Episode 121: Good For Whatever Ails You

Play Now!

Too many ads today owe their stylistic inspiration to old time pitches for patent medicines, empty exhortations promising far more than the elixirs they bottled could deliver. All that—and so much more!—in this Episode 121: Good for Whatever Ails You.


Read all about Clark Stanley!

In this episode, I read from: Tim Wu's book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads; and a couple of Wikipedia articles, Patent Medicines and Medicine Shows.

I play: Podington Bear's "Whiplash String Swell"; The Freak Fandango Orchestra, doing "Requiem For a Fish"; and a bit of Visciera's "Watch the Room Burst". KMFDM backs Clark Gable in the opening; and I close today with Julie and Rolf doing "Over the Rainbow."

I'm releasing this and all my episodes under a Creative Commons 4.0 attribution, share-alike, and non-commercial license.