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Within an hour, the deputies realized just how common the sharing of nude pictures was at the school. “The boys kept telling us, ‘It’s nothing unusual. It happens all the time,’ ” Lowe recalls. Every time someone they were interviewing mentioned another kid who might have naked pictures on his or her phone, they had to call that kid in for an interview. After just a couple of days, the deputies had filled multiple evidence bins with phones, and they couldn’t see an end to it. Fears of a cabal got replaced by a more mundane concern: what to do with “hundreds of damned phones. I told the deputies, ‘We got to draw the line somewhere or we’re going to end up talking to every teenager in the damned county!’ ”

Nor did the problem stop at the county’s borders. Several boys, in an effort to convince Lowe that they hadn’t been doing anything rare or deviant, showed him that he could type the hashtag symbol (#) into Instagram followed by the name of pretty much any nearby county and then thots, and find a similar account.

In some he sensed low self-esteem—for example, the girl who’d sent her naked picture to a boy, unsolicited: “It just showed up! I guess she was hot after him?” A handful of senior girls became indignant during the course of the interview. “This is my life and my body and I can do whatever I want with it,” or, “I don’t see any problem with it. I’m proud of my body,” Lowe remembers them saying. A few, as far as he could tell, had taken pictures especially for the Instagram accounts and had actively tried to get them posted.

Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Blaming the liberal or mainstream media and “media bias” is the patriotically correct version of blaming the corporations or capitalism. The patriotically correct notion that they “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” because the former have “common sense” and the “intellectual elites” don’t know anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can be sustained only in a total bubble.

The ancient question: What moral stain awaits us if we cannot abandon the art of a monster? None.

Michael Jackson’s art matters. It matters not because of any sociopolitical significance, although many of his songs bear uplifting messages. It matters not for its implications about race in America. It matters because of the simple fact that it is, in every sense, the gift revealed.

A generation ago, young people read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift to understand how to live meaningful lives by cultivating within themselves the ability to receive art: “An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.”

In early March, reports of a white, middle-class missing woman, Sarah Everard, had hit the news. A few days later, a white serving Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens, was charged with her kidnap and murder.

Countless stories have been shared online of women being frightened to walk alone, of holding their keys as a weapon, and of feeling a sense of constant threat and anxiety. At a time when lockdown has curtailed freedom of movement, it felt especially cruel that women felt safe nowhere – in their homes, in the street or online.

If there is an image that has come to represent what transpired on the night of the vigil, it is the photo of a young woman, who we now know to be Patsy Stevenson, clad in a face mask and pinned to the ground by a group of male police officers, her head held up, as she stares into the camera.

NEW DELHI—Nepal is banning TikTok over concerns that the video platform is “disturbing social harmony,

“Through social-media platform TikTok, there’s a continuous dissemination of content disturbing our social harmony and family structures,” said Sharma.

Nepal has faced increasing problems with TikTok, including cases of cyberbullying,

Creating and disseminating convincing propaganda used to require the resources of a state. Now all it takes is a smartphone.

Generative artificial intelligence is now capable of creating fake pictures, clones of our voices, and even videos depicting and distorting world events. The result: From our personal circles to the political circuses, everyone must now question whether what they see and hear is true.

exposure to AI-generated fakes can make us question the authenticity of everything we see. Real images and real recordings can be dismissed as fake.