Apple & Creativity: the Sympathetic Magic of Brands

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Image representing Apple Inc. as depicted in C...

One of the most widely discussed studies of the last year was a paper that claimed that people who were exposed to the Apple logo displayed more creativity than people who were exposed to the IBM logo. The study, which came out of the University of Waterloo and Duke University, also reported that people who were exposed to the Disney logo behaved more honesty than people who were exposed to E!.

The idea behind all of this is a psychological phenomenon known as “priming.” There have been a number of interesting studies in this field. People who have been exposed to words associated with rudeness have been observed to behave more rudely than those who were not, and people exposed to the elderly have shown a tendency to move slower and display poorer memory. Essentially, if we have a strong enough association between a symbol and a particular behaviour, it seems that we are more likely to display that behaviour ourselves. So, because the idea that Apple is associated with creativity has been so efficiently drilled into us, our brains are now primed for creative work when we see that logo.

Makes sense. This is, after all, how marketers hope branding works. By associating themselves with particular traits or activities they build a connection between their symbol and the things that activity represents. Apple products don’t actually have to do anything with their design or function that helps us be creative, all Apple has to do is associate the notions of “creativity” and “Apple” enough times and our brains take care of the rest. This is the essence of their branding strategy. I suspect the same is true of “Axe Body Spray” and “sex” or “Budweiser” and “sex” or “Porsche” and “sex”.

The real goal for marketers, however, is build a connection between their product and the behaviour of “buy this,” and I’m not certain that goal is being achieved by any of these branding efforts. If having an Apple poster on my wall while using a Windows machine has the same effect on my creativity as using an Apple product, then why bother laying out the extra cost of buying Apple? In fact, if priming is so effective, why not just put up posters of our creative heroes, images we associate even more deeply with the sort of work we want to produce, than some corporate logo? Perhaps the notion of filling our rooms with the icons we adore, as so many of us did when we were in high school, is a brilliant way of influencing our behaviour.

The idea of sympathetic magic is deeply ingrained in cultures throughout the world. From lucky talismans to superstitious rituals, to the habit of collecting items that were once possessed by famous people, or eating the hearts of our enemies to absorb their life force, humans have long history of connecting symbols with outcomes. We can scoff at the idea of prehistoric man throwing spears at cave paintings of deer in the hopes that it would magically provide them with a more successful hunt, but as an early form of priming this makes perfect sense. By associating the ritual and the image with the actual hunt, perhaps the brains of our ancestors were better prepared for action when they saw deer on the plains.

So, thanks Apple for creating a symbol we can associate with creative work. It reminds me that I should get a picture of Don Delillo to put above my desk.

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Lively Links for Mon, Oct. 6

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The sad, great life of John Stuart Mill

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John Stuart Mill

One of the great quotations that liberals love to pull out of their hats it this one from John Stuart Mill: “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”

That’s one of the reasons our reaction to Sarah Palin is so natural. She fits neatly into the stereotype we hold of conservatives as backwards, backwoods, bible-thumpers who have no interest in, or understanding of, national issues or global politics, let alone the philosophical underpinnings on their own beliefs.

The stereotypes we hold about conservatives are constantly reinforced by blowhards like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh who spout idiocy that appeals to the basest aspects of human nature: fear, ignorance and selfishness. We listen to these men and imagine our idiot, racist, sexist, homophobic uncles cackling with glee at having their worldview reflected back at them and justified. (This is our image of typical McCain supporters.) Even though we run into intelligent thoughtful people who are conservatives and who dismiss Bill-O and Rush as slavering populists who have nothing to do with their movement, we just can’t imagine being on the same team as the vast population of stupid folks that make up the conservative base.

The man we want to stand with is Mill.

In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik outlines Mill’s life by way of reviewing British journalist Richard Reeves’s book, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Mill’s life is that he was, in a way, the Mozart of philosophy:

Chosen for an experiment in education, he was crammed with learning by his father and his father’s mentor, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The aim was to produce a mind distended out of all proportion—force-fed facts, as unlucky geese are force-fed corn. The foie gras of the boy’s mind was then to be dined on by a grateful nation; the boy’s life, like the goose’s comfort, was secondary. Latin, Greek, ancient history, political economy: “By the age of six,” Reeves notes, “young Mill had written a history of Rome; by seven he was reading Plato in Greek; at eight soaking up Sophocles.” By twelve, he more or less sat his examinations for university entrance.

A childhood robbed of all child-like things is sad to contemplate. Though it did produce a great mind, there were consequences. Mill plunged into a two-year-long depression at the age of twenty. He couldn’t write or work. He took refuge in music and poetry, particularly the romantics, and that finally lead him out of the darkness.

Gopnik’s training as an art historian shows through in one of the best parts of the essay where he describes how the influence of art lead Mill towards conservatism at this point in his life.

His love of poetry and music and art also led him toward conservative thought. Aesthetes always bend to the right, in part because the best music and the best buildings were made in the past, and become an argument for its qualities. Someone entering Chartres becomes, for a moment, a medieval Catholic, and a person looking at Bellini or Titian has to admit that an unequal society can make unequalled pictures. To love old art is to honor old arrangements. But even new and progressive art is, as Mill knew, a product of imagination and inspiration, not of fair dealing and transparent processes; the central concerns of liberalism—fairness, equity, individual rights—really don’t enter into it. Mozart, whom Mill loved, would have benefitted as a person had he lived in a world that gave him the right to vote for his congressman, collect an old-age pension, and write letters to the editor on general subjects, and that gave his older sister her chance at composing, too. But not a note of his music would have been any better. Art is a product of eccentric genius, which we can protect, but which no theory of utility can explain.

As Mill emerged from his depression though, and started to consume the works of Continental philosophers like Wilhelm von Humboldt, he turned his mind to the idea that we should all have the right to build the best world for ourselves that we can, according to our own ideals. He would become the paragon of liberal thought, an advocate of individual rights, the rights of women, and a fierce opponent of slavery of every kind. On every issue of his day, and even in ours, Mill stands as a hero whose advocacy was generations ahead of its time.

However, Mill’s life, it seems, would always be sad and complicated. The great early feminist Harriet Taylor was the love of his life, but she was married to another man for the first twenty years they knew each other. They were married when Harriet’s husband died, but as Gopnik notes:

John and Harriet’s intellectual idyll was long-lived in shadow, short-lived in sunlight. Mr. Taylor died in 1849, and in 1851 John and Harriet were married. But after only seven and a half years Harriet died of one of those sad, unnamed wasting diseases that blighted the period. Mill had a monument—of the same Carrara marble as Michelangelo’s David—constructed for her in Avignon, with an inscription that included the lines “Were there but a few hearts and intellects like hers / this earth would already become the hoped-for heaven.” That same month, Mill sent off to the publisher the finished manuscript of “On Liberty,” dedicating it to the memory of “the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement.” (Darwin was finishing “On the Origin of Species” that same year, and also saw it published the next; the two books remain the bedrock of the liberal age.)

At the time of Mill’s own death, he was not highly regarded. He had entered politics after Harriet’s death and he was regularly jeered for his radical views in parliament. The press mocked him for his feminism and obstinant stance against slavery. He did have some followers amongst the lower-classes however.

His working-class admirers helped raise a statue to him on the Thames Embankment. But Mill asked to be interred in a remote French town. Five people came to his burial. This was the one place he wanted to be, with Harriet, in the tiny cemetery outside Avignon, where he could rest beside the one love he had had. In the end, it was all he knew.

I always think it fitting somehow that the lives of great men (and women) are so often sad. Their greatness would almost be too much to contemplate if they didn’t also have to pay a worldly price for it. In the end, isn’t that the story of Christianity as well?

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Lively Links for Fri., Oct. 3

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An immigration marketplace vs. free migration

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Book cover of The Undercover Economist

Tim Harford has a wonderful talent for communicating economic ideas. In his latest piece at The Undercover Economist, he uses a great story to illustrate the difference between centrally controlled economies and free market economies:

Shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, a Russian bureaucrat travelled to the west to seek advice on how the market system functioned. He asked the economist Paul Seabright to explain who was in charge of the supply of bread to London. He was astonished by the answer: “Nobody.”

Harford tells this story is in aid of explaining just how confused we are when try to control immigration by establishing quotas for various job categories. As an alternative, and this is always Harford’s alternative, he thinks the UK should set up an immigration marketplace, a sort of eBay for work permits.

Here’s a crazy alternative: the government could restrict immigration simply by auctioning the right to work in the UK. Permits would have various durations (a month, a year, in perpetuity). Citizens would get a free lifetime permit; non-EU residents would have to pay, or persuade their employers to pay. The price of the permits would depend on their scarcity, a decision that might just be within the competence of the state.

As well as allowing employers and migrants to decide for themselves whether they would get enough out of the match to justify the price of admission, the auction system would raise money to help pay for the public services migrants are so often blamed for clogging up.

Before explaining my problem with this plan, let me just say that from a number of perspectives, it makes a lot of sense to establish an immigration marketplace. The demand for spots to work and live in Western Europe and North America vastly outstrips the supply of spots the governments of those nations offer. People wait years and even decades in order to come and contribute to these economies, or they pay thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of dollars to smugglers to bring them in illegally. A work-visa auction would definitely help solve a great number of the problems associated with the current immigration systems as they are established throughout the western world.

No, my problem with Harford’s plan isn’t that it doesn’t make sense. My problem with it is that it doesn’t go far enough. In a world where we are constantly moving towards the free movement of goods and capital across the globe, it’s time that we finally start taking the notion of free migration seriously. If we admit that free trade and globalization make sense, then we also have to concede that people should be allowed to move as freely as jobs and money.

What Harford is describing with his auction idea is dismantling the bureaucratic barriers to immigration and replacing them with what is essentially a massive tariff. What we really need, however, is a world where people can freely pursue jobs anywhere they like. When people complain about their jobs being shipped overseas, they should keep in mind the fact that it is far easier in the world today to ship a job away than it is to bring in a worker to do that job. Companies don’t ship jobs away because they want to have workers all over the globe, they do it because they have little other choice.

The barriers to immigration are costly. Running our immigration system and enforcing the penalties against illegal immigration do nothing to advance to our economy. We lose out on skilled workers who would love to come to the west and contribute, if only it weren’t for the massive barriers that stand in their way. Companies that cannot find skilled workers locally are forced to set up shop overseas. Conversely, workers in the west also lose out on opportunities to work their way across Europe or Austalia, or seek opportunities in the fastest growing economies in the world.

The arguments against more liberal immigration are nearly always based on xenophobia, protectionism, and misguided ideas about the burden that immigrants place on the social welfare systems we’ve established. Yet, nearly every serious economic study of migration finds that more liberal immigration policies benefit both labour exporting and labour importing nations. It’s time to get past our fear and realize that freer migration is in the best interests of us all.

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The Amazing Adventures of Chabon & Obama

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Photograph of author Michael Chabon at a book ...

In the days leading up to Super Tuesday, Michael Chabon wrote one of the most lyric and powerful defences of a politician I have ever read.  Obama vs. the Phobocracy, though it was written only a few months ago, feels like it belongs to an earlier time. Reading it again today reminds me of the hope that Obama’s candidacy truly represents. Before we got bogged down in the day-to-day sniping and histrionics of this campaign, before hatred of Sarah Palin seemed to dominate the discussion, before the constant mocking of McCain’s age, we had the simple luxury of being able to imagine what it would be like to have a President like Barack Obama. The main question at that time was whether we were ready to let ourselves believe, or whether we would let fear win the day; fear of “the other,” fear of losing yet again, and most powerfully: fear of our own disappointment.

Well, Obama won the nomination and we moved on to a new phase of the campaign. Inevitably, there were disappointments along the way. It’s hard for anyone to remain perfect in our eyes. That first blush of love must wear off as we get to know the real man in whom all of our hope was invested. Even for us progressives, the most wide-eyed Obama supporters, by the time of the Democratic National Convention, this race had become less about Hope than it was about Winning.

Michael Chabon’s wife, Ayelet Waldman, was an Obama delegate to the convention and he tagged along for the ride. The experience as Chabon has written it up in The New York Review of Books, in a piece called Obama & the Conquest of Denver, manages to capture the exhilaration of this moment in history, even given the realities of a long and difficult campaign. Chabon acknowledges the fact that Obama has been a little bit tarnished by the race so far, but he concludes that the candidate has comported himself with as much honour as could be expected and that he has revealed himself to be that which he has always claimed to be: a principled, but pragmatic man.

No major writer at the moment confesses such a debt to genre fiction as Chabon does, and he starts off describing the convention as though it was some combination of scenes from Dune and The Lord of the Rings.

It was [...] like the change that might occur between the first and second volumes of some spectacular science fiction fantasy epic. At the end of the first volume, after bitter struggle, Obama had claimed the presumptive nomination. We Fremen had done the impossible, against Sardaukar and imperial shock troops alike. We had brought water to Arrakis. Now the gathered tribes of the Democratic Party—hacks, Teamsters, hat ladies, New Mexicans, residents of those states most nearly resembling Canada, Jews of South Florida, dreadlocks, crewcuts, elderlies and goths, a cowboy or two, sons and daughters of interned Japanese-Americans—had assembled on the plains of Denver to attempt to vanquish old Saruman McCain. Suddenly it was hard not to feel that we were, once again, teetering on the point of something momentous, but something different than the previous momentousness.

There is some spectacular writing here. This is Chabon describing the concelebratory nature and mass nostalgia of the whole event:

There was a daily mass recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone stood up—on the last night, Obama Night, tens of thousands stood up, and put their hands over their hearts, and said the magic word, indivisible. I was a little self-conscious about doing that, at first, but found that I still remembered the words perfectly, and it was like singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at the seventh-inning stretch, an act of collective recollection of the past, of a time when people routinely stood up and sang together, stood up to recite pledges, credos, oaths, poems. The entire party convention is a collective act of that kind. It’s a throwback, a holdover, a relic, like baseball. It’s also, weirdly, a formal, public celebration of spoken language, a kind of political eisteddfod.

Wonderful word that: eisteddfod. I had to look it up.

If I have a complaint about this piece, it’s that Chabon simply can’t let the baseball analogies go. Here he is on the impossible expectations of Obama’s acceptance speech:

Like everyone, I found myself wondering about the speech that he was going to give on Thursday night. Everyone seemed to agree, employing another term from the approved glossary of bromides, that his speech needed to be “a home run.” Obama needed to “hit it out of the park.” But that was not quite the honest truth. We needed Obama to hit it out of the park. That was what we had drafted him to do. He was our hottest prospect in a very long time. Everything we hoped for in the grandstands he would carry to that podium on his shoulders. And that was why I had come to Denver: to add my little featherweight of hope to his burden.

The Republican Convention was dominated by mocking attacks at Obama, with very little room, it seemed to me, given to the ideals that the conservative movement is based upon. It was nice to be reminded in Chabon’s piece of some of the truly wonderful moments of the DNC:

At one point (Bill Clinton) said, “Barack Obama knows that America cannot be strong abroad unless we are first strong at home. People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power,” and I felt, for the only time before Stevie Wonder sat down behind his keyboard on Thursday night and started in on “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” something of the shiver of pleasure that artistry induces. Only Obama and Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana on Tuesday night, who abandoned his prepared and vetted speech for a skylarking series of off-the-cuff remarks, managed to pull off the same difficult trick of sounding, while engaging in oratory, like he was putting his genuine beliefs into the only form, the only words, that truly suited them.

There has never been a more highly anticipated political speech than the one that would wrap up the convention. Surely there have been speeches that were more watched, and there have definitely been speeches that were more important, but there has ever been another speech where so many people were expecting to witness greatness from a speaker.

But I still had not heard what I had come to hear, what we had all come to hear, the speech of a lifetime (to date) by the greatest orator of his generation. One of the things that had served to discourage me over the course of the primary season was a general acceptance of the premise that oratory was a specious, feckless, inherently untrustworthy art. The Obama camp would rightly dispute the charge of offering only “pretty words,” but they never seemed to argue the larger truth: that ultimately words were all we had; that writing and oratory, argument and persuasion, were the root of democracy; that words can kill, or save us; something along those lines. “You can only say what you can first imagine,” as I heard Tobias Wolff (the short-story master, not the Obama campaign adviser) explain to a group of people at an Obama fund-raiser. It was a mark of Obama’s fitness to lead, to me at least, that he possessed sufficient natural reserves of imagination to kick oratorical ass.

Because of the expectations, there was no way that the speech could fail to disappoint, at least a little bit. There was simply too much work to be done in the speech (outlining specifics, appealing to undecided voters, reassuring Americans that he was really one of them) to allow room for a truly great speech from beginning to end. There were great moments, and there has never been a better performer, and the last 15 minutes of the speech were truly wonderful. Ultimately though, it was what the speech represented, more than the speech itself, that mattered. Chabon writes:

Over the years my hometown of Columbia lost its vision and became divided by lines of race and class and religion. The candidate who promised to try to remake our politics had yet to fulfill his goal. He might fail. But promises, I thought, were like speeches; if you didn’t make them, you would never be able to imagine the better world that they implied.

In the end, the notion of that better world is what matters so much about this election to me. I understand the pragmatic arguments that McCain supporters make. I can even recognize the fact that Obama’s resume might seem thin to some people. I suppose I can even make peace with the fear of the unknown and that will drive some voters away from him. Ultimately though, I just don’t understand how people can resist the hope of a better future that only Obama could possibly deliver. Even if he fails, even if all the hope turns out to have been false, it will have been worth it just to try, just to have that moment when the problems of the world seem solvable.

After Obama vs. the Phobocracy and Obama and the Conquest of Denver, I cannot wait for the third installment of the great Chabon/Obama trilogy, hopefully to be titled: Barack Obama in “Raiders of the Lost Constitution”

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Lively Links for Tues., Sept. 30

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  • Virtual Boyfriends – Apparently Japanese girls are going crazy over a dating simulation site that lets them have a virtual boyfriend. As someone who spent a good deal of the summer with his 12-year-old Canadian nieces, I guarantee that this would be a big hit in North America as well. (Techcrunch)
  • The Superstruct Game – I can’t quite get my head around this yet, but it looks amazingly cool. In 2019, the world is beset by crises including a pandemic respiratory disease outbreak and the collapse of the global food system. Your job is to report from that world and help develop solutions. The game is set on the web and encourages people to set up blogs, make videos, etc. At least I think that’s what this is about. Anyway, the game launches Oct. 6, and I’m interested in finding out more. (via zefrank)
  • The Plunge Protection Team – Drake Bennett writes about Wall Street’s most persistent conspiracy theory: a cabal of powerful men who are propping up the market to protect us from finding out just how fucked the economy really is. (Boston Globe Ideas Section)
  • The Secret History of Paul Thomas Anderson – John H. Richardson gives a fascinating account of how PTA grew up to be the mad filmmaker he is today. (Esquire)

Death of the 8-Hour Workday

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My new column in Report on Business Magazine came out on Friday. It is a look at the revolutionary work environment they have created at Best Buy’s corporate HQ.

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Killing time

Best Buy has embraced an environment where employees may come and go as they please. Will the tyranny of the eight-hour workday finally meet its match?

KEN HUNT
Globe and Mail
September 26, 2008

“The fog of false productivity.” That’s how Scott Jauman describes the aura of busyness that tends to surround people in traditional offices. They appear to be working hard, but when you sit down and look at what they really accomplish in a day, it doesn’t add up to much. At Jauman’s office, “we’ve stopped paying attention to how busy people seem and started looking at what they actually produce,” he says.

Welcome to the world’s first “results-only work environment” (ROWE). Jauman and 4,000 of his co-workers are part of a bold experiment at Best Buy’s corporate headquarters, just outside of Minneapolis, that takes the concept of flextime to an extreme. Employees at all levels, from the CEO down to front-line support staff, are free to come and go as they please (store clerks, of course, don’t yet qualify for the program, although the concept is currently being tested at a number of locations). They can work whenever and wherever they want. There are no mandatory meetings, and no one tracks sick days or even vacation. Everyone’s time is their own to control, as long as they find a way to get their work done.

Before moving over to ROWE, Jauman, a lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, recalls that with competitors like Target and Wal-Mart constantly breathing down their necks, the culture at Best Buy headquarters was becoming unsustainable. “Marriages were falling apart, people weren’t seeing their kids; it was getting to the point where talented people didn’t want to work here any more. That’s how this began.”

It’s been three years since Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, two of Best Buy’s human resource managers, started ROWE. It began slowly and quietly, almost as a “guerrilla movement,” they say. Managers were initially skeptical, but as one team after another found they were seeing not only better morale but improved productivity, the concept spread throughout the company. The two women have since written a book about the transformation called Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, where they claim that their new approach can work for any industry. “Work isn’t someplace you go; it’s something that you do,” says Ressler.

Ressler and Thompson have a raft of numbers to back up the business case for ROWE. At Best Buy, voluntary turnover (quitting, that is) is down 90% in a company that was once losing a lot of young talent, particularly women, who weren’t willing to give up their personal lives in order to do their jobs. Involuntary turnover (getting fired) is up, as workers who were good at playing the system and putting in face time at their desks have been exposed. In some departments, overall productivity is up by as much as 40%. Beyond all the numbers, though, the pair truly believe that workers have the right to control their own schedules, as long as they get their work done.

The concept of the eight-hour workday and the five-day workweek is so deeply ingrained in our society that it’s easy to forget that this, too, was once a radical idea. In the mid-1800s, employers had nearly complete control over the lives of their workers, and 10- to 12-hour workdays were commonplace, six (and often seven) days a week. In fact, one of the most important events in Canadian labour history occurred in 1872, when the Toronto Typographical Union demanded their workdays be limited to nine hours. The resulting strike lasted three weeks and was such a popular cause that John A. Macdonald saw it as an opportunity to win support among the working classes. Not only did typographers get their nine-hour day, but the Tories passed the Trade Union Act, legalizing the labour movement in Canada for the first time.

Workers’ lives were changing, if only gradually. “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will!” became a standard rallying cry for unions around the world throughout the late 19th and early 20th century. Business leaders scoffed at the idea, claiming it would lead them to bankruptcy, while priests led sermons decrying that the idle time would result in moral decay. The fact that an eight-hour workday is ubiquitous today is perhaps the single greatest achievement of the labour movement.

Still, a “results-only work environment” may either be viewed as the next great step in workers’ rights, or as a return to an age when companies had near total control over their employees’ lives. Dividing the workday into a timespan that belongs to our employers and one that belongs to ourselves at least lets us know when to put our pencils down. Many of 
the people who have participated in the Best Buy experiment say that one of the most difficult things about ROWE is knowing when to stop working.

There is an old adage called Parkinson’s Law. Coined in the 1950s, it declares that any task will naturally expand to fill the time available in which to accomplish it. In other words, freedom from schedules might merely allow us more time to procrastinate, or work less efficiently, rather than give us more leisure time. As any writer or high school student will tell you, there is something about a deadline that focuses the mind.

In fact, even with his new-found freedom, Scott Jauman still keeps a fairly normal schedule. “I’m not married. I don’t have kids. So I can’t tell you that ROWE saved my marriage,” he says, “but from a business viewpoint, ROWE works. Employees work harder and are happier under this system. That’s what makes it revolutionary.”

Replace McCain with a tub of lard

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With John McCain announcing that he is suspending his campaign and pulling out of the debate tomorrow night, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber is reminded of a famous episode of BBC4′s “Have I Got News For You” where the Right Honourable Roy Hattersley fails to show up for the third time and is thus replaced with a tub of lard.

I wasn’t familiar with HIGNFY until I watched that clip this morning, but I was fascinated to learn that Boris Johnson has made many memorable appearances on the show, including several episodes where he served as a guest host. Apparently he even won a BAFTA in 2003 for work like this episode, where it appears he’s either having trouble with the teleprompter, or is stuck in some kind of time warp.

Get Your War On!

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Some people believe that the defining conflict of our era is Islamofascism vs. the permissive culture of Western Civilization, others think it is Blue State liberalism vs. Red State family values, and a few will tell you that it is Kenny vs. Spenny.

These people are all idiots. The defining conflict of our time is Accounts Receivable vs. Accounts Payable. Get Your War On, based on the clip art comic of the same name by David Rees, is now a weekly video series on 236.com. Here are a couple of the best episodes.

Sarah Palin and the Rape Kits
“Sarah Palin and the rape kits? Sounds like a punk band. Are they good?”

You Are Loved
“Josh Groban would never say something like that!”

(I tried to embed those videos here, but for some reason that wasn’t working.)

Here’s an old article by Doug Paton from the Ryerson Review of Journalism that explains the origin of the comic.

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