Chain of Fools…
R E S P E C T (Is a Foreign Concept in the White House)
Can we just take a moment to acknowledge the obvious? If you wrote a script with this many villains secretly taping each otherI’d tell you to stop rewatching All The President’s Men and try to find some new ideas. But hey, I guess we’re playing the classics this week!
🙀 100% Omarosa-Free Headlines
Complex things reduced to bullet points
- BREAKING:Azealia Banks says Elon Musk is “not cute at all in person.”
- Let’s play everyone’s favorite game: Watch the media wildly speculate about Elon Musk’s mental state!(ICYMI: He spontaneously threatened/promised to take Tesla private, is trying to get in bed with the Saudis, and — surprise! — now he’s under investigation from the SEC.)
- FYI: Sam Bee has 38,000 emails in her inbox. (This makes me feel better about my inbox, btw.)
- In politics no one can call you out quite like family.
- Speaking of politics:Winners and losers from this week’s (fairly interesting!) primaries.
- Colorado’s freedom-loving (aka LGBTQ-hating) baker is back and crying “discrimination” louder than ever!
- Best Article of the Week:Kellyanne Conway invited a WaPoreporter to come see how strong her marriage is (despite the fact that her husband constantly blasts the President on Twitter). Somehow it went even worse than you could have imagined.
🇨🇳 Trade War Update
It’s getting all 1913 up in here
- WTF is going on with Turkey’s economyand why should we care?
- Why Turkey is spooking China — where the phrase “trade war” would’ve been redacted from this email (literally).
👎 Bad Reviews Are the Best Reviews
Channel your inner Yelp critic
- Netflix’s Insatiable sounds like a nightmare, but Jen Chaney’s review for NY Mag is a dream come true.
- I for one was never interested in MoviePass until they offered Slenderman and nothing but Slenderman. (UPDATE: Don’t try to use your MoviePass to see Crazy Rich Asians on Friday or Saturday.)
- Meet the future, where your smart microwave can be activated with Alexa and automatically cooks anything with a barcode — when and if the scanning function deigns to work. (Also, how is that easier than reading a box?) Wired writes the perfect review of an imperfect microwave.
- The secret conspiracy to serve you bad rosé.
📱 What Google Knows
Are you feeling lucky?
The internet as we know it has been through several major shifts since it exploded on the scene in the 90s. One of those major shifts happened in 2012, when Facebook overtook Google as the king of online advertising— and now it looks like that era is coming to a close. Facebook is already telling media companies that they're “not interested in talking to you about your traffic and referrals any more. That is the old world and there is no going back.” From NY Mag: SEO is back, baby.
So just what is SEO, exactly? That’s slang for “search engine optimization,” the dark art of optimizing content and webpages for google and the other search engines that we still pretend are relevant. SEO was rendered irrelevant by Facebook’s mercurial algorithm and ever-shifting priorities, but it’s back in fashion now that users— burned by clickbait and sick of the news feed— are flocking back to google for real “information.”
The resurgence of SEO is good news for the internet at large, because even with Google’s dominance SEO remains a technically open playing field. But who are we kidding? This is great news for Google, the company destined to know us better than we know ourselves. On Facebook the #1 way people complete the phrase “my husband is...” is with the word “best.” On Google? It’s “mean,” “obnoxious,” or “a jerk.” (TLDR: We lie to social media, but tell search engines the truth.)
Do you think the Big G is going to just sit on all that data? (Lol, me neither.)
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Associated Press discovered Google apps continuing to track and store users’ location data even after turning off the “location history” creature. The Big G says users can easily opt out of this location tracking through a completely unrelated setting that doesn’t feature the word “location” anywhere—and breaks your Google Assistant while your at it (that’s the Goog’s creepily-named Siri/Alexa competitor).
Is this a good time to remind you that Google dropped “don’t be evil” from their code of conduct? Or should I wait until after you read about the Missouri parents who are accusing the free “G Suite” of school apps installed on their kids’ devices (think Google Docs, etc) of logging mom and dad’s browsing history and passwords— even after they logged out of the app.
🗽 Making All Local Stops
This section is basically the only local newspaper left in NY
- How hot is it on the subway? Death Valley hot. Literally.
- Take a trip down memory lane with an oral history of Four Loko.
- Bill de Blasio finally unveiled the city’s plan to replace Rikers Islandwith four borough-based jails.
- Andrew Cuomo, the John F. Kennedy of our times, inspires the nation: “We are not going to make America great, America. It was never that great.”
- Fingers crossed we can get some more nuggets of Cuomo-spiration at his upcoming debate (!!!) with Cynthia Nixon.
😅 Relax, these are jokes
From our friends at Little Old Lady Comedy!
- Good news: The GOP is totes down with socialism now, bro!
- Bad news: Colin Jost is picking all the new Oscar categories.
- News you can use:How to get rid of vermin.
🍹 BYOB of the Week*
*Bring Your Own Beverage of the Week
This week’s BYOB of the Week is Line 39 Pinot Noir!
And I know what you’re thinking — you’re thinking “a red wine? In this weather?!” But trust me on this one: Line 39 is the La Croix of red wines. Find out more: Read the review and subscribe to the podcast.
— — ––
Are you enjoying this recap of the week’s news? Subscribe to WYOY News to get stories like this delivered to your inbox every Thursday!
