Unruly Passenger Swallows Rosary Beads on American Airlines Flight
A satanic disciple had stowed away on a flight to Florida, as one passenger saw it, and something had to be done.
Less than a minute after an American Airlines flight took off from Savannah, Ga., for Miami on Monday night, a passenger began yelling and shaking. Flight attendants initially thought he was having a seizure.
But it turned out he was struggling because he believed a demonic spirit had invaded the cabin — and, at some point during the flight, began swallowing rosary beads to ward that spirit off.
The award for the best headline of 2025 (so far) goes to…
Journalism Requires Owners Committed to the Cause
There are many types of businesses a wealthy person can own as a mere hobby, in which the business can thrive under such ownership, simply by the owner allowing talented dedicated professionals to run the operation. A wealthy dilettante owner can help many such businesses, by providing the capital to hire great talent. Journalism is not one of those businesses. Profits are important because profits maintain independence and pay for talent. Investigative reporting is expensive. But independence is more important than anything, and there can be no true independence for a publication when the owner is not committed to the cause.
If you want to treat yourself (and that’s all it is — a treat), subscribe to the print edition of New York Magazine and never read the website (so you’re always surprised by the contents of the latest issue).
Even if you don't agree with their Lefty politics, it’s one of life’s great pleasures, particularly if you love print journalism.
‘Very few have balls’: How American news lost its nerve
This is so goddamn true.
I myself am afraid to pursue my dream career — independent freelance journalist — for fear of libel lawsuits. A mere threat of a lawsuit can bankrupt a small news venture, let alone a single journalist.
How can you speak truth to power if you fear losing everything?
Goodbye, Jezebel
For those who don’t know, Jezebel was one of the many Gawker properties that survived after the OG Gawker was bankrupted in 2016.
I’ve had a long love/hate relationship with Gawker properties, and I won’t miss Jezebel. Catty, angry, mean-spirited, sarcastic and thoroughly millennial, Jezebel was known for pioneering a style and tone of journalism that’s taken over the internet. It has long since given up the populist David-versus-Goliath vibes that it once embraced 15 years ago, and now just throws shade for the sake of throwing shade.
I’ve watched with horror as this millennial tone — a creature of my own design — has taken over legacy media. The pursuit of objective truth, insomuch as we acknowledge “objective truth” is largely an aspirational pursuit (at least when it comes to human experience), went out the window. Activist journalism took over, and did so with a vengeance.
Activism is good and necessary, but I don’t want it near my meat-and-potatoes journalism. I want information, not to be told how I should think.
For that reason alone, I’m not going to miss Jezebel.
The Chained Reader
I thought to compare the text on the page to the text on my screen. Word for word, they were exactly the same. I was shocked. What happened? Why did a text that read so well in galleys read so shambolically online?
The uniquely powerful insight of the 20th-century discipline of cultural anthropology as formulated by the great French thinker Claude Levi-Straus was that culture is a closed system. A tribal mask hanging on the wall of a hut in Africa or New Guinea has meaning within the culture of the tribe that produced it, which is bound up with their social structures and cosmology. Hang the same mask next to a Picasso in a white-walled room in MOMA, and it becomes a different object, embedded within the cultural system that contains 20th-century Western art. Culturally speaking, the two masks are wildly and indeed irreconcilably different from each other—even if, physically speaking, they are the same mask.
So too with the act of reading. Like every other human activity, reading is a culturally bound activity, whose meaning is determined by its relation to the larger cultural system in which it occurs.
Working in both online and print journalism, this resonates.
The former always feels tinny and thin given its context in the sheer enormity of the internet. Text on a screen is always merely text on a screen. Ephemeral.
Print, though merely ink on a page, holds up.
Scenes From the End of the Sexual Revolution
The Ace Theater boomed with laughter, a thousand bodies convulsing right back at him, blonde beach waves straight from the dry bar bouncing with mirth. That energy hit the stage. He kept shaking. This was not the sound of “offense,” but its opposite, the release of people hearing something they had long wanted to say, reassuring themselves that they are not culpable for the misery they Lyft beyond.
What a fucking line.
A+, 10/10, no notes.