Judd Apatow's miserable new comedy, This Is 40, is a cautionary tale that warns against two things: getting older and being married. I don't know what messages you are to extract from this thing if not: kill yourself and get divorced now.
The overwhelming majority of messages I got in response to Peter Bouckaert's call for an email campaign were critical of Gawker's decision not to honor the Richard Engel media blackout. But not all of them. Somalia Report publisher Robert Young Pelton, a longtime freelance reporter, wrote me to alert me to Bouckaert's campaign and to tell me that "having been kidnapped and involved in dozens of corporate bungled kidnaps, I can say there is no evidence that keeping things quiet does anything than protect the corporate image and pocketbook." Pelton is has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Somalia, Chechnya, and elsewhere. He was the first American to discover an injured John Walker Lindh and interview him near Mazār-e Sharīf. Pelton was kidnapped and held for ten days in 2003 by a right-wing Colombian paramilitary group. I asked him to put his thoughts into a longer email.
Nice Guys of OK Cupid is a Tumblr blog collecting screen shots of men on OK Cupid who describe themselves as "nice guys" but don't seem to understand that being an actual nice guy involves, like, being nice. Many of the men are also obsessed with the Friend Zone, the horrible place where you are friends with women instead of having sex with them.
When we published reports on Monday that Richard Engel and his crew had gone missing in Syria, it was over the objections of Engel's employer NBC News, which had been trying to enforce a media blackout on Engel's situation. That was an unpopular decision in some quarters, and it sparked a discussion on the Vulture Club, a Facebook group focusing on war-zone reporting moderated a Human Rights Watch staffer named Peter Bouckaert. Bouckaert urged Vulture Club members to email me and ask me to take the Engel post down. Below are some of their notes.
It's been less than a week since Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, but local residents are already fed up with the media circus tent that's enveloped their once-peaceful community.
Christmas cards—if they possess any utility other than excuses for networking or sleeves for staged photos and obnoxious form-letters about little Allen's success on the soccer field and getting over his chronic butt cyst—act as a kind of benchmark. Buying a box and sending some out makes you feel like you've stepped into an adult world. You have an address book. You buy stamps in bulk. You now acknowledge calendar events days before they happen.
At about noon Wednesday, five days after the tragedy in Newtown, Conn., President Obama addressed the nation, announcing the creation of a task force to strengthen gun control laws in America.
Robert Bork has died. Bork is best known in public memory for his failed Supreme Court nomination, which thankfully foundered on the rank extremism of his beliefs. And those beliefs were vile—not because of the stark principles that purportedly undergirded them, but because of the bigotry and contempt for modernity they masked. But more vile than his reactionary agenda was his hatred for democracy and his fealty to incipient tyranny, as expressed in his willingness to follow anti-Semitic madman Richard Nixon down the rabbit hole of criminality.
Ke$ha's recent single "Die Young" is suffering an early death from radio airwaves, since right now no one wants to hear someone gleefully singing about dying young, even when it comes in the form of a hyperbolic simile ("Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young!"). The song has lost millions in audience impressions since the tragedy, a lite version of the 2001 Clear Channel memorandum that banned 165 songs (including John Lennon's "Imagine," Elton John's "Daniel," and Alanis Morissette's "Ironic") from the radio in a fit of post-9/11 sensitivity.
