Dinosaur Jr scored a Billboard Top 20 hit in Japan with a 25 year old song that was never released as a single.

How?

Piracy!

Last week, an alt-rock mystery puzzled the music press. Almost 25 years after its release, the Dinosaur Jr. song “Over Your Shoulder” appeared at number 18 on Japan’s Hot 100 chart, beating out major new releases like Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings.”

The fuzzy, mournful closer to Dinosaur Jr.’s 1994 album Without a Sound, “Over Your Shoulder” is an unlikely candidate for a hit single. Indeed, it was never released in that format. Stranger still, the track rocketed up Japan’s charts thanks to over eight million video plays—earning the country’s top spot for video streams—despite no YouTube upload of the song having anywhere close to that many views.

...

In the end, no one factor made “Over Your Shoulder” a Billboard hit in Japan. Nearly 25 years ago, it was released. More than 15 years ago, it was used on a Japanese reality show about boxing bad boys. Six years ago, Billboard started counting YouTube plays. And just days ago, YouTube apparently began recommending pirated episodes of that reality show to Japanese users, who seemingly binged it in the thousands, playing “Over Your Shoulder” over and over again in the process.

Ever heard of The Streisand Effect ? This guy has. Ironically, he coined the term.

This is some crazy shit.

In 1986, a research group published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing the experience of a medical student and a physician who’d become stuporous and disoriented during an ultramarathon. The men were diagnosed with hyponatremia, and they concluded that they’d developed the condition by drinking too much [water].

There’s never been a case of a runner dying of dehydration on a marathon course, but since 1993, at least five marathoners have died from hyponatremia they developed during a race. At the 2002 Boston Marathon, researchers from Harvard Medical School took blood samples from 488 marathoners after the finish. The samples showed that 13 percent of the runners had diagnosable hyponatremia, and three had critical cases of the condition. German researchers similarly took blood samples from more than a thousand finishers of the Ironman European Championship over multiple years and found that 10.6 percent of them had hyponatremia. Most of the instances were mild, but nearly 2 percent of the finishers had severe or critical cases. Although the findings indicate that hyponatremia is still a rare condition, what makes them especially concerning is that the early symptoms of hyponatremia are very easily confused with those of dehydration — weakness, headache, nausea, dizziness and lightheadedness.

FiveThirtyEight

...if their profession is tweet-crazy.

Actual headline.

The Washington Post's David Von Drehle called Twitter the "crystal meth of newsrooms." He dates his moment of disillusionment to the Republican national convention in 2012. In the section reserved for reporters, he noticed many watching TweetDeck feeds instead of listening to speeches from the podium or stepping away to talk to delegates.

"Twitter offers an endless stream of faux events," Von Drehle wrote in a column this past weekend. "Fleeting sensations, momentary outrages, ersatz insights and provocative distortions. 'News' nuggets roll by like the chocolates on Lucy's conveyer belt."

Phys.org

I briefly had a Twitter account. I just deleted it. I can yell at my TV if I want to yell at strangers with no desire for a reply.

When did Ziggy play guitar?

I'm often thankful that every minute of my childhood years were not recorded on video.

Today, I remember the last year I went trick-or-treating. It was probably 1981, so I would have been 11. I wanted to be a ghost! So my stepmother got out her sewing machine and she and I made a ghost costume out of an old sheet.

We were trying for something like this:

It was big and baggy and the hood came out somewhat pointy...

But I remember about halfway through the night thinking, "Hey, doesn't this look like a KKK outfit?" And then "What's a KKK?"

Thankfully, no pictures survive, that I know of.

GenX was too depressed about having to do yet another bunch of stupid graphics about the all-important Boomers and millennials to include itself in the list.

The science says one thing, activists say another. Who wins? Nobody.

Sean Illing, at Vox, interviewed conservative pundit Charlie Sykes. Sykes has just started a new conservative web site that aims to publish "independent, non-Trumpian conservative voices ... thoughtful, nontribal conservatism". One bit rang a little bell with me.

Sean Illing
How can conservatism as a viable political philosophy survive this era? What does it have to become?

Charlie Sykes
I honestly do not know the answer to that question. I think it’s going to take a very, very long time for conservatism to wipe the stain of Trumpism off — and it may not be able to. In the long term, I think conservatism will always have a place as a moderator of radical change. Its real heart and soul is in reacting to destabilizing changes, as opposed to being a mainly positive ideology.

Oh, indeed.

All through it, Sykes sounds very pessimistic about the future of rational, principles-based conservatism. And describes his new venture as a "leap of faith".

Continuing...

But I suspect that the whole project of creating a conservative intellectual infrastructure might have run its course. I hope I’m wrong about that, but I’m just not sure. Maybe the one good thing about the current mess is that it’s forcing conservatives to rethink their dogmas and really question what’s going on.

Whatever form of conservatism emerges out of this will not be the conservatism of Ronald Reagan or the libertarianism of Milton Friedman. It will look different and hopefully be more responsive to the actual needs of the real world, without the sort of ugly bigotry we’re seeing now. It’s also possible that the conservative movement and the GOP will just become a white-identity party, in which case I think we’re doomed.

Sean Illing
That seems to be the most likely course, no?

Charlie Sykes
I think so, but we’re hoping at the Bulwark to stand in opposition to this and say, “We’re not going along for this.” We’re hoping to salvage what we can, because the next couple of years are truly pivotal, and we need all the rationality we can get.

If I was as pessimistic about something as Sykes seems to be, I don't know if I'd start a new business founded on it.