Thursday, July 27, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- X marks the spot where $44 billion used to be.

From the WP:

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter began removing its name from its corporate headquarters Monday, blocking two lanes of traffic as a large crane plucked letters off the sign. The crane departed by midafternoon leaving the task half-finished — only the blue bird logo and the “er” remained, next to a ghostly outline reading “@twitt.”

Some will see that as an apt metaphor for state of business at the social media platform. In changing Twitter’s famous blue logo to a black-and-white “X,” part of a sweeping rebrand that has alienated longtime users and left marketing experts perplexed, owner Elon Musk is trading a bird in the hand for the promise of a wide-ranging “everything app,” one analysts say may never materialize.

He is leaving behind a symbol of silliness, outrage and celebrity that meant something to hundreds of millions, even earworming its way into the dictionary.

“It has become a verb. That’s the holy grail,” said Forrester research director Mike Proulx. “This is a brand that has secured a place in our cultural lexicon. Musk has wiped out over 15 years of brand equity in the Twitter name.”




 





For more background, check out this thread. (Best line: "He's doing the tech equivalent of drunk-DMing his highschool girlfriend to tell her she's still hot.")


If you haven't paid the rent, is it actually your headquarters?




 


That looks like a good place for a political segue.



I am as surprised as anyone to say that I'm looking forward to the Barbie Movie. Great reviews, first rate talent in front and behind the camera, amazing art design, and these guys freaking out in the background.




I know they say campaigns can be a strain on marriages, but this is definitely an extreme case.

As we've said before, the own-the-libs mentality lead to some strange choices.




Even if I hadn't liked the tweet (which I did), I would have had to post it just because of the name, Joe Btfsplk.


"this war in Ukraine against Russia."




Tells us more about prediction markets, conventional wisdom, and the overweighting of the unlikely (Obama ?!?), but still interesting in those terms.


Those last five seconds...

 




A few years ago, I got into the habit of looking up the Wiki pages of people with mediocre abilities who had somehow achieved great success at an early age. Prestigious prep schools showed up a lot.






Closing with some cool stuff.


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Wednesday, July 26, 2023

" [T]he Zelig of unproven supernatural and UFO speculation"

 Art Levine writing for the Washington Spectator.

In 2017, DeLonge’s company claimed it was engaging in rigorous research led by Elizondo and the TTSA co-founder, physicist Hal Puthoff, gathering alien “metamaterial” they asserted could be genuine. These findings were touted as coming from the Roswell, N.M., “alien” crash site that has long been considered foundational to modern UFO mythology but which the U.S Air Force reports was actually the location of a 1947 crash of a high-altitude spy balloon. In any case, part of the metamaterial was exposed as industrial slag in the 1990s. Some of the metal scraps were then passed off to the Army as part of its nearly $1 million 2019 contract with TTSA.

Puthoff may not be as well known to the general public as today’s other UFO influencers, but he is the Zelig of unproven supernatural and UFO speculation. An ex-Scientologist involved in over 40 years of fruitless research, he led the failed $20 million, 23-year CIA psychic “remote viewing” project. One viewer he tested was fellow Scientologist Ingo Swann, who claimed to provide a detailed view of Mars and Jupiter with his mind. Puthoff also endorsed the powers of spoon-bending “psychic” Uri Geller; Geller’s mind over matter powers were called into question in a cringe-inducing segment in 1973 on The Johnny Carson Show.

 Between the NYT/UFO and the Uri Geller threads we've been working on lately, I've been reading waaaay too much about the paranormal and Hal Puthoff has come up three times: remote viewing; the Geller fiasco; and To the Stars. Levine does not do the man credit saying he "endorsed" Geller. Puthoff was the lead researcher on the disastrous SRI study and co-authored the infamous Nature paper (both eviscerated by James Randi in the Magic of Uri Geller), but the Zelig line is perfect.

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Tuesday, July 25, 2023

One way to beat the heat...




Just another reminder of how strange this year has been here in California.

Cari Spencer writing for the LA Times.

While much of the Southwestern U.S. endures sweltering heat that continues to topple daily records, historic snowfall has brought an unusually extended ski season to Mammoth Mountain, where snowboarders and skiers continue to soar down the slopes in shorts and sunglasses.

“Even though it’s July 21, it seems like summer is just starting and winter is just barely ending,” said Ashley Strauss, a recreational snowboarder who has lived in Mammoth Lakes since 2010.

Visitors have until Aug. 6 to shred the snowpack, according to an announcement Thursday. This will be only the third season in the resort’s nearly seven-decade history that has extended into August — joining 1995 and 2017.




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Monday, July 24, 2023

Tony Bennett RIP -- a historical footnote

In the NPR tribute to Bennett, his long time pianist, Ralph Sharon, mentioned he had first performed his signature tune in Hot Springs, Arkansas. That's true, but there's more to the story.

The club was the Vapors, the most popular and successful of the town's many illegal casinos.

 Sean Clancy writing for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

At one time, though gambling was illegal in Arkansas, the city of 28,000 had four major gambling clubs and 70 more casinos, bookmaker shops and establishments with some form of gambling, writes Hot Springs native David Hill in his new book, "The Vapors" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28).

"On a per capita basis, Hot Springs was perhaps the most sinful little city in the world," Hill, 42, writes.

In the world? Maybe that's a stretch, but Hill certainly makes a case that skirting the law was de rigueur in Hot Springs. This is the place, after all, where a stunned New York detective, in town picking up another suspect, ran into mobster Lucky Luciano, the most wanted man in America, strolling along Bathhouse Row with the Hot Springs chief of detectives. 

...

There's Owen "Owney" Madden, the suave, English-born gangster, killer and owner of the famed Cotton Club in New York who moved to Hot Springs in 1934, married the postmaster's daughter and became a sort of benevolent crime-world kingpin.

Dane Harris, the quiet, ambitious son of a Cherokee bootlegger, became Madden's protege, eventually rising to the role of Hot Springs' boss gambler and who in 1960 opened The Vapors, the dazzling nightclub and gambling operation that rivaled those in Las Vegas and that was bombed on Jan. 4, 1963.

And Hazel Hill, David Hill's paternal grandmother, who was a teenager when she came to Hot Springs from Ohio in 1935 with her father, a diabetic, down-on-his-luck horse trainer and was left there by him as part of a used-car deal. Hazel's life would become entwined with Madden and Harris as she grew up and the bright lights and allure of the gambling halls became too powerful to ignore.

And there are appearances throughout from Robert Kennedy, Al Capone, Mickey Rooney, Virginia Clinton, Tony Bennett and others, including prizefighters, B-list starlets and various and sundry Arkansas politicians, many of whom are on the take. And Hill also addresses how religion and race played a crucial part in the town's history of vice.


Back many years ago when I was teaching math and English in the Delta , my principal told me a story of living in Hot Springs many years before that. It's unverified, but I have no reason to doubt it. 

One night at one of the town's casinos (probably one smaller than the Vapors), the manager stepped out and said everyone would have to take a break. The staff and some of the male customers gathered up the gambling equipment and loaded it into a storeroom in the back which the manager then padlocked and covered with a screen. Drinks were passed around and about five minutes later there was a knock on the door. It was the sheriff's department conducting a raid. The sheriff and the deputies stepped in looked around, and declared there was obviously no gambling going on. They shook hands with the manager and left, at which point the manager unlocked the back room and the staff quickly set up the tables and everyone picked up where they had let off.

Orval Faubus's corruption was as much of an open secret as was the gambling in the Vapors, and over his time in office, millions of dollars (and, that's pre-inflation) made its way from Hot Springs to the governor's mansion. According to the definitive biography, Faubus's fear of losing his office and the cash that came with it gave the hard-line segregationist/white supremacist "Justice Jim" Johnson leverage to push the governor to take increasingly extreme positions with famously tragic results.


(The national press corps would eventually be willing to overlook "Justice Jim"s bigotry and general evil, even elevate him to elder statesman status thanks to his supplying rumor and innuendo on Bill Clinton during the Whitewater years, but that's a rant for another day.)

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Friday, July 21, 2023

Columbo vs. Uri Geller

OK, not quite, but close. The military had been looking into the supposed abilities of Geller and other "psychics" in the decade before this episode ("Columbo Goes to the Guillotine") aired. They were particularly interested in the idea of remote viewing, which involved tests very much like this (probably in more ways than one).  

The writer of this episode, the multi-talented William Read Woodfield, had a background in magic and was certainly aware of Randi's book, The Magic of Uri Geller (available from the Internet Archive's lending library), and it's possible he read the notorious Nature paper about the Stanford Research Institute's disastrous research into the paranormal. The details about the actual test are murky,so Woodfield's trick probably wouldn't have worked, but he's probably not that far off.









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Thursday, July 20, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- Dark Brandon approved this message

Brilliant political jujutsu with a subtle echo of LBJ's 1964 KKK ad, touting his commitment to popular programs while accurately portraying the GOP as extreme and out of touch.
Here's the source.





 

Perhaps the most evil of the bunch.



 This is very much playing a long shot, but if MAGA bolts for a third party at the insistence of Trump (an unlikely but not that unlikely scenario), Asa is well positioned and he has also evaded the dignity loss that has hit almost every other prominent Republican.




Alfalfa-gate continues.








Let's have a tech bro weigh in...

Fair weather fascists.

 

Checking in with the PayPal mafia.





We have a long running Roose file.









I didn't.


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Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Ten years ago at the blog -- the topic remains relevant and I really like this title


Friday, July 19, 2013

First assume a fairy godmother...

This is one of those stories illustrates just how bad journalists have gotten at covering life in the bottom quartile. Here, from Marketplace, is the set-up:
The fast food chain teamed up with Visa to create an online budget guide for its employees. And most of the criticism is directed at the fact that the company's budget doesn't list 'food' or 'heat' as monthly budget items. 
...
"Helping you succeed financially is one of the many ways McDonald's is creating a satisfying and rewarding work environment," the McDonald's site's about page states. "So you can take the next step towards financial freedom." 
To do that, the guide suggests journaling daily expenses, setting up a budget and outling a savings goal. Sound reasonable? 
One problem: the sample budget offered by McDonald's (below) doesn't mention money for basic necessities like food, heat, gas and clothing. 
The budget also assumes a worker will need to maintain two jobs in order to make roughly $24,500 a year.

[The original post had a copy of the actual document, but that one seems to have fallen into an internet wormhole. -- MP]

A heated debate has broken out over whether it's possible to live on $24,500 a year. This is not a question that would perplex a group pulled at random from the general populace. People do it all the time. I've done it myself (and yes, I'm adjusting for inflation). I even have a musician friend in New York City who's doing it now.

You eat lots of beans and potatoes. You get a prepaid phone. You buy a set of rabbit ears (which, as mentioned before, would actually give you more channels and better picture than the basic cable the WP article suggests). You live day-to-day. You constantly worry about money. You're one one bad break away from disaster but with exception of the health insurance and heating items, nothing in expenses, including rent, is that unreasonable.

There is, in fact, only one completely unrealistic item here:

Second job: $955

Angry Bear, which does get it, explains just how much work we're talking about.
Besides skipping certain expenses and skimping on others; to meet the income levels portrayed in the budget, McDonalds suggests associates to work not one but two jobs. A full time job at McDonalds and a part time job elsewhere totally 62 hours per week (if the worker resides in Illinois where the minimum wage is $8.25/hour). If perchance, the worker resides in one of the other 48 states; the total hours needed to hit the suggested income level jumps to 74 hours/week due to a lower minimum wage (the equivalent of a second full time job). 
And Marketplace explains how unlikely that 74 is:
At the same time, there’s been a sharp drop in the number of people who are holding down multiple jobs, and most of those are likely to be part-time, since there are only so many hours in a day. The number of multiple job-holders is down by more than 500,000 since 2007.  So, there are more people in part-time jobs, but fewer people able to cobble together two or more of those jobs to make ends meet.
...
This trend to more part-time work could be permanent. Employers like the flexibility, and the low cost. Benefits in many part-time jobs -- health care, retirement -- are slim to none.

But there’s a complication. For job-seekers, it’s now harder to find and keep multiple part-time jobs. “Among low-wage employers -- retail, hospitality, food service -- employers are requiring their employees to say they’re available for a full-time schedule, even when they know they’re never going to schedule them for full-time,” says Stephanie Luce at the City University of New York’s Murphy Institute.

Luce is a labor sociologist who studies union movements around the world. She co-authored, with the Retail Action Network, a study based on surveys of retail workers in New York, Discounted Jobs: How Retailers Sell Workers Short. “Managers are asked to schedule based on customer-flow, on weather, on trends in the economy, and to change the schedule day-to-day,” says Luce. “They don’t want employees that are going to say ‘I can’t come in, I have another job.’ They want employees that’ll say, ‘OK, I’ll come in if you need me. I won’t come in if you don’t need me.’” 

 

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Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Psychologists run more rigorous experiments than physicists*

*when the experiments are about psychology.

OK, I'll admit n = 1, but you have to admit it's a striking example.

From APA's Monitor Vol 5, No 2 (as excepted by James Randi in the Magic of Uri Geller):

by Jules Asher

About that last point, Randi adds:



The person who drops into an entirely new field can often come up with some new insights, but they are seldom worth anything without curiosity and a strong dose of humility.

In these situations you constantly have to remind yourself that relevant expertise is, you know, relevant and that while you (an economist, or a physicist, or a tech bro who stumbled onto a fortune in Silicon Valley) might know something those experts don't, they certainly know things that you don't.

Targ and Puthoff (both still living) are highly intelligent and extraordinarily accomplished in their original  fields, but as Randi points out, these are often the easiest people to fool, in part because they have so much confidence in their own perceptions. Add to that a strong predisposition to believe and you are basically asking for disaster.


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Monday, July 17, 2023

There was a time when serious people took Uri Geller seriously

Picking up from here.

One key element most 21st Century articles on Uri Geller miss is just how much belief in Geller had become respectable by 1973. Researchers and sober intellectuals were treating his supposed powers as a valid area of scientific inquiry. Word of successful RCTs was getting out. Papers were being submitted to major journals. 

When you hear about winning the battle against the debunkers, remember that Randi and company took Geller from this to punch line in the space of three or four years. The "mystifier" continued to make money, but his critics had discredited not only him but, to a large degree, the entire field of para-psychology. 

From NATURE Volume 246  12/7/1973 [emphasis and, yes, double emphasis added.]

It needs to be said, however, that not everyone is convinced that Mr Geller is other than a great illusionist and that there seems to be somewhat more scepticism in Israel and the United States than has yet developed in Britain. For a fairly cool assessment Time of March 12, 1973, should be read. Nevertheless he has clearly created a prima facie case for further investigation and it is to be hoped that the proposal by the New Scientist that he submit to examination by its panel will be taken up, even though he has already been examined extensively by a team at Stanford Research Institute. 

...

The second challenge to scientists will arise if investigations continue to turn up signs of psycho-kinetic powers, and with the present evidence this certainly cannot be ruled out. It would then be urgently necessary for the scientific community to come to terms with something totally beyond its powers of explanation-indeed something which in a religious context would be called a miracle. Just as the public wants scientists to validate Mr Geller, it would also want them to explain him and, however awkward this question may be, it should not be avoided. If Mr Geller indeed possesses extraordinary abilities it is immaterial whether he is an isolated unrepeatable phenomenon or whether a large number of people can be taught the skills, and it is immaterial that he manifests the abilities in ways up to now better known to music-hall illusionists than to scientific investigators. The challenge would still exist-that well established scientific laws as apparent to laymen as to scientists are not inviolate under the influence of some presumed mental process. 

It is difficult to see how research into the causes of such extraordinary happenings could proceed. One suspects that any approach which involved extensive instrumentation would end unsuccessfully. Technology has an unerring ability to suppress human skills. [The idea that true psychics might be unable to function as well in clinical settings was one of the standard excuses used by Geller supporters to explain away failure. It's a bit surprising seeing it used in a Nature editorial -- MP] Nevertheless a boost for psychical research would be very welcome. There are too many loose ends lying around for comfort, and psychical research has not yet been able to shake off its mildly eccentric character and its ability to attract fierce criticism. 

 

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Friday, July 14, 2023

Deferred Thursday Tweets -- in appreciation of the New York Times Pitchbot

If anything Marshall undersells his point. As far as I can tell, no one in a similar position has ever gotten anywhere near the early build-up  that DeSantis did from both the right wing and the mainstream press.


 






This is an oversimplification, but not by that much.

Fallows' tic analogy is remarkably perceptive.

As is this.





 For those who just walked in, Elon really does talk like this...

And like this...




(The Wire is on my short list for greatest show, period.)

 






"In the West, whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over."











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Thursday, July 13, 2023

Ten years ago at the blog: for a while it looked like this tweet was going to age badly

 The mid-teens were not a good time to be a Disney skeptic. The company had a very good run and to be honest, I might have been a little less eager to repost this under the heading "Five years ago at the blog." For a while there it looked like they really could let their budgets increase without apparent limit, safe in the knowledge that no matter how much they spent, the box office and the merchandising would more than keep up. Now, though, we're getting some indication that there still are upper bounds. (Except, possibly, for James Cameron.)

 Disney’s Harsh New Reality: Costly Film Flops, Creative Struggles and a Shrinking Global Box Office

 

Monday, July 15, 2013

Call me suspicious...

But I've gotten to the point where I look for signs of manipulation in all business news and brokers' recommendations. Case in point, Disney had a bad week recently. As you've probably heard, the Lone Ranger reboot is on track to lose a lot of money (the figure $100 million keeps being tossed around), but that doesn't cover the full drop in expected value. Disney was shooting for another Pirates franchise (complete with the same writers, director, producer and star). The first four installments of that series have done almost four billion in box office and the fifth and sixth chapters are in the works. And that box office total doesn't include toys and tee shirts and all of the other ways Disney could make money off something like this. Investors who had priced in the possibility of this being another Pirates will need to recalibrate.

Disney is a huge company, but even there the old saying applies -- "a billion here... a billion there... pretty soon you're talking about real money." Not enough to threaten the company but worth taking into account when thinking about stock price. Fortunately for Disney, this terrible news was balanced out by quite a bit of good (enough to bump the price up a bit). Credit Suisse analyst Michael Senno estimated a global take of $1.2 billion for Star Wars Episode VII and Motley Fool* ran a string of positive stories arguing that Disney was adding value to Marvel and that "Buena Vista Pictures is earning as much as ever." That second claim was supported with a year over year comparison:
Disney won't be as fortunate with The Lone Ranger, which is why so many are comparing this flop-in-the-making to John Carter, last year's $250 million box office bomb that effectively ended the Disney career of former studio chief Rich Ross. 
If only he knew then what we know now. John Carter, for as big a disaster as it was, did nothing to diminish the House of Mouse's theatrical prowess. Here's a closer look at the year-over-year numbers from Jan. 1 through June 30: 
Buena Vista Year-Over-Year Comparison
                                    YTD 2013          YTD 2012          Change  
Number of films            10                       12**                   (2)
Total U.S. box office    $886.8 million      $949.8 million     (6.6%)
Per-film average           $88.7 million        $79.2 million       11.9%
Source: Box Office Mojo.
** Includes a 3D rerelease of The Lion King. 
After achieving $800 million in domestic box office receipts only once since 2000 (in 2010), Disney has done at least that in both 2012 and this year. Impressive may be too timid a word for how well Buena Vista is doing right now.
Notice anything missing? How about budgets, marketing costs, performance of comparable films from other studios? Keep in mind that in absolute numbers, John Carter did pretty well:
John Carter earned $73,078,100 in North America and $209,700,000 in other countries, for a worldwide total as of June 28, 2012 of $282,778,100.
In relative terms, not so much:
Paul Dergarabedian, president of Hollywood.com noted, "John Carter’s bloated budget would have required it to generate worldwide tickets sales of more than $600 million to break even...a height reached by only 63 films in the history of moviemaking"
(According to the New York Times, the Lone Ranger would have to hit $800 million to break even.)

How about Disney adding value to Marvel? The only real example I saw in the article was the willingness to cough up extra money to hold on to talent like Whedon and Downey. Probably a good investment but old news and a case of maintaining, not adding, value.

And that incredible prediction for the Star Wars reboot? Not credible about covers it.

Perhaps I'm too cynical, but given the low quality but excellent timing of these analyses, I have to believe that some folks at Disney have really been working the phones.

* I'm going by the Motley Fool posts and not the videos that accompany them. If anyone out there wants to take one for the team and watch them, let me know if anything of value is said.

Thanks

 

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Wednesday, July 12, 2023

The bad news is that the NYT is still credulously accepting Uri Geller's dubious version of events; the good news is that the rest of the latest article is so terrible that this part no longer seems so bad.

It's going to take more than one post to describe just how bad David Segal's profile of fake psychic Uri Geller is, lousy with pseudo-profundity and cheap zeitgeisty asides, leaving out essential context that completely changes the story, with a central thesis that simply isn't true. We'll get to those gems later. For now, we'll start with one we've covered before, the claim that Randi and the other debunkers actually made Geller a star.

It’s a fortune he might have never earned, he said, without a group of highly agitated critics. Mr. Geller was long shadowed by a handful of professional magicians appalled that someone was fobbing off what they said were expertly finessed magic tricks as acts of telekinesis. Like well-matched heavyweights, they pummeled one another in the ’70s and ’80s in televised contests that elevated them all.

Geller has been pushing this line for years (see below). It's not difficult to see why he favors this version; it preserves his dignity and even paints him as a winner, but there's no reason to accept it and considerable reason not to. Before Randi starting exposing his tricks, Geller was being taken very seriously.

From the foreword to the Magic of Uri Geller:

 Leon Jaroff, 1975

Thanks largely to James Randi, Geller would never again be studied seriously or courted by the military and other big players. Instead, by the late 70s, he would start the long slide toward post-celebrity celebrity. Despite the story he would tell later, he clearly saw his leading debunker as a threat and launched a barrage of harassment suits that would end up costing Randi nothing in damages but hundreds of thousands in legal fees.

Friday, October 23, 2020

The standard narrative on the Uri Geller/Amazing Randi conflict comes from the New York Times, which apparently got it from Uri Geller

RIP Randall James Hamilton Zwinge

James Randi, a magician who later challenged spoon benders, mind readers and faith healers with such voracity that he became regarded as the country’s foremost skeptic, has died, his foundation announced. He was 92.

The James Randi Educational Foundation confirmed his death, saying that its founder succumbed to “age-related causes” on Tuesday.

 ...

On a 1972 episode of “The Tonight Show,” he helped Johnny Carson set up Uri Geller, the Israeli performer who claimed to bend spoons with his mind. Randi ensured the spoons and other props were kept from Geller’s hands until showtime to prevent any tampering.

The result was an agonizing 22 minutes in which Geller was unable to perform his tricks.

 

 

 

 

For Randi, those 22 minutes of magic tricks not being done would ironically become the high point of the magician's biography but there was one more twist in the story

Adam Higginbotham writing for the New York Times Magazine in 2014.

“I sat there for 22 minutes, humiliated,” Geller told me, when I spoke to him in September. “I went back to my hotel, devastated. I was about to pack up the next day and go back to Tel Aviv. I thought, That’s it — I’m destroyed.” But to Geller’s astonishment, he was immediately booked on “The Merv Griffin Show.” He was on his way to becoming a paranormal superstar. “That Johnny Carson show made Uri Geller,” Geller said. To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real: If he were performing magic tricks, they would surely work every time.

 It's a great tale except that there's little reason to believe it actually happened that way. Start with the fact that Geller seems to be the main source, which should have raised some red flags for Higginbotham.

 How about the appearance on the Merv Griffin Show? Wasn't he invited shortly after the Carson debacle? Not exactly. He was invited back. 


From IMDB:

The Merv Griffin Show (1962–1986)
Alfred Drake, Pamela Mason, Uri Geller, Captain Edgar Mitchell
TV-PG | 1h | Comedy, Family, Music | Episode aired 19 July 1973

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962–1992)
Ricardo Montalban/Eskimo-Indian Olympians/Uri Geller
1h 45min | Comedy, Talk-Show | Episode aired 1 August 1973

The Merv Griffin Show (1962–1986)
Eartha Kitt, Richard Dawson, Michelle Phillips, Uri Geller
TV-PG | 1h | Comedy, Family, Music | Episode aired 15 August 1973

 [Late Edit: He'd also made appearances on Jack Parr's show before doing the Tonight Show -- MP]

 Geller's telling makes it sound like it was the Carson appearance that got him on Griffin, but he was a returning guest and there's no reason to believe he wasn't invited back simply because he had done well a couple of weeks earlier.

Nor is there evidence that Geller's career took off in late 1973.



If anything, it looks like Randi's debunking of Geller starting with the Tonight Show and culminating with 1975's The Magic of Uri Geller was what brought the charlatan down.

Journalists love people-are-stupid narratives, but, while I believe cognitive dissonance is real, I think the lesson here is not "To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real" and is instead that we should all be more skeptical of simplistic and overused pop psychology.

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