The Geyser

“The Geyser” has left Substack after the platform began to profit off lies, misinformation, and fraud. You can now find “The Geyser” — including all archival posts and new posts — at www.the-geyser.com.

In 2018, Substack appeared seemingly out of nowhere to deliver two things I was looking for as I moved beyond years of unpaid, volunteer blogging at “The Scholarly Kitchen”: A way to run a subscription publication/blog/newsletter, to help me demonstrate that subscriptions still work, make money from the hard work of writing (yes, it is a lot of work), and test whether I had the ability to attract paying subscribers A leadership team that appeared to understand the ethical problems besetting...

Today’s post was partially inspired by thoughts from an excellent interview on Kara Swisher’s “Sway” podcast with actor Andrew Garfield, best known for playing Spider-Man in the least-successful film of the franchise. With fame before and after that misstep, he is now recognized as a superlative actor, and is up for an Oscar for his work in tick . . . t…

I recently ran a series of analyses showing how the existence of a competing preprint generally leads to accelerating citation loss — in PLOS journals, in major medical journals, and across journals from more than 600 publishers. Citation rate is to some extent related to media coverage, as awareness has to precede citation — i.e., you have to know an article exists to cite it.

In 1987, R.E.M. was accelerating toward peak popularity, which would be achieved between 1988 and 1991 with the albums Green and Out of Time. But the album Document was no slouch, with this song and “The One I Love” becoming hits, and the album representing the band’s first Platinum certification. “It’s the End of the World” is played in G with a bpm of …

In general, given the times, how are you? In case you aren’t familiar with “The Geyser,” it’s a newsletter informed by the idea of “optimistic criticism” — the belief that pointing out problems can inspire people to make things better. I believe SPARC has problems and can do better.

When it comes to exhortations that “more speech is the way, not limits on free speech,” one of the most puzzling aspects is that even with everyone pretty much speaking freely, openly, and constantly, people on the receiving end are able to ignore what they say. News cycles that once lasted weeks or days now last hours or minutes. We’re living in a newsf…

Three times this century, Russia has conducted military expansion during or after an Olympics — first in 2008 when the Olympics were in Beijing, with Russian-led military expanding into South Ossetia; again in 2014, with the Olympics in Sochi, with Russian forces annexing Crimea; and, this year, after another Beijing Olympics, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine — reportedly after coordinating the timing with Chinese authorities.

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ 1982 album Long After Dark generated hits like “You Got Lucky,” “Change of Heart,” and “Straight Into Darkness.” One of the songs off this well-regarded album but never released as a single is “Finding Out,” which has a memorable organ riff courtesy of Benmont Tench and a relentless pace (it has a bpm of 159, so it’s really fast).

Oligarchs are in the news in a big way on the heels of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and one in particular may be entering through a stadium’s side door — Hansjörg Wyss, whose involvement with Arabella Advisors, one of its fundraising non-profits (the New Venture Fund [NVF]), and SPARC, a project of NVF, bears some examination. After all, with SPARC att…