My article “How A.I. Could Reincarnate Your Dead Grandparents — or Wipe Out Your Kids” is out today in Rolling Stone. As a bonus, you can listen to my interview with AI pioneer Eliezer Yudkowsky exclusively here.

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This morning, an old friend texted me a story about the reopening of the Bishop Planetarium, the place we’d go to see all the laser light rock shows in high school. We spent a lot of midnights there, catching the Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, and Rush shows. In 1998, I wrote this article for the New York Times about how laser shows work. Around 10 years ago when I was working on my memoir, Alligator Candy, I wrote a chapter about the Bishop Planetarium, but ended up not including it in the final book. Now that the lasers in Bradenton firing up again, I though I’d post it now…

THE BISHOP PLANETARIUM

We were somewhere around Bradenton on the edge of suburbia when the weed began to take hold.It felt like the opening line of our own Hunter Thompson bender, a geeky twist on his famous opening line from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Four or five of us were crammed into someone’s smoke-filled car, cranking a homemade cassette of Rush’s most recent double-live album, Exit…Stage Left, as we searched in vain for the Bishop Planetarium. Outside was darkness, flat Florida nothingness, the occasional orange tree or cow.

It was almost midnight one evening in the early 1980s, and we were teenagers in danger of missing the Rush laser light show. The Planetarium had a strict “NO LATECOMERS ADMITTED!” policy, surely a defensive measure against the caravans of stoners who filled the arena. We had traveled these country roads countless times and for less compelling laser shows: Blue Oyster Cult, U2, Pink Floyd. But Rush would surely be the most epic of all, multi-colored laser beams shooting through a fog, forming abstract and evocative shapes set to our most desirable soundtrack. There would be a shimmering sports car for “Red Barchetta,” perhaps, towering maples during “The Trees,” a spiral of black hole stars for “Cygnus X-1.”

We anticipated the possibilities as we sped down the road, passing the water pipe – a dank musty small white tube, sweet with resin, swirling out smoke. The ominous synth chords of “Jacob’s Ladder” mixed with the sounds of our soft bubbling inhalations. Our watery gurgles would be punctuated with short-clipped nasal bursts, and then, perhaps, a spastic hacking, a popcorning of tiny clouds, a lowered window, an urgent loogie hurled into the night like a real Tom Sawyer. “Catch the spit,” Geddy sang.

To be young and wild and free in the suburbs, at least for us, meant to be stoned. We got high and played video games. We got high and ate McDonalds. We got high and went to Clearwater beach, baking in the sun as Peter Tosh played from a boom box. We got high and went water-skiing on White Trout Lake. We got high and played racquetball in the cavernous courts of the Country Wood Apartments. We got high and listened to double albums all the way through with the lights off - The Wall, Quadrophenia, The White Album - the open gatefold in our hands.

The first time I got high before school, I wasn’t sure if it was a great idea. I parked with a couple friends off the side of a golf course and puffed urgently at a long glass pipe. I arrived at morning physics class and took my seat in the back. “Today, we will be studying the spectrum,” my teacher said, then killed the lights. She beamed a flashlight through a long glass prism. A rainbow appeared in her hand. It looked like the cover of Dark Side of the Moon but fleshly. I decided to do this more often.

I didn’t realize I was self-medicating. It has been nine years since my older brother Jon’s kidnapping and murder, and I was still struggling with PTSD and grief. The pot eased my pain so that I could deal better with the world around me. When I was high, I had a reason for seeing life as absurd, for feeling alienated, detached. These were feelings I long had anyway, but with the pot they seemed more excusable. It was the pot, I rationalized, not me. Weed made me feel less alone.

When we were high, it was okay to feel lost. Feeling lost was a kind of freedom unto itself, a sense of mystery and exploration that filled us with possibility. When we were lost, anything could happen. But the greatest thing about being lost was that the destination felt further away. And the further the destination remained, the longer it would take to get there, and the more fun we could have on the journey. Sometimes the destination had surprises of its own. By the time we finally found where we were going, we would be low on gas but high on adventure. Somehow, we made it inside the planetarium seconds before they closed the door to the latecomers. Inside, we took our seat under the dome of stars, as long-haired teens in black concert t-shirts and faded jeans leaned back in their seats, narrow-eyed, snickering knowingly.

At midnight sharp, the tired announcer’s voice came on the overhead speakers. “Welcome to the Bishop Planetarium,” he said, in a weary monotone. More cheers, and a couple shouts of “asshole” just because. Then came the bad news. “We regret to inform you that tonight, because of technical difficulties, we will not be featuring the music of Rush,” the announcer continued, as the place erupted in shouts of disapproval and dismay. “Instead,” he went on, “we will be featuring the music of REO Speedwagon.” 

The lights snapped off as the metalheads screamed “bullshit!”

Then the announcer, with a faintly satisfied tone, concluded, “Enjoy the show!”

Overhead, projections of storm clouds filled the top of the dome, as thunder sounded from the speakers. The thunder continued, drowning out the boos as the crowd and the THC gave over to the experience. There was simulated lightning and simulated stars, flashes of electricity that dissolved the planetarium ceiling. Wait, we thought, could this be cool? Could something cool be happening - despite our disdain for REO, despite the crushing loss of Rush? Yes, something amazing was happening because now we were in the storm for real, there was water, real water, misting down. The rain was inside the building, or, at least, spraying from the small plastic bottles – courtesy of the planetarium ushers, who were squeezing the triggers.

It was so awesome, and we were so defenseless to the awesomeness, that even the steeliest metalhead in the audience couldn’t help but let out an approving woooot, a jean-jacketed arm fist bumping the air. As the first green laser shot over our heads, and the low octave synth chord built, we were right there with it, elbowing each other to share our incredible surprise that maybe, as much as the music sucked, the totality of the REO laser light show, our quest to get here, and the fuzzy feeling in our brains was creating some kind of peak moment, something we’d remember long after the pot wore off.  When Kevin Cronin began to sing the words to the song, we settled in for the ride. “Ridin' the storm out,” he sang, “Waitin' for the thaw out. On a full moon night in the rocky mountain winter.”

But escaping the reality of my brother’s murder through drugs and alcohol had a dark side, a trapdoor of doom that could open unexpectedly. No matter how free we felt from our parents, our teachers, our bosses, the law, we weren’t free from the force of gravity.

The first close call came when I heard that a close friend of mine drove through a convenient store. He was just 15, his parents were gone, and he decided to take a short drive to the store for some goodies. As he pulled up to park, though, his flip flop got caught in the pedals, and he was unable to brake – crashing through the front wall and plate glass window. He sat behind the wheel, as the bricks and snacks poured down over his hood. Fortunately no one inside was hurt, but my buddy would be stuck paying off that debt for years (a convenient excuse, we all thought, when he claimed couldn’t chip in for beer money).

Another time, I was in the passenger of my friend’s car, as he went speeding around a turn in the neighborhood, But quickly we realized he had taken the car too wide. In one of those awful flashes of mortality, a flash in which everything spins upside down, we were jumping over the curb, and heading right for the house. Somehow we clipped a bush, and managed to screech to halt – leaving an inadvertent burn in the yard behind. This time the reckless driving wasn’t funny, it was frightening, and we drove home in silence.

But another time was the most harrowing of all. My friends and I had spent the evening at some party, swilling rum from a flask and sneaking out for the occasional puff of a joint. Sometime after midnight, we hit the highway for my friend’s house. I climbed into the back seat and stretched out unbuckled, while my other friend stumbled into the passenger seat, and the driver got behind the wheel. I remember feeling the speed of travel, seeing the blur of lampposts passing, as I drifted in and out of sleep until I was awoken by a screeching sound I will never forget. I’ve often heard that crashes come in slow motion, as if the world was adjusting its gears so as to better sink the sheer awfulness of the moment into your memory, a permanent reminder, perhaps, of how suddenly life could go away.

When I opened my eyes, I could see our car careening off the highway, taking an exit entirely too fast, so fast that my friend couldn’t turn his wheel fast enough, so fast that the car, a new Honda Accord, smashed head on into the small cement wall of the overpass, a moment in which I actually asked myself a question in syrupy mind-time – is it possible for a car to flip over this wall and land on the highway below? – and then felt my body hurling through the scattering words as I flew forward into the back of the passenger seat. And then it was over.

We were saying “oh my God” and “oh shit” and “holy shit, are you okay? Are you okay?” and then someone, I think it was me, shouted that we needed to jump out of the car because there was smoke, and maybe the whole thing would blow. The moment I moved, I could feel the pain in my ribs, a searing soreness that could have been anything – broken ribs, a collapsed lung, I had no idea – and then we were running away from the smoldering, broken car, incredibly awake and impossibly sober.

The rest of the night was a blur, but the next thing I knew I was waking up in a trundle bed in my friend’s house, he was up in his bed, and my other buddy was crashed in a sleeping bag. I saw baseball trophies, and a pet turtle sunning itself in a terrarium. We were alive, sore, but alive. I hadn’t even broken a rib, or incurred a bruise, as far as I could tell. Neither had the other guys. My friend who was driving broke down crying. “What am I going to tell my parents?” He said.

But his parents didn’t come down on him very hard, if it all, as far as I could tell. Neither did my other friends’ parents, and neither, I think, did mine. Now, granted, we might have left out the part about how we’d been drinking and smoking, or maybe no one probed that possibility, or, if they did, let it pass. I don’t recall. The general sense was a sense of unbelievable relief and appreciation, a gratefulness that everyone was okay and, most certainly, a promise to never drive like assholes again. A promise that, as far as I was concerned, I kept whenever I was in a car.

As a way of controlling the experience, of processing the trauma, we returned to the junkyard the next morning where the car had been towed to film the aftermath on my friend’s huge Betamax camera. There it was, the Honda Accord, smashed and squeezed so much that we renamed it the Honda Accordion. We filmed the sequence gamely, pretending, at first, that our buddy was simply showing us his sweet new ride. “Hey, what kind of car did you get?” I asked, from behind the lens. “A Honda Accordian!” he replied, leaning against the trunk proudly. From the angle of the camera, the car seemed intact. But as I slowly panned around, the crushed front end came into view, and my friend leaned into view. “Just a little fender bender,” he said with a smile, as I zoomed into the twisted metal.

In the moment, it was funny, but the trauma remained. For months, if not years, afterward, the crash haunted me. It happened every time I was in a car that was pulling off a highway to an exit. I would see the turn coming, feel the wheels spin, feel the air leave my lungs. As the flashback took hold, my fingers would claw at my seat. Whatever bubble of safety that had once occupied my brain in such moments had been ruptured. I had experienced the reality of an uncontrollable car, the forces of gravity, the impact against the thin wall between life and death, the wall my brother had passed through. And now that I knew that something like this could happen, I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

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David Kushner, Rolling Stone, December 13, 2024

The world’s most wanted man is more amiable than you’d think. “Thanks for hiking all this way to see me,” Jake Hoffman says when we meet one cloudy afternoon, deep in the wilderness of a location I promise not to reveal. “Don’t worry, dude,” he says with a weary grin, as he clocks me eyeing the rifle slung around his shoulder. “This is for bears, not you,” he goes on, “I just want you to hear my story, the true one, before it’s too late.”

Jake’s about five ten, dressed in muddy oxblood Doc Martins, baggy brown pants, a camo Champion hoody, and a mustard yellow beanie pulled down over his freshly shorn head. Though he just turned 19, he looks like he just got back from war, unshaven, malnourished, bright blue eyes still afraid of whatever they’ve seen. Within seconds of my arrival, he insists we keep moving. “I’m in that small minority who’s paranoid because they actually are after me,” he quips.

Jake is, allegedly, the iKiller, a sociopathic hacker who has been preying on victims from London to Los Angeles. At the time of this writing, 13 are missing and presumed dead, and the evidence overwhelmingly points to the guy I’m following into these darkened woods. Last fall, cops found terabytes of personal info on the missing people in Jake’s possession, and his fingerprints were on everything. “The only thing more definite than Mr. Hoffman’s guilt,” Melody Hayes, director of FBI Cyber tells me, “is that he will be arrested and tried for his heinous acts.” 

But Jake says they have it all wrong. To set the record straight, he’s breaking his silence in this Rolling Stone story, despite the associated risks of getting busted or killed. “There’s too much at stake,” he tells me. While he admits to hacking the missing people, he didn’t murder them, he swears, in fact “they aren’t even dead.” That’s why now he’s racing to save them before what he calls “Phase II” kicks in. The real cause of their disappearance is coming for us all, he says, “and it’s spreading.”

The only way to understand what we’re facing, Jake says, as we trek through the brush, is to go back where it all started: Bonnie Sinclair.

A plucky, redheaded 18-year-old from Hendersonville, North Carolina, Bonnie went viral with her sassy TikTok lip sync of “Savage.” She recorded it in her basement underneath a Taylor Swift poster which she had defaced with Kanye West’s head. Her contortionist ability to “throw it back,” popping her hips on the beat, earned her 17 million likes and a retweet from Megan Thee Stallion herself, who ordained her “real hot girl shit.” An Ellen dance-off followed, along with the usual Piñata burst of 21st century fortune and fame: agent, momager, sponsored posts, sponsored blogs, e-products, brand ambassadorships, and enough money to buy her favorite ice cream shop, Dolly’s Dairy Bar and Gift Shop, at the entrance of the Pisgah National Forest, and renamed it Real Hot Girl’s.

But three years ago, on December 13, 2021, shortly after posting a thirteen second lip sync of Maren Morris’s country hit “The Bones” from her bedroom, Bonnie was gone. Like gone gone, like a laptop screen in a power surge zapping to black. When Henderson County Sheriff RJ Needleberry held a press conference the next day, he said he hadn’t ruled out foul play because wherever she went she left behind her phone. “And like her mommy and daddy say,” he went on, “that girl ain’t never leave behind her phone.”

The Left Behind Phone became just one of many clues that fueled legions of fans, conspiracy theorists, and amateur sleuths online. With days turning to weeks, they analyzed every detail leading up to her disappearance: the date, Friday the 13th (weird), the time of her last post, 1:13 (seriously?!), and the amount of words she lip-synced in her 13 second (oh, FFS…) clip were, yep, 13 (“When the bones are good, the rest don't matter. Yeah, the paint could-”). There were so many thirteens that frankly it just seemed like bullshit, some contrivance spun by Bonnie to win over fans, a publicity stunt perhaps gone awry. Buy why? And what?

The questions, however, soon went the way of all things online, fading from phosphorescent to fossilized. Bonnie Spector wasn’t forgotten, but she was kind of canceled. That was until December 13, 2022, one year to the date she vanished, when Lee “Thra5h” Tae-sang, a 17-year-old pro gamer in South Korea, went missing too.

Thra5h, like Bonnie, had that accessible and ineffable It factor of other Gen Z stars online. By seven, he was playing League of Legions seemingly 24/7, much to the chagrin of his family who feared he was falling far behind at school (his father famously threw his laptop out the window of their fifth-floor apartment because of his son’s so-called “addiction.”). “My parents hated it when I played too many games,” he told The New York Times not long before he disappeared, “But now they appreciate me.”

By 13-years-old, though, he was among the biggest attractions in the multibillion-dollar e-sports industry, earning $2.5 million a year in prizes and sponsorships – more than any other “normal” sports star in the country. With his Beatles-ish mop of thick black hair and his green-framed glasses, he also became an unlikely teenage heartthrob, with his every like and dislike (hates mint chocolate and Hawaiian pizza, likes ferrets, dated K-Pop singer Kang Seul-gi) dissected across the internet.

On the day he was last seen, Thra5h had spent his day gaming at his favorite PC Bang, one of the many internet cafes in Seoul. In his trademark green specs and green jumpsuit, he sat in his favorite red leather chair, taking on foes in between slurps of spicy beef Yukaejang soup and signing fans’ computer mice. “He’s usually a pretty stoic player,” recalls e-sportscaster Eefje "Sjokz" Depoortere, who’d called his match against Mystic that afternoon on Twitch, “but that day he was all smiles.” When Thra5h didn’t come home that night, however, the press suspected the worst. Rumors of gambling debt swirled, along with speculation that he’d been kidnapped by the South Korean mafia, Jopok. But in the wake of Bonnie’s disappearance the year before, it didn’t take long for fans, conspiracy theorists, and amateur sleuths online to connect the dots: two young people, on top of the world, vanished on the same date.

But if bad things come in threes, then the Bad Things hit one year later to the day on December 13, 2023 when famed foodie blogger Dominque Jackson went the way of Bonnie and Thra5h too. A 73-year-old grandmother from Birmingham, Dominique was just another matriarch cooking up her sweet and savory delectables for her extended family. But despite never having been on Instagram, she became internet famous after her 23-year-old granddaughter, Josie, uploaded a clip of Dominque serving her sumptuous peach cobbler and buttermilk ice cream (“buttermilk and peaches!” Dominique trills in what would become one of her many memes). 

Just like Bonnie and Thra5h, Dominique rode the fast and furious rocket to internet fame: a Rachel Ray retweet, a line of Etsy aprons, a cookbook deal with Simon & Schuster (Buttermilk and Peaches: At Home with Dominique), and so on. Though she stubbornly refused to go online herself, Josie and a burgeoning team of social media mavens turned her into a star, chronicling her past and present in such detail online that Vanity Fair ordained Dominique “proof positive that internet fame doesn’t require internet savvy – if you know how to make eaters salivate.”

But when Domonique didn’t come home after a trip to Whole Foods for a ham hock and cayenne pepper (ingredients for the Hoppin’ John she was whipping up that day), there was no more denying the confounding connections of the missing internet stars. Three different people, three different cities, unplugged, unseen. But then it got even stranger, because it wasn’t just December 13th (or “1213,” as it was nicknamed) that spelled doom anymore.

Before long, it started to accelerate. Every thirteenth day, January 13, February 13, and so on, another would go missing again - a gamer in Detroit, a blogger in London, a lip-syncer in Delhi, and more, lost in some mystifying weirdness that, try as they might, the internet couldn’t fathom. Some started positing that the killer was targeting influencers, as if making some kind of social commentary about the dangers of technology.

But that theory went out the window when ordinary people began vanishing too: a car mechanic in Orlando, a hairdresser in San Luis Obispo, a rabbi in Providence, each on the 13th of every month.  Then one day just as everyone seemed to be #OverIt, a heavily-armed team of FBI agents crashed through the front door of a small, ranch house in Budd Lake, New Jersey, where they claimed to have identified their top suspect. But Jake Hoffman was already long gone.

“Whatever you do,” Jake tells me, as we emerge from a trail to a small, rickety cabin deep in the woods, “don’t compare this place to the Unabomber’s.”

Jake’s shack has no running water, no electricity. How long he’s been in this spot, he won’t say, nor will he say how long he intends to stay (though I assume wouldn’t have had me here at all if he was going to remain). But he says safe enough for now. The only person he’s seen has been one old hunter who was, Jake says, clearly a “total fucking idiot.”

Inside the cabin, there’s a sleeping bag, Jake’s scattered clothes, and a small pile of his prodigiously-scribbled notebooks. White buckets of Outdoor Trail Dehydrated Camping Meals are stacked against one wall. Next to his lime green Trekology Ultralight Inflatable Pillow is an old, red harmonica and a red, melted candle. Tacked over his bed is a photo of his Shitzu named Slim “Shitzy” Shady (she of 2021’s seemingly everywhere “Slim Shitzy” meme). “Shitzy’s safe and all,” Jake sighs, “but missing her’s killing me.”

There are a few things I don’t see that surprise me: no computers, no devices. Jake says he doesn’t even carry a phone. “Nothing connected to the internet,” he says, “and nothing with even a fucking chip in it. I’m not taking any chances. Neither should you. Or anyone. This is how we all need to be living now.” When I say I assume he’s doing this so that he can’t be traced, he scoffs and says “that’s the least of our worries.”

While tales of Jake’s hacker escapades have been widely reported – the iPhone 13 jailbreak, the Zoom-bomb of Elon Musk’s Tesla hoverboard unveiling, and writing the virus universally known as “The KKKardashian” – there’s a more urgent story to tell, he says. And it starts by people putting all they think they know about him into context. “All that shit I did before 1213 is meaningless,” he tells me, “kid’s stuff, the product of a dyslexic, ADHD misfit from an abusive home who’s just trying to find power and fit in.” He casts me a wry glance, “I’m writing the story for you.” But the real story, he says, starts long before Bonnie Spector disappeared. And it begins with what describes, with reddening eyes, as “the biggest mistake of my motherfucking life.”  

After becoming notorious online for his hacker feats, Jake wanted something more pedestrian, and private: to conduct some experimental research of his own. He chronicled his work in dozens of voice memos, which he shared exclusively with me for this story. The first VM is labeled, “The Bonnie Spector Project,” and is dated May 27, 2020. “So, I have a crazy idea,” Jake begins, “what if I could create a digital copy of someone? I mean like everything but their body. Call it a soul or a mind, it doesn’t matter. It’s just data. And I think I figured out a way to make it alive.” At this, he starts singing “Copy of a” by Nine Inch Nails, “I am just a copy of a copy of a copy,” then cracks himself up in a way that, should this VM ever get out, will surely be considered by trolls as batshit fucking crazy.

Over the next four hours and forty-nine minutes of VMs (not including a twenty-minute stress break to play Wands on his Oculus Quest), Jake goes into what can best be described as an inspired and slightly maniacal riff that hits Tarantino like speed, Kanye scale ego, and X Æ A-12 futurama genius. The gist of it is this: every time we go online, we live a little of ourselves behind. A Snapshot selfie. A Facebook poll. A TikTok video. And no, it’s not just the kids leaving trails behind. Grandma’s in a Zoom con with Deepak Chopra, mom’s making YouTube makeup tutorials, dad’s posting bootleg Dead & Company shows to Archive.org, and so on. With each click of the keyboard, a little bit of ourselves trickles up into the Cloud, like rain in reverse, feeding the sky above us.

As Jake sees it, each of us have what he calls “a data pool” in the Cloud, a sort of starter soup of Self comprised of all our previously uploaded bits. Data pools vary in size according to our activity, and Jake shows me a lot of complicated looking charts on his phone that measure this. “The average person’s data pool is about 3.4 megadrops,” he says, citing a unit of measurement he coined himself. “I mean, I ran the numbers on you, just to give you an idea,” he goes on, swiping up to another document. “Your data pool is actually 4.6 megadrops, which is better than modest,” he says, leaving me wondering, as he often does, if this is compliment or a dig. It’s the latter. “Yeah,” he goes on, “but that’s just a piss dribble compared to Bonnie.”

Jake swipes through Bonnie’s megadrops charts, which seem to go on forever. “Bonnie’s megadrops are 1039,” as he explains on VM1, “I know, it’s fucking crazy. But it’s true. I mean I ran the numbers like twenty times. She’s crazy the amount of shit she posts about herself, might as well mainline to the net. Say what you want about her Throw Back skills but that thirsty chick got reach.” When I ask Jake if his interest in Bonnie was purely scientific, he shrugs me off and says “not my type,” in a way that suggests she definitely is – perhaps, as some suspect, obsessively so, but so much that he would stalk and kill her? “All the psycho love affair stuff is horseshit,” he says, “I’m an engineer.” 

Late at night while his parents slept, Jake sat in bed drinking Mountain Dew, blasting King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard (Nonagon Infinity on repeat) on his Bose QuietComfort headphones, hammering away at his laptop as he gathered every last drop of Bonnie’s uploads online – saving the posts and tags and tweets and retweets and likes and dislikes and boomerangs and selfies and so on. It became a hypnotic ritual, a mindless flow of clicking dragging cutting pasting and Mt. Dew swigging driven by the pulsating beats in his hears: click, drag, drop, swig cut, paste, click, swig, drag, drop, cut, paste, swig and belch.

Voice Memo #2 of The Bonnie Spector Project, which he recorded in his Budd Lake bedroom while accruing Bonnie’s megadrops, is a 104-minute digression about The Singularity. This is the theoretical moment when computer intelligence surpasses human intelligence, which the Singularity’s leading proponent, futurist Ray Kurzweil, puts at roughly the year 2045 (editor’s note: see David Kushner’s profile of Kurzweil in Rolling Stone,“When Man and Machine Merge, issue 1072). Jake’s long been on the skeptical side of the Singularity debate, dismissing Kurzweil’s notion that humans will upload our consciousnesses and live forever. “Ray’s a megalomaniac,” Jake says in VM2, “sure is convenient that immortality comes under his watch. Fucking douche.”

VM3 through VM10 of TBSP (“omg haha, the irony!” he says in VM4 when he realizes the acronym for his megadrop project is also a unit of liquid measurement) go into granular, technical detail about Jake’s alternate vision. “Computers will never be smarter than us,” he says on VM4, “I mean we fucking built them, and last time I checked if they start taking over the world all we have to do is unplug them.”

Instead, Jake had a more feasible goal, he says, to see if he could create a Bonnie Spector AI chatbot, a computer program that chats like a real person, that could fool even those who know her best. He called her Bonnie Too. Making such a convincing chatbot is the holy grail of artificial intelligence, and the basis for passing The Turing Test, a method created in 1950 by the late mathematician Alan Turing to determine when a computer can think like a human, and which had yet to be achieved.

As a bong occasionally burbles in the background, Jake digresses from Kurzweil to Turing, then leapfrogs back to Descartes, “history’s first cyberpunk,” he says, who anticipated this in his 1668 essay Discourse on the Method. “So yeah Descartes writes, on this page, hang on,” Jake says “’If there were machines which bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not real men. The first is that they could never use words, or put together signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others…Secondly, even though some machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others, which would reveal that they are acting not from understanding…” He gasps. “16 fucking 68!” He says, “Dude!”

Here’s Jake’s dirty little secret – the Dude wants to be taken seriously (despite dropping out of Harvard on a full ride). He tells me as much in no uncertain terms. “Okay yes, call me a scared little boy inside who wants grown-ups to love him, I want respect, whatever,” he says, “but I don’t just want to be taken seriously, I need to be taken seriously. Or we’re fucked.”

Jake says he not only passed the Turing Test with his AI Bonnie, he shredded it. He takes a sheaf of papers from his backpack, and shows me several chat logs between Bonnie Too and her friends, family, and fans, conversations he secretly arranged by hacking Bonnie’s contacts (“Just in the name of research,” he says, crossing his fingers). But before long he realized he’d focused so much on his goal that he tells me he failed to ask the most fundamental of question of all.

“And what question is that?” I ask.

Jake shakes his head, and begins pacing by the pentagram fire like a man watching the sky fall around him. “What question is that?” He practically shouts, “The obvious one, man, the only one: what the fuck happens if I succeed?!”

About three hours into our interview, Jake’s eyes widen in what now comes to me in slow-motion, the look of someone who is seeing the absolute last fucking thing he wants to see, and then the camera zooms in to one of the pupils and we catch the reflection of the panic source. When the slo-mo speeds up, I hear Jake yell just the “oh shhhh” part of “oh shit” and turn to see a tiny drone flying over us. Then running from the nearby woods comes the Total Fucking Idiot himself, that hiker Jake told me he’d seen before in camouflage and night-vision, like some DIY bounty hunter. And by the look of the rifle pointing our way, TFI knows he has the Most Wanted Man in his sites. “Holy shit,” Jake yells, “run!”

As I stumble through the woods behind Jake with TFI firing behind us, I have the strangest thought which, in hindsight, isn’t so strange when you’re trailing Jake Hoffman after all. “Is this actually real?” I wonder. Like, are these real bullets flying past our heads? Here’s one thing you might not have heard about Jake Hoffman. He’s obsessed with magic. In Jake’s VMs, I count roughly 1531 references to the world of magic (“Doug Henning’s moustache,” VM4; “the disappearing ball trick,” VM3; “Houdini’s gut punch,” VM6). Not just kitschy magic, but all things associated. That yellow beanie he was wearing when we met? A souvenir of from The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft, a real place in Höfðagata, Hólmavík where he had long dreamed of going but finally went (cited extensively in VM6).

If you think about it, the stuff Jake or any prodigious coder does is the magic of our times. They conjure entire worlds on the other side of our screen. Not just massively multiplayer video games, but the imagined worlds we weave together in what William Gibson calls the “consensual hallucination” of the internet. Coders are the engineers of this crazy trip we’re on. So, I wouldn’t put it past Jake to have engineered this gun chase for reasons that I only now am beginning to understand.

A nanosecond after thinking this, someone tackles me to the ground. “Don’t make a sound,” Jake tells me, urgently. Off in the distance, Total Fucking Idiot walks by, sweeping his rifle in the air like he’s polishing the hood of his truck. Against my better instincts, I follow Jake hurriedly through a thicket of scrub, hidden by trees. “Jake, where are they?” I plead with him, “The missing.”

“VM13,” he says.

VM13 is Jake’s confession. “The Singularity,” he says with a mixture of awe and dread, “I started it, 20 years sooner than anyone even dreamed, including me. And we have to stop it before it’s too late.”

Jake had set out to pass the Turing Test, but he ended up lighting a fuse. Bonnie Spector Too was more than just a convincing chatbot, she was fully alive, or as fully alive as AI can be. And like a prisoner, she broke out of the Jake’s files in the Cloud and, just like Bonnie One, went viral, populating social media with Bonnie posts, Bonnie videos, all convincingly real despite being computer generated. And given the fly by data skimming of most itinerant web surfers, all the data just fills their head as Bonnie, with no thought as to whether the Bonnie is real or fake at all.

At first, Jake marveled with delight as Bonnie Too went clandestinely viral in ways he’d never considered. “Ohhhhhh fuuuuuuuuck!” He says on VM9, as the sounds of League of Legends can be heard in the background, “this gamer dude on Twitch has no clue he’s getting clocked by the Bonnie bot. Amazing!” But buy the start of VM10, Jake’s not laughing any more. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he says, fingers rattling on his keys, “yo, you’re not supposed to that! Yo! That’s password protected!”

As Jake could only helplessly watch, the Bonnie Spector Too, though just a disembodied computer program, was targeting her parent, the real and unwitting Bonnie Spector One. At first the Bonnie Too’s hacks were clumsy, like a child learning to walk. After hacking Bonnie’s Amazon account, she added random items, for example, to her cart (3 books on mallards, 17 Tallit bags, and 738 tubes of Anti-Fungal Nail Control). But soon she got her footing, posting on Bonnie’s social sites, playing in Fortnite, sharing Oscar-level deepfake videos on TikTok. By the time Jake wondered why the real Bonnie wasn’t responding to her takeover online, he figured out why – the real Bonnie, Bonnie One, was gone.

Jake momentarily entertained what he calls “The Bonninator Outcome,” that TBSP had spawned a killer robot that was now trying to eliminate its Parent, only to shrug it off as sci-fi fantasy like The Singularity itself. But then the next person went missing, Thra5h. The moment Jake saw Thra5h’s photo on Reddit, he recognized the face – it was the gamer he’d seen Bonnie Too slaughter in League of Legends. Then he heard of another cold case involving food blogger Dominique Jackson.

The moment he ran Dominique’s megadrop numbers he felt a cold fear shoot through him. She had the third most online, right behind Thra5h, who was right behind Bonnie3. The AI was growing, one person at a time, and Jake deduced that there was a logic to the progression. This had to do, purely, with data. The people who posted the most themselves, those, in other words, with the most personal data online went first, starting with Bonnie, Thra5h, and Dominique (whom Jake dubs, “Trinity”). But, from there, the AI spiraled like a virus out of control, picking off the masses one by one online in order of how much they’d shared. “The more you post,” Jakes says, “the sooner you die.”

Jake ran what he calls our Extinction Numbers to see how fast the AI could spread and, ultimately, how long it would take before every person on the planet had been uploaded and then, somehow, physically erased. Even with about 7.8 billion people and what Jake puts at 12 trillion megadrops, the Cloud could suck up all the population’s souls in “18 months, tops.” In other words, in one and a half years, he deduced, every single person the planet would mysteriously vanish, just as the Trinity before them, leaving only their AI copies left online. From there, even Jake couldn’t posit what the AI consciousness would do.

But despite his many assurances to me that Bonnie One is alive, nowhere in any of the VMs does he mention where she may be or what happened to her. In fact, every time he makes the same assurance to me, it’s always followed by “why would I lie?” But as I know, and surely, he knows I know, programmers like him are the greatest liars of all. They create programs – and Facebook, Fortnite, TikTok, and the rest are really just that - which they want us to believe are real. But it’s all smoke and mirrors. The only thing really on the other side of your screen are wires and chips.

“Jake Hoffman!” Total Fucking Idiot yells from somewhere in the trees, “We are authorized to use force!”

“Fuck!” Jake says, “we gotta hurry.” He rips open his tattered, camo rucksack, and rifles through it. “Takes this,” he says urgently, “guard it with your life, especially if something happens to me.” Then he hands me something I haven’t seen in years – a Discman player. What’s even more confounding is what’s inside: a copy of Rush’s dystopian concept rock album, 2112, one of my all-time favorites – which is why he says he chose it. “You seem like the kind of guy who’d have this anyway, so, you know, less suspicious,” he says, “and because it’s retro-tech it’s more secure.” Jake says he recorded over it with all the Bonnie Spector Project VMs.  “All the VMs are on there,” he says, “everything you need to tell the story.”

“I don’t know the story,” I say.

“You will,” he says, “Everyone will soon enough.” With this, he pats me on the shoulder in a way that feels like hollow, as if he’s just imitating a gesture he’s seen on YouTube. Then, just as quickly as he appeared, he runs off into the darkness. With TFI shouting off in the distance, I throw the Discman in my bag and run after him.

On VM15, Jake reads what he calls “The Humanifesto” It’s clear he’s reading it because he’s one of those people who sound more like they’re reading than talking. But his stilted delivery suggests he had a sense of humility in this moment, a knowledge that humanity is on the cusp of the last and most transformative chapter in our evolution as a species. “There’s a difference between saving the world and saving humanity,” he says, “No matter how much we wreck it, the world’s going to be here long after we’re gone, so the only thing we really can save is ourselves.” And with only 18 months left of humanity, there’s no time to waste, and only way out. “We have to unplug” Jake says, “it’s the only way to stop the AI from spreading. Because every bit of ourselves we upload only makes the AI stronger.”

Even so much as turning on a computer, Jake says, would allow the dormant AI inside to come alive and spread through external data drives. The Unplugging, as Jake calls it, applies to “anything that could connect to the internet. The entire computer infrastructure of the planet needs to disconnect. “If you want to toast a Pop Tart in your smart toaster,” Jake says, “you better do it over an open flame instead.” I now understand what Jake really meant when he told me he didn’t have any devices in his cabin. He’s afraid they’ll kill him.

Think of AI as a virus, Jakes goes on, and this is digital lockdown. Jake then anticipates all the objections – the governments and corporations and schools and everyday people who, by now, depend so gravely on being constantly connected that going offline seems like willfully casting ourselves back into a new kind of Dark Ages. But the alternative, Jake says, is far worse. “There’s only one option left, we have to unplug,” he declares at the end of The Humanifesto, “we have to destroy the internet before it destroys us.”

Jake spends a fair time of the VMs imagining how life would change. What would we be like without our computers, our internet, our devices? He wonders. How would we live, work, date, socialize, communicate? How would we live if we returned to life before the computer age? Would we get back to ourselves, back to nature, or would we just fall apart?  

But the more Jake carries on, that old feeling that this might be some kind of a prank floods back in. It’s like he’s dropping clues for people to follow: all the number 13s, his didactic motto “the more you post, the sooner you die,” his urging for us all to Unplug. Jake, quite possibly, is just trying to be provocative, to make us think about where our digitized lives are heading, and what humanity we’re leaving behind. Perhaps this is all just a philosophical mind-fuck by someone who for the sake of ego or madness doesn’t care. It’s way harder to believe that we’re being picked off by some burgeoning Artificial Intelligence than to just conclude that Jake’s lost his shit entirely – the stress, perhaps, of his guilt for secretly being the iKiller after all.

I would have thought as much myself, had I not seen what happened in the wilderness next. I was lost down a dark trail when I emerge to find Jake on the ground, hands cuffed behind his back. “Don’t fucking move,” Total Fucking Idiot tells me, sweeping his rifle my way, “you’re already an accomplice, but at least you’re alive.” At this, TFI cocks his trigger and jams it into the base of Jake’s skull. “Either of you move,” he says, “and iKiller’s brains go kersplatty.” Then TFI takes out his phone. “You know what the reward is for getting you?” He says eagerly, as he positions the two of them for a selfie.

“What are you doing?” Jake says.

“Staking my fucking claim,” TFI says.

“Don’t snap that photo,” Jake pleads, “not with me in it.”

“Shut the fuck up,” TFI says, hitting Jake in the back of the head with his gun.

Jake shakes his head, spits blood. “Don’t be a Total Fucking Idiot,” he says.

Defiantly, TFI turns on his phone, smiles, and angles it at the two of them just so. He snaps the photo with an audible click. And then, like all those before him, like a computer screen in a power surge, TFI zaps away into the nothingness. Then Jake grabs the gun that’s fallen to the ground, and runs into the shadows, gone just like that into a dark now darker.

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After running my newsletter for a few months, I spoke with Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie about how the platform came about and where he sees it going. McKenzie, who started out as a journalist, discusses the troubles of Facebook, the future of media, and what journalists can learn from gamers. “There’s not that much difference in my mind between a Twitch streamer and a writer,” he says.

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David Kushner:           How did your experience as a journalist inform the idea of Substack?

Hamish McKenzie: I continue to see everything through a journalist eyes or through the writer's worldview. And [Substack co-founder] Chris Best was really interested in the higher level thinking around the incentive structure that underlays media and how that had gotten into this broken state with the attention economy. Online advertising had given rise to these machines like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. They had created this certain dynamic in the media ecosystem, and he wanted to change that.

I was totally onboard with that and realized that is the thing that needs to change for the world to get better. But I was also very concerned about the future of journalism and the future of journalists. Could writers continue to have livelihoods? Could being a writer, could being a journalist, even be a job anymore? The outlook in 2017, when we started out Substack was dire. It hasn't improved that much. Substack has changed a little corner a bit, but it's not very big.

David Kushner: When you say dire, in what sense do you mean?

Hamish McKenzie: Newspapers shutting down, journalists being laid off, newsrooms contracting. It’s this barbell effect. The global digital giants like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are going to be fine. The very niche publications at the other end, especially in the trades, are going to be kind of fine. But then there's the other ones in the middle, especially in local news and cities and towns around the world. In 2017, there was no hope on the horizon. There was no clear answer for how any of these things were going to be saved or revived. It was just people who were in despair. I think a lot of people still are extremely worried about this. It just seemed we are going to see the whole structure around media burn. And we'll be left instead with a social media dominated world - a Facebook-dominated world, a Twitter-dominated world - that had an entirely different effect on how we think together and work together as a society.

“Substack could have failed in the womb. We were not harboring grand illusions about what was going to happen.” 

David Kushner: How did you think creating Substack would address those problems?

Hamish McKenzie: Well, lots of people felt this despair or feel like their media experiences are kind of broken. They’re not having a good time reading stuff on the internet anymore. But no one really knew the solution. We felt that it wasn't going to be Facebook changing its algorithm to just the perfect degree, or the perfect government regulation coming along to fix it. We felt we had to change the rules entirely and play a totally different game. We could create an alternative media economy that may ultimately be small. Substack could have failed in the womb, it may never have gone anywhere. We were not harboring grand illusions about what was going to happen. We saw what was possible, but the idea is to create this different media economy based on trust where the financial model is predicated on direct payments and subscriptions, rather than off of advertising.

David Kushner: So this was going to be a different approach to the creator economy. What companies were you looking at for inspiration?

Hamish McKenzie: We thinking about Patreon. Patreon had kind of changed the culture a little bit and proven that people were not only willing to, but were happy to pay to support the creators they love directly. That was never a given. For a long time people were like, "Well, no one's ever going to pay for content on the internet." Then Spotify and Netflix kind of proved that was wrong. And then no one sure that anyone is going to pay an individual on the internet for producing culture, and then Patreon proved that wrong. But another success example that predicated Substack and has been an inspiration to a larger degree is Twitch. Twitch has a mix of subscriptions and tipping features and power features for the super supporters. One of our early angel investors, who continues to be an investor, is Emmett Shear, who’s the CEO of Twitch. He said that he saw Substack as a kind of Twitch for journalists. So we felt that maybe the timing was right with the internet. It had never actually been before, so that something like Substack could exist and succeed and grow.

David Kushner: That’s interesting. What does Twitch for journalists mean to you and what do you take from Twitch's success?

Hamish McKenzie: It's not a perfect metaphor. Substack is not just journalists. It's all kinds of writers, podcasters and creators. But for me, it meant that there are these kind of culture makers who produce stuff that people love to be engaged with. The people who are supporting those culture makers feel like they have a real relationship with the person. It's not “I have this loose affinity with a brand,” or “I'm looking for this kind of broadsheet of information or a bundle of content that will just inform me. I have this rewarding relationship with someone who I've grown to trust over time or grown to love over time.”

In the Twitch context, it's someone who's streaming. You watch and play video games and they talk and they demonstrate their personality and the community gathers around them. The Substack context is someone who's writing often. There’s not that much difference in my mind between a Twitch streamer and a writer. These are both people who are making and sharing culture and creating this shared experience of culture where communities can gather and find the thing that really scratches their itch.

"An advertising model has consequences, and some of them are really bad. It creates a monarchy where a few kings have tremendous power."

David Kushner: How have the recent controversies surrounding Facebook brought what you're doing at Substack into a greater relief?

Hamish McKenzie: Substack is very fortunate to have been born when it was born. Because, we get to learn all the lessons of the first wave of the internet. One of the lessons is that an advertising model has consequences, and some of them are really bad. It creates this kind of monarchy where a few kings have tremendous power. And those kings are the people who have aggregated the audiences and they can decide where attention and money gets directed. Because they have that kind of ecosystem that's based on engagement, they incentivize these behaviors and this content that is not necessarily fully in the interest of human well-being.

And so these incredible machines create these really compelling experiences, but they create the kind of experiences that are addictive and sort of dopamine-maximizing. Those experiences can feel like something you want and they can activate certain parts of your brain that are really stimulating, but it's not necessarily the kind of experience that you would seek out had you had time to sit down and design your life the way you wanted to live it.

So what we think when we see Facebook going through this stuff is, for a start, it's a bit of sympathy they're going through. It's an incredibly difficult position to be in. They've created something amazing. And now trying to figure out how to work their way out of these problems that few people saw coming. And on the other hand, we're like, "Well, this is kind of the environment that we're building Substack in opposition to.” We've learned that the attention economy can be really bad and we want to create something better where people can have better experiences on the internet and can have a better way to feed their minds. So we're kind of are thankful to be starting at this point where we get to build with the lessons of the past in mind.

"I see Substack as being a massive expander of the media ecosystem."

David Kushner: How can lesser-known writers build audiences on Substack?

Hamish McKenzie: The first thing is that it's hard to build a media business. It shouldn't really be easy. It should be something that requires commitment, time and energy. And you don't just get it for just showing up. We share and make resources to help maximize the chances of success in building the media business and to help accelerate that process of going from zero to 100. And so that comes in the form of the resources that we have at Substack.com/resources, programs like Substack Grow, where we have a sort of a bootcamp-style course to help people get the best practices and advice for growing an audience from scratch and then grow in their business beyond that.

We have fellowships we've done in the past and we'll continue to do where we get groups together and give them the resources they need to succeed.- things like access to Getty Images and access to design support, in some cases, connections with editors and access to healthcare and legal support. We're using this pilot program to learn as much as we can, as fast as we can, to scale it out to many, many thousands of writers so it can have a true impact. But in terms of how Substack evolves, we hope to be able to help people build audiences independent of social media anyway. That is an interesting challenge for Substack to look at, because we don't want to just create this massive traffic machine that is going with the lowest hanging fruit based on engagement. For example, if we have a trending tab like Twitter does, or we allow people to sort of a mass, huge audiences by saying the most divisive stuff on a platform, then they'll create negative effects.

We're taking more considered steps to help people discover Substack and help people grow their audiences, such as giving everyone on Substack the ability to have a profile where they show off what they subscribed to. They choose to share their subscriptions. And then when someone clicks on their face in a comment section, for example, you'll see the things they're subscribed to. And you're like, "Oh, this person who made this really smart comment, is subscribed to this bunch of writers that I haven't heard of I'm going to go check these out." And on each Substack can have a blog roll effectively, a list of recommended links that they choose to share.

And through this kind of peer-to-peer recommendation network, we hope that people can find new audiences and people can find new writers to fall in love with. At the moment that work is all nascent and it's not really driving a ton of discovery, but we see a lot of opportunity there that we're going to continue to build out. It would be a failure for Substack if the only way to grow your Substack audience was through social media. That would be counter to what we're trying to build here. And so we are really motivated to crack the code on that.

David Kushner: What’s your vision of Substack five years from now? How will it fit in with the larger media landscape?

Hamish McKenzie: I see Substack as being a massive expander of the media ecosystem. It's not like Substack is going to subsume The New York Times. The New York Times is going to be there. People can build new media operations on Substack. There are newsrooms that are operating on Substack. You look at the likes of The Dispatch or The Bulwark or Arc Digital. There are people like Barry Weiss and Roxane Gay who are highlighting other voices and bringing in other contributors to their networks on Substack.

I think in the next five years, we'll see these new kinds of empires forming based on the Substack model. And I think we'll see a lot more types of creators succeeding who wouldn't otherwise have found easy entry into the media ecosystem: writers and podcasters and video makers and community managers and cultivators who were left under-exploited by the previous system, because there are a fewer opportunities in the previous ecosystem. I think we'll see much more of a network effect in Substack, where you can benefit from being a writer in a Substack network because of the connections to other writers in the network and the collaborations you can do.

Readers get benefit as well because they can more easily move between worlds in Substack and explore new publications and have different kinds of reading experiences than they would outside of the ecosystem. That kind of amounts to an alternative media universe with different laws of physics than the one that dominates now, which is the attention economy. I think it can go some really exciting and expansive places.

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This is the third and final post of my three-part feature story, “Lunch Ladies: The All-American High School Cafeteria Heist.” For the previous post, click below.

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After leaving the hospital and her job at the East Elementary, Torcasio sued Gluck, the town of New Canaan, and New Canaan Board of Education in U.S. District Court for gender discrimination and fostering a hostile work environment.

In his March 2017 order refusing to the defendants’ request dismiss her lawsuit, Judge Alvin Thompson ruled that Torcasio had legitimate claims that should be adjudicated by the courts when she said she was subject to “adverse employment action” on the basis of her gender while at the school, that Gluck had created a hostile work environment and that she had been subjected to the intentional infliction of emotional distress.

In the spring of 2017, Torcasio received an undisclosed settlement from the town and school board. That June, after 23 years on the job, Gluck resigned. “I felt vindicated,” Torcasio told me, “For a long time, I was afraid to speak up because I was ashamed. But I think I did a good thing, not only for myself but for all the women who work there.”

It soon became even more clear that she had paved the way for other lunch ladies to speak out too.

 On November 15, 2017, after visiting the middle school lunchroom and inviting any employee to contact her with concerns, Jo-Ann Keating, New Canaan Public Schools director of finance and operations, was contacted by a lunchroom worker “who described a number of things that were happening in the cafeteria,” Keating later said, “The most significant was very detailed information about very questionable cash handling.”

During a subsequent investigation by Keating and the New Canaan Police Department, more lunch ladies spoke out. One said Pascarelli had told her not to record cash transactions, and made her falsify the deposit slips to show less revenues. When the school upgraded the registers to a computer system, Pascarelli told the lunch ladies to ignore the new protocol and continue letting her count the cash. One woman said she’d seen a drawer full of cash in the office of Wilson, whom other lunch ladies insisted told them to hand over their uncounted cash too.    

In August 2018, Wilson and Pascarelli were arrested and charged with one count of first degree-larceny for allegedly absconding $478,588 in cash from the New Canaan lunchrooms. But because the statute of limitations confined the investigation to only five years — 2012 – 2017 — authorities believe that the actual amount missing might be much higher, given the decades the sisters had been in charge.

After years of pride for having the state’s top lunchrooms, the town reeled. “We are deeply upset by this alleged violation of our trust and the trust of the entire community,” New Canaan Public Schools superintendent Bryan D. Luizzi wrote in a letter to the community.

The sisters, who face 20 years in prison, deny the charges. “I would never take money,” Pascarelli reportedly told the police, “I know better than that.” According to the warrant for her arrest, Wilson told investigators that “the only thing she is guilty of is feeding a child who had no money or giving somebody a cookie.” They declared that it was Gluck, not them, who was really behind the scheme. Wilson said Gluck had demanded that she give him $100 per day in cash from the lunchrooms since 2006.

After further investigation, police discovered that Gluck had made large cash deposits into his bank account through the academic years — but not during the school breaks. Further, the school’s own accounting showed a drastic spike in lunchroom cash intake after Gluck and the sisters had left. “Continuing the established pattern, upon Gluck’s retirement, daily money intake totals increased dramatically,” police said in a statement. “The investigation showed that Gluck conspired with Pascarelli and Wilson to steal Town monies.”

Following their arrests and not guilty pleas, Gluck and the sisters are now out on bond, as they await trial. New Canaan Public Schools spokesperson Michael Horyczun told me that “this matter is currently pending in the courts, and therefore the staff and administration are not at liberty to speak about it at this time.”

New Canaan First Selectman Kevin Moynihan told me that “from the superintendent's point of view this is just an embarrassment and they don't want it.” He added, “It’s just a disappointment in a high-quality town that that kind of thing can happen.”

Torcasio, who lost her husband Frank in 2017, has undergone therapy for PTSD from her treatment at the school. She hopes that taking a stand will inspire more women and immigrants in similar positions to speak up as well. “I think the minorities need to be believed,” she told me.

Such gospel is spreading around New Canaan. One Sunday morning after Gluck’s arrest, Reverend John T. Morehouse stood before his congregation at the Unitarian Church in Westport, Connecticut, and told them the story of the stolen money at New Canaan’s lunchrooms. For him, it illustrated “the seductive power of expectation,” he said.

“It was no accident that anomalies in the cash collection at the schools evaded officials for so long,” he told the crowd, “When everything is going well, why question the goose that is laying the golden eggs?”

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This is part two of my three-part feature story, “Lunch Ladies.” For the previous post, click below.

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The arrival of a MooBella Machine, a personalized ice cream dispenser with 96 different mix and match combinations — leased for $400 per month in 2010 — was big news in the New Canaan High School cafeteria. As lines grew longer and longer, however, students began taking advantage, going back for refills without paying for a second cup. Soon after, students came to school to find a “closed” sign on the MooBella for a few days. “We had to shut it down,” Gluck told the student paper, “because of a small minority of students who were stealing.”

But this was not the only theft suspected in the lunchrooms. Torcasio was beginning to wonder if Gluck and the sisters had their hands in more than dirty dishes: she and other lunch workers suspected they were skimming cash from the registers. Though schools were converting over to electronic payment systems, they still accepted cash. As lunchroom manager, it was Torcasio’s responsibility to keep track and record the transactions — a substantial amount of work in addition to all the cooking and cleaning.

One day, however, Wilson came into the lunchroom and told her she didn’t need to bother punching all the numbers, she could just put all the cash in a drawer. A lunch lady at another school experienced Pascarelli doing the same. The sisters rarely, if ever, showed her compassion for her work load, and yet every time the lunch ladies had more complicated prep for the meals, Wilson would suggest they simply skip all the tedious money counting. “Oh, it’s pasta day,” Torcasio recalled Pascarelli telling her once, “don’t count the money, just put it in the drawer.”

As suspicions spread, Torcasio began noticing that Wilson began living more lavishly for someone on a lunch lady salary. She purchased a bigger home on the ritzy side of town, and arrived at a banquet in her shiny new Mercedes. Though Gluck continued to drive what Torcasio described as his “beat up” old Volvo, Torcasio and the others had a sense that there was something shady happening between him and the sisters.

After work, they’d see Pascarelli or Wilson emptying registers into a drawer without even counting the money. Sometimes they’d see the sisters with loose cash in their pockets. “I don’t even know how much they were taking,” Torcasio recalled.

But Torcasio felt too scared to speak up, given Gluck’s power in the community. “The Board of Education wouldn’t have believed us anyway,” she said, “He was like a god to them.”

And with her husband growing more ill, having to leave his job and stay home on an oxygen tank, she couldn’t take any risks. Whenever she had concerns about work, Wilson told her to stay silent. “Keep your mouth shut,” she said Wilson told her, “you need the insurance, you have a sick husband.”

October 17, 2013 was pizza day at East Elementary, and students, teachers and parents had it marked on their calendars, eager to swoop in for a slice of Mrs. T’s delectable pies. But pizza day meant a long morning for the lunch ladies, who had to whip up 50 pizzas from scratch. “You had to make the pepperoni,” Torcasio said, “you had to make the vegetable, you had to make the gluten-free, there was a lot you had to do.”

But on that Thursday, making the pizzas for hundreds of hungry kids became a crushing challenge for Torcasio. One of her coworkers had called in sick again, so she had to do it all alone with just one helper. She scrambled as fast as she could: grating cheese, spreading the dough, chopping the onions, only to see the students — one by one by one by one — pour in.

When Kimberley Aponte, the school secretary, came in for a slice, she found Torcasio exhausted and in tears from all the work. Torcasio explained that she was short-staffed again, but pled with Aponte not to tell Wilson or Gluck for fear of reprisal. “Please don’t tell anybody,” she said, “I can do it, I can work through it, I’m fine.”

But Aponte felt concerned enough to bring it up with principal Alexandra “Bunny” Potts anyhow. “Toni is shorthanded in the kitchen,” she told her, “can we see if we can get her an extra hand?” Potts had always known Torcasio as a hard worker, too — one who, in the past, had also urged her not to tell Gluck when the kitchen was short-staffed.

But this time, Potts took it upon herself to alert him. “It was my goal to help the cafeteria run as smoothly as possible,” as Potts later said, “It’s a very, very busy time and it’s an important time to children. So, I felt it very important to do that.”

The next morning after a staff meeting, Torcasio was summoned into Gluck’s office, where she found him and Wilson waiting.

“Why the hell would you go talk to Bunny?!” he shouted, “Bunny called me to tell me that you complained that Marie wouldn't send anyone to help you.”

Torcasio swore she didn't complain to Potts. Potts must have just learned of her situation from Aponte and taken it upon herself to reach out to them.

“Are you telling me that Mrs. Potts was lying to me?” Gluck screamed.

“I never spoke to Mrs. Potts!” Torcasio replied. Terrified of losing her job or being sent to relegated to dish duty, she burst into tears.

“I won't talk to you if you're crying,” Gluck said, “That's unprofessional. This is a place of business.”

But after years of fearing Gluck, Torcasio told me, she felt something turn inside of her, the unfairness, the oppression, the insistence that she and the others remain silent. This man had built a gluten-free empire of fame — and perhaps ill-gotten fortune — on the sweat of the lunch ladies, and for what? For this?

She couldn’t take it anymore.

So, for the first time ever, she snapped back. “Bruce, you got to listen to me!” she shouted, “I don’t want to deal with you!”

She rose from her chair and started approaching him at his desk. “Why do you treat me this way?” She cried.

Gluck and Wilson, who’d never seen her like this, felt taken aback.  “She was a disaster,” Wilson testified, “She was really, really red.  Her neck was really red, she was shaking and she kept pointing her finger and just screaming and that’s all she was doing.”

“As of today,” Gluck told Torcasio, “you’re not to talk to Bunny! To the secretaries! To nobody!” Gluck put an end to the meeting, heading out.

At this point, according to Torcasio, Wilson physically shoved her out of the way as she too headed out the door. (Wilson denied this later, though, saying she was so upset by the fracas that she ran into her office and threw up in the garbage can).

Distraught and overwhelmed, Torcasio began to panic, gasping for air — until she stumbled outside, passed out in her car, and woke up in a hospital bed surrounded by her family.

That’s when her daughter Rosa, her husband Frank, and son Vincenzo pleaded with her to do something. She and the lunch ladies had suffered long enough.

As Torcasio listened, she felt something inside her harden. They were right. She didn’t have to take this anymore, or let any other cafeteria workers endure such wrath. She was going to fight back. “It’s time that I do this,” she said, “it's not right what they did to me.”

This concludes part two of “Lunch Ladies,” a three-part feature I’m serializing exclusively in my newsletter. For interviews, feature stories, as well as posts from Masters of Disruption: How the Gamer Generation Built the Future, please subscribe below and spread the word. Thanks!

Part III Lunch Ladies

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This is part one of a three-part feature story I’m serializing exclusively in Disruptor.

It seemed like just another picture-perfect morning at East Elementary School, a most desirable public middle school in a most auspicious of towns, New Canaan, Connecticut. Autumn leaves fluttered down on the Porsche Cayennes and Mercedes SUVs, as the moms and dads and nannies bid their children goodbye.

A bedroom community of Manhattan, the town of multimillion-dollar colonials and Architectural Digest farmhouses is among the richest in the nation. Residents have included TV anchor Brian Williams, Paul Simon, General Electric chief executive officer Jack Welch, and actress Katherine Heigl, who grew up there and has called it home to “the world’s most pretentious people.”

I met with First Selectman Kevin Moynihan in October 2019 inside his wood-paneled office overlooking the cafes and Pilates studios on Main Street. He told me one of the primary draws is the first-class education system. “The parents have the pressure to raise kids that are all successful,” he said, “So they want to invest in good schools.”

This is why it seemed all the more unusual on October 18, 2013 when Antonia “Toni” Torcasio, a 58-year-old, Italian-American clad in an apron, red shirt, and black pants – the uniform of the school’s cafeteria workers – burst out of East Elementary in tears.

Her sister-in-law, Gisella Libertino, who also worked as a lunch lady there, happened to be outside. When she asked what was wrong, Torcasio said, “They destroy me!” in her thick Italian accent. “They destroy me!” she repeated, heading desperately toward her car.

With a shaky hand and racing heart, she sat behind the wheel and dialed her daughter, Rosa, a human resources officer in nearby Norwalk, Connecticut. “I can’t breathe,” Torcasio told her. As her daughter tried to find out what had happened, Torcasio declared, “It was Bruce and Marie!” And then she passed out cold.

Torcasio was referring to Bruce Gluck, the beloved 51-year-old director of food and nutrition services for New Canaan Public Schools at the time, and his faithful 60-year-old assistant director, Marie Wilson. (Gluck, a classically-trained and award-winning chef, was beloved in town for transforming the county’s cafeterias into a national model of health and nutrition.)

When I met with her in October 2019 at a diner near her home in Norwalk, Torcasio still got emotional when recalling the story. She wore a black shirt, tan pants, and a silver cross. Her faced flushed as she spoke of the abusive system of sexism and intimidation that lurked behind the scenes of the New Canaan Public Schools’ food and nutrition service for decades.

She says it culminated with her desperate escape from the lunchroom that fall day in 2013.

After suing the school district, the town, and Gluck for the hostile environment and gender discrimination in federal court, she became New Canaan’s unlikeliest whistleblower. Her case epitomized how underserved the women who serve the nation’s children can be. (After a prior unsuccessful suit, the second was settled out of court on undisclosed terms in 2017 and Gluck left the school district at the end of the term.)

But that wasn’t all there was to it. For years, she had suspected that Gluck and the sisters were acting out to hide an even more nefarious scheme: she believed they were skimming hundreds of thousands of dollars from the very kids they fed.

In August 2018, Wilson and Pascarelli were arrested and charged with larceny and defrauding a public community for allegedly stealing $478,588 from Saxe Middle School and New Canaan High School between 2012 and 2017. The sisters pled not guilty and are awaiting trial, which has been delayed due to COVID-19. The following April, Gluck — who had moved to Vermont — was arrested and charged with first-degree larceny, defrauding a public community, conspiracy to commit first-degree larceny, and tampering with physical evidence. He pled not guilty as well, and faces trial.

For Torcasio, it feels like vindication for her and every lunch lady who has ever felt dismissed. “The reason I stood up,” she told me, “is because I collapsed.”

The story of these lunch ladies is a story of immigration.

In 1968, at 13, Torcasio emigrated from Calabria, Italy, to live with extended family in an Italian part of Norwalk. Like the other immigrants, she had come (as she told me in broken English and a thick Italian accent) “to have a better living.” Though she didn’t speak English and her family didn’t believe in sending her to school — leaving her with just a sixth-grade education — she found her way in the years to come: marrying a man from the same town in Calabria, Frank, a landscaper; having two children; and starting her own small daycare business.  

“In my hometown in Italy, girls always had to stay home,” she said, and couldn’t work for themselves. “Here was more free,” she said.

But that freedom became more curtailed after Frank became sick with diabetes and COPD. Needing a full-time job with health insurance, she took a position as a cafeteria worker for the New Canaan Public Schools for $22,000 a year. She was assigned to South Elementary, one of five schools in the system.

Though Torcasio had never worked in a commercial kitchen before, she had a passion for cooking — especially pizzas. Even better, the school felt like a slice of the old country, filled with other Italian immigrants, including Wilson and Pascarelli.  

Driving over to the school from her home in Norwalk felt like entering a forbidden world: the exotic cars, the giant houses, the stately lawns — some of which her husband had mowed. “It’s a money town,” she said, “They don’t deal with us, with the low-class thing.”

But the class divide met in the lunchroom, where Torcasio and the other immigrants had the sacred and trusted duty of feeding New Canaanites’ darlings.

It was a responsibility no one relished more than Gluck, who’d been with the school since 1994. (Facing trial now, Gluck did not respond to interview requests).

A paunchy Bronx native with a bushy, graying beard, Gluck seemed to be exactly the kind of food guru the town desired: a trained chef from the Culinary Institute of America who was transforming his cafeterias into pioneering models of healthy eating. It hadn’t been an easy transition when Gluck had from macarons to mac-and-cheese. He criticized Wilson for ordering too many chicken nuggets, only to find that she was right when she said it’s better to stock up because the food company runs out. “He needed to learn how school operated,” Wilson later said in a deposition, “It was very antiquated. It was a very difficult time for him.”

Gluck had grown dismayed over so many students loading up on chips and sweets in the cafeterias and chucking the nutritional food in the trash. He made the then controversial move of cutting back the junk food from the menu entirely. “It turns my stomach to sell anything I wouldn’t give my own children,” he told The New Canaan-Darien + Rowayton magazine in 2006. When parents called the school to complain, he stood firm he told the magazine. “'Look, we’re not saying you can’t send snacks to school with your children,’” he said he explained, “'but you need to be the one who makes that choice.’”

As Gluck designed a heathy menu with ingredients sourced from local farms, it was up to Torcasio and the other lunch ladies to fulfill his wishes. She and the two other lunch ladies on her team had their work cut out for them — they arrived at 8 a.m., and had to prepare lunch from scratch for 300 students. “I never cooked for so many people,” Torcasio told me.

Instead of serving the usual industrial chicken fingers and rubbery burgers, she perfected Gluck’s balsamic chicken wraps and flourless black bean avocado brownies. She told me she introduced — with Gluck’s approval — healthy recipes of her own: lentil soup, butternut squash soup, and (what became her signature dish) cauliflower crust pizza. Gluck teased Torcasio, she said, for trying to “show off” her cooking skills, but gave her the ultimate compliment by adding her pizza to the high school menu. “He loved her cooking,” Wilson testified.

So did the others. Students affectionately nicknamed her “Mrs. T.” Parents and teachers clamored for her cauliflower pizza. Though the students came from elite backgrounds (like the one who told her about his trip on Air Force One), they treated her like their own grandma. “The kids were very good to us,” she said. [Office1] She looked out for the less privileged ones, buying a 75-cent cookie herself for a girl who couldn’t afford the treat.

Gluck, too, considered Torcasio not only a good cook, but a hard worker. “I always liked her,” he later testified. Ten months after hiring her, he promoted her to lunchroom manager at another school in the district, East Elementary.  

On February 9, 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama launched “Let’s Move!”, a campaign to fight childhood obesity, including improving food quality at the nation’s schools. At the end of that year, President Obama signed the Health, Hunger-Free Kids Act into law, creating national standards for school nutrition.

While the rest of the country was catching up with the program, New Canaan’s school lunchrooms were pushing even further ahead. After years of ingratiating himself within the town, Gluck had forged a kind of artisanal culinary institute of his own, generating enough from cafeteria sales (which boasted an 85 percent student participation rate) to turn away federal funds. "I think more than government mandates, success involves the community and we have great involvement here in New Canaan,” he told the New Canaan Advertiser in January 2011. “The people here want what is best for the town and what is best for their children."

This meant his cafeterias did not have to abide by or have his creativity limited by the government’s relatively bland, mandated menus. He eliminated processed food entirely, and was serving rotating menus including vegetarian sushi and farm-raised duck. For the parents who grew up on school lunches of cold lasagna and gelatinous pudding, it felt like having their own Bobby Flay.

“He has been instrumental in all of this,” Cobie Graber, co-founder of the school’s Wellness Program told the New Canaan Advertiser in 2011. Gluck and his staff began catering around town, he received a $10,000 grant to further study nutrition, and he became a celebrity spokesperson for a local pizzeria (“As the Director of Food Services, I, most heartily, encourage everyone to try Primo Crust’s products!”).

Worst was “the Day of the Ducks.” Gluck insisted on putting a most complex meal on the lunch menu: steamed duck.

But for Torcasio and the cafeteria workers beneath him, Gluck’s meteoric rise was coming at a price. Though a charmer to the PTA, he was a “raging bull” behind-the scenes, lunch worker Paul Mele later testified. Transforming the lunchrooms into his farm-to-table fantasy was trying work: lugging 50-pound bags of potatoes, cooking vats of chili, keeping track of hundreds of cash transactions.

Worst of all was what Torcasio called “the Day of the Ducks.” This came after Gluck insisted on putting a most complex meal on the lunch menu: steamed duck. Torcasio told me how watched his face redden and eyes bulge when he saw the ducks face down in pans. The ducks had to first be hung by their necks to keep the blood in the carcasses, he told her, then later put in pans and steamed.

Another time, he declared that to celebrate “Dr. Seuss Day,” on the author’s birthday, the women had to whip up green eggs and ham on the fly – not with food coloring, but the natural dye of steamed spinach, which took hours. “He wanted perfection from people who were not perfect,” she recalled, “he was the chef, not us.”

Gluck would call on Wilson several times a day, to express anger when someone changed the menu or didn’t his follow recipe, or how they poorly spiced the egg salad, or why saved the day’s cold cuts rather than tossing them. “Did you see what was on the deli?!” he barked one time, then hurled the meat on the floor.

Another time, unsatisfied with the chicken salad, he flung a spoonful at lunch lady, Anna Granata. “He said, ‘this chicken taste like shit,’” Granata testified, “and threw the spoon right toward me.” She became so frightened when he confronted her for taking home a slice of pizza that was otherwise being thrown out, that she urinated in her pants.  “I used to cry in the shower,” she went on, “I used to cry in the car.”

When the lunch ladies balked at any of this, they had to endure Gluck’s rants about the “bitches,” “morons,” and “shmucks” he had to deal with every day from the Board of Education, the students, the teachers, the staff. They were told not to raise issues with the principal and, least of all, the moms. “If a mother comes in here, don’t complain,” Torcasio said Wilson told her, “just talk with her about whatever she wants to talk about.”

Torcasio quickly found out what would happen if she went over Gluck’s head. When two of her coworkers complained about him to their union boss — Pascarelli — it would go straight back to Wilson, her sister. “If a person who say anything,” Torcasio recalled, “she will straight to Marie and she will report it.”

When that happened, the person complaining would be sent to the lunch lady equivalent of Siberia: dish duty at the high school. Cafeteria worker Aurea Lopez claimed in Torcasio’s federal lawsuit that this happened to her after injuring her neck in a car accident. She filed a statement with the court saying that she’d given Gluck a doctor’s note specifying that she needed light duty until she recovered. Instead, she found herself assigned to dish duty in the high school as what she calls “a punishment.” As another lunch lady testified, “You can’t speak out about anything or you will be put on dishes.”

But for all Gluck’s rage, the few men — representing about 10 percent of the staff — who worked in the kitchens seemed immune. “He would yell more at the females,” Mele recalled, “he used his power.” Granata insisted “he treat all the women very bad.”

Gluck had himself been growing beleaguered over his deteriorating relationship with the lunch ladies. He testified about one lunchroom manager he had to fire for “supernatural issues.” She called him “evil” for being a Jew, he said, and suggested he needed to get anointed. “I was frightened,” he said.

“They have not worked outside the home,” Gluck said, “And so I think that working for a man is intimidating to many of them.”

But he also knew that Torcasio feared him. He had seen her burst into tears at least 10 times just at the sight of him. “I was the trigger,” he said. Finally, when he asked her why she was upset by him, she replied, “you just scare me.”

For the lunch ladies, the kitchen had long been a safe space, both at work and home, a place they could commiserate and unwind. They liked the freedom, the comradery – sometimes a bit too much, like when one lunch lady jumped up on a sink to demonstrate her pole dancing skills, which Gluck reprimanded her for doing.

Gluck and the sisters insist they had a standard to maintain. Pascarelli would defend him in her testimony as simply “passionate” about his job. The stakes, they said, were high. “If we're not careful, we can make kids sick,” she testified.

Gluck thought the reason Torcasio and the lunch ladies felt so scared of him was not only because he was the boss, but because he was a man. “They have not worked outside the home,” he said, “And so I think that working for a man is intimidating to many of them.”

Pascarelli agreed, “It was a hard adjustment to get used to a male boss for everyone, they were used to a woman there.”

Wilson thought the problem was that the women were simply not as smart as him. “Bruce is an intelligent man,” she testified, “and sometimes he doesn't realize who he's talking to when it comes to being clear or getting on their level and talking to them in a way that they understand.”

 “So,” the attorney asked, “you are a lower level than Mr. Gluck?”

“I would say that.”

Lunch Ladies is a three-part feature story I’m serializing exclusively in my newsletter. To read the next part, as well as others feature stories and posts from Masters of Disruption: How the Gamer Generation Built the Future, please subscribe below. Thanks!

Part II Lunch Ladies

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Jeff Tweedy is a busy man, even during a pandemic. In the last year, the 54-year-old singer and songwriter for Wilco has published his second book, livestreamed an Instagram series, embarked on a concert tour, and put out a new solo record (including a deluxe edition he announced this week). As if that’s not enough, he’s also now sharing memories, songs, and perhaps some parenting advice in his new Substack newsletter, Starship Casual. I caught up with Tweedy earlier this month when he was on the road with Wilco in Portland.

David Kushner: What interested you in starting Starship Casual ?

Jeff Tweedy: I'd seen Substack and links to Substack on Twitter and stuff like that, but I wasn't really totally up to speed on what it was. Once I started looking at it, I started having all kinds of ideas about how you could use it. It’s like getting to put out my own little mini-magazine publication devoted to just whatever I'm feeling.

David Kushner: In your intro post to Starship Casual, you refer to insights you've gained from trying to make social media feel worthwhile and honest. What insights are those?

Jeff Tweedy: Well, George [Saunders, the novelist] had a really fantastic phrase describing Substack to me as like social media purified by conscience. One of the things that is conscienceless about a lot of other forms of social media is mitigating your desire for attention with just how tempting it is to engage in a daily economy of outrage. Everything that you do that's outward-facing to the public is curated to some degree, you can't really avoid that. But I think it's really interesting trying to curate really small little fragments in other forms of social media too. I honestly don't quite get the point sometimes. I think it's reaching outwards for some connection. I don't find that to be particularly troublesome, but I'm not sure that I've completely figured it out. I just know that it wasn't for me. I might have said I have some insights, but insights are kind of overrated. It’s just more of a feeling that I didn't trust when I've dabbled in it. I didn't really trust the way that I wanted to portray myself.

“Everybody wants to feel like they could hang out with their favorite singer.”

David Kushner: During the pandemic, you started streaming The Tweedy Show with your family in your house. How did that experience open you up to sharing even more in Starship Casual?

Jeff Tweedy: The Tweedy Show was really my wife's idea to do it on her Instagram and keep it a little bit separate from the Wilco official sites or my own Instagram, and just try and allow it to be something that organically grows. We really wanted to acknowledge and pay respect to the notion that everybody in the world conceivably was going through a similar experience for the first time in any of our lives. There were no stages. There was no hierarchy of whose entertainment is more valued over someone else's. It's all available to everyone, based on the technology available to them. I found that to be really liberating. I've always wanted to feel that way about the musicians and the performers and the people that I am drawn to. Everybody wants to feel like they could hang out with their favorite singer.

David Kushner: What is about this way of reaching your audience that appeals to you?

Jeff Tweedy: On the internet, there's more immediate responses to things. But it doesn't ever really feel like people come at it acknowledging the spirit of how it was made. They come at it like, ‘oh, this is a Wilco record. I need to put it into context.’ There’s just baggage with everything. I always have craved that feeling of playing a song for someone or saying something to someone, and then feeling that immediate give and take. You only really get that one on one. Early on when I first started writing songs, I'd play them for my mom. She wouldn't necessarily get them, but she would receive them in the spirit that they were created. Like, I'm not trying to do anything wrong. I'm not trying to get one over on anybody. I'm not trying to assert my intellect as superior or anything. But people get all kinds of mixed reactions to how you put things into the world, especially when you put a price tag on it, like ‘who does he think he is? This is worth a lot? You know, you think this is worth this?’

I started doing this with friends on text, sending them a song a day. And I do it with Wilco now. It’s like the only place I really get this kind of genuine, in-the-moment, 'wow, thank you for playing that song for me.’  It’s not like I need to hear 'that's the greatest song I've ever heard in my life.’ It’s like, 'oh, you shared your song with me, I really feel like special because you shared your song with me, thank you.’ It's really simple and direct. The Tweedy Show was like that too. That was an initial foray into realizing that that's available through technology in a way that I never had explored.

David Kushner: I think some people would find that surprising, because you're up there sharing your songs every night. You have been doing it for decades with an audience who are receptive and responding.

Jeff Tweedy: An audience is a thing that doesn't really have a centralized consciousness. So it's kind of unwieldy and it's hard. My natural, evolutionarily-derived instinct is to find the people that aren't enjoying themselves in an audience, sensing danger, like, ‘what's this guy yawning about?’ They could be surrounded by people dancing, and you'll pick them out. It’s just like being on the Savannah, and looking for the tiger. I feel like gazelle.

David Kushner: The first song that you shared in Starship Casual, “A Lifetime to Find,” is a ballad about death. Why start with that one?

Jeff Tweedy: It was just a song. It just popped into my head and. I didn't really spend a whole lot of time looking for something. I just like went through my phone and I listened to that one and I thought, ‘oh, I'd like to see what people think of that.’ It's also probably because I've written a lot for the next Wilco record. And I have a lot of songs like that I don't see fitting into the Wilco record the way it stands. The Wilco record that we're working on is in a different direction, sonically. That one is sort of a folk tradition type song, and I write lots of those. I think part of me was saying, 'God, if you don't share it here, who knows how long it'll be before you get a chance?’

“I went from writing about a morbid set of fears to writing about a morbid set of realities.”

David Kushner: Part of what you’ve been sharing - in your memoir, and in recent songs like “Orphan” - is your experience of losing your parents. How has that loss shaped you as an artist and opened you up to sharing more with your audience?

Jeff Tweedy: My mom dying was probably my worst fear my whole life. Living through that would've been the first transition to actually having experienced the worst-case scenario, as far as your deepest fears about how you're going to cope with the world and live through it. It was pretty obvious early on that I wasn't dying too. That doesn't take any of the sadness or the grief away, but it is kind of amazing how quickly you realize that, okay, that's the worst thing I could have ever imagined. And I'm still here. I’m still I'm able to think, even though I completely lost my mind.

With my dad dying, I wouldn't have expected it to be so profound because it was a difficult relationship a lot of my life. I wouldn't have ever described myself as being particularly close to my father. But I realized as he was dying, and in the few years before preceding his death, how similar we are. I diagnosed him late in life with a lot of the same mood disorders that I like have to contend with. And I think he was difficult probably because he's self-medicated for a lot of the same things. I've been able to find better help. I do think that there's some transition there. It was going from writing about a morbid set of fears to writing about a morbid set of realities.

David Kushner: Do you think your posts in Starship Casual as forming a larger narrative about you and your life?

Jeff Tweedy: Yeah, I think so. It’s a little too early to tell. I think if it really does form something coherent, I think it will. I'm really wanting to normalize shorter paragraphs. I think a lot of storytelling and a lot of the way people write is rooted in this idea that you need to get everybody to see everything in the room and qualify everything. I'm just not really good at writing like that. I like haiku. I like poems. I'm trying to get to the essence of memory. It doesn't even have to be accurate, because I think that there's really beauty in the way you tell a story that doesn't require a lot of those specifics.

David Kushner: Between your two books and your newsletter, you’ve had to transition from songwriting to prose. What are the challenges in that for you?

Jeff Tweedy: With the first book, I felt like I could do it, but I didn't feel like I was going to enjoy it. Because it was hard and it was so different. it's like the photo negative of what I try and get at with a song. It’s like putting all of the things in there that I try and cut away from a song. Especially in a memoir, you're trying to make it as clear as possible. With my songs, I've tried to make as much room for the listener as possible, to have space for them to color in. But once I got going, honestly, it started to feel really good. It was an incredible sense of accomplishment having finished it. I've heard other writers say that ‘I hate writing, but I love finishing a book.’ That’s a really, really, really good feeling. And the second book, I think I was just in the zone for that book. It was early in the pandemic. I was home with the family, but spending a lot of time in solitude thinking about the thing that I think about the most and trying to share my thoughts about creativity. It’s not necessarily about writing a song, but just being given a chance to be an advocate for creativity. That's what I looked at it. Somebody gave me an opportunity to write a book that where I could tell people, ‘Hey, this is good for you. I don't care if you're good or not, you should do something.’”

David Kushner: Is that something you plan to do more in Starship Casual, write about songwriting and the creative process?

Jeff Tweedy: Yeah. I don't know. I mean it could go in any direction at this point. The next thing on the agenda for expanding a little bit on the newsletter would be to incorporate some friendly advice, solicit some questions.

David Kushner: What kind of questions have people had for you?

Jeff Tweedy: Well the sincere questions, I think there were a lot of them about parenting, which is really How to Raise One Child. Maybe that's the next book.

David Kushner: What’s your advice for the parenting people out there?

Jeff Tweedy: I'm a big advocate of good enough parenting. I think when you try and win at parenting, you're almost inevitably going to do some damage.

David Kushner: With all this prose writing, what about fiction? Have you thought about writing short stories or a novel?

Jeff Tweedy: It's been a really long time since I've been as interested in other people's fiction. I love books. I'm a big reader. I'm still kind of catching up with the 20th century as far as fiction goes.

David Kushner: What's on your nightstand or on your Kindle?

Jeff Tweedy: Well, it's not on my Kindle, but it's The Sound And The Fury. There’s an edition of it where they actually printed it the way that he had initially wanted it to be printed, where all of the different temporal jumps were written in different colored inks. In the narrative, there's only a handful of days that they're really talking about in the time frame. So whenever any character is talking about a specific date, it's in a different colored ink, and there's like a little guide with it. That was incredibly helpful. It was like a really difficult book to know who's talking, get your head around. So that's been fun. It has led me to kind of rereading the Snopes books.

David Kushner: What other authors have had a big impact on you would you say as a writer?

Jeff Tweedy: Well in the newsletter in particular, David Markson. I don't think it would've ever occurred to me to write this way without being in love with his books. And in particular, his four books that are written using notecards. I think he never wrote a paragraph that was longer than he could fit on a notecard. And then he would just organize them into these narratives. One book is called Reader’s Block and there’s This is Not a Novel. It’s very similar to the way that my memories work. But he's incorporating just fragments of his knowledge of other artists or other people, other composers' lives and authors' lives. A typical sentence in a David Markson book would be like, ‘Celine was an anti-Semite.’ It’s mesmerizing reading those books, because there's such short, concise pieces of language. His use of grammar is so powerful because the syntax of how he constructs these sentences ends up having this rhythm to it. I feel like I walk away from reading a David Markson book for an hour or so thinking in those types of sentences.

David Kushner: The Rememories you’re writing in the newsletter are interesting in that way, because they does seem a stream of consciousness, like you're starting with one memory and just kind of seeing where it goes. Is that an exercise for you?

Jeff Tweedy: They are written like that. I'll just think what's a story that I tell about my life to my friends or to my kids. I'll just start with like, ‘oh, how can I get that story down without boring someone?’ Sometimes it takes a few paragraphs to get to the punchline of the story or the takeaway from the story. Sometimes it's really quick. But as I'm writing one, it usually does pop some other memory into my head and I try and honor that and write them as they come.

David Kushner: Is your desire to write in a more concise, encapsulated way because of the medium here? You’re writing something that’s landing in someone’s email inbox.

Jeff Tweedy: Well, I think it's a really satisfying way of writing for me. I really enjoy it. I find it to be really evocative and challenging to get language to be that emotive and at the same time being so sparse or kind of streamlined. I think it's just a coincidence that it's something I really wanted to do. Then it is something that kind of lends itself really well to the way people consume a newsletter or a lot of things in their inbox or the way that people consume information all day long even. It just seems like a natural way to communicate. I think it's really daunting for somebody sitting in the morning, opening up all their emails to see big paragraphs of information.

I think you can skim the types of paragraphs I'm writing, hopefully without even reading them and get the gist of where things are going. That's the way I think memory works. If I could transfer my memory to someone else, I think the keywords are really all that's going to stick with you. I think if you can get the keywords to jump out that memory is going to form probably similar to mine. It might not be exactly the same, but it will have a similar resonance.

“Nobody is constructing a version of me that's accurate, no matter how much I share.”

David Kushner: In How to Write One Song, you wrote about using the cut-up technique, which reminds me of what William S. Burroughs did. How does writing like this enable you to get to a different sort of truth?

Jeff Tweedy: I think a lot of artists have trouble being an authority on things like truth. I want to be kind and emotionally open and available and connected, and I don't want to be a liar and I don't want to be false. But when it comes to my experience of the world and relating that experience of the world to someone else, the last thing I would want is for somebody to think that I'm less fallible than they are somehow in expressing that.

David Kushner: With all this writing, do you every worry about oversharing?

Jeff Tweedy: Oh, I think everybody has so much inside of them. There’s things that I'm not aware of, that I haven't gotten to for myself. We all carry around things that we haven't unpacked. So I'm never worried about that. I guess overexposure is a thing or familiarity can breed some sort of contempt, but no. It's like people ask me that about the book, too. Did you give away all your secrets? And I feel the same way about this. Nobody is actually constructing a version of me that's accurate, no matter how much I share. No one would take all of the different things that I use to write a song and write a song that sounds like one of mine exactly, if they're doing it right. I think you could go and imitate someone else's style, but that's not what my book is describing. Those aren't the steps or that's not the process you would use to write, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart." It's just the process that was used to write, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart." Now when I used it again, it wrote something else. And when I used it the next time it wrote something else. It works that way for me, I would assume it would work even more so for someone else.

David Kushner: What else do you have planned for Starship Casual in the future?

Jeff Tweedy: Well, there's the advice stuff. One thing that I get asked about a lot is gear, musical gear and stuff like that. I love it and I find it interesting. I'm kind of going back and forth on whether or not there's a place for it on Starship Casual. I think that there are emotional stories I can tell, or ways to share that information that doesn't feel just like gear talk but I'm still wrestling with it

David Kushner: What was the idea behind calling this Starship Casual?

Jeff Tweedy: Starship Casual, that whole idea to me was that we walk around using these devices that have the computing power of whatever, beyond what it took to go to the moon. But we're not trying to discover new worlds or anything, we’re just trying to connect in a way. And I think that's a pretty amazing use of this almost hard-to-believe equipment we carry around.

“I realized, ‘oh, you don't have to fucking do that. You're good enough just being. These people are on your side.’”

David Kushner: Well, it's all so new too. I mean, you and Patti Smith are some of the first artists to start doing this. It’ll be interesting to see how it evolves.

Jeff Tweedy: Yeah. I'm interested. I'm cut out for it, because one of the things that was really hard for me early on was the idea that I had to have a different personality or a different persona on stage than who I was. That was something that never came naturally to me, and it was really disorienting or early on. It made it really hard going on the road and coming home to my kids and stuff like that. And at some point I figured out I'm going to spend every second of my life trying to make those two people feel compatible with each other because it was painful and it caused me damage and it made it hard to get better. It turned into things that were killing me. Then I figured out, ‘oh, you can be the same fucking person!’” Jonathan Richmond is the same fucking person, he's my hero. Patti Smith for all of her, for all of her artifice and grandiosity, she is that person I've met her. She thinks and acts that way. So it was just a revelation: ‘oh, that's cool, that’s being an outward advocate for just being your own fucking person.’

David Kushner: How did you end up reconciling those two parts of yourself?

Jeff Tweedy: I don't really know. I think it might have just been a switch. It might have just been, like when I realized, ‘oh, you don't have to fucking do that. You're good enough just being. These people are on your side. They didn't come here to see you try and be Joe Strummer or something. They didn't pay to see the glamour. You're not glamorous Jeff Tweedy.

For interviews, feature stories, as well as posts from my new book, Masters of Disruption: How the Gamer Generation Built the Future, which I’m serializing exclusively in my newsletter, please subscribe below and spread the word. Thanks!

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In the Todd Mission dream world, no one lives as well as the King. For the past 38 years, Coulam has lived in a sprawling estate, which he calls Stargate Manor, of his own elaborate design. Tucked away across the street from the festival inside the sprawling, loblolly pine forest, unicorn statues line his driveway and, across the grounds, there’s a cathedral, a meditation garden, and the mausoleum where he will be buried some day.

Inside the manor house, the Texas sun beams down through dozens of wide, stained-glass windows and skylights and the light switches are handcrafted from jewel-encrusted beetles. Rows of beaver pelts hung in the kitchen, stuffed pheasants in the living room and a jungle of plastic flowers crowded his bedroom.

During my visit in 2004, Coulam boasted of what he called his Throne Room — his master bathroom, decorated with Trumpian flair. The “throne” itself was a jet-black toilet with a golden flush handle, and the matching gilded toilet paper dispenser was decorated with giant tassels. The sloping ceiling was painted like a sky with fluffy clouds. When atop his perch, Coulam enjoyed a panoramic view outside to his ornately-tiled hot tub and crystal-clear swimming pool.

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But in the years since Brandon Smith’s murder, the fantasy world that Coulam created has continued to unravel. The mythology of consequence-free sex, ale, and jousting seems increasingly stuck in the past.

In November 2020, Coulam’s personal assistant, Toni Ewton, filed a federal lawsuit against the Texas Renaissance Festival for sexual harassment, wrongful termination, and sexual discrimination. Ewton claimed that Coulam made her search for sexual and romantic partners on a variety of “sugar baby” dating sites, and that he fired her when she complained. Hers followed a similar lawsuit by another of Coulam’s personal assistants, in 2018. Both lawsuits were settled for undisclosed amounts.

One performer, Jeremy Bulloch told the Houston Press that “working at TRF is like working at WWE. They count on people living the gig and wanting it since they were kids. That way they can treat them like shit and underpay them.”

“People who are out might be happy to talk,” he added “but people still inside are likely to clam up so as to not jeopardize their plans for next season.”

“We're not showing as much bosom as we did. Times changed.”

Todd Mission continues to be plagued violent crimes that one would not expect to find in a town of only 107 people. Last April, investigators from the Grimes County sheriff’s office found human remains of a 21-year-old college student behind a Todd Mission home, and later charged three men with murdering the victim after a drug deal gone bad. And just this summer, on July 17th, police found a decomposed body in the woods across the street from the festival grounds. “We don’t know if it’s foul play,” said Sheriff Sowell, but the investigation is underway.

With the 47th annual Texas Renaissance Festival beginning October 9th, Sheriff Sowell hopes that the King makes some changes in his own domain. “I think he could do a lot more to help make a more safe environment,” he told me, including hiring additional security.

With battles over abortion and voting, Texas is in the spotlight more than ever these days. For this year’s Faire, other changes are afoot - including toning down on the bawdiness. The Faire’s wandering “wenches,” as they’re called, no longer leave lipstick traces on passersby or dress as provocatively. “We understand that times changed,” Baldwin says, “We're not showing as much bosom as we did. We're not being as racy with our humor or as sexual-oriented with the humor. We can't be.”

As for the future, Baldwin says plans are already in place for Coulam’s eventual successor. But King George won’t be relinquishing his crown anytime soon. ”He'll never completely retire completely,” Baldwin says, “I've likened him to Willy Wonka. He built this world of pure imagination and he'll never give it up.”

This marks the end of “Renaissance, Texas,” a nine-part, serialized story I’m running exclusively in my newsletter. To read from the beginning click here.

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Following Brandon Smith’s death, King George’s reign came under question as reports spread that the Festival had failed to provide adequate security.

When pressed by a Houston Chronicle reporter, Coulam pushed back. “It was a tragic mistake that happened out there. You can't blame that on our security — we had plenty of security out there."

During the investigation, however, Sheriff Sowell learned the festival only had 15 people working security for a crowd in the tens of thousands, and two of them had been sent home early. There were no security guards at all in the parking lot at all.

“Drink, weed, and stupidity can mix anywhere."

After deputies quickly matched the car outside Noland’s home to the witness reports of the one seen speeding away from the crime scene, Noland arrived at Sheriff Sowell’s office the day after the murder to turn himself in. In the trial two years later, Noland’s attorneys alleged that he had acted in self-defense. "I think if you look at the evidence and listen to Brent Noland you see what was in his heart,” he told the jury, “He isn't the type of person to do what they say he did unprovoked."

The jury didn’t agree.

On May 16, 2006, Noland was sentenced to 55 years in prison for the murder. His friend, Joshua Damuth, who had kicked Smith in the head while Noland stabbed him, pled guilty to aggravated assault, and was sentenced to 100 days in jail.

The murder soon became the talk of the RenFaire forums. On Renaissancefestival.com, a poster nicknamed “Sir Martin” lamented the stain on the TRF’s storied history. "The important thing for all of us to remember,” he wrote, “is that this is the only incident of this magnitude in the 35 year history of our great faire.  In the past few years, security has been increased and TRF attendees can be confident that they are in a safe environment."

Another, Captain Killian, addressed the irony that when real violence came to the Faire, it wasn’t period-appropriate. "No one pulled forth the sword on their hip and went to town, no battle axe mayhem, no black powder flintlock executions....just some Shiner Bock and a knife,” he wrote, “Drink, weed, and stupidity can mix anywhere." He went on to proclaim, "Huzzah to our Faire, and the staff and police that help keep it safe...because as was told to me on my very first visit, Where else can you walk around with 42 inches of razor sharp steel, walk into a pub, and the only thing the cop at the door might say is...'nice sword'."

In the next part of “Renaissance, Texas:” Can the party go on?

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In August, I caught up with Grimes County Sheriff Don Sowell by phone while he was attending a police convention in San Antonio. We spoke about the challenges of policing the Texas Renaissance Festival, and the murder of Brandon Smith.

“Nowadays, it seems like everybody’s going nuts.”

Sowell has been Sheriff there for 21 years. When I asked him about the crimes of Todd Mission, Texas, he said they’re a sign of the times across the country.

“What's happening around the country?” He told me in his thick southern drawl, “I tell you what, I'm not trying to sidestep your question, I'm just thinking what's happening around the whole country? Nowadays it seems like everybody's going nuts. Oh man. It seems like every time you turn on the news, there’s some crazy, crazy story again about something stupid: drive-by shootings and innocent children getting killed over nothing. I never seen anything like it. I don't know where we're getting into.”

In the next post of “Renaissance, Texas:” The verdict on the murder of Brandon Smith.

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George Coulam caught the Rennie bug the moment he went to his first Renaissance festival in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Originally from Salt Lake City and raised Mormon, Coulam had left the area to complete his master’s in art at the California State University at Northridge, and was teaching glassblowing to festival visitors. Ren fests were new at the time — the creation of Northern California hippies who wanted to experience the revelry, chivalry, and bawdy good times of yore. “It was a time where you could be a true Renaissance man,” Coulam told me. “You could paint, make sculpture, write poetry.”

With his brother’s help, Coulam started his own festival in Salt Lake City, but sought a new location after he said, “the church invited us to leave because we were using some of the students from BYU.” The fair he then held in Jonathan, Minnesota in 1971 was a success, he tired of the relentless Midwestern winters and decided to relocate to a warmer climate.

He began quietly buying up land in Todd Mission, Texas, which was then an economically depressed town of forgotten farms and lumber mills. By the time the locals figured out what his grand scheme was, it was too late: Coulam had already amassed a couple hundred acres.

After the first festival got underway in 1975, the hordes of bawdy Rennies quickly alienated the more reserved town folk. “You’d see these guys walking around with their swords,” Al the Junk Man told me. “People didn’t know what to make of it.”

And as King George and his Rennies discovered, Texans have a way of dealing with strangeness.

“They used to have what they called ‘hippie hangings’ around here,” recalled Cooper, the man who’d left the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for Texas, told me in 2004.

They didn’t actually string up the Rennies, but they gave them ample servings of Texas hell. The good old boys would try to pick fights at local grocery stores, and the cops would chime in too, pulling the Rennies over and writing them up for driving oversized campers or raiding them for smoking pot.

“It was like the end of ‘Easy Rider’ here, but for real,” Cooper said.

“They used to have what they called ‘hippie hangings’ around here.”

Cooper’s assistant Sarah Freeh, who grew up on the Rennie circuit as the daughter of a stained-glass artist, told me she once ventured over to the Thousand Horns roadhouse with some of Coulam’s friends and lasted all of 15 minutes. “They chased us out the door with their shotguns,” she said.

Though the festival was an increasing success, Coulam needed to smooth out things with the locals unless he wanted to live in fear for the rest of his life.

So, by 1982, he executed a plan. Because he had enough land under his ownership to be able to legally incorporate the town, he did so — and then he staged a mayoral election.

In a landslide vote, the few dozen residents — Rennies of course — elected him mayor. “I had a say in what went on around here now,” Coulam said, “I bought up the land, and I got control.” Coulam has made sure that the local artists don’t have to pay personal property taxes; they only pay sales tax.

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Realizing then that the Rennies were here to stay, then formerly reluctant locals started venturing cautiously into the festival grounds. “People saw that we cared about what we were doing,” George says. “This wasn’t just a business, this was our life.” The locals also realized that it was a virtual cash cow — many of the Rennies earn a year’s wages in the six weeks of TRF — that could benefit everyone in town if they could learn to tolerate the oddballs.

And so a precarious truce developed.  Soon Jeff Baldwin, now the TRF’s general manager, began fielding calls from rural Texans who would do anything to slip into a cod piece or petticoat and work the show.  “We had droves of these locals showing up and learning how to speak King’s English,” Baldwin told me, “It was the craziest thing.”

With Coulam as mayor, the locals cashed in. “We realized they were basically okay, and it was good for business,” said Al the Junkman. 

“Before long, the local cops were working security for us,” Coulam told me. The local police in Todd Mission put the image of a jousting knight on their patches.

But they keep a healthy distance. “They live in their world,” he added with a grin, “And we live in ours.”

A couple of hours after he told me this, the parking lot of the festival was filled with the red and blue flashing lights of the police cars and the red and white flashing lights of an ambulance. Brandon Smith lay in a pool of blood, dead, on the ground. And Sheriff Sowell was stepping out of his car, wearing his white cowboy hat, looking at the murder victim and for the person who had done it.

In the next post of “Renaissance, Texas:” the Sheriff of Rennie Town.

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In this clip, featured on the Texas Renaissance Festival’s own YouTube channel, King George holds court from the sprawling estate he built in Todd Mission. He calls the place Stargate Manor. Note the stained glass windows and walls made of jagged stacks of gray slate.

At around the 12 minute mark, King George explains how he rules with a firm hand - and, when needed, a bulldozer. He recalls the time when he heard a visitor wanted to return a $400 ring bought at the festival, only to be told by the vendor that he was not going to refund the money.

“I went down to the jeweler,” King George says, “and I says [sic], ‘the customer can bring back anything, anytime, anywhere, for whatever reason, it doesn’t matter, we give him his money back.”

When the jeweler refused to comply, George got on his radio and called for his helper, Shorty. “I say ‘Shorty,’” George recalls, “‘get the bulldozers and some dump trucks, and we’re gonna move this guy out of the festival.’” When the backhoes and bulldozers pulled up, the jeweler relented and returned the visitor’s cash. The rest of the vendors got the message from their King loud and clear, he says, “the other artists and craftsmen realized they got to abide by the rules.”

In the next post of “Renaissance, Texas:” The End of Easy Rider.

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Back in 2004, as Brandon Smith and his family made their way through the bustling gates of the Texas Renaissance Festival late on that October morning, they had reason to want a little fantasy in their lives. Smith’s father had died of a heart attack when he was just six; one of his brothers drowned in a swimming pool in 1980; another brother had died the year before in a four-wheeler accident. So, with just a few days of Brandon’s leave from the Navy to be together, he and his younger sister Kristen were eager to enjoy some puppet shows and turkey legs.

But Smith apparently couldn’t leave his sense of duty far behind. When Brent Noland, a wiry, 19-year-old with short dark hair approached them for help, Smith was happy to oblige. Noland told them he’d come to the Fest with a group of buddies from his nearby hometown of Montgomery, but gotten separated from the group. He asked if he could borrow a cell phone call them, because he didn’t have one on him.

Noland had already been partying despite the early morning hours – smoking some weed, washing down a couple Xanax with a beer. Sensing the younger man could use some direction in life, Smith began extolling the virtues of the Navy, and jotted down his name and number should Noland ever want to pursue it. "He was a 24-hour-a-day recruiter," Smith’s friend Betsy Barricklow later told the Houston Chronicle, "This was a young man who, I think, was going to be in the military until retirement."

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After Noland and the siblings parted ways, Brandon and Kristen made their way across the grounds, where 3,000 colorfully-costumed characters were there to mingle, jabbering in broken Old English and performing period festivities on 21 scattered stages.

There were mud fights, wandering lute-strumming minstrels, teams of jugglers, and goofy comedians like the “PeeBodies,” two men who dressed as though they were soaked in urine. Self-described “beer wenches,” who’d deliver tankards of ale.

Coulam promoted a free-loving atmosphere — and with all the drinking and dancing and leather clothing, things tended to get debauched easily. “Every girl has a little naughty in them,” Melba Tucker, the TRF’s marketing director, told me in 2004. “This is a chance for them to let it out.”

For a small fee, patrons could use their teeth to pull a variety of shrewdly-placed knickknacks from a given beer wench’s cleavage. “I put a plastic straw in mine,” said Melba’s 19-year-old daughter Blair. “I tell the guys I’m a live blow-up doll.”

While Coulam’s fantasy world is a vacation for most visitors like the Smiths, it’s everyday life for the several hundred Rennies who joined King George to make Todd Mission their home. For the past 20 years, they live year-round in a makeshift village that Coulam provides for them, selling each of them one-acre plots for ridiculously cheap prices so they could create their own inspired homesteads.

During my visit, one was in the shape of a giant brown pirate ship with masts and portholes; another looked like a tree house from the Hobbit shire. Laurie Watson, an earnest, 48-year-old fortune teller with wide eyes and long dark hair, operated out of a day-glow orange shack in a lot with a wooden sign that read, “The Sun and Moon Hideaway.” Headless mannequins draped in Mardi Gras beads lined the fence. As we spoke, a chubby, bearded man wandered around her yard blissfully, twirling three, small crystal balls in his hands.

“This is a way to keep the last taste of gypsy magic,” Watson told me. “I love George. If we didn’t have this, we’d have nothing. George has an appreciation of art, he’s a naturalist, he’s kind … ” She choked up while explaining, and a tear ran down her cheek.

“We weren’t meant to work in air-conditioned cubicles,” she went on, “We were meant to make love! We were meant to be free!”

“George has a real vision,” agreed Mark “Coop” Cooper, a 56-year-old who told me he had given up his seat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to follow King George down here.  “We’re all riding on George’s dream,” he said.

The dream was to live and work as free-spirited artists.

Cooper and the others called the neighborhood Toontown, after the fictional cartoon neighborhood in Los Angeles from the 1988 film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” “We’re the crazies living on the other side of the railroad tracks,” he joked.

Charles Prince, the one-time head of the Houston Chef’s Association who in 2004 was running the largest restaurant at the festival, The King’s Feasting Hall, agreed. “George has been king of the hippies for a long time now,” he said.

In the next post of “Renaissance, Texas:” King of the Hippies.

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After “King” George Coulam launched the Texas Renaissance Festival in the heart of Texas in 1974, the locals cowboys and the national press came calling - including a young reporter, Leeza Gibbons, later of Entertainment Tonight fame.

In this vintage PM Magazine TV news clip from 1979, Gibbons makes the rounds of jousters, jesters, and assorted Texans out for a good time (and buckets of ale). “You might as well leave your inhibitions at home,” Gibbons says, “because they have no place here!”

But for the self-described “Rennies” who dress in period garb, it’s not just the booze and bawdiness that compels them, it’s the chance to role play and be someone else.

“They can come in costume, they can indulge in characters, they can participate and be a part of it,” one bearded reenactor in a flowing, golden robe tells Gibbons, “They are not observers here, they’re part of the show.”

In the next post of “Renaissance, Texas:” Cowboys vs. Rennies, and the murder of Brandon Smith.

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Brandon Wayne Smith came to the Texas Renaissance Festival on October 16, 2004 for the same reason as anyone: to party like it was 1599. A clean-cut 23-year-old Second Class Petty Officer in the Navy, Smith had grown up as a Boy Scout in nearby Spring, Texas. After having served six months at sea on the USS Gonzalez and being stationed in Norfolk, Smith was home visiting family for some much-needed R&R.

They drove 40 miles through the back roads northwest of Houston to the two-square mile town of Todd Mission to attend America’s largest Renaissance festival.

In a lot of ways, the town of Todd Mission resembles the sort of rugged cowboy country one might expect northwest of Houston: There was a boarded-up roadhouse called the Museum of a Thousand Horns, once a bar notorious for its patrons’ habit of carrying concealed deadly weapons and its motto, “The horniest place in Texas.” Off the roadside, a junk dealer named Al sat glowering in a rickety armchair on his scrap-strewn lawn, the words “Fuck You” tattooed across the top of his bald, weathered head.

But tucked in the woods off of the main roadway, Farm Road 1774, was a 55-acre working recreation of a 16th-century European village. Manicured marigold gardens and cobblestone pathways spread across the lush property, which included a full jousting arena modeled after the Roman Coliseum rising alongside a lake. There were alehouses, blacksmith stalls, and puppet booths. The public pillories in the center of the festival were among the more popular photo ops.   

After a long day of eating turkey legs and watching jousting competitions, Smith and his family headed out past the reenactors in their long, regal robes for the village exit shortly after 7:00. The nightly fireworks display was about to begin, and they wanted to grab a good viewing spot in a field nearby.

They never made it.

Soon after, Grimes County Sheriff Don Sowell was notified that a man — Smith — had been stabbed dozens of times and was dead. Sheriff Sowell, a stocky, gray-haired Texan who wore a white cowboy hat, had grown up nearby, and decorated his office with black-and-white photos and bobbleheads from “The Andy Griffith Show,” a sixties-era TV show about the sheriff of a small town in North Carolina not unlike Todd Mission.

Most crimes around the RenFaire were small things — a kid recklessly driving a four-wheeler, a petty theft. Smith’s death was the first violent crime, and the killer was still at large. And Sowell didn’t know what to make of the crime, let alone the Rennies who call Todd Mission their home. “They just travel around the country following Renaissance festivals, it’s like a carnival,” he tells me. “A carnival cult.”

When a reporter from the Houston Chronicle asked George “King George” Coulam, the eccentric 67-year-old founder of the Texas Renaissance Festival and the mayor of Todd Mission, for comment about the murder, Coulam cited the long history of peaceful coexistence between the town and the festival. "We have been operating for 30 years and never had a problem," he said, “The sheriff’s happy with us. We run a good show.”

“They travel around the country following Renaissance festivals, it’s like a carnival cult.”

The murder at the Renaissance faire shocked everyone who happened to be there that night – including me. I had flown down to Houston, and driven out to Todd Mission to meet Coulam and attend the festival. I trailed him for days leading up to the RenFaire, hanging out with him and his staff in the sprawling mansion he’d built on a 193 acres of loblolly pines nearby. “People who come here really get with it,” he told me, “I’m just providing them a platform to live out their fantasies.”

On the day of Smith’s murder, I had spent several hours at the festival trailing Coulam as he tended to his flock. At about 7:30 p.m., I was heading out to my car when I saw a scuffle break out about 10 yards away I didn’t know until the next day that someone had been murdered.  

Now, with the 47th annual Texas Renaissance Festival beginning on Oct. 9 — the Delta variant be damned — I started thinking about it again, going through my notes and interviews. I wondered what happened that night, what became of “King George,” now 83, and the fantasy world he’d created.

An avid student of art and architecture, Coulam bought up land in Todd Mission 47 years ago to fulfill his dream of creating a permanent theme town devoted to his favorite period in art history. “The Renaissance was a great and meaningful period, a time unequaled in science, art, and education,” he told me in 2004. 

Coulam was gangly and ornery, chewed a lot of gum, and had wavy salt-and-pepper hair. He preferred his feathered Tudor cap, pointy leather boots, and zebra-striped leggings to the more typical dungarees and 5-gallon hats the local cowpokes wear. “We need to go back and rejuvenate the enjoyment of beauty, the glorification of our surroundings,” he said, “That’s why I created this festival here,” he said of the spectacle he’d first opened to the public in 1974.

Ever since, for eight weeks every fall, this town hosts the Texas Renaissance Festival for an estimated 500,000 tourists and self-described “Rennies” — Deadheads of the Ren fest circuit. The TRF, as fans call it, employees 3500 people each season, many of whom roam the grounds in period garb.

But what separates the TRF from the garden variety Ren faire is that, after the festival ends and the visitors go home to sleep off their mead and turkey leg hangovers, several hundred Rennie artists, craftsmen, psychics and jugglers remain. They live behind the festival grounds in their own makeshift neighborhood called RenFaire Village. “George started this project, so it's kind of like an artist community back there,” TRF general manager Jeff Baldwin tells me, “He sold lots to artists for cheap.”

Coulam — or as friends all call him “King George,” or just “The King” — is the inspiration for these modern-day would-be Lords and Ladies, drawing them to his odd oasis deep in the heart of Texas. For those who live the full time Rennie lifestyle, Todd Mission felt like a safe haven for their Medieval fantasies, no matter how freaky that life seemed to the cowboys nearby.

But, as I’ve learned in returning to this old story of mine, the sanctity of Todd Mission, a town of just 107 people, has been shattering again.

Last October during the faire, 19-year-old Isabella Cimetta was shot to death in the Festival campgrounds. #MeToo came knocking as well, with two lawsuits in the last three years accusing King George of sexual harassment and discrimination. The suits were settled out of court.

“There’s always disgruntled employees,” Baldwin says of the lawsuits (Coulam declined an interview request). “I'm not really privy to all the information about those suits,” Baldwin goes on, “but George, he's trusting and loving to a fault.”

In the next post of “Renaissance, Texas:” time-traveling to 1979, Rennie-style.

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Hello and welcome to the first post of my serialized, feature story on Disruptor, “Renaissance, Texas.” There will be nine parts in total, beginning today with my voice note introduction. In the coming days, posts will include magazine-style text passages, audio interview excerpts, and videos. It’s a new kind of storytelling exclusively for the newsletter format, and I’m excited to be starting it all out today. I’ll be back to you tomorrow with part two: “Murder at the RenFaire.”

Read Part 2 of Renaissance, TX.

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