On the front lines with Media Matters — the conservative network’s worst nightmare
By Brian Hiatt
If you believe former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, Media Matters for America is the nation’s “most dangerous organization,” which would be quite a feat for a modestly funded nonprofit whose 80 employees spend a lot of their time quietly watching cable news at their desks. …
OK, yeah, the moon is weird, but that doesn’t mean the moon landing wasn’t real
By EJ Dickson
Let’s all just agree on one thing: the moon is weird.
It’s in the sky. It glows. Sometimes it’s big, and sometimes it’s small. It also causes tides, somehow, for some reason, though if you’re looking for an in-depth explanation as to how it does this and why, you are encouraged to look elsewhere. To top it all off, in all of human history, only 12 people have actually been to the moon and experienced it firsthand; for context, this is less than the number of kids in the Duggar family.
With all of this in mind, it’s unsurprising that the moon would generate so many myths and conspiracy theories. For centuries, people have posited such batty ideas as the moon is made of cheese, or that women’s menstrual cycles are affected by the lunar cycle (it is not, and they are not). And while you would think that us actually landing on the moon 50 years ago would curb these theories, it has not. If anything, speculation about the moon has ramped up in the decades years since Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Third Guy (who, to be fair, only orbited, and did not land) made their historic Apollo mission on July 20th, 2019, to the degree that some people, including NBA superstar Stephan Curry, didn’t believe that we landed on the moon at all. (He retracted his comments after a literal astronaut called him up to tell him otherwise.) To that end, people have come up with a wide range of explanations for the iconic footage of Armstrong walking on the moon, some of which involve director Stanley Kubrick and a 1970s thriller starring O.J. Simpson as an astronaut. …
Former staffers of ousted President Leanna Wen paint a picture of a leader who lacked political savvy
By Tessa Stuart
The day before Dr. Leana Wen took the reins as president of Planned Parenthood — the first doctor to lead the organization in 50 years — staffers received a detailed memo indicating how things were going to operate under the new leadership. Addressed to the organization’s communications team, it included the eyebrow-raising directive “No action or requests should be taken until approval from the [Office of the President] is given.”
Planned Parenthood is a massive health care provider, serving more than 2.4 million patients at some 600 health clinics across the country, and a political powerhouse that had spent the preceding decade successfully deflecting repeated attempts to strip it of both public and private funding. Wen was taking the organization over from beloved president Cecile Richards at an especially fraught moment: a month after Brett Kavanaugh was appointed to the Supreme Court, just as conservatives around the country were pushing increasingly aggressive abortion restrictions through state legislatures in hopes of seeing Roe v. …
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