Takestorm Dissipates Before Making Landfall

Although NY Magazine’s Chas Danner and Margaret Hartmann bravely chronicled the near-universal devastation on social media, fears of a cataclysmic force five takestorm making landfall on the mainland internet proved largely unfounded yesterday. Damage was locally severe in Canada, which suffered a glancing blow from the National Post’s “Barbara Kay: Will Smith wasn't wrong to smack Chris Rock at the Oscars,” and communication lines are still down so conditions in the Apple fandom are not yet known after it suffered a direct hit from “‘The Slap’ shows why Apple should shake up its events,” in Cult of Mac. But discourse meteorologists believe that despite its powerful initial energy source, the incipient takestorm ran into an unusually strong upper level counter-take flow which prevented it from becoming organized enough to unleash its full destructive potential.

Joel Anderson’s “Let’s Please Not Make ‘the Slap’ More Than What It Is,” for example, or veteran stormchaser Ryan Broderick’s report of widespread “Viral Pre-Exhaustion” document a powerful shear that seems to have knocked the developing convection out of balance. Records indicate that even before the slap itself, environmental conditions were much less favorable to takestorm development than anyone anticipated. All the way back on Friday, Soraya Nadia McDonald wrote in Andscape that “even as a longtime admirer of Smith, all I can muster for this potential triumph is resignation.” Could Will Smith lose his Oscar over this? Sure. Will he? Absolutely not. So with Smith posting the apology his PR team wrote for him, and the Academy pretending to “explore further action and consequences" until everyone gets distracted, the takestorm has lost any remaining energy source and looks set to dissipate.

Meanwhile, Clarence Thomas is out of the hospital, but not the way we hoped. Could he be impeached for the blatant corruption of using his power on the Supreme Court to cover up his wife’s involvement in an attempt to overthrow the U.S. Presidency? Of course. Will he be? Absolutely not, writes Chris Geidner in Grid. Also today in politics: New Nixon dropped. CBS News hired odious Trump administration apparatchik Mick Mulvaney to lie on television. Mulvaney’s journalism credentials consist of confidently promising that “If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully” and, as Matt Gertz reports, “the fact that he now runs a hedge fund and a lobbying firm.” It’s genuinely hard to believe how much that sucks. Regrettably, things are only going to get harder to believe in this paragraph, as twenty six year old Kremlin Congressman “[Madison] Cawthorn claims people in DC have invited him to orgy, done cocaine in front of him,” and NY mayor Eric Adams, Cara Delevingne, and A$AP Rocky cut a rug last night at a party sponsored by Wells Fargo to launch “a push by banks to allow the more than $500 billion in rent payments in the US to be paid with credit cards.” That sentence was the dystopian news equivalent of hitting a big lump of wasabi in a California roll. It just blasted everything out of my psychic sinuses and now I think I’m blind.

Ukrainian peace negotiators are Havana tough time, but having achieved their strategic mission of shedding surplus equipment and commanders, Russian forces are “pledging to cut back military operations near Kyiv and Chernihiv.”

What’s Going on With Shipping: The first attempt to refloat the current big stuck boat Ever Forward is scheduled to be underway as I write this. We should know by tomorrow whether it worked.

Jennifer Daniel says no more flag emoji. 🚩🚩🚩 Huge ORC found in space. Remember the whole thing with Spotify and Joe Rogan from, I‘m gonna say, eighteen years ago? Well: “Spotify rolls out Covid disclosures after Joe Rogan boycott.” Today in Business: PRICE SHOCK ROCKS GUAC. And staffers from Vogue, Bon Appétit and elsewhere in Condé Nast form unión. “‘It comes down to prestige doesn’t pay the bills,' said one Vanity Fair staffer,” and even if it did, not everyone wants to work for The New Yorker.

#Reads Worth Your #Long:

“BuzzFeed Doesn’t Deserve Its Newsroom,” by Rachel Sanders in The Nation:

And Colin Dickey in actual Longreads, with “The Cabin on the Mountain,” an essay I really loved about cabins and lateral thinking and the Arctic exploration ships Erebus and Terror and…

Today’s Song: Ian Sweet, “Show Me How You Disappear”

~ she walks in beauty, like the night / of cloudless tabs and starry skies ~

Registered at the post office as: “like taking a bath.” @fka_tabs is what doesn’t fit down the drain. @TodayinTabs is a warm, fluffy towel. I didn’t think I could love Wet Leg even more but then I read this profile. Thanks for today’s song, mkilly from the subscriber Discord! Come join us.