Ferg Morrissey 💜

★Bowiefan★ (... but wha deed you keell Zeeggy?)

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

These words. These perfect words.
Goodbye mum.
I have never felt so close to you. https://t.co/huts3Uq7uL

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

@ChristinaPushaw

[Heart Surgeon Dr. Philip Ovadia @ifixhearts]

Most cardiologists still tell patients: “Your cholesterol is the problem. Take this statin.”
After operating on thousands of hearts, I can tell you that’s incomplete at best — and dangerous at worst.
The real drivers of heart disease are what I call The 3 Missed I’s.
🧵 1/8

[Melodies & Masterpieces @SVG__Collection]

John Lee Hooker & Van Morrison performing “Baby Please Don’t Go”

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

@RJTMorrissey Valpolicella and cake....and family, takes the pain away. ❤️

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

@RJTMorrissey Sorry Richard.🥲

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

My God, it's beautiful.🙏

[Historyland @HistorylandHQ]

Pietà was completed by Michelangelo when he was only about 24 years old. Carved from a single block of Carrara marble between 1498 and 1499, the sculpture depicts the Virgin Mary holding the body of Jesus after the Crucifixion.

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

Magnificent.
Silver Springs-Fleetwood Mac.
https://t.co/3xKTf1tT51

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

@JamesMelville His lips are tighter than wee Nicola's.

[Jake (the 80s & 90s never ended in my world) Rudh @JakeRudh]

Remembering Jeff Buckley who died on this day in 1997 at the age of 30. RIP.

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

@ChristinaPushaw @MattWalshBlog Not even the good half!🙄

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

@jk_rowling @ShippersUnbound @eNeecie "Very frugal with the housekeeping..."
https://t.co/rvmYO7c7Ee

[Harman @itsharmanjot]

A British scientist took a single photograph in 1952 that revealed the structure of DNA, then watched two men quietly take it from her lab and win a Nobel Prize without her name on the paper.

I read the actual timeline last night and could not stop thinking about it.

Her name was Rosalind Franklin. The photograph is called Photo 51.

The textbook story names James Watson and Francis Crick as the discoverers of the double helix. Two young men at Cambridge, working together, having a flash of brilliance, solving the structure of life on a chalkboard. That is the story every biology student learns. That story leaves out the woman who took the actual photograph that made the discovery possible, and the colleagues who passed it to Watson without ever asking her permission.

Here is the story almost nobody tells you.

Rosalind Franklin was born in London in 1920. By her late 20s she had become one of the world's leading experts in X-ray crystallography, the technique of bombarding crystals with X-rays and reading the diffraction patterns to map the molecules inside. In 1951, she was recruited to King's College London to apply the technique to DNA. The molecule had just been confirmed as the carrier of genetic information. Mapping its structure was the most important problem in biology.

She was the most skilled person in the world at the technique that could solve it.

In May 1952, after months of careful work, Franklin and her PhD student Raymond Gosling captured the 51st X-ray diffraction pattern of the B-form of DNA. The exposure took 100 hours. The image was so clear that the helical structure of the molecule was almost visible to the naked eye. The diamond patterns on either side of the dark central cross indicated two strands. The spacing between the markings encoded the dimensions of the helix. The image is now considered one of the most important photographs in the history of science.

She did not publish it right away. She was initially focused on solving the A-form of DNA, which she considered more analytically tractable, and she filed Photo 51 aside while she completed her calculations.

Then in January 1953, two things happened that she did not know about.

She was preparing to leave King's College for Birkbeck College. Her PhD student Raymond Gosling had been reassigned to work under Maurice Wilkins, her colleague at King's. On January 26, 1953, Gosling showed Photo 51 to Wilkins. Four days later, on January 30, Wilkins showed it to James Watson at Cambridge.

Neither of them told Franklin.

Watson later wrote in his memoir that the moment he saw the photograph, his mouth fell open and his pulse began to race. He understood immediately what it showed. He went back to Cambridge and told Francis Crick. Within weeks, they had built their famous double helix model. In April 1953, they published their paper in Nature with no mention of where the critical data had come from. Franklin's own paper appeared in the same issue, presented as merely supporting their model rather than being the foundation it actually was.

The detail almost no biology textbook prints is what happened next.

Franklin moved to Birkbeck and never knew her image had been shown to Watson. She continued her work on viruses and made foundational contributions to that field as well. She died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at age 37, never having received any meaningful credit for her role in the most important biological discovery of the 20th century.

Four years later, in 1962, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins.

The Nobel Foundation does not award the prize posthumously. Franklin had been dead for four years. Her name was not on the citation. It was not in their acceptance speeches. Watson published his memoir in 1968, "The Double Helix," and described Franklin in some of the most condescending and personal terms ever printed about a serious scientist by a serious scientist. He nicknamed her "Rosy," a name she despised. He mocked her appearance, her temperament, and her clothing. He suggested she had been incapable of interpreting her own data and had needed men to do it for her.

He had used her photograph without her permission to build his model.

He spent his Nobel lecture not mentioning her by name.

The most uncomfortable line in this entire story is the one Watson eventually admitted, decades later, in a moment of unguarded honesty. He said the structure could not have been solved when it was without Franklin's data. He just never said it loudly enough or early enough for it to matter.

Decades after her death, Sir Aaron Klug, her last collaborator and a Nobel laureate himself, inherited her laboratory notebooks. He spent years analyzing them. The notebooks showed that her own analysis of Photo 51 had already arrived at most of the conclusions Watson and Crick would publish. She had calculated the dimensions. She had identified two strands. She had described the helical structure. She was weeks, possibly months, from publishing the same result herself.

She was not assisting them. She was racing them. And the race was decided when a colleague handed her photograph to a competitor without her knowledge.

Walk into any biology classroom today. Ask the students who discovered the structure of DNA.

Almost none of them will say her name.

The most important photograph in the history of biology was taken by a woman who never lived to see herself recognized for it. The men who used it without permission spent the rest of their lives in laboratories named after them. She is buried in a small London cemetery. The molecule whose structure she revealed is inside every cell of every person who has ever told her story incorrectly.

She was right. They were faster.

And modern biology is still slowly learning how to put her name back where it always should have been.

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

★

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

@RJTMorrissey @TaraBull 👏👏👏

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

@RJTMorrissey @TaraBull Visceral, muscle, soft tissue....
it'll definitely bruise Richard.🫣

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

@RJTMorrissey @TaraBull This clip was made for that clip!😫

[Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 @TulsiGabbard]

But my eyes are toward you, O God, my Lord; in you I seek refuge - Psalm 141:8

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

Its a 'YES' from me!💜

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Marvin Gaye’s voice isolated from music

«I heard it through the grapevine», 1967.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.

Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.

The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.

Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.

Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

[Ferg Morrissey 💜 @fig100]

@RJTMorrissey @piersmorgan You deserve that medal too Richard! 🏅

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS. I am the person who turned a comedian into a priest and charged advertisers to watch the congregation.

I want to be precise about what I built. Not a comedy show. A permission structure. For eleven years, six million Americans tuned in every night to find out what they were allowed to believe by morning. We didn't sell jokes. We sold certainty. Certainty costs nothing to produce. People will pay anything for it. We charged $50 million a year and still lost money because it turns out permission is even cheaper than we thought.

In 2014, we had a genuinely dangerous comedian. A man who once testified before Congress in character as a fictional conservative pundit and made the entire chamber look like they'd been pantsed on C-SPAN. His fake persona was the most brilliant satire on television. Layered. Ironic. Unpredictable. The character could say anything because nothing was real. The character was the art. The character was the comedian.

We killed the character and put the real man on stage. The real man was a lecturer. Earnest. Thoughtful. Correct about everything. Correct is not funny. Correct is not dangerous. Correct is the absence of danger. We promoted the absence of danger and called it growth. His character could make a Senate committee squirm. The real him makes an audience nod. Nodding pays the same as squirming. Nodding is easier to produce.

His final words on air were "We love doing this show for you, but what we really, really love is doing this show with you." The audience wept. I wrote that line. Not the words. The architecture that made those words feel true. For eleven years, the audience believed they were participants. They were not participants. They were the product. "With you" is what you say to a congregation. A comedian says "at you." We hadn't said "at you" since 2015.

Our internal metric was called Affirm Rate. It measured the percentage of monologue segments that generated applause instead of laughter. I invented this metric. I also invented the bonus structure tied to it. In 2015, our Affirm Rate was 34%. By 2022, it was 94%. I received a raise every year. We are crushing it. At the things I made up. That's performance management.

But I need to tell you about the real discovery. The one I put in a deck called "Content Strategy 2019-2024." The one that got me promoted.

Agreement gets applause. I knew that early. But correction — telling the audience their vocabulary is slightly outdated, their outrage is aimed two degrees off-center, their feelings are valid but their phrasing needs work — correction gets them back tomorrow. Agreement is a transaction. Correction is a subscription. We converted a comedy show into a nightly software update for moral vocabulary. Churn was near zero. They couldn't afford to miss an episode. Missing an episode meant using last week's words in this week's meeting. That's social death. We monetized the fear of social death and called it entertainment.

I want to be honest about something. The content was not bipartisan. We chose a side. But I need you to understand: we did not choose it because we believed in it. We chose it because that side's audience is more responsive to correction. They want to be updated. They want to be told their language is outdated. They experience correction as care. The other side does not respond to correction. They respond to provocation. Provocation is harder to monetize. You can't build a subscription on provocation because the audience doesn't come back to learn — they come back to fight. Fighting is unpredictable. Correction is scheduled. We optimized for the audience that wants to be told what to think. That audience leaned one direction. That's not ideology. That's market segmentation.

The writers' room had a whiteboard. In 2015 it said "What's funny?" In 2018 it said "What should they feel?" By 2021 it said "What are they still saying wrong?" I watched that whiteboard evolve like a finch beak and I never intervened. The market was speaking. We listened. Listening to the market is the same as leading the audience. They can't tell the difference.

A writer named Marcus raised his hand in 2019. "What if we just tried to make them laugh again?" I thanked him for his passion and scheduled a creative alignment conversation. He transferred to streaming development within the month. The Affirm Rate the week he left was 91%. Laughter would have brought it down. That's risk management.

Here is what nobody will say out loud. I will say it because I am proud of it.

We made our audience worse at politics.

Not better. Worse. Every night for eleven years, we expressed their outrage for them. Professionally. With a band and good lighting. And because the outrage had been expressed — because a man in a suit had furrowed his brow with the precise calibrated degree of indignation — they didn't need to express it themselves. They watched. They clapped. They felt the catharsis of resistance without resisting anything. They went to bed having done nothing and feeling like they'd done something. That's the product. Not comedy. Not information. Catharsis. Catharsis is the enemy of action. A man who has screamed into a pillow does not then also scream in the street. We were the pillow. A $50 million pillow with a house band.

If you feel the outrage has been expressed for you, you will not march. You will not organize. You will not call your representative. You will tune in tomorrow to feel it expressed again. That's retention. Our retention was extraordinary.

I want to talk about the comedy-to-catechism pipeline because I think people underestimate what we achieved.

Stage one: comedian makes jokes about the powerful. Audience laughs because the powerful are absurd. This is the Carlin model. The jester punches up. Everyone below feels relief.

Stage two: comedian makes jokes about people who disagree with the audience. Audience laughs because disagreement is stupid. The jester has turned around. He's still on the stage but now he's facing the crowd with a pointer.

Stage three: comedian stops making jokes. Comedian identifies incorrect beliefs and explains why they're dangerous. Audience does not laugh. Audience claps. The jester is gone. In his place: a hall monitor with a desk and a band.

Stage four: audience watches not for entertainment but for certification. Having seen last night's episode means you know which words are current. Not having seen it means you might use yesterday's vocabulary in today's meeting. The show is no longer comedy. It is a credential. Watching it means you are educated. Not watching means you are the person being discussed. We made a show that you watch to prove you're not the kind of person who doesn't watch it. That's a closed loop. Closed loops don't need content. They need continuity. We provided continuity for $50 million a year.

A comedian — whose entire historical function was to say things too dangerous for anyone else to say — became the person who decides which things are too dangerous for anyone to say. And the audience applauded. Every night. For 2,500 nights. Because being told what is forbidden feels exactly like being told what you already knew. Prohibition performed as validation. I put that in the deck too.

Our audience was correct about everything. I know this because they applauded everything we said. The applause proved the correctness. The correctness justified the applause. We called this audience research. The methodology was peer-reviewed by the audience. They approved unanimously. Every night.

The actually funny comedians left. They went to podcasts. To clubs. To rooms where the audience doesn't know what's coming and that uncertainty is the point. They took the laughter with them. We kept the applause. We called those spaces problematic. That's market differentiation. The problematic spaces are funnier. But funny is not our product.

We lost $40 million a year. We didn't lose it because the show failed. We lost it because we spent $50 million producing what a podcast host in his garage gives away between mattress ads. The podcast is funnier. The podcast is more dangerous. The podcast has an audience that laughs instead of claps. But we had the Ed Sullivan Theater. We had 461 seats. We had a former Beatle play the farewell episode. Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, and Louis Cato playing "Hello, Goodbye" like it was a benediction. I booked a Beatle for a funeral. The Beatles played that stage in 1964 and the audience screamed so loud you couldn't hear the music. Our audience didn't scream. They wept politely. That's the difference between entertainment and church. We ran a church.

Jon Stewart showed up to the finale and did a bit where he pretended to deliver a corporate statement from Paramount about the cancellation. The audience laughed. It was the first time they laughed in a way I didn't recognize. Involuntary. Surprised. Dangerous. For ninety seconds, a comedian was in that building. Then it was over.

John Oliver said "At some point, this may come for all of our shows" and then added "but Stephen, what's important to remember is that tonight, it is going to eat you." The audience laughed again. Involuntary again. Two moments of actual comedy in a three-hour farewell. Both of them about death.

The finale drew 6.74 million viewers. Biggest weeknight audience in our history. More people came to the funeral than ever visited the patient. I know what they were mourning. Not comedy. The comedy died in 2016. Not the man. The man is fine. He's wealthy. What they mourned was the permission structure. Starting today, they have to decide what to believe on their own. They have to form an opinion without waiting for a man behind a desk to form it first and deliver it with a knowing look. Some of them haven't done that since 2015. The funeral wasn't for the show. It was for the certainty.

He joked about the Peanuts theme music licensing cost on his last night. "Oh no! I hope this doesn't cost CBS any money!" The audience laughed. It was a joke about money. About the network losing money. The last joke was about money. Not about truth. Not about power. About a licensing fee for a cartoon piano riff. Eleven years and the final joke was about accounting. I think that's perfect. The show was always about accounting. We just dressed it up as conscience.

The President of the United States — the man we spent eleven years explaining was dangerous to an audience that already believed he was dangerous — posted an AI-generated video of our host being thrown into a dumpster on the Late Show set. Then Trump danced to "YMCA" in the clip. Viewed more times in four hours than our farewell managed in a week. His production cost: zero. Ours: negative $50 million a year. We manufactured his relevance every night at 11:35 for eleven years and he never paid us a dime. We were his marketing department. He turned our funeral into content. His ROI was infinite. Ours required a write-off and a farewell concert.

The Strike Force Five — Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Oliver — appeared in a segment about late-night losing "one middle-aged white man who makes jokes about the news." They were joking about their own obsolescence. All of them know. None of them will say it. The format is dead. The audience moved to phones. The phones don't have desks or bands. The phones have men in garages who are allowed to be wrong, allowed to be surprised, allowed to say something their audience hasn't already approved. That's comedy. We stopped doing that a decade ago. We did approval. Approval looks like comedy from a distance. Up close it's church.

I do not feel guilt. Guilt would require me to believe I took something from them. I didn't take anything. They came to us. Every night. They chose the catechism over the comedy. They preferred correction over surprise. Certainty over danger. Instruction over laughter. They wanted to be told. Not challenged. Not shocked. Not made to laugh against their will at something they didn't see coming. They wanted to see it coming. They wanted to mouth along. That's not comedy. That's karaoke. We ran the most expensive karaoke bar in television history and the only miscalculation was charging a cover when the songs are free on every phone.

We turned a jester into a priest. We turned an audience into a congregation. We turned laughter into obedience. We turned political engagement into passive consumption. We turned a comedy show into a permission structure and charged $50 million a year to tell people what they already believed in a voice slightly nicer than their own.

They were so grateful they showed up to mourn us. 6.74 million of them. Weeping. For the certainty.

Applause is more reliable than laughter. I proved it. The proof cost $450 million, one character, one comedian's capacity for danger, and one audience's willingness to act.

The metric went up.