Whatever It Is I Think I See Becomes Today in Tabs To Me

First as tragedy, then as farce:

Once in a while the New Yorker’s favorite format, the meandering many-thousand-word feature that you can’t tell where it’s headed or what it’s about, really pays off. This week it pays off in the form of Rachel Aviv’s profile of psychologist and memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus, a masterpiece that is sort of about the “malleability of memory” but ultimately suggests that maybe memory and motivation are the same thing, and maybe none of us understand either one? There’s a lot more, just go read it.

Today in Historians Gone Rogue: Someone stole a big stone Jefferson Davis memorial chair in Selma, AL, and is threatening to turn it into a toilet unless the Daughters of the Confederacy hang a banner with an Assata Shakur quote from their headquarters. The ransom note is a pure delight. The Union Forever! According to the Washington Post, “until local media reported on the ransom emails Monday, many in Selma didn’t even know the chair had been stolen.” In conclusion: put it in the sea.

Oregon cops shot their own dog, then raised $73,000 in GoFundMe donations for him. If you want to crowdfund something, how about The Deadlands, “a monthly speculative fiction magazine, exploring all aspects of Death and the borders it shares with the living.” Medium invented blogrolls again, so the pivot’s going well, I guess. Today in Capitalism: A brand licensing guy and a mall guy bought Brooks Brothers at bankruptcy auction, piled a lot of unwanted retail fixtures in a Connecticut warehouse, and then stuck the warehouse owners with the bill for getting rid of it, which will probably cost them their house. Jim Dao, the New York Times editor responsible for the Tom Cotton editorial that cost James Bennet his job and probably a future Times EIC job as well, is the paper’s new Metro editor. Cancel culture strikes again. The Morphe x Lisa Frank collection returns.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Andrew Yang is going to be the next mayor of New York (sorry), and today Intern Pernell shows us how even an attempt to point out how dumb that is backfired.

Legally Yang

This week’s issue of City & State New York Magazine featured Andrew Yang on the cover, along with a subpar Legally Blonde reference. So stoked were they at referencing the iconic 2001 film, and who can blame them, they completely overlooked that the current front runner in the New York mayoral election whose personal brand is “MATH” appeared… extremely yellow. Twitter users, however, did notice that Yang was straight out of Springfield. The magazine’s first explanation only raised more questions:

Why is City & State New York Magazine still shooting their subjects on film? What is this, “Blow-Up?” I mean, W Magazine is shooting iPhone pictures on the sidewalk, and Vogue has Annie Leibovitz trapped in a basement with a Nikon Coolpix. To its credit, the magazine did eventually take responsibility for the incident instead of gaslighting all of us, tracing the jaundiced mishap to “CMYK-to-RGB conversion settings in our PDF software.” OMG. It totally worked. #YangGang redacted their anger and completely ignored the actual article, which falls just short of calling Andrew Yang a buffoon. 

Tomorrow Intern Pernell brings us an investigative report: Is “City & State New York Magazine” the dumbest name for a magazine? Find out, only in Tabs.

Yahoo! is shutting down Yahoo! Answers in classic Yahoo! fashion, which is to say: with only 30 days of notice. The web’s finest repository of advice from the hard-of-thinking will stop taking questions on 4/20 (nice 🥲) and shut down for good on May the 4th (Pi Day!). The Internet Archive still has all the content, but it won’t be the same. Griffin McElroy asks that you respect his privacy in this time of grief. Also grieving is Intern Pernell, who, in very un-intern-like fashion, has volunteered to do extra work by illustrating a Yahoo! Answer every day until I get tired of the bit.

Today’s Song: in honor of Paris’s “secret luxury dinner parties,” here’s Run The Jewels, “Ooh La La”

~ The tabs look mighty good to me ~

Thanks to Tabs Junior Graphics Intern Garrett Miller for the slick new “Intern” header, and a few variants thereof that I will unveil over time, and Tabs Senior Graphics Intern Alison Headley for fixing the mess I made of the sponsor ad yesterday. I tweet @fka_tabs and that’s no malarkey, or all malarkey, depending on how you look at it.