Monthly Archives: April 2023

The 99th Percentile

Modern humans have been on Earth less than .01% of the planet’s existence.

The Earth has been around for a while — about one-third as long as the universe itself. By comparison, Homo sapiens are the new kids on the block. Earth’s story began at the outset of the Hadean eon, about 4.6 billion years ago. It took 600 million years just for the Earth’s crust to take shape, another 300 million years for the first signs of microbial life to pop up, and about 3.2 billion years after that for life to really get going thanks to the evolutionary burst known as the Cambrian explosion. Several mass extinction events and some 465 million years later, mammals finally took center stage, but modern humans didn’t enter the biological limelight for another 65 million years. With the first Homo sapiens appearing around 300,000 years ago, humans have only been on planet Earth for 0.0067% of its existence. 

In those 300,000 years, humans have been pretty busy. For a couple thousand years, we harnessed fire and lived a nomadic existence, until around the fourth millennium BCE, when the very first civilizations began to take shape. Since then, humans have been on a meteoric trajectory, going from hunter-gatherer to spacefarer in less than 6,000 years. Carl Sagan famously displayed the universe’s history on a 365-day calendar, with the Big Bang on January 1 and our current moment starting at 12:01 a.m. the next year. On that timeline, it’s only at 10:30 p.m. on December 31 that humans first appear, and all of recorded history is squeezed into just a few seconds — but what a few seconds it’s been.

Of Mortal Coils

There’s a that’s jellyfish considered biologically immortal.

Immortality is the dream of ancient mystics and futuristic transhumanists alike, but for humans and most other animals on Earth, the promise of such longevity remains out of reach — that is, unless you’re a jellyfish known scientifically as Turritopsis dohrnii, nicknamed the “immortal jellyfish.” The life cycle of most jellyfish begins with a fertilized egg that grows to a larval stage called a planula. Eventually, the planula attaches itself to a surface, and forms into a tubelike structure known as a polyp. These polyps eventually bud and break away into an ephyra, aka a young jellyfish, and these floating youngsters then develop into adult medusae capable of sexual reproduction.

Most species of jellyfish call it quits at this point, and eventually die like every other species on Earth — but not Turritopsis dohrnii. Instead, when this creature becomes damaged for whatever reason, it can revert to a blob of living tissue that eventually develops back into a polyp, and once again its developmental process repeats. Of course, this jellyfish isn’t immune to the numerous dangers of the ocean — whether from predators or climate change — but if left to their own devices, these incredible creatures can just go on living forever. 

Although the immortal jellyfish is a longevity outlier in the animal kingdom, there are a few other organisms that can pull off similar feats. Planarian worms display a limitless ability for regeneration, and can become two worms when cut in half. Additionally, the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans is resistant to basically everything, as it can reassemble its genome and effectively return to life even after intense heat or radiation — a feat that earns the hardy bacterium the fitting nickname “Lazarus microbe.” Maybe immortality isn’t so impossible after all.

Television’s Most Unlikely Anti-Hero


Dave is an acquired taste. And you still may not like it, even when you like it.

Such is the bargain with anti-heroes, who have all but died off in a post-covid entertainment climate. Where once anti-heroes ruled the small screen — from Walter White to Don Draper to Omar Little to Tony Soprano — the Irony Age has given way to an era when lantern-jawed superheroes have a brand to protect, copyrights to consider and studio-funded universes into which to be tenured.

Anti-heroes don’t do well in those universes because death isn’t lethal there. Just ask John Wick or James Bond. And (spoiler alert) three of the four aforementioned protagonists die in their vehicles, smashing head-on with a real world anti-heroes typically inhabit.

Enter, then, Dave, FX’s latest series that continues the network’s dominance in the streaming market. Like Atlanta, the network’s other foray into pop culture, Dave examines life in a music business that’s less about beats and more about beat downs and does not give a fuck.

Where Atlanta features multi-hyphenate entertainer Donald Glover, Dave features, well, Dave Burg, aka Lil Dicky, whose lucky to get a single hyphenate as a Jewish rapper. He’s hairy, slouchy, and uncertain as hell — until he’s given a mic. Think Eminem meets Curb Your Enthusiasm, with Jewish angst set to a drum machine.

Even if you’re not a rap or hip hop fan, Dave has some infectious moments that come from its genuine struggles with privilege and appropriation. Murky waters when white meets blight. Change that: Eminem meets Mr. Rogers.

Lil Dicky is a canny dj name for Burg, as LD’s favorite songs tend to be how he got the nickname. In great detail. Dave has a South Park ethos, but with Burg as a real-life Cartman. Lil Dicky believes himself a generational rapper, and his narcissism can run Kaufman deep. And funny. And Kaufman deep and not-so-funny.

That, too, is the anti-hero gamble. Dave as a soul is utterly up for sale — in the form of clicks, likes and retweets. In its third season, the same can be said for the show, just monetized: Dave seems to take commercial breaks every five minutes.

The self help ads are worth the occasional brilliance, though. The singularly named GaTa plays a rapper and Lil Dicky’s hype man — in the show and real life. And it’s his contribution, not Burg’s, that makes the show bounce. He’s bipolar rage on the show, and he literally gives Lil Dicky the one commodity he can’t schtick his way through: street credibility on a racially rickety rollercoaster.

Like any freestyle act, Dave has a flash drive-ful of awkward silences, cultural misreads and racially-tinged flashpoints. But, in testimony either for or against the sheer force of will, Lil Dicky has the mic.