Category Archives: Popular Culture

Facebook’s “Fact Checking”

You’ll be as shocked as I am to learn that it’s one sided. I wonder if all this social-media censorship will revivify the blogosphere?

[Thursday afternoon update]

Facebook’s algorithm removed the text of the Declaration of Independence as “hate speech.” Because of course it did. I mean, Jefferson was a slaveholder.

Harlan Ellison

RIP.

In addition to the books and short stories, he wrote some Twilight Zone episodes, and Star Trek.

Buzz

Emilee Speck got the court documents. As someone who’s known them all for years, this is very sad.

[Afternoon update]

Here’s a statement from Christina:

[Wednesday-morning update]

Here’s the latest, from Chris Davenport.

[Bumped]

[Late-morning update]

Marina Koren has more at The Atlantic.

Remembering Bobby Kennedy

I remember waking up on a school day to hear that he’d been shot out in California. That was a rough couple months, between it and the earlier MLK assassination. Fifty years on, a useful reminder that much of the history has been rewritten, and that both he and JFK were highly overrated. Teddy was scum, but apparently some Americans have need for royalty.

More thoughts from Ed Driscoll.

Anthony Bourdain

I’ve never paid much attention to him, but he seems to have been quite a character. Here’s a foreword he wrote to a book in defense of a guileless restaurant reviewer in flyover country.

[Update a while later]

Dealing with suicide.

It’s always been such an alien concept to me.

[Update a few minutes later]

After a suicide, think of the survivors. and Ben Shapiro asks “How do we stop suicides?”

When I was a kid, one of my classmates’ father shot himself, and she discovered the body. I wondered just how terrible that would be.