Though it’s tempting to keep rehashing the widespread academic and other evidence of worker exploitation and stolen wages (US$40 million a year by New York based, non-scripted TV companies alone in 2013, according to the Writer’s Guild of America), pitifully cheap production values, links to mass plastic surgery, eating disorders and generally diminishing morality in audiences, “frankenbiting” (where dialogue is deceptively edited to create better stories), metadata surveillance, the impoverishment of public discourses and the fact the that the whole thing is predicated on being real when it is extraordinarily fake – there is another aspect to reality TV that makes it even worse.

The exuvia or cast skin of insects, being exceedingly transparent, are well adapted for observation, as they exhibit the outward appearance of the little animal; among these we may reckon those of spiders and cimices, but particularly the forficula, or earwig, which is an elegant exuvia.

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they called him the phantom walrus – an animal, it is true, Tubbs had come to resemble, swathed against the fog and mist in an oversized raincoat (Tubbs was losing weight), his favoris bristling on his cheeks like tusks and glistening with weather.