The Weekender: The Path of Totality
Three stories, perfectly packed for your weekend. Today's edition: eclipses driving Americans mad and a reckoning at NPR.
Meet The Weekender, a weekend digest that highlights just three reads from the week and why they’re worth your time.
I spent much of this week scratching my head about the absolutely inane responses to the eclipse on April 8. Overnight, phrases like ‘the path of totality’ became commonplace, and naturally, this being America, hot takes flooded in from every perspective and each end of the political spectrum.
From the left we received the interesting—and simply incorrect—information that the eclipse was caused by climate change. From the right, Marjorie Taylor Greene offered that these were signs of divine communication and signals for repentance. But the best take came from The Onion with the headline ‘Biden Surges in Polls After Convincing Terrified Voters He is Causing the Eclipse’. How are other people interpreting this fairly common celestial occurrence, I thought to myself, and why are Americans acting so strangely?
Much of the hype is driven by our always-on news cycles and social media, which are gaping black holes of human attention. We have to feed the beast, and so we fill it with endless coverage of a natural phenomena. Our first two stories today are fittingly about eclipses. The final story is a look at what happened to one of America’s most reliable news sources from one of its own.
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