Many of you will likely remember that late last year Charles Baxter wrote an evaluation of H. P. Lovecraft for the New York Review of Books that I characterized as elitist and, largely, wrong. Baxter expressed his distaste for what he perceived as Lovecraft’s antisocial, adolescent fans, and he applied a Freudian reading to Lovecraft’s fiction that reduced the Cthulhu Mythos to, essentially, abject terror of vaginas. Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi was incensed at Baxter for a different reason, and he wrote a letter to the editor of the Review blasting Baxter for factual errors in his piece as well as what Joshi claimed was an overblown emphasis on racism.
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Nationally syndicated columnist Tina Dupuy, who in her childhood was a member of a cult, wrote against charlatanism and anti-science in America culture in a recent column. Dupuy singled out the History Channel and its corporate owners, Disney and the Hearst Corporation, for making money from what she called the television equivalent of homeopathic scam remedies:
According to the cold open of Expedition Unknown S01E05 “City of Gold,” there are still people who believe that a lost city made entirely of gold exists somewhere in the Andes mountains. Given how malleable gold is, it would seem an impractical construction material. Perhaps it is simply gilded? No matter, we back up from the footage of host Josh Gates gaping in awe at some unseen wonder to flash back a week to listen to gates tell us about Paititi, a legendary Inca utopia located somewhere in the Amazon. Gates tells us that “new” evidence from the vaults of the Vatican “suggests that the city might actually be real,” but this “new” evidence was a manuscript from around 1600 rediscovered in 2001 (14 years ago!), in which the missionary Andres Lopez describes Paititi as a city rich in gold and jewels. The legend of the city was already known from many other Spanish accounts.
I have a few random odds and ends for today…
Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on correcting the page proofs for my anthology Foundations of Atlantis, Ancient Astronauts, and Other Alternative Pasts. I find the corrections to be frustrating, both because it forces me to confront my own typographical errors and also because it reminds me that in today’s publishing world, no one actually proofreads anything, and even the most ridiculously obvious typos stand until I correct them. Anyway, in checking some of the text, I have a conundrum that I hope someone reading this may be able to help solve. This story is a little bit off topic, but it’s the kind of thing that helps to explain why I feel that cable TV shows and book publishers have an obligation to take responsibility for the content they provide to the public, and to recognize that large segments of the audience don’t have the expertise to critically evaluate the difference between fact and “entertainment.”
Today I’d like to share a depressing new app that’s promoting pseudoscience and Mormon archaeology in the guise of serving as a guide to ancient America. The app, called Heartland Art, comes from artist David Lindsley, best known for his portraits of Jesus Christ and Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. The app uses some of the greatest hits of Mormon archaeology and fringe history to claim a connection between the Hopewell culture and Europeans, including the haplogroup X DNA results that were debunked ages ago and the allegedly “menorah”-shaped earthwork construction in Ohio featured last year on America Unearthed.
As always, Mondays are a bit of a time crunch for me, and this Monday is made worse by the endless snowstorm that has had me out shoveling every few hours to try to keep up with the massive accumulation. I’ve run out of places to put snow, and the piles I’m shoveling into are now nearly as high as I am!
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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