing, two other friends of mine — now they’re friends, but two other athletes started competing as well, and they were so, so great that right now the No. 1 guy in the U.S. is also the No. 1 guy in the world. So the U.S. now holds the record for being the best country with a memory athlete as it were.

DUCKWORTH: America is great again.

DUBNER: I have a question for you, Livan. What does this phenomenon, the original phenomenon we were talking about, the doorway effect, or just the way you’ve learned to control memory or to build memory — what does this suggest for people with memory loss? Is there anything clinical-ish, therapeutic-ish that it suggests?

GRIJALVA: Well, that’s kind of interesting because at the same time people make the joke a lot of times that I should never forget anything. And if anybody who knows me, knows that I have a pretty average memory when I don���t pay attention to things. The reality of it is that these techniques are so specialized that this is what I use for a deck of cards. I could practice this for hours and be really, really fast at a deck of cards. It won’t translate to being fast at numbers. I would have to specialize and train just at numbers. I teach a class, and what I try to tell people is basically, you practice these things and when you understand them, you’re able to use them in your day-to-day life. So it’s a really great way to kind of stay in shape, but unfortunately these techniques are very, very specialized for what it is that you want use. There’s no magic key that if you practice this it will improve your general memory.

DUBNER: Mike Maughan, Livan Grijalva has not only showed us how to memorize part of a deck of cards, but told us a lot about memory and memory athletes. Care to tell us if everything checks out?

MAUGHAN: So for years, golfers and cheerleaders have been mocked mercilessly for calling themselves athletes. You’ve just handed them an amazing gift. A couple of substantive things: we learned from Colin Camerer on this podcast a while back that one of the keys to memory is curiosity, because it enhances the encoding process, which is one of the three stages of memory, which are encoding, storage, and recall. So this idea that we’ve talked about of the Doorway Effect happens when we change locations, and therefore remove triggers that help us in the recall stage. So it’s encouraging to know that we’re not crazy when we walk out of a room and forget what we were doing. Interestingly, like all things in life, it turns out that to increase your memory function, you’re supposed to get sleep, exercise, and eat a healthy diet. So in other words, it’s probably not worth doing what it takes to improve your memory.

DUBNER: Mike, thank you. And Livan, thank you so much for playing Tell Me Something I Don’t Know. And can we give one more hand to all our guests tonight? I thought they were fantastic. Thank you. It is time now for our live audience to pick a winner. Tough one, so good tonight. Would you please take out your phones and follow the texting instructions on the screen. So who will it be?

Colin Jerolmack, with “In Praise of Pigeons.”

Ben Orlin, who told us about lottery misperceptions.

Kate Sicchio, using choreography training to spy on people.

Philip Barden, the unfortunately over-specialized hell ant.

Or Livan Grijalva, with memory and the Doorway Effect.

DUBNER: And our grand prize winner tonight — thank you so much for telling us all about pigeons, Colin Jerolmack. To commemorate your victory, we’d like to present you with this Certificate of Impressive Knowledge. It reads, “I, Stephen Dubner, in consultation with Angela Duckworth and Mike Maughan, do hereby vow that Colin Jerolmack told us something that we did not know, for which we are eternally grateful.” That’s our show for tonight. I hope we told you something you didn’t know. Huge thanks to Mike and Angela, to our guests, and thanks especially to you for coming to play “Tell Me Something …

AUDIENCE: I Don’t Know!”

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know and Freakonomics Radio are produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Alison Craiglow, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, Morgan Levey, Emma Morgenstern, Dan Dzula, and David Herman, who also composed our theme music. The Freakonomics Radio staff also includes Greg Rippin and Alvin Melathe. Thanks to our good friends at Qualtrics, whose online survey software is so helpful in putting on this show, and to Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater for hosting us.

The post Freakonomics Radio Live: “Jesus Could Have Been a Pigeon.” appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/tmsidk-duckworth-2018/