Stuff You Should Know

...the flashpoint of paper is not Fahrenheit 451... the flashpoint of books is not Fahrenheit 451, it is Fahrenheit 851...

...Ray Bradbury apparently changed the title because Fahrenheit 451 sounds a lot better than Celsius 450...

the working group for personality disorders for the DSM-5 ... they actually said, we're not sure that this should be a categorical disorder, which is the type that you either have it or you don't. They suggested it should be dimensional, which means that it exists on a spectrum.

Have you ever read a Beloved Toni Morrison novel?

You should read that too if you have. No, I haven't read that. It's very good, but there's a - it's mind-bogglingly good actually. But it's - there's a few scenes about a chain gang and just what it would have been like.

And then Dr. Dre's The Chronic was like that was just the soundtrack of one year of my college life.

And I think there was an author named Brian Merchant who wrote a book called Blood and the Machine.

He famously in 2004 did a mashup of the Beatles White Album and Jay Z's The Black Album and called it The Gray Album.

So you'd think of course, like, I mean, they're famous for The Scarlet Letter. These are the people who branded Hester Prynne with The Scarlet Letter, at least put it on her clothing.

Right? They really did that.

Yes, they did. That was a real thing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne did not lie.

But I think as a modern group, we've kind of extrapolated that to mean that they did not like sex at all.

It is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

I had two books in my hand, the Talking Heads book and Abel Ferrara's memoir, The Filmmaker.

Well, the first, uh, sort of definition, I think example wise is The Maltese Falcon is kind of always, if you, if you look up anything about the MacGuffin, they'll usually kind of point to The Maltese Falcon film. Yeah. As one of the best examples. Uh, it was a novel and then later a movie, um, where Humphrey Bogart played Sam Spade and the MacGuffin is The Maltese Falcon.

It's this statuette, uh, of a bird in the movie, but it's really not about that Maltese Falcon, the object. It's about what happens, uh, to try and get ahold of this thing basically.

The Maltese Falcon is the point. This is the object that does everything in the movie. All of the actions are based on getting their hands on The Maltese Falcon. There would be no plot whatsoever if The Maltese Falcon didn't exist.

If you read the book Les Misrables or go see that Broadway show, if you see that awesome movie and you cry every time Anne Hathaway sings like I do.

You really need to read Into the Woods because one of the characters is exactly in that same position.

the bachelor dinner is popularly supposed to have been a frightful orgy. But in reality, it was a sheep in wolf's clothing.

One is called Curtain. That's Poirot's final book.

And when Hercule Poirot's last book came out and he died, the New York Times ran a front page obituary for him, the only fictional character to have that honor bestowed on them.

What a sight. Aren't you describing a scene in Jonathan Livingston Segal? Probably so.

I think it was from cyberpunk writer William Gibson's poem, Agrippa that was from 1992.

a young company called Simon & Schuster said, Richard Simon's aunt, I think said, hey, these crosswords are a lot of fun. You guys should package these together in a book because you're a book company.

And she got a couple of other editors from the world and said, all right, let's get to work on this thing. It'll come out in 1924. It'll come with a free pencil and eraser, which is super cute.

sold 123,000 copies in that first year.

Jack Olson wrote that story, the Sports Illustrated story, which is a really fun read and it's got three parts and three separate issues that you also get the benefit of the ads of 1967 in a magazine, which are always fun.

I'm sorry, this was 1969 when it finally came out.

When he wrote the actual book in 1969, he was a disinterested observer. He was a reporter, but he concluded like that was the fate of the grizzlies.

They were goners. The public had turned against them so much that it was all but already done.

Oh, wow. I'm glad they switched it.

Livia got some information from this great book, a historian named Beverly Gage from Yale University wrote a book in 2022 called G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of an American Century.

Yeah, pretty great stuff.

Yeah. So yeah, Beverly Gage is essentially like the definitive source of J. Edgar Hoover information right now.