Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)

For one day in 2021, all of social media was obsessing over... Gorilla Glue? Tessica Brown ran out of göt2b hair product and used Gorilla Glue instead and one month later, her hair hadn't moved at all. She turned to TikTok for help and immediately became a main character, prompting a complicated months-long saga that included custom surgery, Hollywood managers, a botched rap career, and some of the most startling and scary days of her life. Jamie talks to Tessica about the ordeal four years later and gets the real story.

In part two of our William Hung series, Jamie takes a look at two of the biggest conversations that William sparked upon his debut: the representation of Asian Americans in the U.S., and how reality shows remove authorship from their subjects. Twenty years later, what can we take away from this moment? We speak with sociologist Nancy Wang Yeun about her experience first encountering William’s narrative and the legacy of Asian representation up until that time, and reality show editing vet Steve Flack about how reality television can Frankenbite its subjects into completely different people.

Twenty years ago, William Hung of "She Bangs" American Idol fame became one of the earliest people to straddle traditional media and the internet to become an overnight sensation. A notorious "bad audition" on one of the world's most famous shows, William built a whole career on a mix of positivity and negative attention, remaining firmly himself every step of the way. Warning: this episode contains severe 2004, from Angelfire fan sites to successful prime time TV to early-aughts xenophobia. Buckle in, we're going deep, from William's college days to his TED talks and everywhere in between.

This week, Jamie recounts William's story and speaks to the man himself. In part two, we take a closer look at what William's fame meant to Asian Americans, and what it said about the state of reality TV.

Of course the graverobbing episode couldn’t be one part! In part two of the Tmblr bone witch story, Jamie speaks with the leading voice in American human remains law, a New Orleans cemetery preservationist and of course, a real-life witch.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, MOTHERFUCKERS! This week, we’re diving deep into the Tumblr bone witch saga, the epic 2015 tale of internet-age graverobbing that all but exploded the internet. 

In late 2015, a witch named Ender Darling posted that they’d found some human bones in a New Orleans graveyard, and offered to mail them to other witches in a Facebook group called the Queer Witch Collective. What followed was bedlam – a debate on the ethics of private safe spaces, on bone thievery in New Orleans, and a story that led all the way to court. Spoiler alert: grave robbing isn’t as illegal as you think! Tune in, dear listeners, to the scariest episode of Sixteenth Minute of all time.