Category: You Should See This

At the time, there was a lot of discussion about whether the movie’s slurs were insensitive and gratuitous or simply “harmless jokes.” I found it unnerving, the laughter that the slurs elicited in theaters with predominantly white audiences. And it was always white people who would say, “Can’t you take a joke?”

Now, the FBI had a favor to ask: Would Walker become an informant? More specifically, they wanted him to help in an effort to investigate and undermine an activist group that had become a thorn in Iowa Select’s side. They even asked if he’d be willing to sell drugs.

One officer in the middle of the scrum, a combat veteran, thought the rioters were so vicious, so relentless, that they seemed fueled by methamphetamine. To his left, he watched a chunk of steel strike a fellow officer above the eye, setting off a geyser of blood. A pepper ball tore through the air over his shoulder and exploded against the jaw of a man in front of him. The round, filled with chemical irritant, ripped the rioter’s face open. His teeth were now visible through a hole in his cheek. Blood poured out, puddling on the pavement surrounding the building. But the man kept coming.

There was no person or subject that was off-limits for Mr. Limbaugh’s ire. Black people, gay men and lesbians, feminists, people with AIDS, the 12-year-old daughter of a president, an advocate for victims of domestic violence: All found themselves the subject of denigrating put-downs by Mr. Limbaugh over the years.

But by 9 a.m. in Sydney, the impact was apparent and even more wide-reaching than Facebook’s statements suggested. In addition to news publishers being blocked, pages for Fire and Rescue New South Wales, the Bureau of Meteorology and state police departments had all been wiped clean. Even state government pages with public health information about the pandemic were blocked, prompting outrage from many officials and lawmakers including Senator Sarah Hanson-Young of South Australia.

And then Australians discovered it wasn’t just those staples that were missing. Pages for state health departments and emergency services were also wiped clean. The Bureau of Meteorology, providing weather data in the middle of fire season — blank. An opposition candidate running for office in Western Australia, just a few weeks from an election — every message, gone.

A former Fox News host, Mr. Beck had speculated for weeks about baseless claims of voter fraud in the presidential race. He told listeners that Donald J. Trump had taught conservatives that “you don’t have to cower anymore, you don’t have to back down when ridiculed into oblivion. You can fight back.”

It was fitting that words occasionally fell short while Lockwood was discussing her new novel, “No One Is Talking About This,” out next week from Riverhead. The book follows an unnamed narrator who has found modest popularity on the internet — or “the portal,” as Lockwood refers to it in the book — yet is unnerved by the uniformity of language and thought she encounters, like a school of fish that intuitively changes direction together. “Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made,” the narrator thinks. “Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.”