Closing a few tabs….

It’s that time again:

::  Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes and commitment to reclusiveness fame is returning to bookstores as the illustrator, along with caricaturist John Kascht, of a new book. Wow.

::  Harrison Ford gives a very insightful interview:

I think it’s the place I feel most useful. It’s what I know the most about. I lost my chops as a carpenter. I haven’t ever played fiddle. But I feel comfortable wrestling with how to make behavior out of words on a page and tell a story, and I’m still excited about the prospect of telling a story. I think this is a service occupation — telling stories. We need it. Whether it’s drawing on caves or religious tenets, we love telling stories.

::  On the Year of the Rabbit.

::  Via Roger:

(original)

::  When The Onion decides it’s not taking prisoners, the results can be brutal. Perhaps it helps to understand the context of this from the days preceding it–the New York Times‘s insistence on platforming anti-trans voices with little questioning, the response in the form of an open letter signed by many (including myself), and the Times‘s pouting response to that, followed by their running an appalling op-ed titled “In Defense of JK Rowling”–is best found on one’s own. Meanwhile, The Onion opens fire:

“Quentin” is a 14-year-old assigned female at birth who now identifies as male against the wishes of his parents. His transition was supported by one of his unmarried teachers, who is not a virgin. He stole his parents’ car and drove to the hospital, where a doctor immediately began performing top surgery on him. Afterward, driving home drunk from the hospital, Quentin became suicidally depressed, and he wonders now, homeless and ridden with gonorrhea, if transitioning was a mistake.

We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.

Youch.