Jamie Loftus Gives the Internet’s Main Characters Their Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)

Disclaimer: Jamie Loftus used to be a regular contributor to Paste Magazine, but I, Clare Martin, have never worked with her. Do I have to disclose I think she’s really cool, though?

Jamie Loftus is not afraid to be the podcast she wants to see in the world. About a year ago, the comedian, writer, and prolific podcaster was looking for a show that revisited the internet’s main characters of the day—relatively unknown people thrust into the limelight after going viral for any number of reasons. No podcasts she looked into really fit the bill; some interviewed the subjects again, but tended to repeat the exploitation the person experienced in the first place, rather than analyzing the social context around that particular internet moment. And so she made it herself: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), which premiered last month via iHeartMedia’s Cool Zone Media. 

Much of Loftus’ solo work has happened in this vein, where she looks for a project examining a certain topic, and finding nothing satisfying there, takes matters into her own hands. Previously, she documented her foray into the surprisingly chauvinistic world of IQ test weirdos with My Year in Mensa (which she also wrote about for Paste), explored the spiritualist movement in Ghost Church, analyzed the cultural impact of the Cathy comics with Aack Cast, and thoroughly delved into Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous work in Lolita Podcast. Her book Raw Dog looks into the social history of hot dogs in between her own thoughts on America’s most famous tubular meats. Loftus’ work is always thoughtful and well-researched, accentuated by moments of levity thanks to her off-the-wall sense of humor (and, in the case of her podcasts, liberal use of air horns).

So far on Sixteenth Minute, Loftus has revisited the “bed intruder” story from 2010, the famously controversial dress, the Boston slide cop, the woman who dared to enjoy drinking coffee in the garden with her husband, and the Philadelphia man who endeavored to eat 40 rotisserie chickens. Picking her subjects is a tricky and ongoing process; Loftus has assembled a “scary spreadsheet” listing internet main characters that could end up on the podcast.

“There are so many internet stories that are a woman saying something innocuous and then being told to die,” Loftus tells me over Zoom, referencing coffee wife. “I don’t want the show to be that week to week to week to week, but [I choose] the stories that feel like they happened at an interesting moment and the response was unique.”

One particular main character hangs in front of Loftus like a portent of doom: Bean Dad, a.k.a. musician John Roderick, who was accused of neglect after making his daughter figure out how to use a can opener. 

“The dread that comes with thinking about Bean Dad, I cannot undersell it. I don’t know why. I don’t know why. I was thinking about, like, having to interview my own therapist when I do the Bean Dad episode. There’s a mental block there,” Loftus explains. 

When I try to get Loftus to talk about her favorite internet incident instead, she declares a truth known to most anyone who spends too much time online: “On a long enough timeline, I feel like almost any moment on the internet grows to suck.”

Case in point: the dress, an episode which Loftus had initially enjoyed putting together (“The discourse around it was very intense, but genial”) until the recent revelation that the husband of the couple at the center of the story was horrifyingly abusive and appeared in court after attacking his wife.