Illustrated Man

There is a nice story in this week’s issue about a family who saved a woman in grave danger. This isn’t about the story per se, but rather about how one “news” site treated it. Let’s start with the story:

Continue Reading

Chuck Shepherd: News of the Weird

Chuck Shepherd started “News of the Weird” as a newspaper column in 1988, and was picked up by the Universal Press Syndicate in 1989. Similarly, a year after I started I was offered a contract by their biggest competitor, Creators Syndicate, almost certainly as way to compete with the very popular NotW, but I turned it down.

Continue Reading

Authors for Libraries

The non-profit “Fight for the Future” — formed in 2012 to lead the successful fight against the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) and the “PROTECT IP Act” (PIPA) — has turned to protecting libraries from giant publishers who are trying to take away the right to loan books, particularly now that most books are published as ebooks.

Continue Reading

Snopsing Snopes

Claim
In August 2021, Snopes’ co-founder and CEO David Mikkelson was revealed to be a serial plagiarizer, sloppily violating copyrights of other publications in an attempt to make the site look extremely proactive in uncovering news.
Rating
A snopes-like 'True' checkmark.
True

Continue Reading

To the Moon

I Look At a Lot of Articles to find just the right mix for each weekly This is True column. Naturally, the vast majority are discarded, and I have to tell you about one that didn’t make the cut. It has a lot to do with “cognitive processes” …aka thinking.

Continue Reading