This entire column is worth reading, and honestly the whole thing is good enough that there really isn’t a pull quote that would do it justice.
Plus: an online event with me about the past and future of Jewish life
Cory DoctorowIn William Gibson's 1992 novel "Idoru," a media executive describes her company's core audience: "Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections." It's an astonishingly great passage, not just for the image it evokes, but for how it captures the character of the speaker and her contempt for the people who made her fortune. It's also a beautiful distillation of the 1990s anxiety about TV's role in a societal "dumbing down," that had brewed for a long time, at least since the Nixon-JFK televised debates, whose outcome was widely attributed not to JFK's ideas, but to Nixon's terrible TV manner.
I must have missed the part where racist Karen who filed a false police report became a protected class.
When AOC says it’s simplistic to say that Israel has a right to defend itself, she’s right. It is simple: Israel has a right to defend itself.
From the beginning of my rabbinic career, I focused mightily on public relations and disseminating the Jewish message to the world. I was accused of being publicity-hungry and of shallowness. But I knew that the one area where we Jews have so significantly failed was in public relations. And this has been true throughout the centuries.
I don’t know Rabbi, did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason so many have accused you of being publicity-hungry and shallow is because you’ve spent the last 40 years or so co-opting the worst excesses of the self-help genre to do your bit to strip Judaism down to its cheapest parts so you could make it a pop culture sensation?
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An attack that targeted Apple devices was used to spy on China’s Muslim minority—and US officials claim it was developed at the country’s top hacking competition.
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The reality is that Trump used Facebook most effectively as an organizing and fundraising tool, not as a platform for ‘posting’
My only response to this is: “Well of course he did.” He was handed an incredibly powerful set of tools coupled with an incredibly easy way to use them. What did people expect would happen?
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