Pun Salad

Our Eye Candy du Jour is from Our World in Data, which wonders Does the news reflect what we die from?

And, yes, Betteridge's Law of Headlines seems to apply (click to embiggen):

The authors (Hannah Ritchie, Tuna Acisu, and Edouard Mathieu) explain:

Our headline above refers to the classic Mark Twain quote:

Be careful when you’re reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Except, as Quote Investigator reveals, Twain never actually said that.

Also of note:

• I bring you tidings of great joy. And I do that by linking to Robby Soave, who says: Bari Weiss has won the war on wokeness in media.

  In the resignation letter announcing her departure from the Grey Lady in July 2020, the opinion journalist Bari Weiss memorably lamented that "Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor."

  What Weiss meant was that the extremely progressive sensibilities of elite social media users—leftist activists, educators, journalists, Democratic campaign staffers, etc.—held undue sway over the range of views that could be printed in the opinion pages. This was a constant source of frustration for Weiss, a centrist thinker critical of the left whose mission was to bring some measure of ideological diversity to the paper. (In her letter, she bragged about having published independent and contrarian writers such as Jesse Singal, Glenn Loury, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Reason's own Nick Gillespie.) But in the summer of 2020, the collective set of ideologies, habits, and preferences commonly referred to as wokeness still ruled the roost.

  Much has changed in the last few years, and they are about to change even more noticeably at another large media company. Weiss is set to become the editor in chief of CBS News, and parent company Paramount has also purchased The Free Press—the media company she built from scratch in the years since leaving The New York Times—for an eye-popping $150 million.

  grep tells me I've mentioned Bari 75 times over the past eight years. The earliest one gave a thumbs-up to her NYT column Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation (archive.today link):

  These days our mongrel culture is at risk of being erased by an increasingly strident left, which is careering us toward a wan existence in which we are all forced to remain in the ethnic and racial lanes assigned to us by accident of our birth. Hoop earrings are verboten, as are certain kinds of button-down shirts. Yoga is dangerous. So are burritos and eyeliner.

  It’s no longer just the online hordes that will string you up for your unintentional sins, though the cost of that public shaming can be devastating. In Portland, Ore., activists recently created a list of “white-owned appropriative restaurants” for residents to boycott on the grounds that white people probably shouldn’t make banh mi or dosas. This summer, the University of Michigan posted a job for a “bias response team” employee to “enact cultural appropriation prevention initiatives.” I wonder if they’ll go after people for using algebra (thanks, Muslims).

  My comment at the time proposed a bargain: "I promise not to use eyeliner if I can still get burritos."

  There's a lot of dismissive snark and sloppy ideolgical pigeonholing going on. For example, this Slashdot story, headlined CBS News Was Just Taken Over By a Substack. Which deems Bari a "conservative-leaning Substack writer".

  Somewhat surprisingly, NPR (which still exists) manages to be more accurate:

  Over the years, she has described herself as a "radical centrist" and a "Jewish, center-left-on-most-things-person." In a 2024 TED Talk, she said she voted for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in one election, and Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in others.

  She went on to characterize her ideological views as pro-choice, pro-Israel and pro-gay marriage, "so much so that I'm actually in one myself." (Weiss married [Nellie] Bowles, a former Times tech reporter, in 2021 — the same year they cofounded The Free Press — and they have two children together.)

  So: Mazel tov, Bari.

• The WaPo drops a truth bomb. Their Editorial Board makes a long-overdue admission in the middle of The shutdown conversation no one wants.

  The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act was never actually affordable. President Barack Obama’s signature achievement allowed people to buy insurance on marketplaces with subsidies based on their income. The architects of the program assumed that risk pools would be bigger than they turned out to be. As a result, policies cost more than expected.

  Fine, but us right-wing cranks "expected" exactly that at the time.

• Warning: Goldwater quote ahead. Kevin D. Williamson writes on Desirable Things and Their Limits.

  In our political conversation, we have a tendency to lump things together in an unproductive way: vicious things and virtuous things both.

  For example, we hear a good deal about things such as bipartisanship, consensus, moderation, and civility. These are all desirable things, at least in some circumstances, but they are different kinds of desirable things, desirable in different ways for different reasons. Bipartisanship and consensus are not desirable in and of themselves, inasmuch as we can—and often do—see bipartisan consensus supporting very, very bad policies.

  Our national fiscal mess, for example, is the result of a bipartisan consensus, enduring if seldom stated, that it is better to borrow money for the time being in order to put off difficult and unpopular reforms to the entitlement system, the tax code, and legislative procedure. There was a fairly broad bipartisan consensus in favor of abortion rights, once upon a time, if you recall, while the nascent anti-abortion movement also had a bipartisan character in its early days, when Catholics leaned Democrat and Republican-leaning evangelicals were only starting to embrace the cause.

  Moderation is a virtue that is easy to mock, and you don’t have to be Barry Goldwater—“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”—to find faults with its misapplication. Should a husband vow to be moderately faithful to his wife? Should a soldier show moderate courage and discipline?

  I'm old enough to remember people freaking out about that Goldwater line. I thought it was fine in 1964, at age 13. And I still do.

• No matter how much we might wish otherwise. Andy Kessler points out an Inconvenient (for some) Truth: Idiots Have Free Speech Too. (WSJ gifted link)

  Missed during the “public interest” Jimmy Kimmel canning calamity was the Federal Communications Commission’s Brendan Carr’s statement on CNBC: “I can tell you Jimmy Kimmel is no Johnny Carson.” So true. Carson’s “The Tonight Show” ran so your TV dial would, in New York anyway, be set to channel 4 in the morning—so you’d watch “The Today Show.” Who has a TV dial anymore?

  Now networks are stuck overpaying and overhyping overly political empty suits on late-night TV. ABC hasn’t been funny at night since Dick Cavett. Ratings for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” have been plummeting—key demographics are down 70% over the past decade. He was probably toast already.

  It was Napoleon who likely said, “Never interrupt your opponent while he is making a mistake.” Instead—free speech be damned—Mr. Carr threatened to revoke ABC broadcasting licenses, and then President Trump piled on to take credit and also hassle NBC. An unnecessary mic drop for sure.

  Andy goes on to note:

  Even Hillary Clinton agrees, sort of. On Sept. 18, she told CNN, “You defend free speech in terrible times. You defend free speech that is used against holding people in power accountable through satire, humor, barbed attacks. You defend it when it is offensive.” You go girl! Except in 2016 she urged Congress to propose a constitutional amendment to nullify Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), a free-speech and campaign-finance decision that protected a movie critical of her.

  Someone should ask her if she changed her mind about that.

• "Don’t send my boy to Harvard," the dying mother said. Minding the Campus notes the latest effort to increase the ideological diversity down in Cambridge: Harvard Hires Illustrious Academic. Quoting a Harvard Salient article:

  In its unending quest to prove that it remains the unrivaled beacon of Western civilization, Harvard University has announced the appointment of Dr. Kareem Khubchandani as a visiting associate professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Students, however, may find him better known by his scholarly sobriquet: LaWhore Vagistan.

  Dr. Khubchandani, whose curriculum vitae includes a Ph.D. in performance studies and an extensive body of drag performances, will teach two courses that promise to edify the Harvard undergraduate body. The fall semester offers Queer Ethnography, while the spring will provide RuPaulitics: Drag, Race, and Desire. At last, the Harvard name will be safely tethered to the intellectual heritage of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

  (This item's headline reference.)