Tyson Whiting | Vox

I worked at a Halloween store. I saw nice people turn into monsters.

2017-12-14T11:40:58-05:00

I love Halloween. I love the horror movies, the costumes, the candy, the fall leaves, being scared — I love it all. In fact, I’ve been connected to the industry for years, via working in haunted houses and Halloween stores.

I love Halloween, but I am here to tell you something important. There is something about costumes and strobe lights and animatronic ghouls that transforms normal people into monsters. Around Halloween, a switch flips, and the rules don’t apply anymore.

This is an illustrated portrayal of my six years working in a Halloween store. Sure, plenty of pleasant individuals also entered the store … but they aren’t as funny.

How pop songs are made

2018-09-14T15:49:23-04:00

Most people think this is how Top 40 hits are created:

An artist writes a song,

goes to the studio and records it,

and puts it out there for us to hear.

But that’s not how it typically works.

First, a producer goes into the studio and creates the beat, composes the chord progression, and arranges the synths.

Then a songwriter comes into the studio to improv over the beat.

Together, they choose the song’s hooks — the catchiest parts of the chorus and verses — but they don’t write the entire song.

The process is a lot of work, and there are a lot of failed efforts. A whole lot.

Once they’re reasonably happy with what they’ve got, the producer and the songwriter record a demo track with a stand-in singer — often the songwriter — performing the vocals.

At this point, the track is rough. Maybe it’s missing lyrics, or maybe only the chorus is present. It will now be sent to major recording artists who might be good fits for it.

If more than one artist wants the track, the producer can try to turn it into two similar but ultimately different songs, or give it to the artist he or she thinks is the best match for the song.

The artist’s job is to work with the songwriter to flesh out any remaining lyrics. Sometimes the artist writes the rest of the song; sometimes the songwriter does.

Then the artist re-records the vocals, and the producer lays them over the beats.

Sound engineers mix the track to make it sound smooth and pristine. Once the track is mixed, it is reviewed by the involved parties.

If the song is explicit or long, a radio version must be edited separately.

Once the sound mixing is complete, the artist’s label takes over.

The label distributes the song to radio stations, YouTube, and music streaming platforms. It also distributes the song to stores both physical and digital.

That, in turn, pays everyone involved for their hard work. Well … sort of.

11 surprising foods with way more calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger

2019-03-03T00:03:52-05:00

Americans are about to learn a whole lot more about how many calories they’re consuming — in every bag of movie-theater popcorn, every chain-restaurant sandwich and every theme-park turkey leg.

Under a new Obamacare requirement, all chain restaurants with 20 or more locations will have to post calorie contents on their menus. The final regulations came out in November 2014, and restaurants will have to come into compliance within the next year.

We’re about to learn that some things we really like to eat — and might even think of as relatively healthy — are actually pretty bad for us. Take the virtuous sounding grilled turkey sandwich at Chili’s. It has 1,350 calories, more than half of what an adult is supposed to consume in a given day. Or take the tomato soup bread bowl at Corner Bakery (my go-to, rainy day lunch). It has an astounding 1,360 calories — the bread bowl being responsible for 1,040 of said calories. RIP bread-bowl lunches. Hello sad, lonely tomato soup.

We’ve pulled together some of the most surprising calorie counts that will start to turn up on menus beginning next year. And we’ve expressed them in terms of McDonald’s cheeseburgers. A medium movie theater popcorn (1,610 calories) is equivalent to five-and-a-half McDonald’s cheeseburgers (290 calories apiece). This is all to drive home the point: many of the things we think of as healthy just aren’t.

(Tyson Whiting / Vox)

If you want to figure out how many cheeseburgers your favorite food amounts to, you can do that with this nifty calculator we built. Type in a calorie count, and you’ll find out how many cheeseburgers you could eat for the same amount of energy.

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