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The Daily Currant is a fake-news site of a different stripe: one entirely devoid of jokes. Whether this humorlessness is intentional or not—the site's founder contends his critics don't have a sense of subtlety—the site's business model as an ad-driven clickbait-generator relies on it. When Currant stories go viral, it's not because their satire contains essential truths, but rather because their satire is taken as truth—and usually that "truth" is engineered to outrage a particular frequency of the political spectrum. As Slate's Josh Voorhees wrote after Drudge fell for the Bloomberg story, "It's a classic Currant con, one that relies on its mark wanting to believe a particular story is true." 

The Daily Currant's headlines don’t engage in subtlety so much as fail entirely to signal humorous intention. That would be acceptable, perhaps even clever, if the stories themselves skillfully exploited the reader's initial credulity, the copy growing increasingly ludicrous until the reader realizes the joke. Instead, jokes sometimes materialize in the final lines, but they’re half-baked at best. The VA story ends with Obama dismissing calls for officials to resign. "Why," Obama asks, "would holding people accountable for their actions be necessary?” That neither funny nor satirical. But it rings true to partisans who genuinely believe that Obama thinks that way—the same people who, in a flash of outrage, are most likely to share the story on social media.

A frantic President Trump, holding court in a bathrobe, ordered his aides to wrap the White House telephones in tinfoil, several Chinese publications reported this week, citing The New Yorker.

Internet readers were puzzled. The state-run news media — and China’s army of censors — are not known for making jokes. Was this for real?

Others were more discerning. “This was made up and meant to be funny,” another user said. “Surprising it was treated as news. Editor, could you be more professional?”

This type of glib quasi-logic works really well in comedy, especially in a format where space is restricted, and where the quick, disposable nature of the strip limits your ability to draw humor from character and plot. You take an idea, find a way to subvert or deconstruct it, and you get an absurd result.

while the idea of a “cubicle job” can seem to younger readers like relative bliss, they were (and are) still an emblem of boredom and absurdity, a sign that life was being slowly colonized by gray shapes and Powerpoint slides. Throughout his classic-era work, Adams hits on the feeling that the world has been made unnatural, unconducive to life; materially adequate, but spiritually exhausting. 

He makes constant use of something I’m going to call, for want of a better term, the sophoid: something which has the outer semblance of wisdom, but none of the substance; something that sounds weighty if you say it confidently enough, yet can be easily thrown away as “just a thought” if it won’t hold up to scrutiny.

The social network is going to partner with the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, which includes groups such as Snopes and the Associated Press, to evaluate articles flagged by Facebook users. If those articles do not pass the smell test for the fact-checkers, Facebook will label that evaluation whenever they are posted or shared, along with a link to the organization that debunked the story.

Mosseri said the social network still wants to be a place where people with all kinds of opinions can express themselves but has no interest in being the arbiter of what’s true and what's not for its 1 billion users.

The new system will work like this: If a story on Facebook is patently false — saying that a celebrity is dead when they are still alive, for example — then users will see a notice that the story has been disputed or debunked. People who try to share stories that have been found false will also see an alert before they post. Flagged stories will appear lower in the news feed than unflagged stories.

Speakers and writers of American English have recently taken to identifying a staggering and constantly changing array of trends, events, memes, products, lifestyle choices and phenomena of nearly every kind with a single label — a thing.

It would be easy to call this a curiosity of the language and leave it at that. Linguistic trends come and go.

One could, on the other hand, consider the use of “a thing” a symptom of an entire generation’s linguistic sloth, general inarticulateness and penchant for cutesy, empty, half-ironic formulations that create a self-satisfied barrier preventing any form of genuine engagement with the world around them.

Palin's poll ratings are telling a more devastating story.

engage with the process much earlier on – not least with their Sunday morning political talk shows

It currently commands 10 million viewers – a creditable figure for a primetime drama, let alone a late-night sketch show.

“These are heartless sadists who have put in countless hours of backstabbing and forsaken all ethical constraints in order to bolster their own power, and yet time and time again they are denied a place at the top of the corporate ladder simply because of the color of their skin,” she continued.According to the report, even when companies were presented with numerous highly qualified minority candidates with no moral compass and a history of increasing earnings by knowingly rushing an unsafe product to market or outsourcing thousands of manufacturing jobs to overseas sweatshops, the top-tier positions still tended to be awarded almost exclusively to deceitful, empathy-devoid whites.

You know the situation is getting desperate when three bioethicists propose genetically modifying humans to reduce our environmental impact. In a bizarre paper titled ‘Human engineering and climate change’, Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache argue we should seriously consider technologies to engineer human bodies to reduce carbon emissions.

The paper, to be published in a respectable journal, is beyond satire and its only likely effect is to bring the philosophy profession into disrepute. Philosophy, it seems, does not have a ‘laugh test’ for filtering out whacky proposals. So why stop at cat’s eyes and midget babies? Why not genetically modify people to make them white in order to cool the Earth by increasing its reflectivity?

The three bioethicists suggest that people who are appalled at the idea of human engineering may have a “status quo bias”, resisting their innovative ideas because of an inherent conservatism.

hovering above all that is a more subtle — and quietly clever — narrative arc, involving the gap between parents and children and how each generation has a different awareness of what it means to be black in 2014.

I want it to succeed because the show arrives when black characters on mainstream broadcast networks who directly deal with issues like race are incredibly rare.

so far, his approach seems to be a hit. The premiere resonated with critics and attracted a robust 11 million viewers, besides generating a lot of positive reactions and discussions on social media. In a vote of confidence, ABC has given the show a full-season order.

If “South Park” were a person, it would be old enough to vote, though it probably wouldn’t.

“It’s like I’m a relic,” a recurring character says. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve outstayed my welcome.”

white restaurant owner who believes he is Chinese and speaks in a grossly stereotyped Asian accent

“Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.

“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual

“No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”

Over the last week, two of the world’s biggest internet companies have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome.

Hours later, Facebook, the social network, updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites.

Google did not escape the glare, with critics saying the company gave too much prominence to false news stories.

over 13 years, he has published a series of anthologies—of the contemporary American essay, of the world essay, and now of the historical American essay—that misrepresents what the essay is and does, that falsifies its history, and that contains, among its numerous selections, very little one would reasonably classify within the genre. And all of this to wide attention and substantial acclaim

D’Agata’s rationale for his “new history,” to the extent that one can piece it together from the headnotes that preface each selection, goes something like this. The conventional essay, nonfiction as it is, is nothing more than a delivery system for facts. The genre, as a consequence, has suffered from a chronic lack of critical esteem, and thus of popular attention. The true essay, however, deals not in knowing but in “unknowing”: in uncertainty, imagination, rumination; in wandering and wondering; in openness and inconclusion

Every piece of this is false in one way or another.

Beverly Cleary, Beloved Children’s Book Author, Dies at 104

Her funny stories about Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, the sisters Ramona and Beezus Quimby, and a motorcycling mouse named Ralph never talked down to readers.

Beverly Cleary, who enthralled tens of millions of young readers with the adventures and mishaps of Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, the bratty Ramona Quimby and her older sister Beezus, and other residents of Klickitat Street, died on Thursday in Carmel, Calif

According to “fourth turning” proponents, American history goes through recurring cycles. Each one, which lasts about 80 to 100 years, consists of four generation-long seasons, or “turnings.” The winter season is a time of upheaval and reconstruction — a fourth turning.

The theory first appeared in “The Fourth Turning,” a work of pop political science that has had a cult following more or less since it was published in 1997. In the last few years of political turmoil, the book and its ideas have bubbled into the mainstream.

According to “The Fourth Turning,” previous crisis periods include the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. America entered its latest fourth turning in the mid-2000s. It will culminate in a crisis sometime in the 2020s — i.e., now.

Could technology companies have monitored ominous messages made by a gunman who Texas authorities say massacred 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school? Could they have warned the authorities? Answers to these questions remain unclear

But if nothing else, the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, seems highly likely to focus additional attention on how social platforms monitor what users are saying to and showing each other.

Shortly thereafter, Facebook stepped in to note that the gunman sent one-to-one direct messages, not public posts, and that they weren’t discovered until “after the terrible tragedy”.

while labeling something parody might be bad for comedy, it can be essential for credibility. If people can’t tell whether an article was satirical or not, that chips away at trust that is essential for a news organization. But what’s good for comedy isn’t necessarily best practices for journalism or social media.

Even today when the lines between comedy and politics often blur — years after the press marveled that young people trusted Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” more than the news media, which now seems like a much darker development than it did back then — the idea that free speech might involve some trade-offs seems obvious.

But maybe not to Musk, who appears as naïve about comedy as he does about the economics of social media.