Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) 🖥️

Duh

Hi, welcome to Podcast Promise, the newsletter dedicated to only podcasts that truly inspire me to write something about them for real. They might be new releases, they might not. In this case, it is a new release! It’s the new Cool Zone Media always-on podcast by Jamie Loftus, Sixteenth Minute (of Fame). And I’m publishing this on the week of my BIRTHDAYYYYY 🎉 so I’d double love if you could share this edition with a friend who you think might enjoy it!

If you’ve followed my previous work at all, I can only assume this could not be less of a surprise for you. Jamie Loftus + celebrity + internet + human connection + journalism. This could not be more my shit. And it should be yours, too. Here’s the show’s description:

Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) is a weekly show from Jamie Loftus that takes a closer look at the internet’s main characters – one part reported, one part interviews, and one part Jamie collapsing her permanently internet-damaged brain. Whether it’s an enduring meme or a dreaded Character of the Day distinction, it’s the kind of notoriety that often results in little money, unwarranted attention, and a confusing blurred line of consent. What do you do when you get more attention and judgement than any one person is built to handle? The Sixteenth Minute of Fame is the place where we figure that out, putting people in the context of the moment they've been frozen inside of.

💖Give a shit

Thank you for this image, hungwy on tumblr dot com.

Host Jamie Loftus gives a shit. Not about everything, but about very specific things — and always, the intricacies and nuances often left behind by other journalists.

The premise of Sixteenth Minute is almost entirely based on this premise: it’s a reevaluation of what happens to viral internet figures and moments after the rest of us stop paying attention.

The first episodes are a two-parter on Kelly Dodson and Kevin “Antoine” Dodson, the figures behind the “bed intruder”/”hide your kids, hide your wife” meme. Not familiar with the name Kelly Dodson? She’s the woman who was assaulted by the so-called “bed intruder” (you know, an attempted rapist who committed a breaking and entering).

The media didn’t give a shit about Kelly Dodson, of course. The media typically does not care about Black women, let alone vulnerable Black women. But Jamie Loftus does, and she also cares in a much more real way about Kevin Dodson as well. Not in the point-and-laugh way — in the real, deep, caring way. In a conversation with Kevin Dodson, Loftus goes into the depths of his memetic fame, but also what brought him there.

Because he’s a person. Like, a whole, real person, with a whole life, who became internet-famous because his sister was almost assaulted in her home. Why didn’t we give a shit then? (We know why.) Where are we repeating this same pattern today? (All over, all the time.) How do we do better? (We give a shit.)

⭐What is fame?

Remember Cracked? I remember Cracked. More on that later — but I especially remember an article by Mara Wilson on Cracked that changed my life. In very Cracked fashion, the title is “7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy (An Insider's Perspective),” and your should read it. Sorry for how that website looks now.

If you’ve followed my work, you probably know I have a bit of a fixation on dissecting parasocial relationships. I’ve written articles about it in podcasting and outside of podcasting, and I’ve written a really good script for a video essay on parasociality in a positive light that was whittled down to a painfully mid video essay for what was an insultingly low rate. Thanks, The Take!

All of this work is inspired by Mara Wilson’s aforementioned article which isn’t about parasocial relationships, but is about fame — and it’s something Sixteenth Minute reminds me of every episode. The same goes for a credo from another beloved and likeminded podcast, You’re Wrong About: “Fame is abuse.” (Do not come at me about how this trivializes abuse for actual survivors. Who’s got two thumbs and blah blah blah this guy 👍🏻👍🏻.)

But what else is fame? How does it happen and why — especially to the unsuspecting? What do we latch onto, and what does the internet incentivize paying attention to? What happened to Kevin Antoine Dodson after getting “songified” for Autotune the News?

And what happened to him before? Sixteenth Minute isn’t just about the moment of fame; it’s about everything outside of that moment. It’s about people; it’s about moments; it’s about what fame is and how it works.

💾I do miss the old internet

But Sixteenth Minute is also about the fame of moments in internet history, how those moments emerged, and how the internet contributed to that fame.

Remember The Dress? Literally all I had to do was Google image search “the dress” for it to come up.

Image via Wired, with a piece on The Dress written by Adam Rogers, 2015

I expected the second subject of Sixteenth Minute to be on another person — maybe a Twitter Main Character of the Day or maybe that lady who fell while smashing those grapes (it really sounded like it hurt bad — and apparently, it really did.) But that’s not what the focus was at all.

It was The Dress. It was about the unfolding of The Dress’s sensational fame. And it was about how we likely will never get something like The Dress again.

I really miss Google Reader. I also really miss StumbleUpon, which kind of still exists, but not really. There’s been much discussion about how the old internet was better, or how all of the internet is dead anyway. It can be easy to chalk this up to millennial nostalgia, and I won’t claim to be unbiased in that regard. I spent my birthday watching Sailor Moon. I know what I am.

But I also know that for a brief period of time, the internet was somewhere most people my age and younger (and a good deal of people older than me, too) were congregating across the world, and the way we encountered anything online was not algorithmic. It was organic. We just shared shit that was cool or funny or stupid or weird. We’d gotten past the point where you could easily see a video of a real human person dying because you just ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It would have been easy, I think, for Sixteenth Minute to be an always-on interview-based show in which Loftus interviews one person who has gone viral and analyzes how their viral moment came to be.

But Loftus isn’t about taking the easy way out. Interviews happen in the podcast to serve the central question, not the other way around.

🎙️Go subscribe!

It’s taking all of my self control to not go on yet another rant about how journalism is dying and Jamie Loftus is one of the few people giving me hope. We do not need me to rant about journalism AGAIN. So instead, I’ll say: I knew it would be mind-numbingly obvious for me to recommend this podcast, but I’m doing it anyway, because I’m right. Obviously this show owns. Obviously I think you should listen to. That doesn’t make it less true.

Go subscribe and listen RIGHT NOW — and then please please please please please talk to me about it when you’ve listened! Were you shocked by Kevin Antoine Dodson’s heartbreaking stories? Do you have any more information about slide cop? What would you love to see as the subject for an episode? Tell me in the comments please!

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Other recs

⚙️What I’ve been making

• Still workin’ on:

  • Nevermorphed is my newest podcast baby, in which I read the Animorphs books for the first time ever. These books are so fucked up. It’s honestly insane. And they’re so good??? Come join me as I read this series that puts its contemporaries to shame in like 500 ways. And if you’re an Animorphs person, come be a guest!

  • Y’all get a sneak preview of this next one. The Deposition is an audio drama meets dramatic reading using Elon Musk’s deposition from the Ben Brody lawsuit as the script. Every single page of this document is unhinged and hilarious, and actually hearing it performed made me notice even more about it. Cannot wait to bring this to you all. It’s going to be a real fun time. More info coming soon!

• And another coming soon: How to Act Fereldan is an upcoming fancast about all things Dragon Age. In this podcast, Anne Baird and I explain Dragon Age to the wonderful Giancarlo Herrera, who’s playing the games for the first time as we go. It’s got grief over the gaming industry, ruminations on colonization, and the best segment in the universe: What’s That Dragon Age? It also has the best podcast art I’ve ever made. Go subscribe — it’s launching soon!

• Please please please please please please please watch Things Heard & Seen on Netflix it’s so bad. Please. I wrote about it here and trust me, you WILL want to watch at least the last 10 minutes. Hopefully only the last 10 minutes.

• Still syndicating old posts from a dead site (don’t sue me!!!):

  • A Guide to Managing Your Podcast Workflow

  • How Mermaid Palace Balances Intimacy and Vulnerability

  • How Foley Can Enrich Your Podcast’s Soundscape

  • How Articles of Interest Provides a Roadmap for Spin-Off Podcasts

  • Short Fiction Best Practices with Jonathan Mitchell

  • Lauren Shippen’s Journey from Indie Podcaster to Multimedia Star

🎞️What I’ve been watching

• I Saw The TV Glow is a fucking masterpiece. I cannot remember the last time a film affected me this way. It’s beautiful, and it’s out now in theaters. Please go see it in theaters. Please go see it like five times. If you watch it and you don’t get it, pay for a trans friend to come join you on a subsequent viewing and talk to them about it after.

  • Killer interview with creator Jane Schoenbrun on Tuck Woodstock’s Gender Reveal btw

  • And please please please go watch Schoenbrun’s previous film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. It’s haunting, memorable, and unlike anything else.

• The second film in my monthly little film club with some buddies was Past Lives, and ah, wow, so gentle, so tender. Really beautiful. I love a film that is borderline plotless and impressionistic. Send me some faves that feel the same, a la Frances Ha or In the Mood for Love. Should I finally watch the Before trilogy?

• Jenny Nicholson is so back with her four-hour takedown of the Galactic Starcruiser. This video is so good, especially as someone who watched all of this news play out in realtime.

📰What I’ve been reading

• Finally finished Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. Cannot recommend them enough, but I feel like you don’t need me to tell you that.

• “Culture Needs More Jerks” by Dan Brooks for Defector is so real and true as someone who has been dubbed both a “character assassin” and an “intellectual cypher” lol

🎶What I’ve been singing

• I went and saw the musical Six live in theater with my dear darling Anne Baird for my birthday! It went so unexpectedly hard and was so fun. I’ve had every song stuck in my head. I’m too picky about individual performers and video quality to link anything here, but this show is touring right now — go see it!

• And likewise, I saw ILLINOISE when it opened at Bard College before going to Broadway. As someone with a predatory wasp tattoo, I bought the tickets the moment they became available. And they just released the cast recording!