Stardust + Phetasy Digest
Stephen Colbert’s Pathetic Downfall | Anti-Fire Cavemen: “DATA CENTERS AHHH” | The Dark Side of America’s Obsession With Therapy | Why Did We All Become Fact-Checkers? | Men And Women Deserve Better
President Trump released the UAP Files, and aliens might be real, so we should talk about your hair. It’s made primarily of keratin, a protein built from amino acids containing carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur. None of these elements originated on Earth.
So, where was your hair before you were born? In outer space (who knows how far), since before the Sun. Atoms that survived a supernova. Cooked at 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. Next, these pieces of your future self journeyed through the deathly void, until they encountered a collection of gas and dust larger than our solar system, the force field of a black hole. And this mysterious structure compacted the atoms into rock that wandered around the cosmos for God knows how long, guided by God knows what, till it eventually landed on Earth. The atoms lived inside this rock and waited for you to be born. Billions of years of waiting. Until you ate them and used them to make hair. Carl Sagan described it as being made of star stuff.
You are the subject of this gorgeous sonnet by 18th-century Romantic poet William Wordsworth: The Stars Are Mansions Built By Nature’s Hand. You participated in your own creation. And now you wear the last breath of a star on your head like jewelry.
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #316
A Data Center Murdered My Family
Commencement speakers got booed this weekend for mentioning AI — by the same graduating class that used ChatGPT to write their papers. Bridget Phetasy breaks down why the anti-AI panic is just climate anxiety with a new face, why Bernie Sanders and AOC’s plan to ban data centers is the worst idea in recent memory, and why China is absolutely loving every minute of our meltdown.
WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #391
The Dark Side of America’s Therapy Obsession | Jonathan Alpert
Bridget sits down with Jonathan Alpert, therapist and author of Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It’s Left Us More Anxious and Divided, to dig into something most mental health professionals won’t say out loud - that the therapy industry may be making people worse, not better. They cover how therapists are trained to validate rather than challenge, why the explosion of diagnoses tracks more with social media trends than actual illness, and how therapy culture has quietly become one of the most divisive forces in American life. They also discuss political bias in the consulting room, therapists coming between parents and their kids, how to tell the difference between good therapy and bad therapy, and how Jonathan was nearly de-licensed for an op-ed he wrote in the New York Times in 2012, arguing that if therapy isn’t working, you should probably leave.
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #315
The Death of Late Night and Why Nobody Cares
Stephen Colbert’s Late Show aired its final episode tonight, ending a decade-long run that cost CBS roughly $40 million a year and alienated half the country. Bridget Phetasy breaks down how Trump derangement syndrome turned late-night television from a unifying institution into a smug resistance rally — and why no one is actually sad to see it go. Also: the case for Dumpster Fire to fill the slot.
THE SPECTATOR
The internet is dying and so are we
There is a lot of proof that the internet is dying. People aren’t burned out of politics, although that’s part of it. They are burned out from going “is this real?” No one has the bandwidth to become an investigative reporter for each post.
A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down
Mar 22
I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…
THE DAILY WIRE
America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.
America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.
Bridget, your highlight reel was hilarious. You should get Colbert’s job.