In case you missed what we chucked into your inbox this week, don’t worry, here she is:

Out to everyone, 136 Times from Kennedy. We often oversimplify our understanding of behaviour. “She blocked him, but he kept contacting her” is a simple sentence that explains a complex issue. It’s a sentence that can describe almost anything. This week’s piece is about what gets lost in that compression, and why scale, context, and human relationships matter when we evaluate cases involving domestic violence.

In paid inboxes, Some Lawyer answers the important question on everybody’s mind with “How to find your grandpa in swimwear.” Taking a dive into some family lore, we explore the channels we can utilize to confirm those whispers and rumblings from our cousins at the Fourth of July BBQ.

What Kennedy Recommends

Movie | Obsession

Obsession is one of those rare low-budget horror successes. It was shot in just 26 days for well under $1 million with a scrappy non-union crew. It premiered at TIFF’s Midnight Madness, sparked a bidding war, and ultimately sold for around $15 million, the biggest genre acquisition in the festival’s history.

I’d read about all of this and heard some rumblings in the horror community, but had no idea what the movie was actually about. So, the other night I walked to my closest theatre and caught the 7:30 screening, completely blind to the plot. What a ride.

The movie follows Bear, a music store employee who buys a toy that grants his wish for his friend Nikki to fall in love with him, a wish that comes with horrifying consequences.

While I’m a big horror nerd and fan, I can admit the genre makes some pretty shit films. The formula can be pretty predictable, and the scares can be cheap. You can have a nice time and still just shrug afterwards. Obsession is the first movie in a long time to make me genuinely uneasy, pleasantly shocked me with its performances, and posed some thought-provoking questions I’m still pondering.

Check it out.

Touch grass, stay hydrated.

See you next week.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

“Grandpa John was on the cover of Life Magazine, you know.”

Without getting into epistemology, I wasn’t sure. He was my grandfather, but I wasn’t sure of the man’s first name and was only medium-confident as to his last1.

I knew he wore a hat with a boat on it, when I was small, and that he’d stop by the house on Saturdays, with little bags of almonds f…

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Out to all subscribers was the first installment of The Eh-Files, brought to you by Justin. A locked trunk sat untouched for decades in an Ontario basement. Inside: letters, occult research, spiritualist artifacts, and a family history obsessed with the paranormal. When it resurfaced in the 1990s, it helped reignite an interest that would find its way into television screens across North America. This is the story of the Aykroyd family, PSI Factor, and the rise of conspiracy TV.

In paid inboxes, 136 Times from Kennedy. “Did you block them?” is a question that often carries an unspoken assumption: that the situation could have been easily controlled if only the victim had made the right choice. Reality is rarely that neat. This week, we examined what continued contact actually looks like in abusive relationships and why context matters more than technology.

Also out to paid subscribers this morning is High Spirits Volume 15! It’s a good one, team. After weeks of reading, researching, and assembling evidence, our resident skeptic, Justin, sits Kennedy down to make his case for why ghosts might actually exist. Along the way: dramatic readings, historical oddities, and the rare spectacle of us mostly agreeing with each other.

What Justin Recommends

Movie | The Backrooms (2026)

My youngest son and I went to this one last Friday night; he was armed with all the background and lore, having watched the YouTube series first. I was genuinely worried this was going to be a nightmare ride of Skinamarink proportions. Ultimately, I think there was enough there for both of us: it’s unnerving, it’s weird, it’s new but familiar. It’s not Skinamarink; it’s something better and something worse. This is not The Exorcist, Hereditary, or Weapons, but it fits in another category somewhere else that’s just as unnerving.

We’ll see you next week!

Until then, rest up.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Team

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Recently, we were asked to participate in a documentary, and I’ve been thinking about the conversation we had with the filmmaker.

The case at the centre of the documentary is a woman who shot and killed her abuser. We did a post-conviction analysis of the minimal digital evidence that was collected during the initial investigation. In that, there were records of phone calls and messages sent through virtual phone number services like TextNow, which allow a person to get around a block if the receiver has blocked their primary phone number.

The filmmaker asked me something along the lines of, “Do you believe that the general public, even judges, have a sense of the technology being used in cases of domestic violence?”

I don’t have a copy of what was said, so I’ll paraphrase myself here. In essence:

Yes, I do believe they have a sense.

Most people understand that someone can create a new email address after being blocked. They understand fake social media accounts, burner phone numbers and messaging apps.

What I don’t think people understand is scale.

We can all imagine that clicking block has different implications depending on the circumstance. If you’re on Bluesky or Instagram and you get into a back-and-forth with an argumentative stranger you then block, that’s pretty simple, over and done with. This person doesn’t know you; they don’t have multiple channels to go through, and it wouldn’t be worth the average person’s time to try.

Now, moving to block someone you know, someone you have a relationship with in any sense, is a lot less simple.

If you pulled out your phone right now and blocked your partner or your best friend, or your parent or sibling, someone you have consistent contact with, you’ve put an orange pylon in the passing lane of a three-lane highway.

You’ve restricted the quickest route.

You haven’t removed access.

They know where you live. They know where you work. They still have your email address. They know your social media accounts. They may know your friends, your family, your routines, your favourite coffee shop, and the places you’re most likely to be on a Friday night. They may have your Venmo, your LinkedIn, your old phone number, and a dozen mutual connections.

While blocking can be an important boundary, we have to be realistic about what it actually accomplishes, and it can’t erase a lived relationship. It doesn’t erase knowledge or proximity.

The archetypal “healthy” person understands the point of a block and, if on the receiving end, accepts it and the interaction ends. The problem arises when the person on the other side has no interest in respecting it, and very likely knew this would come at some point and is prepared to work around it.

So, the question isn’t, “Did you remove this person’s ability to contact you?”

It’s “How many alternatives did this person find when they decided they wanted to?”

And for people who share a history, particularly one marked by violence and the consistent violation of personal boundaries, the answer is often far more than most of us realize.

As a fairly normal function of communication, we tend to compress details, especially when we’re trying to summarize someone’s behaviour.

“She blocked him, but he kept contacting her.”

That’s a true statement, but it could describe one message or ten messages. Five hundred messages. It can describe a single desperate lapse in judgment or a sustained campaign of harassment.

What does it actually mean when someone “continued contacting” another person?

A single text sent six months later? Or 136 contact attempts from 43 phone numbers, 11 email addresses, 7 social media accounts, and 5 messaging platforms over the course of six months? Does it mean waking up every morning to discover that another account has appeared overnight?

The technology itself isn’t particularly sophisticated, so there’s a tendency to believe it also isn’t particularly affecting. There is no one sitting in a dark room trying to hack into your laptop, or a GPS tracker installed in a car, or some spyware on your phone.

But it is relentless persistence all the same.

A blocked number becomes a TextNow number. That number gets blocked and becomes an email. The email becomes a Facebook account. The Facebook account becomes a message request through Instagram. The Instagram account disappears and is replaced by a new one. Then a mutual friend receives a message. Then another. Then a coworker. Then flowers arrive at work. Then a cash transfer with a note attached. Then a comment on a years-old social media post.

Collectively, this is the exhausting minutiae of coercive control.

Singular events can hardly capture the reality of the experience. The impact lies in the accumulation and in the knowledge that every time one avenue closes, another may open. That no matter what boundaries you put in place, there is very little you can do to stop a motivated abuser.

Outside the courtroom, outside spaces where sharing information with fellow practitioners becomes a benefit to all, there are moments where a broader conversation about digital evidence in these cases starts to lose a real sense of meaning.

Do I think the general public understands what Cellebrite extraction is, how a warrant is drafted for cloud-stored data, or why we send preservation requests? No. I also don’t think they have to.

I don’t know how to operate a forklift or engineer chemicals for biofuels, but I hope that if one day I’m sitting in a courtroom, on a jury, and that information becomes relevant, they’ll explain it to me. Until then, not really my business.

I don’t think it’s nearly as important to understand how the technology works as it is to understand how and why victims and offenders use it the way they do.

“Did you block them?” is a question often laced with assumption, an assumption that clearly communicates the person asking believes that the situation could’ve been easily controlled or mitigated.

Again, reality is rarely that simple.

Victims don’t always maintain blocks.

Sometimes they’re frightened of what will happen if they don’t respond; sometimes they’re trying to gather evidence; sometimes they’re exhausted. Sometimes they’re trying to co-parent. Sometimes they’re trying to negotiate the return of property, access to children, housing arrangements, finances, pets, or any number of practical realities that don’t disappear because a relationship has become abusive.

And sometimes they unblock because this was, and perhaps still is, a meaningful relationship to them.

That can be difficult to understand. Particularly when viewed through the clean, clinical language of a police report or court filing. But abuse does not erase attachment. People do not stop loving someone simply because that person has harmed them.

People do not stop hoping. They do not stop remembering the good parts. They do not stop believing that perhaps this time the apology is sincere, or that perhaps this conversation will finally provide closure, or that perhaps the person they believed they once knew is still in there somewhere.

Victim behaviour or survival strategies can look irrational when you remove them from the greater context. From the perspective of trauma, attachment, and very ordinary human behaviour, it is entirely unsurprising. In fact, it would be strange if years of emotional connection could be severed as cleanly as a phone call.

The existence of contact does not tell us much on its own. A victim answering the phone does not mean they welcomed the call. Responding to a message does not mean the contact was desired. Unblocking someone does not mean the fear has disappeared, and continued communication does not magically transform an abuser into a healthy partner.

These relationships are often messy, contradictory, and difficult to explain because people are messy, contradictory, and difficult to explain.

What strikes me most when reviewing these cases is how often victims are expected to have made perfect decisions under the exact conditions that would prevent them from doing so.

And that is what I wish people could bring themselves to understand.

This week, we did a hard thing and left our houses to sit in a studio, in front of cameras. Maybe you’ll see it someday; maybe you won’t. We’ll see. Then some cars broke down, some cases broke open. The usual.

For ya’ll, it was back-to-back, Justin, popping in for paid and free subscribers.

In paid inboxes was a dip into some unexpected Canadian history with The Eh-Files: Family Matters. Before there were Ghostbusters, there was Dr. Samuel Aykroyd: a Canadian dentist, spiritualist, and paranormal researcher whose séances and correspondence with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle helped shape a family obsession that would eventually spill onto movie screens and late-night television. This is the strange history behind the Aykroyd family, PSI Factor, and Canada’s role in the rise of conspiracy television.

Out to everyone was Debris. Blending cultural criminology, media analysis, personal reflection, and firsthand investigative experience, this one moves through surveillance footage, convenience store parking lots, horror films, and sociological theory to ask a deceptively simple question: what actually is crime? Thoughtful, sharp, and human, all of our favourite things.

What Kennedy Recommends

Show | Deadloch

Living with an Australian for six years was an education all its own. Oftentimes, I joked that it didn’t feel like Australians were real. You either know exactly what I mean, or you’ve never had another adult look in your eyes and seriously say a sentence like, “The arvo was going fine until some bogan wandered over and started explaining cryptocurrency to a sheila who clearly wanted to be anywhere else.”

The Australian and I don’t live together anymore, and when I feel homesick for that specific sense of humour, I watch Deadloch.

The show follows Dulcie and Eddie, wildly different detectives forced to solve murder mysteries together in isolated Australian towns. The cases, the suspects, and the setting serve as the eccentric backdrop for these women and their complex lives. It’s genuinely gripping, genuinely funny and different. You don’t need your own personal Australian to enjoy it either.

Rest, read, relax.

See you on the other side.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

“When I considered the wonderful psychical phenomena of the one circle seen with my own eyes and the religious atmosphere of the other, I came away with the conclusion that Winnipeg stands very high among the places we have visited for its psychic possibilities.”

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Our Second American Adventure, 1924, pictured above in Winnipeg medium’s snot.

Samuel was a curious fellow.

Born in 1855, near Kingston, Ontario, he’d taken a keen interest not only in science but of the spiritual. To be more specific, spiritualism and spiritualists. You know the ones: the Ouija-boarders, the knockers, rappers, tappers and automatic writers that sprung into existence in the 1800s.

Samuel embraced these beliefs and in the early 1900s. He and his wife traveled south to the spiritualist hotbed of Lily Dale, New York, where, to this day, “...about 40 mediums…connect thousands of spiritual seekers with their deceased loved ones.” (Erin Donaghue, 2025). When Samuel returned, he and his wife continued the practice, hosting seances in their farmhouse, cottage, and sometimes within the city limits of Toronto and Kingston, Ontario.

Samuel was a member of the British Society for Psychical Research, and had corresponded with fellow member, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; yeah, the Sherlock Holmes dude who opened this piece. Doyle had bounced around Canada and the US a handful of times during various book tours, and apparently found the hotbeds of some horny ghosts in Canada along the way.

Samuel passed away in 1933, and his occult research materials, spiritualist ephemera, correspondence and ghostly bric-à-brac were locked in a trunk and stored away. Silently it sat in the basement of his Ontario home, ready for intergenerational handoff, natural disaster or garage sale discard.

Even after Samuel’s passing, spiritualist practices were continued in the family. First by his son, Peter, who hosted seances at the family cottage, and then down the genetic line the customs went, finally settling deep into the 20th century at Samuel’s great-grandsons: Dan and Peter J.

Dan and Peter J. Aykroyd.

Dr. Samuel Aykroyd, Canadian dentist and spiritualist, had no idea the scope of the impact his interests in the unknown would have on us all. The link between Samuel, his seances, his correspondence with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, reached much, much deeper into the 20th century.

Dan Aykroyd makes no bones about the fact that Ghostbusters (1984), written alongside Harold Ramis, was a take on very real ghosts, based on a very real family history. In an interview in 2013 with George Stroumboulopoulos, Aykroyd explained:

“My great grandfather Sam Aykroyd, he was a dentist in Kingston [Ontario]...was also a psychic researcher. That’s where Ghostbusters comes from. The old farmhouse was where we had seances, and entities would come through, according to my Dad, my uncle, and my grandmother and grandfather – I never saw any… but all of that stuff was around sort of subliminally… we had our own transmedium, he used to go into a trance and his head would go back and he’d start speaking Mandarin… he didn’t speak Mandarin, he had a grade 12 education!”

The crowd laughs, and Dan shrugs. Weaving through his desire to entertain, his family history, his own experiences and beliefs, makes it difficult, at times, to pin down where the fact and fiction are demarcated in Aykroyd’s stories.

However, you never feel like he’s shilling or trying to pull one over on you; he seems earnest. Maybe a feature of his acknowledged neurodivergence, something in the 1990s often framed as Dan just being a weirdo or someone who “... talk[ed] more in lists of statements than in sentences…” (Grant McIntyre, The Globe and Mail, 1996).

Dan just seems like another seeker. A seeker that had a supporting network of family and friends, and impeccable timing, with the cultural backdrop of the blossoming horror genre and various social panics of the 1980s and 1990s. Aykroyd is honest about his role as an entertainer, and that he’s not a scientist, but he’ll challenge his own assertions in the next breath by elucidating on scientific-sounding stories of the paranormal that he maintains he believes in.

That’s just Dan. That’s a lot of us neurospicies, in fact.

As Dan Aykroyd’s film career ebbed and flowed, his interest and passion for the paranormal never waned. In fact, the Aykroyd family would make a discovery in 1990 that reignited their passions anew: the locked trunk of our old boy, Dr. Samuel Aykroyd.

The cache of paranormality, as though beckoning Samuel’s descendants from beyond, would be released not just from the confines of the trunk, but would be directly mediated through the airwaves into a large swathe of North American households.

If you were allowed to stay up late enough that is.

The Birth of ‘Conspiracy Television’

Late 1980s and 1990s television reshaped North American culture, in ways I am sure we’re going to study for decades to come. I think a large part of this cultural shearing came from what film and media scholars, along with critics, labelled conspiracy television.

“I Want to Believe. Question Everything. Trust No One. The Truth is Out There. The major metatext of The X-Files has been, since its inception in 1993, conspiracy,” wrote Stephanie Kelley-Romano.

While I would argue Unsolved Mysteries (1987) was the foundation, The X-Files poured the concrete. Anything that was alien, conspiratorial, occult, Satanic or ghostly, was going to get some action based on how audiences had devoured the exploits of Mulder and Scully.

During the period of time between Ghostbusters, Robert Stack’s ominous intonations and The X-Files, Dan Aykroyd may have taken a lot of the public spotlight, Peter, his younger brother, was also staying busy.

Peter was no slouch in the world of entertainment, having spent time as a Saturday Night Live writer and cast member (1979-80), and appearing in a number of his brother’s films. Where Peter differed, however, was in his embrace of paranormal research. Peter was wholeheartedly engaged in ‘real’ ghostbusting in the late 80s and early 90s; alongside scientists, scholars and skeptics alike.

Werewolves, vampires, bloody jealousies that won’t quite die. They say no city in America has more haunted houses than New Orleans…[r]esearchers from a real-life ghost-busting team called the Office of Scientific Investigation and Research have come to this apparition-rich bayou country to put these old stories to the test using scientific methods…the research team includes a professional magician and Peter Aykroyd, brother of Dan Aykroyd, who starred in the movie ‘Ghostbusters’….

This notion of “real-life ghostbusters”, and the mingling of ‘scientific’ research and the paranormal, was ubiquitous at that time. Academic and philosophical battles regarding the occult and the supernatural were absolutely raging. Like diss tracks for nerds: papers and books were written for and against each side with Carl Sagan’s ‘Demon Haunted World’ emerging as one of the guiding texts for the scientifically and skeptically minded. Sagan was up against some formidable opponents, going toe-to-toe with Hollywood, late-night psychics, and consumerism; a tough battle for even the brightest of educators.

It should come as no surprise that wherever possible, for branding purposes of course, that the words ‘research’ or ‘scientific’ be included at least somewhere on a ghostbuster’s business card. In the above case, it is key then to read the ‘team of researchers’ harkened from The Office of Scientific Investigation and Research. A governmenty-sounding name that includes the trifecta of science, investigation and research. That’s like hitting the grand slam of ghosts-for-dollars business branding.

More tremors of all things Aykroydian-to-come is in an article from January 25, 1995. There’s a mention of Dan in attendance at the National Association of Television Producers and Executives convention in Las Vegas, pitching as the “...host of would-be show PSI Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal” (Tim Goodman, 1995). Well this sounds interesting.

In September of 1995, more rumblings, “Ghostbusters star Dan Aykroyd is hosting an American TV series PSI-Factor investigating paranormal experiences” (Hull Daily Mail, September 16, 1995). While not entirely accurate, the article is now acknowledging that whatever paranormal series Aykroyd was pitching in Las Vegas, has been picked up and is going into production.

PSI Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal

A year later, in September of 1996, the veil lifted nearly all the way. The series has a title, a cast, shooting locations and a host: Dan Aykroyd. Peter Aykroyd is credited as a creator, along with credits to fellow paranormal researcher, Christopher Chacon.

Before the show had even been released, there were critics, of course.

• “…[one of the] goofiest series in the paranoia parade…PSI Factor (debuts in October on Global, date and time not yet set), which purports to tell true stories of truly weird happenings that the world has somehow never heard of…” (Tony Atherton, The Ottawa Citizen);
  

• “…a mid-budget syndicated X-Files knockoff…” (Grant McIntyre, Globe and Mail);

However, with all of this promotion going into PSI Factor, it becomes even more difficult to untwist what is entertainment, fact or fiction.

“…Peter [Aykroyd] whose fascination with the subject led him to the fictitious-sounding Office of Scientific Investigation and Research (OSIR), a privately-funded organization that uses conventional science to examine such cases.” (Grant McIntyre, 1996).

Remember our ghost-vampire-werewolf hunters in New Orleans? Same organization it seems.

Now, when one starts to mix and mingle the news with the entertainment section, it all becomes even more muddled: “…[PSI Factor] dramatizes cases from the Office of Scientific Investigation and Research (OSIR) over the last 20 years which includes 300 researchers who investigate the paranormal: telekinesis, telepathy, ghosts, poltergeists, alien abductions, reincarnation and time travel…there’s enough scary elements to attract The X-Files fans.”

You see? Dramatizations would indicate they are real life events, played out by actors. Mixing the fictitious The X-Files into it then makes it sound as though…the series is fictional and not based on some shadowy organization of ghostbusters.

In this era of conspiracy television, this ambiguity in messaging and categorization would spell trouble for the Aykroyds. The show was released in October 1996 and its first archived website was from December 1996.

It is here, within the newsgroup archives, that one can begin to see that people wanted to know the truth behind the show’s cases and of this shadowy O.S.I.R.

This truth is something I am still figuring out in 2026 as you’ll see.

The ‘Eh-Files’ is a series examining the curious world of Canadian crime and occulture. The ‘Eh-Files’ phrase should be credited to Canadian journalist, David Migicovsky, who jokingly used it in a 1998 article.

Greetings all,

A week for records, residue, and the uncomfortable afterlife of information.

This week, out to everyone was a piece on How to do your own homework, from our one-of-a-kind Queen, Some Lawyer. A woman discovered that years of her Talkspace therapy sessions had been turned over in court during an employment discrimination lawsuit. Follow the trail through federal filings, legal databases, and public records to explain how it happened.

Out to paid subscribers, a classic thought flow from Justin with Debris. Crime scenes are made of more than just concrete elements; they’re made of rubble and wreckage, debris. Not just blood and fingerprints, but Slurpees, surveillance footage, Fortnite discarded gum and memory. A piece on cultural criminology, horror and evidence.

What Justin Recommends

Book | My Best Friends Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

I had yet to pick up a Grady Hendrix book, and this one just so happened to be on the shelf at McNalley Robinson here in Saskatoon. It did not disappoint.

Set in the 1980s, with all the right mood, background, culture, and references one expects. The level of juvenile shenanigans is painfully detailed and becomes intrinsic to the horror that begins to unwind. It did not scare the hell out of me, but it did horrify me, and it dwells on you after you’re done. You’ll feel stuff when you finish this book, and that’s what horror is all about. You gotta pick this one up.

As always: take it easy this weekend.

Read something strange, eat something comforting, stare at the ceiling for a while.

We’ll see you next week!

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

My mind often wanders, trying to explain some of the bigger, maybe deeper, meanings behind the casework we engage in, often in response to what I find to be deeply baffling behaviour among its participants.

I find myself frequently turning to the media as a way to explore these underlying currents. Mowing through films and books, trying to understand, maybe through art where science has seemed to have failed, just what ‘crime’ is.

For a time, I found myself hunting through horror to find a place to cognitively settle. But it wasn’t a good fit, not for me anyway. Horror takes it all just a step too far, particularly since I subscribe to the school of thought that horror movies “...reflect our deepest social anxieties, mirroring society’s moral panics and cultural fears.” Horror, to me, is a way to experience something and explore the “what ifs” – and where my own anxieties live. To suspend disbelief, but with control.

If you have ever had the unpleasant experience of witnessing a death notification delivered to a deceased child’s parent, you have a reference point for Toni Collette’s screams of grief in Hereditary. It is too close to home.

Through continued chats with a good friend (read PhD), he began feeding me some core texts in sociology and anthropology. I wasn’t sure how Balinese cockfighting, or the ‘theatre’ of everyday life, was related to crime, but I trusted my anthro-sherpa. I kept an open mind, I kept listening, and reading. I was surprised at what field it led me to: cultural criminology. Not a field I had heard of before, but one that I felt at home in immediately.

Cultural criminology is a rather squishy term for the field’s own acknowledgement that ‘crime’ itself is, well, kind of squishy. But cultural criminology has something interesting to offer and a perspective I felt drawn to, because as Mike Presdee says “cultural criminology uses the ‘evidence’ of everyday existence, wherever it is found, and in whatever form it can be found; the debris of everyday life is its ‘data’...life histories, images, music and dance, all have a story to tell in the unravelling of crime.”

Now we’re talking. It’s all the things.

Finishing a recent murder trial, my brain truly appreciated the bulb that had been turned on. The ‘debris of everyday life’ is truly what covers and constructs a crime scene, wherever that debris may lie, digitally, physically or psychologically. My mind traced back through freshly spilled Slurpee mixed with blood in a post-shooting convenience store parking lot; debris telling its own story of consumption, crime, and panic. Half-crushed joints left by a loitering crowd with an Air Jordan logo pressed into discarded gum beside it. Video recordings showing a young man dancing out a Fortnite emote on top of a vehicle – another cultural reference layered into a criminal act, leaving its own debris behind. The angled, always-on eyes of the convenience store’s extensive surveillance system, leaving digital debris on hard drives and cloud storage, capturing moments of everyday life and its everyday litter.

Debris has its own storied history in crime scene investigations, with the oft-quoted Locard’s Exchange Principle boiled down to its simplest form: Every perpetrator will bring something into a crime scene, and every perpetrator will leave with something from the crime scene.

This scene debris, as Paul Kirk puts it, “...bear[s] mute witness against him [the perpetrator]. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value.”

This debris gets vacuumed, swabbed, photographed, analyzed, computed, inferred, judged and then further mediated via the evening news, podcasts and YouTube. What story the ‘crime’ tells depends on the teller, and it depends on the audience. The debris is what makes up the mosaic of a scene and the lives that lived up to that point. The debris itself can mean the difference between freedom and imprisonment.

So it gave me a start, somewhere, at least. Debris.

Still leaves me with other questions and more to ponder.

What of the debris left behind on the human actors? What of the lasting imprint of trauma, of loss, of grief? How does this debris become mediated and interpreted by the larger society? Where a crime scene may eventually be hosed and scrubbed of its history, it is not so for those who have witnessed, been victim to, or been charged with a violent crime. There is no ‘brain bleach’ and no hose for this debris. No squeegee to push the thoughts and prayers down the psychological storm drain with.

But debris is not part of a crime scene until the ‘crime’ itself is brought into existence, and cultural criminology helped pin this down for me further. Presdee (along with cultural criminologist, Jeff Ferrell) sum it all up nicely, “[f]or crime to come into ‘being’ and enter the realm of popular consciousness there must exist a tentative arrangement between criminal, police, media and the public on the criminalizing process…all become partners in crime…as much a part of the process of crime as the person identified and defined as the criminal.”

It is here, I think, that I recognize that I am (and you are too) a participant, or ‘partner in crime,’ and that comes with it responsibility and reflection. If nothing else, the world becomes a more fascinating and curious place, even in the absence of crime, if you spend some time looking at the ‘debris’ around you.

This week, we had our compulsively readable, delight of a writer back in the fold. In paid inboxes, Some Lawyer brings us an informative piece: How to do your own homework. A woman’s private Talkspace therapy transcripts were produced in court, sparking questions about privacy, privilege, subpoenas, and what actually happens to deeply personal data once it lives inside these platforms. Part legal explainer, part OSINT walkthrough, part warning about the collision between apps and AI data collection.

This will unlock next week, and paid subscribers will have a Justin original to look forward to.

Also out to paid subscribers, a new installment of High Spirits, Volume 14. This one is a silly romp with some poltergeists out of Tennesse, ride on lawn mowers, and golden retrievers.

What Justin Recommends

Book | Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime by Mike Presdee

“Cultural criminology uses the ‘evidence’ of everyday existence, wherever it is found and in whatever form it can be found; the debris of everyday life is its ‘data’...[l]ife histories, images, music and dance, all have a story to tell in the unravelling of crime.” – Mike Presdee

The field of cultural criminology is one that I have stumble-fell in love with as a way to think about what ‘crime’ is and what it means. The field spends less time on statistical models and more time in the ‘debris’ of everyday life that swirls around a criminal act. In this book, Mike Presdee invites your gaze to fall on these everyday activities that can be transgressive or criminalized, and just who gets to determine what exactly is a crime in the first place. From joyriding cars, to the consumption of hate and humiliation via reality TV, from rap to the rave, from the corner, to the alley and the boardroom – Presdee highlights the ‘carnival’ of crime and its participants in all their swirling, complex, foggy glory. While this may not be a book that everyone will want to curl up with, for those of you with an interest in criminology, sociology, or true crime, Presdee’s book is one that you will undoubtedly dog-ear and highlight heavily.

Enjoy your weekend, glorious reader.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

We’re back, and getting our sea legs with a bit of a silly one, a poltergeist case out of Tennesse. Enjoy!

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“Woman’s talkspace therapy app sessions exposed in court” was the headline.

The article described the shock of both a patient and a therapist, when, after two years of treatment via the therapy app Talkspace, “a transcript of every word [patient] had typed to her psychologist using the app Talkspace was produced in court by her former employer.”

Talkspace, the article explains, “records and stores text, video, and audio messages with clients” and “has amassed ‘one of the largest mental health data banks in the world,’ containing 140 million message exchanges” with the end goal of training an AI therapist.

Courtroom intrigue, with a side of privacy concerns, professional ethics, and the looming threat that everything from our text messages to bowel movements are being data-mined for the purpose of training AI.

Transcripts of years of therapy were maintained by a tech company, then produced in court by the plaintiff’s employer.

Who wouldn’t have questions.

From non-lawyers:

“What about doctor patient privilege? That’s a thing1, right? How did her employer even get that stuff?”

From litigators, generally:

“Wait, the therapy app2 responded to a subpoena?”

From the plaintiff’s bar:

“Who fucked up here? Because somebody fucked up here.3”

To answer any of the questions above, we need to find the court case.

As much as lawyers-on-the-internet love to implore journalists to link to relevant court documents, when discussing cases and decisions, the article cited above did not link to anything.

The article did not include a link to any filing. Sometimes, no matter how nicely I ask, I still have to do my own homework. Looking through the article, let’s find out we can learn about the plaintiff’s lawsuit:

• The case “began after [plaintiff’s] employer, AdventHealth, terminated her nurse practitioner role in 2021, when she was nearly nine months pregnant.”

• “In the months that followed, [plaintiff] filed a pregnancy discrimination claim against her former employer.”

• “A federal judge ultimately found the claim insufficiently supported...”

The article names the plaintiff. The above paragraphs name the plaintiff’s employer, who was the defendant in the lawsuit. Therefore, the name of the case is almost certainly [Plaintiff’s Last Name] v. [Plaintiff’s Employer].

The suit was filed in federal court, likely in, or after 20214. It was resolved by motion practice rather than trial, meaning there is likely a written decision5 explaining what happened, and why.

At this point, there are a number of ways to proceed. A legal research provider, such as Westlaw or Lexis will, if something close enough to the caption of an extant federal case with at least one written ruling will return something.

A search on Westlaw found the decision on the defendant’s motion for summary judgment6, issued August 30, 2023, by Judge Broomes in the District of Kansas.7

Without access to Lexis or Westlaw, how to proceed?

Google Scholar returned the same result8.

Is there any other way?

Sure. One of the best, when dealing with federal cases. The recap archive.

And the strength of recap is that it is not limited to decisions. Which is good, because the summary judgment decision had nothing to do with the “Talkspace” issue.

Recap has dockets. Recap has filings. Recap has enough, often, if sufficiently careful and nosy people have searched for the same thing before, that exactly what you want will already be there. And recap has the link to purchase any missing documents, directly from Pacer, should you be so interested that you simply must fill in the blanks.

Answering the questions, raised by the diligent and imaginary people above:

“What about therapist-patient privilege?”

The plaintiff designated her treating therapist as a witness in the case. That was sufficient that privilege was not a concern.

“How the hell did they get Talkspace to respond to a subpoena?”

That I can’t tell you. I don’t see any extraordinary measures apparent from the docket. I can’t guarantee that if I had a similar need, I wouldn’t be blown off, with vigor and precision.

“Did someone fuck up here?”

Personally, I would not try to support a plaintiff’s employment-discrimination case with testimony from her long-term therapist, provided through a third-party platform. But hindsight is 20/20, or so they say.

Reporting to you from a sunny morning, peppermint tea in hand. You may have noticed vibes were a little low last week, but we’re back in the flow and getting some much-needed naps in.

Once all the naps are had, we’ll be back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Until then, we only had one article out this week. In all inboxes, there was The Ghosts of New Tech. I wrote about a strange experience I had while walking through a conservation area and how it led me to think more deeply about how modern technology fills in the blanks for us. After a photo editing app generated a figure in one of my images, I started looking into how AI-assisted lighting and scene completion actually work, and why those results can be so eerie.

What Kennedy Recommends

Book | On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

April was an astronomical month in writing for me, something like 90,000 words, combined, in a number of projects. Some days, it comes easily, some days, it would be easier to run a cross-country marathon through hell.

Ending the day with this book always made it more tolerable.

There are a lot of books about writing that feel like they were written by people who have spent too much time thinking about writing and not enough time actually doing it. On Writing by Stephen King isn’t one of them.

What makes the book work is that King treats writing less like an inspired and impassioned art form and more like something you have to show up for consistently, badly, stubbornly, and often while doubting yourself. There’s very little romanticism in it. He talks about rejection, addiction, routine, editing, vocabulary, and the deeply unglamorous reality of getting words onto a page when you’d rather be doing almost anything else.

It’s one of the few books on craft that feels genuinely useful, whether you write fiction, investigative pieces, newsletters, scripts, or anything else that requires sitting alone with your own thoughts long enough to shape them into something coherent.

Available wherever you buy books.

Meet here again next week?

Can’t wait.

Until then, be well.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

When the highs are high, they’re untouchable. When the lows are low, well, at least I’m short enough to pick us back up. It was a long week at BSH HQ. The kind of week where words like “justice” and “fairness” start to lose meaning and morph into some secret third thing we can’t quite figure out. Still, we’re ending the week as we always do, with a shit attitude and high hopes.

This week, in all inboxes was The Cult of Productivity. This one was a slightly updated retrospective of an earlier article that examined the legitimacy of productivity culture. A, perhaps, cynical but realistic look at the schedules, experiences, and “hacks” that LinkedIn influencers and thought leaders try to sell us. When I posted this on LinkedIn, I had to wonder, “Are you allowed to say motherfucker on LinkedIn?” Whatever, I don’t want to be there if you can’t.

In paid inboxes was The Ghosts of New Tech. I went for a walk along an empty trail and heard a voice where no one was standing. Later, when I edited a photo from that same walk, there was a figure I hadn’t seen there at all. This one’s about how both our brains and our technology try to make sense of incomplete information. To read it early, unlock a paid subscription today.

What Kennedy Recommends

Podcast | Hunting Warhead

I’m just starting this one, so have some grace if it’s not your favourite.

Hunting Warhead is a critically acclaimed, 6-part investigative podcast from CBC Podcasts and Norway's VG newspaper that follows the international investigation to expose "Child's Play," a massive dark web child abuse site. Host Daemon Fairless tracks police, journalists, and survivors to detail how authorities infiltrated the network and arrested its administrator.

Check it out wherever you listen to podcasts.

Rest up. Another week of debauchery awaits us all.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

On a grey Sunday afternoon, I send Justin a text.

Do you want to see something scary?

Immediately, he writes back an unequivocal no.

And it’s important, folks, that when someone says “no,” you listen to them.

Unless, of course, that person is your business partner and you have something that needs to be seen.

Too bad, I write back, and send it anyway.

I woke that morning and decided to take a drive. Along the river that runs through and out of our city is a conservation area with a few kilometres of walking trails; a scenic delight in the summer and fall. In early April? Less scenic.

I wasn’t surprised to find myself pulling into an empty dirt lot.

You have a 10-ish minute walk from that parking lot to the beginning of any real trail, and it’s rare that the area isn’t filled with people and dogs, or families deciding which route to take. So, I laced up my boots and savoured having the wide open field to myself.

Eventually, I met the beginning of a boardwalk and, inspired by the mere thought of everything coming to life in spring, took a photo.

The clouds were shifting to reveal blue sky and sun, and when I rounded the corner, I found myself overlooking a valley of trails.

Disappointing but unsurprising, many of the trails were still covered with melting snow or washed out by muddy water. They looked like a nightmare to trek through. But I was already there, and there was no one else in sight; should I try my luck and fall on my ass, there would be no witnesses. So, with my headphones now on, I went forward.

I don’t know what I was thinking about; I just know I wasn’t really listening to the podcast when I heard what sounded like a man’s voice behind me. I stopped and lowered the headphones from my ears.

It seemed the world was entirely silent aside from my own breathing.

I waited a moment to see if another noise would come.

Nothing.

15 minutes later, mud-covered and damp, socks thoroughly wet, I began to curse myself when the sound came again. This time, it sounded closer and louder. I flung my headphones down my neck. Now, I was on higher ground, and in the silence, I could see the trails around me were still empty. I spun every which way, but I could see no one, and aside from the rustling of branches, I heard nothing.

Fool me once, meh. Twice? I’m out.

Half an hour later, I was through the trails and heading back to the parking lot when I realized I was about 1.2km short of my goal. At that point, I had two options. I could do a lap in a bare field to my right or take a small trail through a wooded area to my left. Having just seen a family and more vehicles pulling in, I turned to the left, sans headphones.

Branches cracked under my feet, birds chirped, and the sun fell behind the clouds again.

Then, with nothing between my ears and the air, a booming and incoherent male yelling came from not so far away, and I pivoted on my heel. I don’t know who it was, I don’t know where it was. I don’t really care. Fuck that last half a kilometre.

Later that afternoon, I opened the photos on my phone. Because my phone is just a few years old and new technology is engineered to become obsolete, the camera is starting to show its age. No matter how clean the lenses are, photos in natural light come out with a haze. It’s annoying, but most of it can be fixed in the same editing app I’ve been using for years.

Let me stress that again: the same editing app I have been using for years.

When I edit my photos, I’m primarily adjusting the lighting. Like so:

Now, in the photo of Mochi the cat, it may just look like colour grading (a filter). But in the cafe photo and the corner of my kitchen, you can see the addition of shadows and highlights that weren’t originally there, because the app is using local tone mapping to adjust different sections of the photo independently, lifting highlights in areas that would naturally catch light and deepening shadows where light would fall off.

It creates the illusion of a directional light source to create more depth.

Very helpful in areas with low lighting or little to no natural light.

I pulled up the photos I’d taken on my walk and popped them into the editor. Given the issues with my barely geriatric camera, and the fact that the photos were taken outdoors, they were all too low-contrast to really spend time on, but I decided to try with the boardwalk.

I scrolled through the lighting options and clicked one titled “midday.”

Imagine my surprise when it presented me this:

I can assure you, that has never happened before.

The creation of an entire entity has never been part of the editing process.

After my walk full of disembodied mysterious yelling, the sudden appearance of a transparent… young man?… was certainly not the soothing lighting improvement I was hoping for.

My immediate, and admittedly flawed, first thought was that the editor was picking up something I couldn’t see. If it increases highlights and deepens shadows, then it had to be mapping something.

I deleted the photo from the editor, added it again, and it did not happen. I could not recreate the boy.

Before this, I hadn’t given much thought to what the app was doing.

Traditional lighting adjustments play with exposure, contrast and white balance. Basically, there are mathematical changes to the pixels. Pretty simple.

Newer technology is different. Instead of changing pixels, the app is using generative AI-assisted relighting and scene completion. It’s changing the content rather than the grading, and under certain adjustments, it can create plausible elements based on patterns it’s learned. In photography datasets, a boardwalk path, horizon line, and open field may often be accompanied by a figure. So it placed one there.

Spooky in theory, not so much in actuality, these ghosts in new technology.

When I sent the photo to Justin, he gave me what I was looking for. A solid “What the fuck?” and a few other choice words and adjectives.

I didn’t feel too bad about bulldozing his earlier “no,” because it had it’s intended effect, and sometimes, I think the universe brought us together primarily to freak each other out.

Recently, Justin has been immersed in a case that required comprehensive scene analysis.

He did a fascinating remote crime scene walkthrough with a wicked forensic scientist using high-resolution laser scan data. I was not there, but I have the recording, where we’re looking at the scene as if we’re standing inside it, just digitally reconstructed.

In certain areas, you can see what seems to be the shape or mass of a person made up of tiny white dots, no discernible solid features. The laser scanners sit in one position and rotate, sending out pulses of light and measuring how long they take to bounce back. Over a few minutes, the device collects millions of points to build a full 3D map of the space.

If someone walks through while that’s happening, they’re only captured in fragments depending on where they were in the moment. Since the software stitches all those moments into a single model, the moving person doesn’t resolve into a solid figure. Instead, they appear semi-transparent, duplicated, or partially missing, like a ghost passing through the scene.

I’ve watched the video a dozen times or more, and it never gets less eerie to pass by one of those “ghosts,” even when you’re aware it’s just authorized personnel on scene.

Whether it’s a trail in early spring or a reconstructed crime scene rendered in millions of points, your brain and the technology are functionally doing the same thing: trying to resolve something incomplete into something whole. A shadow becomes a person, a distant sound becomes a voice.

A flicker of movement between trees. A cluster of pixels where a person might be. A smear of light that looks just enough like a body.

So maybe there was no one on the trail that morning. Maybe the yelling was just sound carrying strangely through wet trees and open space. Maybe the app stitched together something it thought belonged there because, statistically, it often does. Who knows.

I closed the app, but I didn’t delete the photo because even though it didn’t capture anything truly frightening, for a moment it felt like it did.

Not even all the caffeine spilled in the Boston Harbor would be enough to keep us invigorated on a snowy Friday after a long week, so let’s start easing into the weekend, shall we?

This week, we had a Kennedy double feature for paid and unpaid subscribers.

Going out to everyone was “It was spring, perhaps.” With a recent focus on grooming cases, Kennedy reflects on memory and what we expect of victims and witnesses. How we hold onto the unremarkable, how we lose it just as easily, and what happens when systems demand precise detail from people whose experiences were never built to be remembered that way.

In paid inboxes was a slightly updated release of a Bullshit Hunting favourite, The Cult of Productivity. This one takes aim at hustle culture, productivity theatre, and the billion-dollar industry built on convincing you that exhaustion is a personal failure. From LinkedIn routines to influencers that contradict themselves, this is part rant, part investigation into the mythology of self-optimization.

What Kennedy Recommends

Book | No More Mediocre by Laura Danger

During the pandemic, many people found themselves spending more time on social media. While it’s not the place we oughta be, I was one of those people who used that strange and isolating moment in history to create content. It was a fun, creative way to pass the time and led to finding community in people I wouldn’t have otherwise met. One of those people was Laura Danger.

Laura began creating videos on domestic equity and quickly became a prominent voice in conversations about household dynamics, power, equity, and care. I clearly remember the moment I watched her first video about “weaponized incompetence.” Her way of simply distilling complex cultural, systemic, and gendered issues resonated with me, and clearly, many others.

I was quick to pre-order her book, both the physical and audio versions, and I’m glad I did.

Drawing from case studies, including nontraditional, intentionally developed family structures, and her own experience with mental illness and the demands of work and family life, Laura provides communication models and actionable steps you can take to restructure your household, home and partnerships to simply live better.

Available wherever you buy books.

Now, if you have any reading or watching suggestions for us, let us know!

Until we see you on the other side, rest easy and have a good time.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

Are you tired?

I’m pretty tired.

And you know what? I do a lot of the “right” things. I journal, I drink green juices, keep a tidy space, silence work chats from 7pm to 7am. I take probiotics and go to therapy. Motherfucker, I do cardio 6 out of 7 days of the week, and I’m child-free.

Sometimes, still, I’m so exhausted that I’m one Instagram notification away from faking my own death.

So, when that notification turns out to be a “Hey girlie!” DM from a Corporate Baddie™️ peddling a “focus” supplement and a productivity clock so I can fit Zoom calls and Pilates in my day, I’m one step closer to burning my passport and identifying documents.

But I get it. I do.

In late-stage capitalism, what could be a greater marketing ploy than promising human productivity and optimization far past what we’re built for? Don’t fear the machines, ye skeptics, simply become one.

Every day, LinkedIn thought leaders and self-proclaimed business gurus flood our feeds with life hacks. We get bolded words and rocket emojis to let us know, “Hey, I’ve unlocked the ultimate secrets to success, and you could too!” If only you’d wake up earlier and embrace the grind, loser.

“I wake up at 4:00 am, meditate, read 100 pages, drink some cucumbers, raw dog a cold plunge, kiss my wife exactly five times, do my inner-child work and respond to emails—all before 6 am.”

Or some variation of that, littered across the internet as far as we can see. Despite the sheer volume of words, the idea is simple: if you just start your day like a successful person, you’ll be successful, too. But is this how anyone is actually living? Really? Sustainably?

OSINT for Good? Nah, OSINT for a Cynic

I’m not the first person to grow weary of hustle culture and its quixotic and condescending nature. In fact, plenty of people have dedicated time and energy to this, technically. And here’s what we’ve learned:

Public Schedules

My inherent issue isn’t with lying. Marketing and communications essentially exist to capitalize on our frail humanity with truthiness and hollow guarantees. My true issue is that I believe if you’re going to lie for profit, you should probably be good at it.

Ever seen someone put a call out on social media to let you know their calendar is filling up quickly, so you should score your 15-minute window of life-changing time?

Alright, open that Calendly, let’s see this jam packed sched.

Well, as the Dixie Chicks once sang, “wiiiide open spaces.”

In 2018, Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, tweeted about his infamous daily commute; a five-mile walk that took him just over an hour. He spoke with CNN Money about how it was the greatest investment he’s ever made.

You can find hundreds of articles chronicling Elon Musk’s morning routines over the years, including a bedtime of 3 am and a wakeup time of 5 am. People have experimented with this, replicated it, and sworn by it. Though, 6 months later, he might be quoted as saying he actually wakes up at 9 am after a tidy 6.5 hours of rest. Notoriously truthful, that one.

In both instances, it’s been pointed out time and time again that these people maintain schedules that would render this borderline impossible.

But for the sake of argument, we’ll say these are loose schedules maintained on days without meetings or flights. We can’t all be perfect, after all. But isn’t that exactly what we’re being sold here? The idea that when everything is done “right,” in perfect balance, you too will become uselessly wealthy?

Totally, sounds great.

Timestamps

So, your morning routine begins at 4:30 am? 8 am, you’re at powerlifting and by 2 pm, you’re in your 6th “focus block” and lining up calls. Or, so you’ve said in a LinkedIn and Instagram post, monthly, for the past year.

We analyze influencer behaviour in a number of industries for a multitude of reasons. Marketing professionals need the data to build campaigns and social media schedules accurately, and bored folks on Reddit have personal vendettas against corporate influencers. Both valuable.

Analyses of influencer posting habits show a number of things, including self-proclaimed early risers tweeting and posting at hours they’re meant to be asleep (You know what kept me up and alert in my youth, blasting nonsense out at 2 am? Nothing, mom). A timestamped tweet goes up about an “inspiring” meeting that just ended. Meanwhile, Instagram stories clearly display a carnivore platter overlooking a beach view, with no laptop in sight.

Copy and Paste

It’s hard to be original these days. It’s pretty much all been thought, conceptualized, and written.

The LinkedIn hustle-post-formula is easily identified, showing productivity advice is directly recycled from books like The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, How to Win Friends & Influence People; concepts that have been in the cultural zeitgeist for decades.

David Perell and Nat Eliason, productivity writers, note how many “morning routine” articles are just slightly reworded copies of each other. Harvard Business Review has published multiple articles debunking the idea that a single morning routine formula works for everyone.

Selling Productivity

“Get your shit together for the low price of $399!”

The productivity industry is worth billions, and most of it is built on selling an idea, an imagined you, rather than being of actual service. It’s a grift.

Every guru has a “perfectly optimized” planner that will “change your life.” In reality, these templates are created on the same programs using the same principles, and most people buy them and never use them. It’s the same repackaged and recycled material turned into new books, podcasts, and courses that also cost hundreds of dollars and provide you nothing more than platitudes found on Pinterest.

Don’t even get me started on “one-on-one sessions” that are actually pre-taped 30-minute videos with zero tailoring for individual “clients.”

What to Look For

Timelines: If someone is selling their own success story, pay mind to incoherent timelines, claims of working at five different places simultaneously, or meteoric rises with no track record.

Career History: LinkedIn allows self-reported job titles, meaning anyone can claim to be a “former Google executive.” Check company rosters and press releases for tangible records.

Engagement Manipulation: Some of these posts rack up hundreds of thousands of likes instantly. Suspicious, right? That’s because LinkedIn pods/engagement groups artificially boost them.

I didn’t build this ant hill in an effort to slam those trying to maximize their time. We all want to be efficient.

But our timelines are flooded with myths that keep us tired and distracted while we live under leadership and governance modelled after patriarchal, capitalistic individuals who will continue to industrialize humanity. And you should be reminded that your greatest responsibility, in all of it, is to take care of yourself.

“Maximizing your capacity” is the quickest road to depression and illness. Guess how productive you’ll be, then?

You are a human being deserving of rest and self-compassion, not another daily planner or focus app. Take a page from my book today, and lay down for a nap, for Christ’s sake.

In this moment, one of us (Kennedy & Justin) is cursing the snow outside the window, the other is in that snow puffing a pipe tobacco. You guess who.

We hope that wherever you are, it’s far less frozen and far more pleasant.

Out to all this week was The ghost of sanctions yet to come. Oil, soap, candles, corsets, we know where those come from. Understood origins from a simpler time. Now? We can’t be so certain about where things come from. As AI infiltrates legal work and research, there’s much to learn about what is true and what could be hallucinated. If you haven’t already read, make sure to add it to your weekend reading list.

For paid subscribers, Kennedy muses on memory and how our expectations of witnesses and victims often bump up against the reality of how our brains process our experiences. To unlock “It was spring, perhaps” before it reaches all inboxes next week, upgrade your subscription.

Also in paid inboxes was High Spirits Volume 13. This week, Kennedy talks us through the mysterious death of the Isdal Woman. We talk 1970s espionage, poor tradecraft and what it might mean to have a variety of wigs in your luggage.

What Kennedy Recommends

Documentary | Trust Me: The False Prophet

Talk about boots on the ground journalism.

In this four-part docuseries, cult researcher Christine and her filmmaker husband Tolga share years’ worth of footage shot inside the FLDS community of Short Creek, Utah.

What started as an effort to help the community after a deadly flood unexpectedly turned into an explosive exposé as Christine and Tolga realized they were neighbours with a so-called Prophet who was “spiritually married” to at least 20 women and girls, at least 10 of whom were underage.

The unique nature of watching the filmmakers realize and reckon with what they’re witnessing and how they’ll handle it is a compelling part of the story that we rarely get to see.

If you’ve ever wanted to watch a predator make an absolute buffoon of himself by parkouring off boulders and willingly and thoroughly, and enthusiastically, documenting his crimes, this is the watch for you. Find it on Netflix.

Now, go have the weekend you deserve! (Whatever that means to you)

See you on the flip,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

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Once the season turns enough that the sun rises with me and the temperature is tolerable, I resume my ritual of a pre-coffee walk each morning. At any point between 6 and 8am throughout the week, you can find me slowly wandering the streets with headphones on, nothing playing, contemplating my mere existence.

This morning, I came back through the door with 4,200 steps in, filled a mug with peppermint tea and boiling water, stretched on my yoga mat and took my meds. I placed a jazz vinyl on my record player and cracked my laptop to begin the workday while espresso poured from the machine into a tiny cup.

This moment is as concrete as any.

It’s April 13th, 9:17am. My mood could most succinctly be described as “moderate.” I just used the last of my Greek yogurt and hemp hearts. The milk is running low. I need to call a lodge on a lake where a friend is getting married in September. I have case work to do that looks similar to any other case work. In two hours, Justin and I will have a phone call that sounds like most of our phone calls. I’m looking forward to painting on a fresh canvas later. I think maybe I’ll paint a frog smoking a cigarette.

By the end of the week, I won’t remember how long this morning’s walk was. At this point, I can’t remember which of the three perfumes I plucked from the table in my entrance before I left, needlessly spritzing myself, though I had yet to brush my teeth or hair. I can’t tell you what I wore to bed last night.

Nothing about this morning is memorable, but if, for some reason, in five months, you had to ask me about it, I’d probably be able to place it as early spring. I’d likely remember that it was grey, that the trees were still dead, and I might remember that I was annoyed with myself for wearing my white runners, not my boots, because there are still small mounds of dirtied snow melting into the ground, creating thick mud throughout the walking trails.

I might not be able to tell you if it was March or April, but you could cross my memory against the weather and snowfall. If I somehow remember that I called Wolf Ridge Lodge the morning of this particular walk, I could check my emails for a reservation confirmation or search my texts to see if I mentioned it to anyone I was booking accommodations with. If I happened to recall that I stopped to rub my sore back because I had my period, I could check my cycle tracker. If I give the smoking frog away to a friend, we might be able to smash our brain cells together to think of when.

Now, say, you ask me four years from now about this morning, what I can remember would depend on a few things. Nothing small or elaborate, just large life architecture stuff.

I’ve lived here for seven months. If I move when the lease is up, I’ll know it was spring of 2026, the only spring I had here. As we speak, my dad is sick. During my walk, I texted him to make dinner plans on Wednesday at a spot we’ve never been to. Because he’s sick, I catalogue these memories differently than I did pre-cancer. If that’s the first and last dinner we have there, I’ll probably be able to tell you with some level of accuracy that these two things happened around the same time. I’m expecting to hear from someone in the next few days that I don’t typically hear from. If I do, it could be another marker.

But all of these things rely on a hypothetical.

I have no reason to believe I’ll move. I think I’ll probably have more dinners with my dad. If I do hear from this person, it could be lacklustre. I could hear from them again, and those things could blur together.

I probably won’t remember this day at all.

I’m currently combing through materials related to two grooming cases. On a granular level, they’re not similar at all, but they do share some overlapping themes. The alleged perpetrators in each case are around the same age, the victims are too, and the “relationships” happened in the same time period.

In both cases, the legal proceedings happened a number of years after the fact.

A big point of contention and confusion is the timelines. The “relationships” went on for years; the court is focused on a relatively small number of specific incidents over all those years that blur into other incidents; we’re relying on the memories of kids who have become adults, and memories are a fickle thing.

I reached “throw your keyboard across a room” levels of defeat one day when I hit page 637 of a trial transcript. Nothing made sense; the dates didn’t add up, the lawyers were confusing themselves, littering the transcript with a dozen half-thoughts that only led to more confusion. I found myself placing events on the timeline that happened between two people months before they supposedly met. Under cross-examination, things didn’t get a hell of a lot clearer.

I wasn’t frustrated because I needed one thing to have happened or because I had an opinion on what happened at all. I don’t. Whether or not the timelines don’t make sense because someone is misremembering or because they’re lying is not relevant to my work of putting down on paper who said what about whom and when. In fact, inconsistencies are valuable.

But I have a brain that, like many brains, likes order, and having to break a massive timeline into tables of anomalies in a different document is not the kind of order my brain craves.

Once I was thoroughly bamboozled and in need of a break, I switched to the other case, where I was glad to have more than just transcripts. I had trial audio.

Having audio or video in a case, particularly those that happened 10 or 20 years ago, is a beautiful thing. The way information is contextualized through these mediums is vastly different than the words you can read on paper. For me, at least, it’s much simpler to follow someone’s train of thought audibly than it is to read it transcribed.

I was prepared to settle in, let the information synthesize in my brain, get the basics into my skull, and restart the audio to take my notes.

Unsurprisingly, this case was also riddled with memory failures. It was a bit more straightforward in that the victim rarely asserted their recall as fact. Because they were apprehensive about naming dates for things they couldn’t clearly remember, there was little contradiction. Instead, they provided large ranges that evidently frustrated defence counsel.

So much of the cross-examination focused on narrowing those dates.

But the victim in this case had an atypical childhood experience.

They were in an accelerated program for gifted students, shuffling schools at a different rate than their peers. When prompted, they couldn’t remember what grade they were in during certain events because their grade didn’t correspond with their age. They lived with different parents in different households with no formal custody agreement or schedule; narrowing down where they were staying was unhelpful. They’d known their abuser for many years as their coach, so trying to recall certain games, of which there were hundreds and dozens of tournaments for years, was also futile. Even the weather was largely debatable. “A bit of snow on the ground” could be fall, could be an unseasonally warm winter week, could be early spring.

When asked for the tenth time to try to give a more accurate date, there’s an objection. The victim has tried, in every conceivable way, to give a more accurate date. They cannot. The objection is sustained.

There’s a particular kind of scrutiny placed on memory in cases involving children and grooming that feels, at times, fundamentally mismatched with how memory actually works. We ask for specificity from people who were, at the time, still building the frameworks that allow memory to organize itself at all. Most people, let alone children, don’t catalogue their lives in dates and sequences. They remember in fragments of people, places, sensations, and disruptions. Add grooming to that, and those fragments are also shaped by power, confusion, normalization, and, often, a slow and purposeful erosion of what should have stood out as unusual, and what should be understood.

Grooming, by design, blurs reality. When something happens once, it can be easier to isolate. When it happens repeatedly, incrementally, and within a relationship that is already part of a child’s life, those moments don’t always register. They accumulate and become part of the background. Years later, when asked to recall them, what surfaces isn’t clean or isolated events, but overlapping layers of detail—this happened when I was still going to that school, when I was staying at that house, when it was cold out.

Time, in these cases, is rarely linear. It’s anchored to structures like school, sports seasons, holidays, who they were living with, whether there was a broken curfew, a first cell phone or messages on the family computer. Even those anchors can shift. A child moving between households, switching schools, or living in instability, not uncommon for grooming victims, may not have consistency to rely on. And over time, memory fades. Early spring becomes “summer” or a spring from a different year. Late fall becomes “before winter.”

And yet, we bring those memories into systems that demand chronology. We ask for dates, sequences, and order. We narrow, and we press, and we try to fix things in place. Sometimes that produces clarity. Sometimes it produces a contradiction. Often, it simply exposes the gap between what memory can offer and what we expect it to provide.

I probably won’t remember this morning.

If you asked me about it years from now, I’d try to give you a painted frog smoking a cigarette or an empty spot on the shelf where my dark cherry yogurt should be, but I’d probably have a failure of memory on any of those details. So, I wouldn’t give you a timeline or much for nuance, I’d give you a season. I’d give you the feeling of wet pavement and stubborn snow, and hope we could make something of it.