Welcome to the weekly recap. In this post, I’ll be linking to my work from the week, sharing some stories from others I thought were interesting, and providing a few casual thoughts on [gestures at everything]. If you’d like to receive this weekly email ONLY, please go to your account page and under “Email notifications” uncheck every box except “TPA Weekly Recap.” If you don’t want to receive the weekly recap, leave all boxes except “TPA Weekly Recap” checked.
Sunday is my birthday! You know what would be a great way to wish me a happy birthday? By becoming a subscriber! Just saying…
Outrage Easter spaghetti, Libs of TikTok, and The Masked Singer as a barometer of social failure
On Monday, I published a story about right-wing media’s need to find something new to be angry about, even if there’s nothing of substance to actually complain about. This piece revisits something I wrote three years ago about fake outrage about the term “Easter worshippers.”
On Wednesday, I wrote about the lie that the Libs of TikTok Twitter account simply “publishes other people’s videos without editing them — that’s it!” The truth is that this Twitter account exists to put targets on the back of LGBTQ people, which has included instances where they just make things up. If people want to defend it, they should do it without lying.
Rudy Giuliani should be in prison, but instead, he was on Fox’s The Masked Singer this week. I wrote about what that says about who we are as a society.
Posts from others that I want to draw attention to:
Judd Legum and his team have a breakdown of the math textbooks that are being banned by the state of Florida. The right is really going all-in on its book-banning crusade. That should worry all of us.
Over at Discourse Blog, Jack Crosbie has a piece patiently explaining that journalists exhausting all avenues of communication in an attempt to confirm a story and offer the subject the ability to comment is not “doxxing.” It’s how reporting works.
And over at Alex Pareene’s newsletter, he offers another point on that topic: that people on the right know that this is standard reporting, but simply don’t care. They just want to scream online.
“This new right fundamentally doesn’t want ‘newsgathering’ to happen,” he writes. “They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda.”
And Lyz Lenz wrote about baseball! And nostalgia! This line is great: “What I’m grieving is ignorance. The times were never simpler; we were just more ignorant.”
Oh! And Substack has me listed as one of its featured newsletters this week, which is pretty neat, tbh! They even sent me a little icon that I don’t really know what to do with so I’m putting it here:
Sunday is my birthday! So here’s a Parker’s-birthday-specific edition of today’s tunes:
“Losing My Edge” by LCD Soundsystem
“Audience of One” by Rise Against
“Help the Aged” by Pulp
“I Was a Teenage Anarchist” by Against Me
“Standing on the Edge of Summer” by Thursday
Happy Birthday for Sunday! Hope you get to celebrate in some fun ways!