We’re not ready for this.

Collectively. As a species.

We’re not ready for what’s coming. We’re not going to be ready until it’s too late, except it already is, it’s already happening, we’re doing nothing about it, and by the time we do something, we should have done it ten years ago, or forty, back when we could have done something about it, back when we first knew about it.

Only we first knew about it sixty years ago. Or seventy, ten years from now.

The world is melting. And we’re just going to let it. We can’t help ourselves.

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Back when all this began, when the aliens invaded and the timeline shifted and the world spun off its axis, we started wondering what life was like in Weimar Germany, knowing what’s coming and being unable to stop it.

We haven’t wondered that lately. Now it’s more like 1860 America.

We’re not alone, obviously. You probably have some excitable friends assuming the worst, and really, who can blame them? What’s to stop all those (white) people from acting out the moment they no longer get their way? What’s to stop politicians from preying on their fears the way they’ve been doing for, oh, let’s say fifty years now?

What’s to stop the next Civil War?

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Back when we were in journalism school, back when it was still a career you could expect to exist when you retired — hell, back when you could expect the world to outlive you — the most important class we took was libel law.

Or, as we called it: How to keep your publisher out of trouble. Those deep pockets they’re coming after aren’t yours, man.

The benchmark was 1964’s Times v. Sullivan, interesting in itself for its glimpse into the civil-rights era, but operative for the profession in what libel ultimately amounts to: Not just getting facts wrong, but “reckless disregard of their truth or falsity”.

Reckless Disregard has been the bumper sticker ever since. It’s a perfectly turned expression for the purpose, commanding a good-faith effort to get shit right. And, if you take it to heart — as we did — it entails not just factual accuracy, but representing the story, the whole story, or at least your best understanding of it. That means getting at the reality of the story you’re telling, not the “both sides” of an issue.

Yeah, it can be Rashomon out there sometimes, but that’s just the job.

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“[The Cybertruck] doesn’t have a brake pedal. Why? We didn’t have to do that. It doesn’t need one.”
–Elon Musk

• You’ll feel no pain when your head smashes into the shatterproof windshield.
• Framed notarized certificate and titanium wallet card declaring your dick isn’t that small.
• The optional Westworld android to cheat the diamond lane during your commute definitely won’t kill you.

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Congratulations to Junior’s book “Triggered” for being #1 on the New York Times bestseller list!†

Wait, what’s that dagger doing there?

If you’ve followed the NYT Bestseller Game over the years, you know the dagger is equivalent to an asterisk on a baseball stat: Something’s fishy there. Maybe the batter was juiced. Maybe someone bought a ton of copies to goose sales reports. Happens all the time.

That’s why the dagger exists, of course. Once upon a time, the NYT caught publishers gaming their system, and… continued to let them get away with it. Triggered is still #1, after all. Just because bulk purchases undermine what the list purports to express, that’s no reason to disqualify them. Just add a “Not really!” that everyone is free to ignore.

Like, you know, the relationship between American citizens and their government.

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We’ve hated our generation since Disco.

You need to understand this about us, the resentment we’ve harbored for kids our age from the moment kids our age were swept away by Saturday Night Fever. You need to understand this about that moment, that pre-Internet moment, that pre-cable moment, when there was no escape from what everyone was watching and listening to.

The previous generation got the Beatles. We got stuck with the Bee Gees.

Don’t call us a Boomer.

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Stick to sports, they say.

That’s what they told Deadspin. Deadspin, a website founded on the premise of not sticking to sports at all. They, in this case, being the guys who own Deadspin, the guys who own it after the previous guys owned it, the guys who bought it from Nick Denton, who sold it because some billionaire set out to destroy Gawker.

Stick to sports. Stick to the game.

Deadspin’s rise and fall was the game.

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