Blog | kevinlankes

Ben Franklin's Crispy Thanksgiving Turkey Was Almost the Symbol of America

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/NJna3nL73yQ Did Benjamin Franklin really want the noble turkey to be the symbol of our great American republic? No, he did not. Why does everybody say this, then? Why does this myth persist? Because we all know the story about how the bald eagle was put forward, and Ben Franklin is all like, “the bald eagle sucks, it’s a lazy scavenger, and we want a noble glorious bird that’s native to our nation.” Well there are a lot of issues with this

The Sad Mushy Popsicle Bodies of the Cryogenically Frozen

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/L1mspG_TRsg Cryonics is a process where we stick rich people into sealed thermoses and lower the temperature down to around -190 degrees Celsius. If you need the conversion, this is like negative 370 degrees in freedom units. One thing to highlight from the start is that cryonics is not what you’d call a standard science. Some of the first people who underwent this process had to be scraped off the bottom of their capsules. Make sure to watc

The Worst Thing You Didn't Know About Bats

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/KLtovm-ryUo We all have this innate cultural understanding that bats are some of the spookiest critters around, but the scariest thing about them is actually the number of babies they kill. I’m willing to bet you weren’t expecting that, because I wasn’t. Now don’t get me wrong, they’re definitely really creepy otherwise. There’s lot of other things to talk about. I mean there’s a reason bats are everywhere around Halloween. They’re pretty m

Why Aren't Toilets Brown?

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YoFlZQQG2YU Let’s just get this out of the way right now, but you poop in toilets. It’s where poop goes. Let’s just get it out of our system. Just like it goes right out of the plumbing system. Because of this fact, it would seem to make a great deal of sense for toilets to be the color brown, so that, in our easily grossed-out human sensibilities, we wouldn’t have to struggle with the remnants of whatever we ate yesterday that isn’t complet

Yelling at Progressives While Real Problems Get Worse

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Kn9TLp960RY It’s looking like Zohran Mamdani is going to be the next mayor of New York City. Whatever you feel about this, I’m feeling pretty good about it, the thing that we really need to talk about that’s living underneath all the uproar surrounding Mamdani is this long-standing narrative about progressive candidates. The main thing I’d like people to come away with is that the reason a lot of us collectively fear progressive policy posit