Special guest Rachel Monroe (re-)joins Mike and Sarah to talk about all the myths surrounding the second-biggest news event of the 1990s. Digressions include car crashes, September 11, Diane Sawyer and the terrors of teenage journaling.
Links!
- Dave Cullen’s book (which all three co-hosts agree was kind of meh but he seems like a nice guy)
- An interesting write-up weighing the evidence for various theories of the killers
- Rachel’s lovely and disturbing essay on “Columbiners”
Rottin' in Denmark 
Hi Mike,
Toward the end of this episode, you recount a time when you wrote hardcore porn for a journal entry and got into some trouble. Something almost exactly like that happened to me once and I had to share.
It was an English class and this teacher, too, wanted us to journal every day. One difference, he said he WOULD be reading them, so they didn’t have to be specific, and that we could use the time to write about anything at all. I made sure to clarify. “Anything at all?” “Anything.”
So over the course of the next five days, I told the story of how I started a cult. It even starred half a dozen kids from the class. Now from the get-go, I made it clear I was starting the cult as a scam to convince people to give me their money.
In the end, I convinced the congregation of 10 million (I was a very charismatic cult leader, obviously) to commit suicide, minus the people from class. They were in on the scam from the beginning.
I turned this journal in and the next day I got pulled out of class. This was in 2001, so it was a couple of years post-Columbine. The teacher found my journal very disturbing and convinced the school to set me up with a counselor. My punishment was to spend his next ten class periods with a shrink.
The first day I walked in, sat down, and she had the journal sitting on her desk. She looked at me and said, “So I read your journal. Are you a cult leader?”
“No.”
“Do you plan on being one?”
“No.”
“Ok. You can come here and do whatever you want for the next ten class periods with this teacher.”
She and I honestly never spoke about anything again.
But yes, I related a lot to that story of getting in trouble for innocent journal writing. Keep up the great work with this show Mike and Sarah!
Tom