“We live in deeply conspiratorial times. The spread of misinformation has never happened more speedily, never been so easy to monetize, never felt so inescapably ingrained in our daily lives. It covers every aspect of our being, from politics to academia to, of course, celebrity. Since my field of interest is mostly the last one, I’ve been privy to some truly bananas conspiracy theories involving the most famous people on the planet. They’re always ridiculous, frequently terrifying, and seldom easy to explain away. They’re also inadvertently extremely revealing about the ways that we dehumanize others as part of a ceaseless search for answers that do not exist.”
“The qualities that make a Nickelodeon Kid are also the traits that would make us challenge Nickelodeon. We were the kids who learned about terrorism, climate change, and AIDS on Nick News. And yes, Linda Ellerbee even taught us about child abuse. We learned to ask the hard questions and challenge questionable behavior. If we can’t trust that Nickelodeon is safe and ethical, we might as well change the channel.”
“4 underrated parts of the Inflation Reduction Act”.
RIP, Virginia Porter Moss, last surviving adult actor from It’s A Wonderful Life.
RIP, Pete Carril, Hall of Fame basketball coach at Princeton.
Pardon me while I give my extremely tiny violin a tune-up.
Guess I need to start watching Sandman soon.
“What is ‘soft’ censorship? When school districts don’t ban books, they still limit student access”.
“Justice, apparently, was only recently invented — some time in the 1960s, perhaps — so evaluating the justice or injustice of any person or group’s “values and mores” before then is just an anachronistic projection of “contemporary social justice issues” into the foreign country of the past.”
“Yelp is adding a prominent consumer notice to crisis pregnancy center listings to more clearly distinguish them from clinics that provide abortion services”. Your move, Google.
“A summer of drought has revealed long-submerged relics across the globe. Some bring us back decades, while others boast histories of thousands of years. A park in Texas now claims one of the oldest revealed this summer – dinosaur footprints dating back over 113 million years.”
RIP, Jerry Allison, drummer for Buddy Holly and The Crickets, who co-wrote the songs “Peggy Sue” and “That’ll Be The Day”.
RIP, Len Dawson, Hall of Fame and Super Bowl champion quarterback with the Kansas City Chiefs.
RIP, Gary Gaines, former head coach at Odessa Permian high school, made famous by Friday Night Lights.
Here’s one way to tell that The Former Guy is really scraping the bottom of the legal barrel these days.
“Letter shows National Archives, DOJ, and Biden gave Trump every chance to return documents”.
I love an Ichiro Suzuki story.
“The rise of the ‘Morally Dubious Podcaster’ in pop culture”.
Don’t read too much news. It’s not good for you.
Will the last creator at HBO Max please turn out the lights?
“Star Trek icon Nichelle Nichols is taking one final journey through the final frontier. Celestis Inc., a private space flight company that works with NASA, will include some of the actress’ ashes on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket as part of the upcoming Enterprise flight, scheduled to take off sometime later this year.”
“Pair Trump’s attitude toward the intelligence services, whistleblowers, and witnesses of all kinds, with his incredible disdain for protecting classified information, and it’s a recipe for utter catastrophe. The revelation of a “NOC list,” giving away dozens of undercover operatives in vital roles, may be the subject of adventure fiction, but it seems like an all-too-real possibility for Trump.”
RIP, E. Bryant Crutchfield, inventor of the Trapper Keeper.