Author Archives: Scott Bowles

‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ Is Wrong Kind of Horror


Capim Grosso

Mansourah You can’t look away from a train wreck, but Netflix keeps making you wish you could.

The latest entry in Ryan Murphy’s Monster franchise, this one centered on Ed Gein, is the purest kind of TV turd: slickly produced, hopelessly sensationalistic, and about as thoughtful as a Halloween haunted house. It’s billed as a “story,” but there’s nothing here resembling storytelling. What you get is voyeurism disguised as television art.

Charlie Hunnam, cast as Gein, delivers his lines in a bizarre falsetto, the kind of false softness that makes you wince rather than shiver. Gein’s real voice was quiet, even childlike at times, something unsettling because it was natural.

The performance here sounds like an actor putting on a skin mask he doesn’t quite understand. If Hunnam has a naturally soft voice, it doesn’t come through. It plays like a gimmick, one more piece of borrowed creepiness that turns campy instead of chilling.

Then there’s the mother. Laurie Metcalf plays Augusta Gein, a role that should’ve been layered with nuance. Gein’s mother was famously domineering, a towering religious fanatic whose shadow loomed over his entire life.

In this series, she arrives straight from central casting as Demon from Hell, dripping venom in every line, scowling like an exorcism in a ratty dress.

It’s unsubtle, and worse, it’s unimaginative. Real horror comes from the everyday. By making her a cartoon monster, Murphy robs the story of its only real psychological core.

This is the problem with the whole enterprise. Rather than digging into the questions Gein still raises — how does small-town isolation incubate violence, how does obsession curdle into depravity, why does true crime still grip us — the show is obsessed with surfaces.

The series paints Gein as a horror mascot, not a human being warped by circumstance. The camera lingers on corpses, on skin, on grave-robbing like a kid showing off his goriest comic book.

Murphy has made a career out of excess, and sometimes it works. American Horror Story thrived on spectacle. The Assassination of Gianni Versace found real drama in flamboyance.

But here, excess feels cheap. There’s nothing new to say about Gein, nothing undiscovered. The show doesn’t try. Instead, it doubles down on lurid images we’ve all seen before.

There’s no denying the production looks expensive. The sets are suitably grim, the lighting all shadows and menace.

The polish, however, only sharpens the cynicism. You feel like you’re being sold a wax figure in a freak show. This feels more like exploitation than exploration.

The true crime boom has given us enough to know the difference. Mindhunter wrestled with the banality of evil. Documentaries like The Jinx and Making a Murderer pulled apart the systems around crime. Even Dahmer — Murphy’s previous monster — found angles about race, policing, and media complicity. The Ed Gein Story has no such aim. It just wants you to squirm.

And squirm you will. Not from terror, but from the sheer awfulness of it all.

One day, someone will tell Ed Gein’s story with clarity and restraint, with attention to the horror of his past, his crimes and the humanity of the world he destroyed.

This isn’t that day. This is another Murphy sideshow, another exercise in television taxidermy.

Netflix calls it Monster. They got that part right.

Fact Social


The Times needs a Trump Truth beat.

For a newspaper that bills itself as the paper of record, the New York Times is falling short on one of the strangest and most important stories in American history: the fact that the sitting president communicates with the country through a self-made social media echo chamber, largely unfiltered, often unhinged, and always revealing.

Even if you argue these rants are not traditionally “newsworthy,” the sheer accumulation of them demands attention. What matters is not whether they pass the usual editorial test, but that they show the unfiltered state of mind of a commander-in-chief whose words reach millions.

The case for a dedicated Trump Truth beat is straightforward. This is not about platforming every outrageous claim. It is about chronicling history in real time.

When Franklin Roosevelt took to the radio for his Fireside Chats, the press covered them not because they were universally wise or profound, but because the president of the United States had chosen that medium to speak directly to the people.

The same is true now. Truth Social is Trump’s version of a fireside chat, only the fire is gasoline.

To understand the scale of what the Times is ignoring, consider just a handful of recent posts:

  • Trump branded the Democratic Party “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.”
  • He amplified an AI-generated video mocking Chuck Schumer in a yarmulke and Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero, reducing them to crude ethnic stereotypes.
  • He accused the FBI of planting more than 270 undercover agents to incite the violence of Jan. 6.
  • He threatened to cut federal funding to colleges that allowed what he called “illegal protests.”
  • He shared a campaign message that included the phrase “unified reich,” language pulled from the darkest corners of 20th-century history.

Each of these is unprecedented for a U.S. president. Each of these is worthy of front-page coverage, not buried in the back of the paper or left to cable news chatter.

By failing to treat Truth Social as a daily reporting assignment, the Times leaves the record to partisan outlets and second-hand summaries. That is a disservice both to readers and to history.

There is an argument, of course, that coverage only magnifies Trump’s messaging. The Times fears becoming a megaphone.

But journalism is not about comfort. It is about bearing witness. The paper’s editors know this, which is why they report on war atrocities even at the risk of amplifying propaganda.

Truth Social is a battlefield of its own, one where the commander in chief fires off salvos at his enemies, at institutions, at democratic norms. To ignore those salvos is to deny the public the raw evidence of what leadership looks like under Trump.

Think, too, of the practical function of a dedicated beat. A Trump Truth reporter would do what no single journalist has time for now: track every post, confirm its accuracy, trace its origins, and place it in context. Was that meme lifted from a fringe site? Did that accusation come from a debunked conspiracy? What is the intended audience?

These are not questions for an op-ed. They are questions for the news pages, and they deserve daily answers.

The Times has always understood that the presidency demands special scrutiny. It maintains a White House team, a Capitol Hill team, even a Supreme Court desk.

Yet the loudest, most revealing channel of presidential communication has no dedicated reporter. Instead, Truth Social slips by piecemeal, covered sporadically, with the most explosive posts often filtered through outside sources.

Imagine future historians combing the archives and finding scattered references, instead of a steady record. The absence would look deliberate, as if the Times chose to shield readers from their own president’s words.

A Trump Truth beat would also provide accountability. By cataloging posts in real time, the Times would make it harder for Trump to revise or erase his statements. Already, he deletes or edits posts once they draw fire. A beat reporter would capture those digital footprints before they vanish. That is journalism at its most basic: preserving the record.

The public appetite is there. Readers want clarity about what is true, what is false, and what is dangerous. A single column or occasional news story cannot provide that clarity.

A beat can. And in a media environment where outrage travels faster than fact, the Times could reclaim its role as the steady hand, the trusted ledger.

Trump has given the country a daily window into his thinking. He has chosen Truth Social as the glass. The New York Times should choose to look through it, directly and consistently, not with one eye closed.

History is watching, and the record is being written with or without the paper of record.

Why Young Men Are Losing Faith in Science

New York Times

By Adam Frank

Dr. Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester.

A few years ago, on a flight, I was seated next to a man in his mid-20s. He looked at the astrobiology textbook I was reading and asked if I was a scientist. When I told him I was, his face lit up and he told me how much he loved science. He listened to podcasts like “The Joe Rogan Experience” and others where scientists came on as guests and talked about quantum mechanics, black holes and ancient aliens.

Encouraged by his enthusiasm, I told him that not everything on those shows was science (case in point: ancient aliens). I advised him to be on his guard. Then, with all earnestness, he told me while I was clearly OK, it was common knowledge that sometimes, on some subjects, science hid the truth. 

After 30 years as a researcher, science communicator and university science teacher, I’ve been unsettled by what appears to be a growing skepticism of science among some of my Generation Z students, shaped in part by the different online cultures these young people have grown up in. While I cannot speak to what happens in every corner of the internet, I can speak to the one I’ve been invited into: the “manosphere” — a loose network of podcasts, YouTubers and other male influencers. I’ve appeared on some of the manosphere’s most popular shows, including Joe Rogan’s. I’ve watched how curiosity about science can slide into conspiracy-tinged mazes rooted in misinformation. And I believe the first step out of the maze for young men begins by reasserting to them the virtue of hard work — an often grueling but indispensable part of finding the right answers in science.

Of course, women can be antiscience just as much as men; for example, some studies suggest women have more reservations about new vaccines than men. But the male tendency to view debates as adversarial contests that must be won at all costs is what may help to create a more alarming antiscience dynamic in the manosphere.

The manosphere can foster genuine interest in science among young listeners. But framing science as a debate to be won makes it easy to paint established scientists as opponents who must be overcome. And one of the easiest ways to win the debate is to suggest scientists are either self-satisfied elites who won’t consider new ideas or, worse, liars who know the truth and are hiding it.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. 

While there can seem to be a sincere desire in the manosphere to learn more about topics like black holes and neuroscience, discussions in these communities can sometimes devolve into a compelling story about searching for “the truth” about the moon landings, ancient technology and climate change. That powerful story, repeated enough times, can become the background against which manosphere audiences come to see all science.

The way to counter this story is, ironically, already there in the manosphere. Research shows young men and women today want a higher purpose, a call to something greater than themselves. In the manosphere, figures like Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist with an immensely popular podcast, speak directly to this desire among young men.

Mr. Peterson has framed virtues like personal responsibility, honesty and a purpose-driven life as qualities that are important to manliness. Those same values surface in other manosphere interests, like rigorous athletic training and disciplined health regimens.

What does not get much airtime, however, is recognition that these are also the very virtues that guide science and its principal values of veracity, accuracy and precision — seeking the right answer. Essentially this is just honesty when it wears a lab coat. Reframing scientific inquiry as another area where these values are lived can help counter science skepticism.

All the scientific marvels on which modern society depends are the fruit of extreme dedication. Rockets, computers and lifesaving medicines all come from decades of effort by scientists hunkered over pages of calculation or the laboratory bench. They required the same tireless, single-minded effort every elite athlete understands. The fringe science appearing in young men’s online social media feeds, however, requires none of that effort. Instead, it stands on proclamations based on profound ignorance and a disinterest in even the most basic scientific principles like those I’m teaching my freshmen this semester.

Good scientists are intimate with the limits of what they know and stand ready to learn in domains outside their expertise. They don’t just claim they are right. Instead, they know the cure for their ignorance is to actively and rigorously test their own assertions. That kind of humility is no different from enduring the hardships required to become a champion middleweight boxer, a great rock climber or a master musician.

It’s time to make that connection explicit, and the best place to start is with members of Gen Z themselves. If I could talk to that young man on the plane again, I would not simply tell him to exercise caution when it comes to fringe experts. I would instead explain the long traditions of scientific discipline and determination that built the jet he’s flying in. Einstein’s relativity, evolution and genetics, climate physics on any planet (even alien ones) — these topics are a thousand times more compelling than faked moon landings because they are not the fever-dreams of hucksters but a direct vision of nature’s outrageous beauty and complexity. Make the effort to walk down that road, embrace its honesty and humility and you’ll be hooked forever.