Good to see ya.

This week, out to paid subscribers was yet another masterclass in storytelling from Some Lawyer, The Eyes of Laura Mars. For part two in a series exploring violence linked to the movie “The Warriors,” we revisit three of the incidents most often cited as proof that the movies inspired brutality. Case after case, the facts are stranger, sadder, and not as neat as the narratives we may have believed.

Out to everyone was The Restoration from Kennedy. A fictional tale about an investigator, not unlike many of you, cataloguing a family’s photo archive for the local historical society. And what happens when our investigator discovers that the digitally restored images don’t quite match the originals. Asking the question of whether memory was ever the reliable archive we imagined it to be.

What Kennedy Recommends

Swingers is a new investigative series presented by BBC journalist Catrin Nye.

Ruth O’Grady, from north Wales, alleges she was pressured into joining FabSwingers, a popular swinging website, by her then-husband, and then encouraged into sexual encounters with strangers over 100 times.

The Gisèle Pelicot case was a catalyst for O’Grady coming forward, saying, “Everyone was so shocked. I got really, really angry because I wasn’t shocked at all. That’s what motivated me, because I am fed up with the shock.”

She has chosen to tell her story as a warning to other women, and in the hope that those who have been through something similar will recognize their own experience. “If even one woman recognizes herself and realizes she is doing things she does not want to do, it would be enough.”

In this podcast, Catrin pieces together Ruth’s story and asks what it tells us about sexual consent, pressure in relationships, and the swinging community.

Have the weekend you deserve, everyone.

We’ll see you on the other side.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

This is part two of a series concerning violence linked to the movie “The Warriors.” Part One is here.

The Boston Police Department investigated Juan Claudio Pascacio’s death for fourteen months. Even though suspects were elusive, blame was not.

Bay Village is Boston’s smallest neighborhood. Edgar Allen Poe was born there to actors working in the theater …

Read more

Good? Good.

This week, you had two from Kennedy.

Out to everyone was a quick lesson in context with Congratulations, You Read the Abstract. What started as a misunderstanding of a study on domestic violence became a vastly overused internet comment. We follow one of social media's favourite talking points about lesbian relationships back to the original CDC research, unpack what the study actually measured, and explore how data can become myth one missing detail at a time.

In paid inboxes. We were missing last year’s fictional horror series, Accounts Vary, so we dipped our toes back into the art of the tall tale with The Restoration. You meet your narrator at the beginning of a new job. Hired to identify thousands of old family photographs after an estate sale, they find certain copies at odds with their originals. A story about memory and what happens when we preserve history with artificial “enhancements.”

What Kennedy Recommends

Sick in bed, I found myself perusing documentaries.

A fascinating documentary about legendary climber Dean Potter, whose career was defined by an endless drive to push the limits of what was possible.

Even if you have no interest in climbing, it’s a worthwhile watch. The four-part series explores ambition, risk, obsession, and the complicated legacy of someone who inspired countless people while also making choices that deeply affected those around him. The climbing footage is an affecting watch, your heart will likely race; but it’s the human elements of the story that were of particular interest to me.

Available wherever you watch HBO.

That’s it, that’s all, folks.

Catch you on the flip.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

The first time I heard someone say that generative AI could have the capacity to manipulate our history, I dismissed it as the sort of prediction people make whenever a new technology appears. We have a habit of assuming every advancement could either save civilization or end it, and reality usually lands somewhere closer to the centre. The printing press did not destroy memory. Photography did not eliminate lying. Photoshop did not make every image meaningless.

False histories are not always created through elaborate conspiracies. They appear slowly, through repetition. A mistake appears in an obituary, which is copied into a family tree, which is cited by a local historian, which eventually becomes the source used to correct someone who thought they remembered what actually happened. The right people have died, the newspaper has been poorly digitized, and surviving relatives doubt whether their own memories can be trusted.

I accepted the Mercer job without much thought.

An estate company had been hired to empty a farmhouse after the last surviving member of the family died. There were no children and no close relatives prepared to inherit the property. The furniture would be auctioned, the house sold. The local historical society had expressed interest in the family’s photographs, provided someone could determine whether they contained anything of significance.

There were, according to the estate manager, somewhere between three and four thousand of them. She said this apologetically, as though she had personally taken every picture.

“They’re mostly in boxes,” she told me over the phone. “Some albums too. We found slides, negatives, old discs. It’s a lot.”

“How much of it is labelled?”

She laughed, which answered the question.

The estate company needed someone willing to compare the photographs against public records, newspaper archives, cemetery databases, school yearbooks, property documents, and whatever scraps of family history had already found their way online. The historical society wanted names, dates, locations, and just enough supporting information.

Those are modest ambitions until you have tried to meet them.

The photographs arrived in twelve cardboard storage boxes on a Thursday morning. One of the boxes originally held liquor bottles, another was for an eletric mixer, and several bankers boxes. Someone had written MERCER PHOTOS across the top of each one in black marker, although several also contained tax receipts, Christmas cards, appliance manuals, and the sorts of paper that accumulates in houses where nothing is thrown away because everything could matter someday.

The prints ranged from formal studio portraits to badly exposed snapshots. There were tintypes, cabinet cards, Polaroids, school photographs, wedding pictures, military portraits, and hundreds of small square prints with white borders and dates stamped in the margins. Some were pristine, others had been bent, torn, water-damaged, or stuck together by decades of humidity. The negatives had been stored in envelopes with notes such as LAKE, CHRISTMAS, and 1964 (MAYBE).

There were also six compact discs in cracked plastic cases. Each had been labelled in blue marker: MERCER 1 through MERCER 6.

The estate manager mentioned that a volunteer digitized part of the collection years earlier. She believed the images were also available through an online archive maintained by the historical society.

“Might save you some time,” she had said.

The archive was better organized than I expected. Each image had been assigned an identification number, a short description, an estimated date range, and a list of known names. Many entries included comments from local residents who had identified buildings, vehicles, or distant relatives. The site was not sophisticated, but it had clearly been built by people who cared.

More importantly, the photographs had been restored.

Dust had been removed. Exposure had been corrected. Torn corners had been reconstructed. Faded faces emerged from shadows, and water stains disappeared from pale summer skies. The photographs still looked old; they had not been sharpened into some sort of waxy oversaturated imitation.

There is nothing inherently wrong with restoring a photograph. Preservation often requires intervention. Archivists repair tears, stabilize paper, adjust scans, and remove defects introduced by damaged equipment or poor storage. Digital restoration can reveal what was always there but had become difficult to see.

The important word is reveal. Restoration should help us perceive what the original contains. It should not decide what the original contained and place it there.

That boundary has always been difficult. A person repairing a damaged portrait may reconstruct the edge of an ear or continue the line of a dress across a tear. Before generative AI, every restoration involved a judgment call. A human restorer knows when they are making an inference, but a generative model has no relationship to truth at all. It identifies patterns and predicts what belongs next. It does not ask what was there, it simply asks what would look plausible.

One of the reasons people are so easy to mislead with photographs is that we spend very little time really looking at them. We see a grandmother standing outside a farmhouse and our brain concludes, Grandmother. Farmhouse. Summer. We do not inventory the porch columns, count the fence posts, or study the direction of every shadow. Recognition is efficient, and allows us to understand an image in a fraction of a second.

I began by matching the physical photographs to their online counterparts. This was slower than it sounds. The numbers written on the backs of the prints did not always correspond to the digital filenames, and the volunteer who created the archive had occasionally grouped several photographs under one entry. Some images had been scanned from albums and cropped so tightly that the page itself was no longer visible. Others existed online in multiple versions with slightly different descriptions.

None of that was unusual. Archives are made by people, and people are contradictory.

The first photograph that bothered me was numbered M-1968-044.

Three children stood beside a white wooden fence, squinting into bright sunlight. The oldest boy had his eyes closed. The younger two wore matching striped shirts, although one shirt had been tucked into shorts and the other had not. Behind them was a field, a line of trees, and the edge of a barn that appeared in dozens of other Mercer photographs.

The physical print had a tear through the lower-left corner. It removed part of the youngest child’s shoe and splintered one of the fence posts. The restored image repaired both. The child had two complete shoes, and the post continued neatly to the ground.

What I did not expect was the second horizontal rail.

In the physical photograph, the fence had two rails running behind the children. In the restored version, it had three.

It disappeared naturally behind the children’s bodies, followed the angle of the existing boards, and carried the same paint wear as the rest of the fence. Had I seen the restored version by itself, I would not have questioned it.

I enlarged both images and compared them side by side. The new rail was not just an addition to the torn area but had been added across the full width of the picture, including sections where the original was perfectly intact.

The restoration software must’ve made a mistake.

Older automated tools sometimes extended nearby textures when repairing damage, and newer generative systems are designed to create visually coherent results rather than historically accurate ones. The model saw a fence and predicted a more complete fence.

I recorded the discrepancy in my notes and moved on.

The second inconsistency involved a dog.

The photograph had been taken on a porch, probably in the late 1950s. Two women sat on a wooden swing, each holding a glass. A black Labrador stood partly behind them. In the physical print, only the dog’s head, shoulder, and one front paw were visible. The rest of its body was obscured by the swing.

In the archived version, the dog had been moved slightly forward. Its entire chest was visible, along with both front legs and the beginning of its back. The result was anatomically plausible and consistent with the lighting. It did not have extra paws, distorted fur, or any of the obvious defects people associate with AI-generated images.

I checked whether the archive might have used a different print or negative. Families often took several photographs in quick succession, and similar frames can be mistaken for one another. I searched the boxes, reviewed the discs, and examined every nearby image in the online collection.

There was only one version.

By Friday afternoon, I had documented twenty-three alterations. Most were small. A wrinkled tablecloth became smooth. A missing porch spindle reappeared. A child’s obscured hand acquired fingers that were probably correct but could not be verified. In one photograph, a faded sign on a building became legible enough to read MERCER GENERAL, although the original contained no discernible lettering.

None of these changes were dramatic which made them more troubling.

If a restoration reveals a face hidden in shadow, the detail should exist somewhere in the source data. If it reconstructs an area destroyed by a tear, the result may be convincing, but it is still an inference. If it creates a readable sign where no readable letters exist, it’s manufactured.

I contacted the historical society on Monday.

The woman who answered introduced herself as Elaine. She had volunteered there for more than twenty years and remembered the Mercer digitization project.

“We were very proud of that one,” she said. “People from the family kept finding us online. We got messages from all over.”

“Do you know what software was used to restore the photographs?”

“There were a few different programs, I think. The volunteer who did most of it passed away.”

“Were the original scans retained?”

“I would assume so.”

“Do you know where?”

There was a pause long enough that I heard her keyboard begin clicking.

“We changed website companies a few years ago,” she said. “The new one improved a lot of the images automatically.”

“What do you mean by improved?”

“Cleaned them up, ya know? Removed scratches, made the faces clearer.”

“Did anyone review the changes?”

“Well, there weren’t changes, really, there were enhancements.”

The distinction seemed important to her.

I asked whether I could receive copies of the original, unprocessed scans. She said she would contact the company that hosted the archive and look through the society’s drives.

Before we ended the call, she added, “The restored ones are much nicer.”

The photograph that propelled me forward was in a paper album near the bottom of the ninth box. Its pages had once been black but had faded to a soft charcoal grey. Each picture was held in place by triangular paper corners, and someone had identified the subjects in white pencil beneath them.

The image showed four women standing outside the Mercer General Store in 1947. Three were young, possibly sisters. The fourth was older and wore a dark dress buttoned to the throat. The photograph had been folded before it was placed in the album, leaving a crease through the older woman’s face.

The paper had separated slightly along the fold. A narrow section of the image was hidden beneath the raised fibres, including part of the woman’s left cheek and the corner of her mouth.

I found the matching archive entry and opened the restored version.

The crease was gone. The woman’s face was complete.

At first, I saw nothing that distinguished it from the other restorations. The missing area had been filled smoothly. Her mouth continued across the damaged section, and a small dimple appeared beside it. The result was subtle enough that most viewers would never have known the photograph had been damaged.

I removed the physical print from its paper corners and examined the fold beneath a magnifying lens.

The hidden section remained unclear. The emulsion had cracked and curled inward. There was no visible information from which the shape of the smile or the dimple could have been recovered.

Then I noticed another photograph on the same album page that showed the same woman in profile.

She had the same dimple in precisely the same place.

A generative system trained on a collection could use information from one photograph to complete another. A volunteer could have done the same consciously. The archive contained hundreds of Mercer faces. Perhaps the restoration software had identified the woman across multiple images and reconstructed her damaged features from an intact photograph.

That explanation was technically possible.

It was also far more sophisticated than anything the historical society believed it had purchased.

I searched the archive for every photograph tagged with the woman’s name. There were fourteen. In three, the dimple was visible. In the others, she was turned away, too distant, or unsmiling.

The restored 1947 photograph matched the earlier images exactly.

I sat with the physical print, the archived restoration, and the later portrait arranged across my desk. For several minutes, I tried to decide whether I was impressed or alarmed.

Then I turned the 1947 print over.

Someone had written a note on the back in pencil.

First photograph after Ruth lost the left side of her smile.

“Hmm,” I thought. Perhaps a stroke or some sort of paralysis that left her smile flat an undimpled on the side the photo had suggested

Beneath the note I’d made about Ruth’s photograph, I wrote:

Most likely explanation: Modern restoration software reconstructed missing portions of damaged photographs by referencing other images in the same archive.

It was a sophisticated capability for a volunteer historical society. But it wasn’t impossible. Consumer software had become startlingly good at identifying recurring faces across collections. If the model recognized Ruth in a dozen photographs, perhaps it had simply inferred the missing portion of her smile from another image.

I decided to leave Ruth alone for the afternoon.

The Mercers had lived in the county for well over a century, which meant census records, school yearbooks, church bulletins, property transfers, wedding announcements, obituaries. Local newspapers have a wonderful habit of documenting the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary detail. A county archive can tell you when someone won a pie contest, broke an ankle, bought a new tractor, or hosted twelve relatives for Thanksgiving. It is simultaneously invaluable and deeply nosy.

By the end of the first day I identified nearly thirty people with reasonable confidence.

The work was pleasantly repetitive. Compare a face to a yearbook. Confirm an address. Find a marriage announcement. Check whether the children listed in the obituary matched the people standing beside them in a Christmas photograph. Every confirmed identity made the next one easier.

The archive, for all my growing reservations about its restorations, was proving genuinely useful.

Names aligned.

Dates aligned.

Buildings matched insurance maps.

Vehicle registrations corresponded with the estimated years of the photographs.

If I had been evaluating the archive for historical usefulness, I would have given it an enthusiastic recommendation. But I was trying to determine whether it still represented the photographs it claimed to preserve.

The first interview I conducted was with a woman named Margaret Mercer, who was seventy-eight and still lived about twenty minutes from the farmhouse.

She apologized three separate times for not having made coffee before I arrived, despite the fact that she had no reason to expect I was coming at all. Small town Canadians of a certain generation possess an almost innate ability to feel guilty.

The walls of her living room were crowded with family photographs.

Most had been printed from digital scans.

I recognized several immediately.

“I’ve been looking through your family’s archive,” I told her.

“Oh, it’s wonderful, isn’t it?” she replied. “We never thought we’d have all those pictures back.”

I asked whether she still had many originals.

“A few.”

She disappeared into another room and returned with a small floral tin that once held Christmas cookies.

Inside were perhaps twenty photographs wrapped in wax paper.

“I couldn’t tell you why I kept these ones,” she said.

I selected a photograph almost at random. It showed six people gathered around a picnic table sometime in the early 1960s. I had seen its restored counterpart online the night before.

“Can I ask you something a little strange?”

She smiled.

“I’ve lived long enough, nothing seems all that strange.”

I opened the restored version on my laptop and placed it beside the physical print.

“Which one looks right?”

She didn’t hesitate.

“That one,” she pointed to the laptop.

“What makes you say that?”

“It just does.”

I pointed to one of the men.

“The restored version has him wearing a wedding ring, but the print doesn’t.”

Margaret leaned closer.

“I suppose...” she began, “...I never noticed.” After a moment she laughed softly “Funny, isn’t it? I remember him wearing a ring.”

“But not whether it was actually in the picture?”

She looked at me for a long time before answering.

“I remember him often wearing one. Maybe I’m remembering him instead of the photograph.”

I nodded.

“That’s very common.”

Every time we remember something, we’re rebuilding it from fragments; some visual, some emotional, some borrowed from later experiences. We don’t retrieve memories nearly as much as we rewrite them.

Margaret made us tea. While the kettle boiled she asked what exactly I was investigating.

“I think some of the restored photographs contain details that weren’t in the originals.”

She shrugged, “I suppose that’s what restoration means.”

“No,” I said, perhaps more sharply than I intended. “It isn’t.”

She looked surprised, and I apologized. Then I pulled the fence photograph from my folder and laid the restored image beside it.

“It built a different fence.”

Margaret adjusted her glasses. She looked once and then twice. Then, a third time.

Finally, she frowned.

“I think I remember that fence,” she said, but nothing else followed.

She could no longer distinguish between remembering the day the photograph was taken and remembering the version of the photograph she’d spent the last five years looking at online.

Margaret was not the only Mercer who struggled to separate the photographs from the memories attached to them.

Over the following week I spoke with nine more relatives. Some lived nearby. Others joined by video call. I stopped asking people whether they recognized the individuals in the photographs. Instead, I began asking them to describe the photographs before I showed them.

Tell me what you remember.

One cousin remembered a porch swing that seemed to appear only in a restored image. Another insisted her grandfather’s suspenders had been blue, despite the fact that the original colour slide, one of the few in the collection, showed they had always been brown. A woman in Alberta described the lettering on the Mercer General Store sign in remarkable detail.

The lettering did not exist in the physical photograph.

None of this was especially surprising. Memory is porous. If you show someone the same corrected image often enough, it simply becomes the photograph they remember.

The younger the relative, the more likely they were to describe the restored image.

The older the relative, the more likely they were to remember details from the physical print.

People who had grown up handling the albums remembered the albums. People who had grown up searching for family history online remembered the archive.

A few days later, the historical society called to tell me they had located the original scans.

“They’re coming from the hosting company,” Elaine said cheerfully. “Apparently they keep backups.”

An hour later, a download link arrived in my inbox. The folder contained just over twelve hundred TIFF files, uncompressed, high resolution.

Exactly what I had hoped for.

If you’ve never worked with digital evidence, you might take for granted that a photograph is the photograph. In reality, every save creates another object. A print is an object, a negative is an object, so is a scan. A cropped scan is another. A compressed JPEG sent over email is another again.

One may faithfully represent the other, but they are not the same thing.

Every digital file can be run through a mathematical function that produces a unique value called a cryptographic hash. Think of it as a fingerprint. Change a single pixel, and the fingerprint changes completely. The hash won’t tell you which file is authentic, but it will tell you whether two files are identical.

I generated hashes for the scans from the Mercer CDs. Then I generated hashes for the files the hosting company had described as their original backups.

None of them matched.

Perhaps the CDs had been rescanned years later. Perhaps the archive had recompressed the files. Perhaps someone adjusted the brightness before uploading them. Every explanation I considered was ordinary and accounted for some of the discrepancy. None accounted for all of it.

The dimensions matched, as did the filenames and the scratches in the paper. But when I overlaid the images, they drifted apart in dozens of tiny places.

I called the hosting company.

The support representative was patient.

“Our restoration pipeline has changed several times over the years,” he explained. “It automatically improves material.”

“Right, I get that.”

“The original scans don’t appear to have been modified.”

“But they aren’t identical.”

“They’re functionally identical.”

I wrote that phrase down. “Functionally identical.” It sounded like something a lawyer would say.

I spent the next several evenings tracing the photographs outward instead of backward. Genealogy websites, local history blogs. Family memorial pages and social media.

The same restored images appeared everywhere.

Because they looked better; they were brighter and cleaner. They looked the way people wished old photographs looked. So those were the versions they downloaded, which became the versions they shared with cousins. Those became the versions printed for funerals. Eventually, they became the versions scanned again.

The restorations had not replaced the originals through malice but through preference.

I finished my report three weeks later.

It was longer than anyone had asked for.

I recommended preserving every physical print, every negative, every scan, and every restored image as separate artifacts. Do not overwrite originals, document every enhancement. Treat restoration as interpretation, not preservation.

Record the software used, record the date and the settings.

The historical society accepted every recommendation.

“I suppose we never thought about future researchers,” Elaine admitted.

“You were thinking about the public and what they want to see.”

She smiled.

“We wanted people to enjoy them.”

“I know.”

This is not a true story, but a story nonetheless.

Howdy!

This week, out to all was “Leopard keeps spots.”, the first part in a coveted Some Lawyer rabbit hole. Our story starts with the murder of an 18-year-old National Guardsman in Boston, the wave of violence that supposedly followed it, and the years of reporting that contradicted the original story. The Warriors, the "Cobblestone Killing," and why one of the media panics of the twentieth century may tell us less about violence than it does about our need to explain it.

In paid inboxes was Congratulations, You Read the Abstract from Kennedy. The internet loves to parrot a shitty statistic with no real context. Somewhere between a 2010 CDC report and a TikTok comment, a nuanced finding about intimate partner violence became "proof" that lesbians are uniquely abusive. We traced the citation chain to see where the research ends, where the myth begins, and what we can learn about contextualizing data.

What Kennedy Recommends

I’m about eight years late to this recommendation, but I just rewatched Sharp Objects and remembered why it lodged itself in my brain the first time. So much so that I found myself listening to Engelbert Humperdinck on repeat.

If you somehow missed it, it’s a limited HBO series based on Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name, following a crime reporter, Camille, who returns to her hometown in sweaty Missouri to cover the murders of two young girls. It’s ostensibly a crime mystery, but that’s sort of beside the point. The underlying story is about family dynamics, generational trauma, memory, self-destruction, and how people learn to survive.

Amy Adams is phenomenal, Patricia Clarkson is terrifying, and the entire thing has this humid, claustrophobic feeling that makes you want to get in the shower after every episode.

And if you’re a reader, pick up the book. I’ve loved everything she’s published. Flynn’s writing has the same uncomfortable intimacy, and while the series is excellent, the novel gives you something TV never can.

Get an ice cold bev and sit yourself next to a swamp cooler.

Enjoy.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

The internet loves a shitty statistic, and the lifespan of those statistics is a fascinating thing.

What begins as a careful, considerate paragraph in a journal article becomes a guy with an AI-generated profile picture blasting off from his keyboard: “Actually, studies prove...” I would know, because I’ve been on the receiving end of one of those troubling stats too many times to even ballpark it.

Here’s an example from a video I posted in December of 2025, where I made a joke about lesbians loving women differently than men. As happens on the internet, my video left my circle of safety, and the comments got weird.

Let’s go to school for a minute.

The study that this commenter probably doesn’t even know they’re citing here is: The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Findings on Victimization by Sexual Orientation.

And very simply, the data was interpreted as saying “Lesbians report the highest rates of domestic violence.”

I can’t stress enough how often I see some version of this parroted across social media platforms.

If I type “lesbian DV” into TikTok, here are some of the first comments that come up:

“People don’t like hearing it, but lesbians actually have the highest domestic violence rate of any relationship.”

“Statistically, women are more abusive than men in relationships. Just look at lesbian couples.”

“Everyone blames men for domestic violence, but lesbian relationships have the highest abuse rates. The data is public.”

“Women always say men are the problem, but if you remove men from the equation, domestic violence actually gets worse.”

“Google it. It’s 43.8%. This isn’t even controversial.”

Here’s what the study actually says:

Queer women are significantly more likely than straight women to have ever experienced intimate partner violence in their lifetime, reported by 61% of bisexual women and 44% of lesbian women, compared with 35% of straight women.

The part that is either misconstrued or conveniently left out is that the CDC also collected information about the sex of the perpetrator.

Among lesbian respondents who reported intimate partner violence, 67.4% reported only female perpetrators, while the remaining 32.6% reported at least one male perpetrator, meaning their lifetime experiences of abuse included violence by a man, or by both men and women.

When you look at the CDC’s follow-up report using data collected in 2016 and 2017, the agency changed how it reported perpetrator sex and broke out different categories of violence in much greater detail. For several forms of intimate partner violence, most lesbian victims identified exclusively male perpetrators.

The methodology isn’t identical to the 2010 report, so the numbers shouldn’t be compared directly, but they point to the same conclusion: the study was never evidence that women abuse women more than men do.

What should be: “Lesbian women experience high rates of intimate partner violence", became: "Lesbians have the highest rates of domestic violence."

Queer women experience high levels of male violence for concrete, structural reasons rooted in patriarchy, sexual entitlement, and the policing of women’s autonomy, not because there’s something inherently dysfunctional about queer relationships.

Some men don’t experience queerness as a boundary. They experience it as a challenge, a provocation, something to overcome. That can manifest as coercion, punishment, stalking, or, in its most extreme forms, what is often described as “corrective” sexual violence. These dynamics are especially relevant for bisexual women, who consistently report the highest rates of intimate partner violence and whose abusive experiences are disproportionately perpetrated by men.

Bisexual women are frequently framed as sexually adventurous and available. If someone believes your sexual orientation is negotiable, then it’s apparently not a huge leap to believing your consent is, too.

Compulsory heterosexuality also matters. Many lesbians have relationships with men before coming out, or while trying to reconcile their sexuality with social expectations. Those experiences are reflected in this data.

Even outside intimate relationships, queer women whose gender expression falls outside conventional expectations experience elevated rates of harassment and hate-motivated violence. Taken together, the pattern isn’t queer relationships producing violence, it’s queer women living in a society that punishes women for rejecting their expectations.

Data is evidence, but it is not truth.

A statistic doesn’t tell you what happened. It tells you how a question was answered by a particular group of people, in a particular way, at a particular moment in time.

Most research on intimate partner violence relies heavily on self-report surveys. Those surveys don’t measure the objective presence of abuse. They measure someone's ability to recognize what happened to them as abuse, whether they feel safe disclosing it, and whether the questions being asked capture their experience in the first place.

Researchers know this, which is why they don’t rely on a single source. They compare survey data with police reports, hospital records, shelter usage, hotline calls, court records, and protection orders. Even then, they’re careful about their conclusions because every source has its own blind spots. Police data underrepresents communities with lower trust in law enforcement. Shelter data misses people who never look for their services. Surveys miss people who don’t identify their experiences.

Research on queer relationships is also young. Sociology and family studies have spent nearly a century examining heterosexual relationships. Large-scale research on openly queer relationships has only really become possible in the last few decades, and in many places, only after same-sex marriage was legally recognized. We’re trying to compare bodies of research separated by generations of legal rights, social acceptance, and available participants.

So, now, let’s look at lesbian divorce rates. Another thing Simreaper1 wanted to talk about as evidence that lesbian relationships are uniquely unstable.

This is where there is some partial truth. Lesbian marriages tend to end in divorce more often than marriages between two men, and, in some datasets, more often than heterosexual marriages. But divorce rates don’t measure the quality of the relationship, they measure access to the exit door.

Lesbian couples tend to face fewer structural barriers to leaving unhappy relationships, and have higher expectations for emotional reciprocity. Having already distanced from social and traditional norms, long-term relationships between same-sex partners do not carry the same expectations. They have fewer children, they’re less likely to be constrained by traditional gender roles, less likely to have one financially dependent stay-at-home partner, and less likely to remain together solely because leaving is economically impossible.

And because same-sex marriage has only been legally observable for a relatively short period of time, the original data largely reflects marriages of couples who were waiting to marry. They tended to be older, more legally literate, and more willing to leave relationships that no longer meet their needs.

Higher divorce rates can reflect greater autonomy just as easily as greater dysfunction.

Now, let’s make one thing very clear: women can be abusive.

Lesbian relationships can be violent. Queer people don’t hold moral superiority because they’re queer. We are as capable of hurting each other as anyone else.

But if your understanding of domestic violence begins and ends with a statistic you saw in a TikTok comment, you’re not learning about abuse; you’re learning how misinformation spreads.

The people doing the hard work on domestic violence aren’t winning arguments in comment sections. They’re staffing shelters, answering crisis lines, helping people write safety plans, documenting injuries, navigating family court, and trying to keep victims alive.

A statistic is a piece of evidence, not a verdict. It exists within a study, which exists within a methodology, which exists within a social, historical, and cultural context. Strip away those layers, and almost any number can be made to support almost any argument.

We have to ask who was surveyed, who wasn’t, what was measured, what wasn’t, and whether the conclusion being shared is actually the conclusion the researchers reached. Then hold that information alongside everything else we know: history, sociology, psychology, lived experience, and the limitations of the data itself.

It’s that special week of the year when two neighbouring countries pause to congratulate themselves on surviving their own founding myths. Anyway!

You know ‘er, you love ‘er; it’s Some Lawyer with a historical piece, “Leopard keeps spots”, out to paid subscribers. For a few weeks in 1979, America became convinced a movie was turning young men into killers. Editorials were written, hearings were held, lawsuits were filed. Then, facts began to change. This week’s piece traces one of the most famous claims about media violence back to its source, and asks why the corrections are so much harder to remember than the accusations.

Out to everyone, an introspection from Kennedy with Neighbourhood F*ing Watch: The Sequel. For a long time, I believed the lesson from one summer of my life was simple: don't assume the worst. Then another summer flipped that lesson entirely. This piece explores two experiences that couldn't have ended more differently, and what they taught me about intuition, uncertainty, and the uncomfortable reality that we often have to make consequential decisions before we know whether we're right.

What Kennedy Recommends

Hard to believe we’re just getting here now, but I’ll be honest, it took me a second to finish.

This quirky, cozy and hilarious series follows the downtrodden, ambitious Mayor Tom Loftis, who attempts to turn his isolated, superstitious New England island town into a booming tourist destination. However, his plans are constantly threatened by an ancient, blood-thirsty supernatural curse.

Everyone around me loved this series, which, of course, instilled a defiance in me. But after four episodes, I was hooked. This one is the perfect watch for all the Summerween celebrators.

See you on the flip.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

Juan Claudio Pascacio moved to Boston in 1973, at the age of 18. He got a job at a restaurant, in the kitchen.1 He joined the National Guard. People who knew him say he was quiet. Thoughtful.

Around closing time on March 30, 1975, he was walking in Bay Village with a group of friends, when he was chased by a group of five or six men into a vacant lot.2 He was slashed, stabbed, and beaten. One of the men lifted a thirty pound paving stone and used it to crush his skull. He died at Boston City Hospital.

Seasoned police officers were shocked at the brutality of the attack. The gay community called it the “Cobblestone Killing,” and wore black-and-lavender armbands, representing opposition to anti-gay violence.3

Friends couldn’t collect enough money to send his body back to Puerto Rico. The life insurance policy available to him as a member of the National Guard was payable only to his widow, from whom he was estranged. Catholic Charities ended up paying his last fare. He was buried with military honors.4

Three years later, principal photography began in New York City for a motion picture based, in part, on a5 classical Greek account of the return of Spartan merceneries from battle in Babylon.6

The film shot quickly, edited quickly, and premiered on February 9, 1979. Critics found it unrealistic,7 and the dialogue stilted. Others praised the movie:

Powered by kinetic tracking shots, The Warriors sets a blistering pace, and all the transitions are effected with brisk wipes, which suggest that a dozen things are happening at once.

The balletic, bloodless combat scenes have been photographed and edited with startling grace and cleverness: they’re downright beautiful.

Shooting almost exclusively at night, in the fluorescent, green-tinged garishness of underground parking lots and subway platforms…Hill has come up with a spacious variant on the nightmare-beautiful cityscapes of film noir.8

It is beautiful, and odd.

People loved it. Young people, especially. They turned out to see the movie in droves, nation-wide. Almost immediately, there were reports of violence:

• Marvin Kenneth Eller was shot at a drive-in in Palm Springs on February 12, 1979.

• Timothy Gitchell was stabbed a fight in a theater lobby in Oxnard, California, on February 12, 1979.

• On February 15, 1979, Martin Yacubowicz was stabbed on a train in Boston, Massachusetts, by someone who had just come from seeing the Warriors.

• On March 3, 1979, Charles Eltringham reported that he’d been beaten and tortured by three men who referenced The Warriors throughout the ordeal.

Print advertisements were briefly suspended, but resumed when only “minor reports” of disorderly conduct occurred in subsequent weeks.9 Paramount offered to supply additional security guards to theaters.

Editorials were written. Columnists speculated.

These and other violent acts erupting in the wake of these films raise the question: Is there a relationship between violence seen on the screen and violence enacted in the neighborhood?

Behavioral experts contacted for this article suggest there may be.10

Pediatricians spoke against the movie.11 Legislative commissions were convened or coopted for the purpose and the producers and distributors testified.

Serious and sensible people insisted on the conclusion: Portrayals of violence cause violence. Someone must be held accountable.

Lawsuits were filed. Time passed.

And slowly, quietly, without much fanfare, the facts changed. The supposed causal relationship between each attack and The Warriors was quietly disclaimed, or debunked after the furor died down.

Except one.

It’s one of those Fridays where, if we were communing, we’d be looking at each other over a cigarette, muttering, “What a week.” But we’re here now, and that’s what matters.

This week, out to everyone was Eyes Lie: Reloaded. Nearly two years ago, we published one of our favourite Bullshit Hunting stories, tracing the bizarre intersection of Dan Rather’s assault, a New York homicide, and R.E.M.’s What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? Then the NYPD responded to our records request, and a year later, we’re here with that update. Anonymous tips about shadowy groups, and even more reasons to question the story we’ve all accepted for decades.

Out to paid subscribers was another follow-up piece, Neighbourhood F*ing Watch: The Sequel. In this one, Kennedy recounts a memory that turns some of her general advice on its head. An insight into the way we often judge our own fears with the benefit of hindsight, and what that fear asks of us in the moment. Update your subscription to unlock this article today, or get your eyes on it next week.

What Kennedy Recommends

TV Series | Cape Fear (2026)

The first time I saw Cape Fear (1991), I was deeply hungover in my ex’s basement, eating a breakfast sandwich. Ah, memories.

The brutal nature of the movie rocked me to my core. I never watched it again, despite enjoying it, instead choosing to file it away as a worthwhile classic. When I heard they were making a series, I was skeptical but excited.

In this iteration, Javier Bardem plays Max Cady, an alleged murderer who is unexpectedly released from prison. Anna, who represented Max 17 years earlier, and her husband Tom (Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson, hello) are living the good life. She now works for a nonprofit trying to free unjustly convicted inmates, and he’s practicing law for a coveted firm filled with high-profile clients.

Their kids are slightly less idyllic, with a depressed and isolated son, and a daughter tired of playing the “perfect child” while her brother is coddled.

I’ve only watched the first two episodes of what I imagine is going to be the perfect summer thriller, but I think we can all see where this is going. Nice suburban family meets the man nightmares are made of, and chaos ensues.

Available on AppleTV.

Until next time,

Don’t let any dangerous men into your backyard or near your kids toes.

Word to the wise.

See you next week!

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

If you’ve been around for a while, you may have read about the summer I turned 18. I was living in Somewhere-Small-and-Desolate, Canada, and convinced myself I was being followed. I wasn’t. My schedule just happened to align with the daily drives of a lonely old man. I worried about him for over a month before we became friendly, and then I felt like an asshole.

It wasn’t paranoia, not really. In most ways, it was entirely reasonable to feel suspicious.

Noticing the same vehicle appearing over and over again on the same route, with the same face and same timing, is just ordinary awareness. Most of us would take note.

The problem, of course, is that noticing something doesn’t mean you understand it.

This past weekend, I was talking with a few friends about moments we’ve had that may have been close brushes with danger. In every story, there was a distance between our perception and the intention. We can’t know what the people we encountered meant to make us feel or what they were trying to do, we just know what we sensed. I found myself thinking of that old man in the van and how wrong I had been.

As I was revisiting the article, where I warned everyone not to make assumptions, it struck me that I have a counterexample, or maybe a cautionary tale. Something that flips that advice on its head and pokes at it, inconveniently.

Probably three summers later, I was living in a different, slightly larger Somewhere-Small-and-Desolate, Canada.

I was there for work, renting a house with a roommate whose schedule barely overlapped with mine. Most weeks, we were only in the house together for about two days.

At some point, she had to take an unexpected leave, and five weeks passed while I was in the house alone.

Once a month, I’d have four days of 13.5-hour split shifts. At the station by 4:30 a.m. to write and report the news, back again for the evening slot, finally getting home around 10 p.m.

Being in my very early 20s, barely able to afford the necessities of rent and groceries, scraping together change for gas and weekend beers, yet holding the responsibility of a key to a newsroom and the freedom to broadcast across the country, it’s something I look back on romantically. But it was hellish at the time, averaging about four hours of sleep, begging some higher power to let my mouth-mind connection function behind the microphone.

I don’t remember much about the day itself, only that I had come home in the afternoon between shifts, and when I’d looked out the kitchen window, I noticed a truck. It was striking because the lot across from us was oddly shaped, and no one ever parked in front. A few hours later, when I left for my second shift, it still sat empty.

Later that night, it was hot and humid. I imagine I was walking into the house around 10:15 p.m. The sun was gone, but the sky hadn’t fully committed to night. The first stars may have been showing, but only barely.

I was 21, so hardly concerned with exhaustion, and laced up for a run before bed. I remember it distinctly. Not the run itself, but rounding the corner back onto my street and noticing that the truck was still there.

Standing in the kitchen window, filling the water tank of my coffee machine, something seemed off. And that something was that the driver’s seat was totally gone. I could see no one and nothing.

When I pulled out of the driveway five hours later, the truck was still there, and when I returned a few hours later, it was gone.

It was strange, I thought, but not necessarily worrisome. Life goes on.

That night, I was wandering from the bathroom to my bedroom when I heard a faint knocking. I stopped, waited. The sound came again, only it wasn’t coming from the front door; it was coming from the side of the house. There was a door at the side of the house, but it wasn’t well-lit, and it wasn’t where people usually knocked.

It was just before 11 p.m.

I thought about ignoring it, but every window in the house would betray me. It was evident someone was home, and the knocking wasn’t stopping. It wasn’t forceful or loud, but it was there.

I walked through the kitchen, to the door, and opened it only slightly. I couldn’t really make out the features of the person standing there, just that it was a man, fairly tall, thin.

“Is Laura here?” he asked.

Laura was my roommate.

“No,” I said. “She’s not.”

“Do you know where she is?”

I did.

“I don’t.”

“Do you talk to her?”

“I’m in contact with her family,” I said honestly.

“Can you tell her to call me?”

“Who are you?”

“She’ll know,” he said, and then he walked away.

That was it.

When I turned back into the kitchen and began turning off the lights, I noticed him getting into a truck, the same one from the night before, parked in the same spot.

The next day was my last split shift of the week. I came home at lunch, and the truck was there, again, empty. At the end of my work day, it wasn’t there. But that night, shortly after 10 p.m., there was a knocking at the door again.

This time, I called a friend who lived across town and told him to stay on the phone with me while I answered the door.

Same guy, this time, holding something in his hands.

“Is Laura here?”

“No, I told you she’s not.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“She’s not here.”

There was a long pause.

“Can you just get her?”

“You have to leave.”

“I know she’s here.”

“I’ll call the cops.”

“I just want to talk to her.”

“She is not here.”

“Then I’ll stay until she is.”

The moment continued to escalate. I’m not proud of the things I said or threatened, but as the moment sustained, my fear built, disguised as anger and bravado. Eventually, he sighed and thrust a sad bouquet of grocery-store flowers toward me. “Just give these to her.”

He got in his truck and drove away.

I picked up the phone, my friend still on the line.

“I almost called the cops,” he said, “but you were threatening him.”

I was.

And my threats probably seemed disproportionate. A man was on my doorstep with flowers. He never threatened to hurt me, never forced his way inside.

But a stranger spent days parked across from my house. He seemingly slept there, driver’s seat reclined into invisibility. He appeared at my door late at night. He came back after being told the person he wanted wasn’t there. He knew where we lived, and I didn’t know who he was.

The threat wasn’t spoken to me. It was implied by the simple fact that a man I didn’t know had decided that my home was an appropriate place to conduct whatever business he had with my roommate.

And in doing so, he placed me in a position where I felt I had to become threatening.

Not because I wanted to be. But because women learn, often very young, that there is a narrow window between discomfort and danger, and that nobody can tell you exactly where that line is until after it’s been crossed.

Maybe he was just a lonely guy trying to find a woman he missed. Maybe he was heartbroken. Maybe the flowers were genuine, and the whole thing looked different from where he was standing.

But that’s the privilege of hindsight and distance. At 11 p.m., standing alone in a poorly lit doorway, I wasn’t being asked to judge him after the fact. I was being asked to make a decision in real time.

When I did finally get to discuss this with my roommate, what I learned made things feel far worse. Like everything I’d done was both too much and not enough, and that I should’ve called my friend the night before and prepared a plan. Called the cops and told them someone was outside my house.

But in that moment, that felt like too much.

People often discuss women’s caution as though it’s a personal failing, an overreaction. Paranoia and anxiety.

If I'd been wrong, I was an asshole. Because I was right, I needed to be one.

Feel the heat? Maybe it’s our writing, maybe it’s summer solstice. Either way—

Out to everyone, Some Lawyer takes you on an adventure you may never have thought you’d get here. How to find your grandpa in swimwear. Every family has a story that everyone knows, and nobody can prove. For Some Lawyer, Grandpa John was on the cover of Life Magazine. Armed with little more than a first name, a handful of memories, and an archive stretching back decades, she follows the rumour through military records, old newspapers, forgotten photographs, and family lore.

Out to paid subscribers, The Eyes Lie: Reloaded! Sometimes, you file a FOIA request, receive the documents, and then forget about them for a year. Maybe you forgot too, but we’re bringing it back. This week, Justin hit you with an update to our first story mix, The Eyes Lie. New-ish NYPD records reveal a second man at the assault on Dan Rather, a mysterious advertisement that triggered a police stakeout, and enough loose threads to keep this story alive for another decade, if you’re lucky.

What Kennedy Recommends

For something I chose on a whim when I was going to bed, I sure have thought about this movie a lot.

Imagine the anxiety of a late-night phone call stretched across an entire movie. Hallow Road traps you in the front seat with two parents trying desperately to reach their daughter after a horrific accident, while each new revelation makes the situation worse. It’s a small-scale thriller that gets enormous mileage out of tension, atmosphere, and great performances.

This movie doesn’t exactly spell out its conclusion, and I’ve loved considering what I think reality was with this one. Worth it for those who have the patience for something that mostly takes place in one setting, and for people who love to ruminate, picking plots apart.

See you next week!

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

In September 2024, we published a ‘Story Mix’ — a blend of music, noise, and storytelling that traced the arc of an assault on Dan Rather, a deadly attack in New York City and the R.E.M. song, What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?

Before continuing, do give it a listen or read the long form here. It’s one of my favourite Bullshit Hunting pieces by far.

Spotify | Apple Podcasts

At the time we were working on it, a request for public documents was sent to the NYPD:

And then?

I forgot about it.

As often happens.

Other cases came and went; other rabbit holes were burrowed into. In fact, the NYPD did respond, a year later, in May 2025, but more pressing matters in a murder trial pulled me away from it.

So, the documents sat in my inbox.

It wasn’t until I was building bookshelves over this past weekend, and while transferring books to my office, my eye caught a cover…

The weird, paranoid, delusional comic from Daniel Clowes (1989) with eerie elements of the attack on Dan Rather in 1986. I ordered a copy in 2024 so I could scour the comic for clues.

My brain clicked, realizing I still had documents waiting for me in my inbox from the NYPD. Plopping down at my laptop, I cracked the first of two PDFs open, and with that, the flame for this story was lit once more.

The Second Man Was Real

It’s right there on page 1, ‘Perp #2 stood by watching. Both fled in unknown direction.’

Remember, in our first instalment, we established that Rather identified ‘a guy’ meaning singular, and that the guy was William Tager. However, there was no mention of a second man, even though Rather had indicated in his first report that there were two men.

A second witness, from a different vantage point, also sees two men:

We were right to question Dan Rather’s recollection that it was William Tager who had assaulted him in 1986.

We were right to question how and when (or where) William Tager confessed to Dr. Park Dietz that he was the guy who assaulted Dan Rather. And certainly, we have more questions still about how Dr. Dietz was given permission to run around with this information in the middle of an impending prosecution.

There were, however, some very interesting leads that I had never encountered before. For example, there was a mysterious ad placed in the Village Voice that allegedly triggered a swarm of press and a stakeout from the NYPD:

The police traced the advertisement to a library, and then ultimately to someone who says… they didn’t place that ad at all. We’re still hunting for this advertisement; if you have a copy of the October 21, 1986, Village Voice, please do hit us up.

Now, it was well known that Dan Rather received a lot of hate mail, no shocker for a media personality, but what was news to us was that some of that mail held hazardous materials:

Not sure who mails empty tubes of mace to a news anchor, but it’s certainly not the craziest shit that’s been put through the USPS.

Then we get into some truly conspiratorial stuff:

Well, now who exactly was this person? And who exactly would they have been working for?

Yet another frayed thread that could be paranoia, a real domestic militiaman…or a Jerky Boys wannabe just fucking around with the cops. Either way, there’s no record of a follow-up… this ‘trainer’ is another mystery piled on top of shitty facts in this case that is just as plausible as any other.

Then, on April 15, 1987, 6 months after Rather’s terrifying ordeal, the NYPD closed the case:

That’s it. Not even a year into their investigation, albeit for assault, the police closed it up.

It’s not until 1994 (7 years later) that William Tager steps out of his car and opens fire in Manhattan and kills Theron Montgomery. Not until 1997 (11 years later) did Rather allegedly make his visual identification of Tager from the attack.

But there’s no evidence to support Rather’s identification; not even Tager identifies a second man, nor does Dr. Park Dietz ever assert the second man being there. Notably, there’s no second man in the Daniel Clowes comic either, just a lone, disturbed individual.

So we can be pretty confident that Dan Rather’s 1997 identification was flawed at best by leaving out the second man — at worst, the identification was completely false.

So what we’re left with is: (1) an alleged kidnapper-trainer for a shadowy group of unknown individuals that called him into action around the time of Rather’s attack; (2) an unknown advertisement placed in the Village Voice on October 21, 1986 that triggered the press to attend and the police to stake out the location; and (3) two men in black who collectively bashed Rather around on October 4, 1986, as reported by Rather himself and another eyewitness up the street.

Soldiers of fortune.

Anonymous advertisements.

Men in black.

Will we ever be able to put this story down?

NYPD Documents #1 (Document Cloud)

NYPD Documents #2 (Document Cloud)

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 from his trips to the casinos, and misprinted letterhead from the Gillette factory, and anything he’d won at a meat raffle.

“Diving,” the first cousin said. “He was such a diver. A rescue diver2, during the war.”

“Was it for that?”

“He was a young man, and he was diving.” She shrugged. “Maybe.”

Life Magazine is no more.3 Its archive, however, is broadly available, including through archive.org, and likely, anywhere they’ll still let you play with the big microfiche machine that smells like an amplifier and goes “whirrr.”

Because the existence of an archive, and the distinct absence of other easily accessible narrative information, made it seem like an answer was possible yet difficult, I figured I’d give it a shot.

First task. What was my grandfather’s name, really?

My own last name is distinctive, and was my father’s. Birth and marriage records would show whether Grandpa John was really named “John,” or alternatively, whether it was a “Wojciech, W, O, J-fuck it, call me Stanley.”

John. His name really was John. His middle initial shifted from time to time, but that wasn’t unusual for the era.

With a first name, and last, I looked for an obituary to give more biographical detail. The one I found went into great detail about his military service, down to the ships on which he served, but didn’t name any of his children4 or grandchildren.

There was no caption within the “Life” Archive mentioning him by name, or the ships he served on. There were no male, military divers, in fact, on the cover of Life Magazine during the entire period of the war.

If it was true, it wasn’t during the war.

I found no record that, apart from military service, he’d lived anywhere but eastern Massachusetts. In fact, apart from military service, and high school athletics, he was hard to find, except when he lost a golden gloves match to a fisherman named Whalen.

So I looked before the war. And I looked nearby. He spent most of his life in South Boston. At seventeen, or eighteen, he probably wouldn’t have made it much farther than Quincy.

And I found it. Either the cover, or the rumor.

In my family, we’re better storytellers than we are historians.

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

Read more

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