I remember reading Buzzfeed’s extensive article about her, and being shocked that—as uncharitable as I had been over the years about her lack of substance—I had actually been giving her too much credit all along.

I’m not sure why you’d expect people who are chasing success under the status quo to be advocates for any kind of revolution.

Out of curiosity, I had a look back at the internet archive of this site from about 10 years ago. To be fair, there was a lot of dross back then as well, especially since they were pushing out new pieces of content every 10 minutes from 9 am to 8 pm. Since that’s a pretty punishing schedule, they made much more…

I think a lot of people—including those who [used to] write for it—outgrew this place, or will do eventually. That said, it really does seem like the content has gotten objectively more vacuous in the last couple of years. I come back because there are still some very sharp commenters whose insights I enjoy, and it’s…

You too (be well).

I didn’t join in the pile-on against her either. I always thought that the mocking attention given to “Friday” said a lot more about the adults engaging in it than it ever did about Rebecca Black. I also wondered how many of them filled notebooks with terrible poetry/artwork/songs of their own when they were 13.

Story debunked:

I think you definitely had it worse than I do. High-rise jeans are unflattering on me, but they don’t put me at risk of exposing anything I don’t want exposed.

Same. I’m a bit short-waisted, so low-rise jeans are flattering on me for the same reason high-rise jeans are flattering on long-waisted women: it gives the illusion of a balanced waist. On me, mid-rise jeans look like high-rise jeans and high-rise jeans look like I’m doing the “old man whose trousers going up to his…

My guess is that a Sarah Dessen book (or something similar) had been chosen before, prompting this student to join the committee to ensure that something like this didn’t happen again. Same for your AP Lit teacher—I bet someone (or possibly multiple people) wanted to do their paper on Harry Potter or some other…

That’s what Private Eye call the queen. I don’t know why they do it, but it’s a thing with them.

To be honest, I think the sister (the one getting married) comes off as the true hero of the story here. Wearing that costume was guaranteed to siphon attention away from the bridal couple for as long as it was on, and I’m pretty skeptical of the intentions of someone who would do that at someone’s wedding (or any…

My first thought was that it’s an ad, so why would we assume the names are real? My second thought was that if the names are real, it was some sort of opt-out program (“We will be publishing an ad using employee names. If you do not want your name in the ad, please contact X or do A, B, C by tomorrow to opt out”), and…

My guess is that enough of that net worth is tied up in non-liquid assets, like property, that buying it herself would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible.

If he did, I hope she replied with, “Neither can you, but it didn’t hold you back.”

I came here for this comment. I read that and thought, “That’s a Simpsons episode, right? And at the end, all her new friends signed her yearbook? Or am I crazy?”

Neither do I. It doesn’t sound like these changes are being made at the expense of women—photos and reading materials aimed at men are being provided in addition to those aimed at women, not in place of them. One thing that is not changing as fast as it should is the assumption that women rule the domestic sphere and…

I think USC is thought of differently for people from California than from outside of it. I think people in California are more aware that a) it exists and b) it’s hard to get into. Obviously there are other schools in California with even lower admissions rates and whose freshmen class have higher mean test scores…

What got me when listening to the ABC podcast about her was how many people referred to her as “highly/well-educated”. Uh...no. A major part of her story is how dropped out of college, albeit a prestigious one. Her high school education may have been first-rate, but it was still just a high school education.

I think what makes this scandal so interesting is precisely the way that it highlights the different gradations of wealth (and class) in the US. These parents dropped tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to misrepresent their kids on their college applications and/or bribe university staff to “recruit” their…