Click HERE to read the article in Wired.
You’d think this would be easy, right? So did I.
It turns out that rechargeable batteries are a lot more complicated than we had thought; this article barely scratches the surface of how they work. There’s just so much going on that it was difficult to do this one justice.
Click HERE for the Wired article.
This one was so much fun to do!!! Partially because I love A1. I can practically eat it with a spoon.
My editor came up with the idea of interviewing the great chefs of television to get their opinions and insights into A1. I contacted the representatives for Rachel Ray, Wolfgang Puck, Paula Deen, Alain Ducasse, Mario Batali, Nigella Lawson, Emeril Lagasse, Alice Waters, Anthony Bourdain, Jamie Oliver, and Tom Colicchio. None of them were willing or able to help. Most of them didn’t even respond. Bobby Flay’s people said he would, but then flaked.
Only Alton Brown came through, and boy did he ever come through! He gave intelligent, well thought-out answers to our questions, and offered his insights into what the secret herbs and spices might be. I can’t say enough good things about Alton Brown.
One item in the story I’m particularly proud of: I said that earlier versions of A1 were made with marmalade. How was I able to find that out? I searched the Gogle Books magazine archive for A1 advertisements like this one. When the image is zoomed in to the A1 bottle, it is easy to read the ingredient list.
I wonder what tragacanth tasted like.
Click HERE for the Wired article.
Like you, I watched the protesters in Egypt’s Tahrir Square with a mix of excitement and pride. Hooray: the people were standing up for themselves! Democracy in the Middle East! What’s not to like?
Well, one thing not to like is that the tear gas grenades used by the Egyptian authorities on the protesters were made right here in the good old USA. Since those gas bombs were “ours”, I figured we had a duty to understand them better.
As almost always happens with these What’s Inside pieces, the actual manufacturer wanted nothing to do with this story. I put it together through investigative research, and the amazing assistance of “the professor of pyrotechnics”, John Conkling of Washington College.
Click here to read the entire story in Wired Magazine.
There was almost too much candy to do. I kept opting for candy corn, and everyone kept telling me that was a Halloween candy, not an Easter candy. We also had to leave out jellybeans, because there simply wasn’t enough room.
Peeps creep me out. They always have. I don’t know why. Probably because I am of the last generation to actually sometimes get live hen chicks for Easter. I had no idea what we were supposed to do with them, and I was always too afraid to ask the grownups what they did with them when the chicks mysteriously vanished. “They flew away” never flew with me.
So, the diabolical little Peeps having been taken care of, I turned my sights to the Cadbury Creme Egg. Notice the spelling of “creme”: they use that word to make you think of real cream, without requiring a drop of real cream in the product.
And then there’s my favorite, the Lake Champlain chocolate Easter bunny. Some people love chocolate, others can take it or leave it, but these rabbits are hard to resist. I also admire the simplicity of them: they are nothing but chocolate, sugar, milk, vanilla, and some fats. Maybe not exactly health food, but a hell of a lot of fun.
Click here to read the complete story in Wired magazine.
This can actually be thought of as heroin part II: in researching the previous month’s What’s Inside Heroin, I came across the (apocryphal ?) story of the heroin dealer who put Drano into his bindles and then “let” one of his rival dealers steal the batch.
Click Here to read the full story in Wired magazine.
Oh man.
Oh, man!
This one was bad.
It’s difficult for the reader to gauge just how much work goes into one of these What’s Inside pieces. You’ll just have to take my word that it is a lot. I visited the first place in North America where heroin was sold (sold legally, I might add!). I interviewed an old junkie (yes, some of them do make it to old age), and read old junkie memoirs. I tried to interview people from Bayer (the first marketers of heroin, back when it was legal), but they wanted nothing to do with my story. I visited medical libraries and I visited hospitals. And I feel as though I read every single blog kept by people trying to get themselves off of heroin, or trying to get a loved one off heroin. And each new piece of data got me more and more upset and depressed. There are few things as insidiously evil as heroin.
I’m a white guy from the Bronx, so of course I knew junkies when I was a kid; it was the 1970s and it seems that all of my friend’s older relatives were on methadone maintenance. They all seemed like such monumental losers. When we first decided to cover heroin as a What’s Inside story, I was excited about looking into this powder that was powerful enough to make someone throw their life away.
People around me were more wary of this story. TWIML laid down some rules: you’re not buying any heroin, she said, and if you do buy any you’re NOT bringing it into the house, and you are definitely not using heroin in any way. My editors were equally uneasy. Don’t do anything stupid, was their advice. It’s simultaneously flattering and disquieting to know that people around me think I am gonzo enough to go out and score smack, let alone use it! To tell the truth, before I started researching the story, I didn’t even have any idea where to buy the stuff.
On the lighter side: the photo editor contacted me and said they didn’t want to photograph a mountain of baby powder and call it heroin. We wanted the real stuff. Our photographer was in England at the time, so I called Scotland Yard and got their narcotics division. I asked if we could send a photographer and art director into their evidence room, break open a kilo of China White and take some pictures. The officer I spoke to was very nice, but she said that as much as they like the idea of the article, the Metropolitan Police are under intense public/governmental scrutiny as to how they allocate their resources, and it’s not in their best interests to devote a couple of officers to spend all day monitoring a photo shoot that won’t appear in the UK anyway. Then — and I’m sure she didn’t mean it as an insult — she said that “The US is awash in heroin. Wouldn’t it be easier to shoot your pictures there?”
So, what’s inside the stuff in the spoon, above? I’ll tell you when the statute of limitations runs out.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE STORY IN WIRED
The origin of this story was pretty straightforward: we got a kitten! It was not long after the stories of those unfortunate pet owners who had fed their animals tainted food from China. We decided to be pretty thorough when it came to checking what we fed our little friend.
As you might have noticed, I frequently try to stick little pop culture references into these What’s Inside pieces. Most of the time they’re excised int eh editing process, but thank goodness “Fish Heads” made it through.
Also, dig the highly US-centric quote from the FDA, about how animals don’t mind eating fish heads the way people do. One of my editors is of Philippine ancestry, and she says her mother can’t believe that Americans throw away the fish heads, which in her homeland is a great delicacy.
Click here to read the story in Wired!
It’s been said (unfairly) that WIRED stands for Women’s Issues Rarely Ever Discussed. I do admit, however, that “What’s Inside” can go a long time between products that are commonly thought of as “women’s”. So it was exciting to get into the workings of mascara, considering it had been at least 25 years since I last wore the stuff*. How had it changed?
I started examining mascara ingredient lists, and mascara formulae, and mascara patents, and it occurred to me that with all these metallic compounds (see story), mascara ought to be affected by a magnet. Could this be true? Had no one noticed this before?
I asked some friends if they felt any strange magnetic attraction when they wore mascara. Then I realized that the question was too vague. I asked them if they had ever stuck kitchen magnets to their eyelashes while wearing mascara. They told me to go away and stop bothering them.
I asked my girlfriend if she had any mascara. She doesn’t need (and doesn’t really use) makeup, so I wasn’t sure if I had ever seen it on her. She thought she might have one tube, in the back of a drawer. While she dug it out, I found the rare earth magnets I had salvaged from the last hard drive I destroyed. We delicately brought the mascara and the magnets together….
And the bottle of mascara stuck to the magnets!
*It was the late 70s-early 80s. Saturday nights. New Rochelle Proctor’s movie theater. Midnight performances of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Me as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. No, no pictures exist.
Click here to read the article in Wired!
Somewhere out there there is an unknown chemist who should be proud. He went out on a limb and spoke to a crusading journalist, and he leaked the contents of Rain-X to an unsuspecting world!
Ok, it wasn’t that dramatic. But there is a chemist, involved somewhere along the Rain-X process, who was invaluable in helping us understand the complicated process of keeping the rain off your windshield. He is a rarity because many corporations nowadays forbid their employees from ever speaking to the media. Our chemist friend either didn’t get that memo, or he got it and forgot. Or he’s just an open, friendly guy who likes his work and likes to talk about it. These days, that’s enough to make him a rarity.
Unknown chemist, we salute you!
Click HERE to read the story in Wired Magazine.
We’ve been writing this story since the spring of 2007. First we were really excited about it, then we weren’t that excited about it, then we were excited again but Duraflame had stopped making Colorlogs, then Duraflame reintroduced Colorlogs but we weren’t excited at the time. Then later we got so excited about artificial fireplace logs that we contemplated taking them to a laboratory to have then completely broken down and their ingredients analyzed (deformulated, is the word), then we dropped that idea. Then I started researching firelogs in earnest.
My favorite tidbit is the birdseed. It is so simple it is positively brilliant! Like little popcorn kernels embedded in fake wood, popping at pseudorandom times!
But my favorite part of this story is the discovery of W. Hughes Brockbank, Renaissance Man of the American West. He was a miner and real estate developer, an education pioneer, spent two terms in the Utah state legislature and four terms as a state senator. He ran a profitable janitorial supply company, and sued the governor to preserve a legislator’s right to sell janitorial supplies to the state legislature. He was a member of the Utah board of regents, and he served on educational commissions in the Nixon and Reagan administrations.
But for all those accomplishments, W. Hughes Brockbank will be forever remembered in these pages as the man who invented a fireplace log with colored flames.
Click here or the image above to read the whole story on Wired!
Oh, what a tangled story this one is!
Wired is very happy and proud of its iPad app, as it should be. Not too long after the app launched, the editors came to me and said that they wanted do something app-special for the next What’s Inside, such as, say, make a video of the product in use. How cool would that be? You tap on your Wired app, and there is What’s Inside, in full motion video! I thought it was a great idea! They asked what was next on the What’s Inside list. I told them Preparation H.
Uh oh.
Eventually, after some discussion, they decided that they weren’t going to make a iPad video of Preparation H in use. So they held off on the iPad idea until this month, when the subject is Doritos Late Night All Nighter Cheeseburger Chips.
I was in my local Target back in March when I first came across this bag. Cheeseburger flavored Doritos?? How did they manage to do that? Why did they manage to do that? Did people write letters to Frito-Lay, saying “You know, I like the Nacho and Cool Ranch flavors, but could you make something more cheeseburgery?” Did it come from a focus group Frito-Lay held with college stoners? “Dude, sometimes we want cheeseburgers late at night, but, like, we don’t want to go out and get food, so we just like eat Doritos. You know what would be awesome? If you guys could like make Doritos that taste like cheeseburgers! That would be so awesome!” We’ll probably never know.
There in the store, I read the ingredient list and my eyes lit up. At the time, Doritos Late Night All Nighter Cheeseburger Chips were made with pork enzymes, to give them a unique flavor. Pork enzymes! Pork. Enzymes. I love working on those products that contain unexpected ingredients, and here was a great one — after all, you probably don’t anticipate pork enzymes in your cheeseburger chips (although you probably should).
Unfortunately for the narrative, it was about that same time that Frito-Lay discontinued the use of pork enzymes in Doritos Late Night All Nighter Cheeseburger Chips; the next bag I looked at didn’t have them on the ingredient list at all. Later, while I was actually researching this article, a Frito-Lay spokesperson confirmed that pork enzymes were no longer in use. No matter; there was still loads to talk about (as you’ll see by clicking the above link).
As I do with almost every What’s Inside, I had to test these for myself. I’m not much into junk food, so I brought them to a friend’s barbecue earlier in the summer. They seemed to go over well enough — people ate them about as much as they ate any of the other chips. When I asked, some people swore they could taste ketchup, and multiple people said there was too much mustard, but on the whole people enjoyed the novelty of these chips. Because there was so much food at the BBQ, we had about a half a bag left over.
So there I was with half a bag of Doritos Late Night All Nighter Cheeseburger Chips I knew wasn’t going to finish. I asked a friend if she wanted them. She said no, throw them away. I said I grew up in a home where it was considered a sin to throw away food, so I felt bad about just tossing them.
“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “I’m not entirely sure this counts as food.”
Click here to read the whole story on Wired.com
Wow. How did it take us so long to do Preparation H? Just one of those things, I guess.
The original draft I handed in had a special sekrit shout-out to Flaming Lips fans. See if you can see where we’re going: The base ingredient of PrepH is petrolatum, or Vaseline. One remedy for hemorrhoids was to apply butter to the inflamed area. Another was to avoid constipating foods like cheese. Still another was to use neutral pH gelatin soap to wash the hemorrhoid. So I handed in the following:
Folk remedies for hemorrhoids say you must use butter, don’t use cheese, and use gelled soaps. But Preparation H doesn’t use any of these. It uses Vaseline.
Unfortunately, throughout the editing process, the phrase was gradually whittled down for space and clarity.
Another thing we didn’t have the space for is the bizarre story of the forced reformulation of Preparation H. From its creation in the 1930s, PrepH had used a special yeast extract to shrink the swelling of hemorrhoidal tissues. It apparently worked well for more than 50 years, but in the early 1990s the FDA stepped in. They claimed that the yeast extract didn’t work (more precisely, that there was no evidence that the yeast extract worked as it was claimed), and forced the PrepH company to substitute a less effective and slightly more dangerous active ingredient.
But there is a remedy. If you get your prescription medication from Canada, ask the pharmacist to throw in a couple of tubes of their Preparation H; the Canadian version still uses the original formula.
Also, in the editorial process we went back and forth on the line about how hemorrhoids burn: did they burn like “teenage love” or more like “Catholic guilt”? You’ll see which we chose when you click on the link above. Also also, in my opinion, methylparaben should have come last — it has the obvious punchline.
See you next month!
Click here for the Wired story.
This started life as What’s Inside Miracle Gro soil. I went to the store, found a bag of the stuff, carefully copied down the ingredients, came back to my desk and started doing the usual in-depth investigative research What’s Inside is famous for. I can’t reveal every facet of the investigation, but it involves multiple trips to the Science and Business Library on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, as well as phone calls and emails with chemists, agricultural experts, marketing experts, and government officials from the state of Florida (to whom I sent an email with the subject line “Media inquiry about cow manure”).
I handed the story in on deadline. And then, in an editorial meeting, someone noticed that we had done a Miracle Gro product way back in April 2007 (What’s Inside Miracle Gro plant food). They were concerned that we were doing another Miracle Gro product so soon. We needed another What’s Inside, fast.
I got the news at 7PM. I ran (literally! ran!) (Well, I started out running, then I jogged for a little bit, then I walked the rest of the way) to my nearest Lowes home furnishing store, the one underneath the Smith and 9th subway station in Brooklyn*, to find another bag of planting soil. I figured that replacing Miracle Gro soil with another brand of soil wasn’t going to be so difficult — after all, dirt was dirt was dirt, right?
Well, problem #1: Most garden soil carries either the Miracle Gro brand (which was off limits to me) or the Scotts brand (which is the parent company of Miracle Gro so I figured they were probably off limits too). Problem #2: the other brands of soil were so vastly different from Miracle Gro that researching them would be like doing a brand new What’s Inside. (Incidentally, next time you’re in a home improvement or gardening store, spend some time handling those big 50 lb bags of soil. Notice how badly they smell.) How could this be? Whatever happened to dirt was dirt was dirt? As it turns out, you can make soil out of almost anything that can be composted.
Eventually I found Sta-Green, the soil most like the soil I had originally analyzed. “Most like”, in this case, meant that about 2/3 of the ingredients were the same, and the remaining 1/3 could be researched pretty easily. I had been so agitated earlier that I ran out of the house without a notebook, so I turned on my phone’s videorecorder and made a movie of me reading aloud the ingredients of Sta-Green Tree and Shrub Planting Mix.
*Yes, the store is located underneath the subway station, but its not what you think. Smith and 9th is an elevated stop, actually the highest one in the entire NYC subway system. I could have taken the subway to the store, but when you’re excited you don’t think of these things.
This was a particularly fun one. In my research I found a federal lawsuit from the 1880s concerning truth in labeling; apparently some prosecutor thought he had cause to believe that Worcestershire sauce contained some hidden impurities. He was wrong, but not before forcing the manufacturer to reveal the exact contents of his sauce (specifically, the unlisted “spices and flavorings”). Since most Worcestershire manufacturers pride themselves on not changing their formula, the 1880s list provided me with a great starting point.
Then, I had to find someone to speak on the record about the current composition. I can’t reveal who I eventually found, but finding him was the most fun. I found his name, and that he retired last year to the summer cottage he had kept for the past 30 years. He didn’t seem to be listed in any public directories, but then I found a young man with the same name on Facebook. His interests included summer sports in the same area as the old man, and I asked if they were related. Sure enough, they were father and son, and the young man put me in touch with his dad.
I'm the real Patrick Di Justo. This tumblr is the home of behind-the-scenes stories on the the What's Inside pieces I've done for Wired Magazine.
