Three hilarious things that made jaws drop in the twenty-tens:
1. John Travolta mounted the Oscars stage, looked into the camera, and introduced a performance by a singer whose name he invented on the spot.
2. Millions of people posted videos in which they doused themselves with ice-cold water to raise funds for motor neuron disease.
3. According to a media report, there existed a video of the President-elect instructing well-hydrated strangers to urinate onto his hotel bed.
The so-called “pee tape” was said to show Donald Trump’s berth being widdled on by sex workers at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, and its alleged existence had come to light in a thirty-five-page dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former M.I.6 officer, who suggested that the Kremlin held the tape as kompromat against the man with curious hair. The file referenced other points of purported Russian influence. Its publication, in January, 2017, planted the unsettling suggestion that the next President of the United States lived under the thumb of a foreign government.
The decision to publish the Steele dossier originated with the reporter Ben Smith, then the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News and now the author of an illuminating book, “Traffic” (Penguin Press), about the rise of online traffic-chasing as a twenty-first-century media norm. In Smith’s telling, the laws of Web traffic, shaped by social media and their ability to disseminate material at exponential, “viral” rates, unseated old power structures. An old news outlet held its authority by retaining a fixed audience and standing on its record of success. A new one, such as BuzzFeed News, won largely by being linkable and first.
Denne historien er fra May 15, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra May 15, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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SLEEP ESSENTIAL FOR HEALTH
To achieve good health, you must maintain a regular sleep schedule, and be able to get back to sleep once you are awake.
THE K-POP KING
Chairman Bang is bringing his formula for creating idols to the U.S.
THE SIGHTED WORLD
Growing up with the writer Ved Mehta.
QUARTET ISLAND
Mendelssohn on Mull celebrates chamber music away from urban pressures.
FIX YOU
The self-help positivity of Coldplay.
ILLUMINATIONS
Suzanne Jackson captures the transformative power of light.
RAT PACK
The classic rodent studies that foretold a nightmarish human future.
ROYAL TREATMENT
The unrivalled omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth IL.
WELL, WELL, WELL
Eating—and not-in the epicenter of hype diets.
NEWARK STATE OF MIND
Mayor Ras Baraka's reasonable radicalism.