But Emerson’s fixation revealed a capacity for seriousness he only hinted at on the radio: It took him seven years of research to complete Unmask Alice, and much of that work was spent confronting publishing houses like Simon & Schuster with the damage they did. That’s the kind of plunge a lot of obsessive people make-especially if they are, say, adrift after a divorce and the end of a 14-year radio talk show. ![]() “It is a rabbit hole the length and breadth and width of which I could not have possibly imagined,” he says. An internet search turned up no comprehensive study. In 2015, he assumed someone had already written a history of Sparks and her fabrications. In 2006, WW compared him to Howard Stern (“in the same category, if not class”) and noted that when his show went off the air for a year, devoted listeners mailed Entercom hundreds of coffee cups affixed with notes reading, “I need my morning fix.”Īll of which is to say that Emerson knows something about cult followings-both as subject and object. With a clipped cadence that recalled the sportscaster Colin Cowherd, Emerson delivered sardonic soliloquies on topics ranging from suicide bombers to the songs of Meat Loaf. It’s also a second chapter for a man who for 15 years was a familiar voice on Portland radio.Īiring from 1998 to 2012 and drifting from station to station across the AM and FM dials, The Rick Emerson Show was a totem for a generation of Portland pop-culture geeks. ![]() ![]() And it’s become something of a literary phenomenon this summer, the subject of lengthy consideration in the pages of this week’s New Yorker. Unmask Alice is an unusually resonant book in the era of QAnon and Pizzagate, when significant portions of Americans are ready to believe their political opponents (and neighbors) are child molesters. The result is a propulsive read, a boardwalk thrill ride through the scams and moral panics of the late 20th century that abruptly hits the brakes to consider who’s buried under the fun park.
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