I Don't Want You To Get Mad

Things are bad. Bari Weiss—a minor opinion editor at the Wall St. Journal, then a minor opinion editor at the New York Times who canceled herself because no one else thought she was important enough to cancel, then the founder of a fake college and a fake media company—has just been handed the job of editor in chief at CBS News. According to an obsequious New York Times tongue bath by Jessica Testa, Weiss “ascended the mountain of journalism on a slingshot” which I guess is one way to describe failing upward for a decade by charming a series of influential conservative men at cocktail parties while never producing a single worthwhile piece of work. Peter Shamshiri wrote the short version of why this is a black joke on all of American media:

And if you’re like “Bari who?” (bless your heart), Defector’s Patrick Redford recapped her entire sordid lore and situated this seemingly minor blog acquisition in the ongoing story of American media and elite institutions’ billionaire capture and their resultant sweaty lurch to the right:

Things are bad. The government is shut down, but that didn’t stop a bunch of agencies from updating their websites to blame “the radical left” for somehow preventing an all-Republican government from funding itself. If only we could! The President declared that anti-fascism is terrorism, finally providing official confirmation of Today in Tabs’ 2015 scoop that Donald Trump is a fascist, and Liz Lopatto and Sarah Jeong explained what this means for Americans who don’t yet believe in the Führerprinzip. Things are bad. There’s an “A.I. actress” now [Editor’s note: no there isn’t.] and Bari Weiss’s Free Press’s George Mason University and the Mercatus Center’s Tyler Cowen wants to make sure you know she’s a virgin. Things are bad. A bunch of rich comics who spent their recent years carping and bellyaching about free speech just took huge checks from the Saudi royal family to show up at the Riyadh Comedy Festival and do their little jokes while vowing to remain polite to Crown Prince Mohammed bone Saw.

Things are bad! As an astonishingly disheveled Peter Finch told moviegoers in the year I was born: “I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.”

Well unlike Howard Beale, I am going to leave you alone. As longtime Tabs readers know, when things get bad that’s when I get going… back into the woods for a while. I know I’ve said it before, and also before that, but this time I mean it: I’m going to finish hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Last summer and fall I hiked from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Rockfish Gap, near Waynesboro, Virginia—about 1,300 miles—and wrote about it in my other newsletter, Today on Trail. This spring I returned to Rockfish Gap and hiked south about 600 more miles to Hot Springs, North Carolina and didn’t write anything about it, for reasons that I still have to unpack in my own heart. But I returned home again in May, still 275 miles short of the southern terminus at Springer Mountain, Georgia, because my family needed me back. But now my son Mica, who I started the trail with more than a year ago, is back on the A.T. and waiting for me at Hot Springs and it’s time for us to finish this project together, the way we started it.

The last 275 miles should take us about three weeks, so I expect I’ll be back by November. You’ll hardly even notice my absence, bombarded as we all are now every day by a numbing and battering of events and developments featuring all the worst people who have regrettably appeared in these newsletter posts since 2013.

But if you do need something to do, and you hate yourself, you could spend three hours and seven minutes with the fash Barbies of Red Scare and Thomas Chatterton Williams. Or, if you don’t hate yourself, you could get really into competitive cheesemongering, like the first American Meilleure Fromagère du Monde Emilia D’Albero.

“Cheese” is easily a top-three monger, in my opinion. Maybe even top two, and that’s in a field of mongers that has quietly exploded in recent years thanks to Urban Dictionary.

You might just need to take the rest of the month to deal with the discourse spurred by the imminent release of Cory Doctorow’s book-length treatise on enshittification. In a sentence that will upset an overlapping Venn diagram of different Tabs discord members, here’s Joseph Bernstein talking e14n with Doctorow in Times Styles today. Take a deep breath! I thought it was a pretty good profile, actually.

But whatever you do with your time please don’t use the Pikachu-grilling slopstream app, and watch out for a rain of burning drones.

So, unlike Howard Beale, I am going to leave you alone. And also unlike Howard, I don’t want you to get mad. I know you’re already mad. If anything we all need to find a way to get a little less mad. But I do agree with Howard that “You've gotta say, ‘I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!’” And so did Jane Goodall, who died last week but who recorded an interview with Netflix in March to be released after her death. I think it’s really worth taking three minutes to watch this clip from it:

No promises but I do intend to write about this last stretch of the trail, so sign up at Today on Trail to see if I’m lying to myself about that. And I’ll see you back here in November.

Today’s Song: Wyclef Jean, Canibus, “Gone Till November”