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Like all men, flawed as they are, Cockburn has indulged in the odd message to an Instagram beauty after one mojito too many. But as we’ve learned from Adam Levine over the last week, it’s probably best to follow some rules when doing so. After the Maroon 5 singer was caught sending multiple messages to women who aren’t his wife, people have been quick to shame him for being a scumbag. Cockburn recognizes that extramarital flirtation is frowned upon, but he also believes there is a way to do these things. It’s all in the delivery. Step one If your wife is a Victoria's Secret model, and you are a declining rockstar covered in tattoos that make Post Malone's look like the Sistine Chapel, maybe message her instead?!

New York Four years ago, I had a stroke that left the right side of my body paralyzed and my speech so impaired that I sound like I'm talking under water. But the stroke also left me not giving a fuck what anyone thinks of me. I didn't know a thing about Instagram until 18 months ago when a friend explained how it worked. Looking at some typical posts for the first time, I was appalled how mundane the majority were. At least half were of dogs, kids or spouses, falsely attesting to the happiness of their lives. There were some brilliantly ironic posts, but not many. The political posts were the worst. I found the iron-like conviction of their opinions so frightening that I decided to half throw my fool's cap into the ring and oppose them. I loathe cancel culture.

Cockburn has long admired the athletic feats of strength displayed on the basketball court and the Olympian proportions of the game’s players. The muscle-bound, skyscraper-sized men and women leaping and pirouetting across the court, like a herd of stampeding gazelles, is never less than thrilling to watch. So, it was with consternation Cockburn heard of an incident last weekend, during a game between the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun and the Las Vegas Aces, where a coach was heard to hurl a dire insult at one of the players, from the safety of the sidelines. Curt Miller, the head coach for the Sun, reacted to a decision by the referee about an opposing team member, by yelling out ‘Come on, she’s 300 pounds!’ Big mistake.

The first time I saw the Instagram feed of Georgie Fenn I thought she was a model stooge. Utterly gorgeous, Fenn regularly poses in carefully picked diaphanous clothing, ‘nipple poke’ a specialty. Paid brand collaborations offer excellent returns. Her artfully shot images tagged with maxims as trite as ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re drinking as long as you’re enjoying it’ are a marketeer’s wet dream. Miss Fenn is an up-and-coming ‘vinfluencer’ — that is, she uses her considerable social media presence (31k and rising @winingawaytheweekend) to sell wine.

Cancel culture, I’m sure you’ve heard, is everywhere. Not a day goes by without some sorry sap being caught out for tweeting The Wrong Take, wearing The Wrong Clothes, using The Wrong Word. It’s not just a cottage industry: the entire digital media ecosystem is predicated on cancellation: pick your target, call them out, watch them burn and reap the rewards. Does it have to be this way? What if we didn’t all get mad — we got even instead? What if everyone was equipped with the same tools as the online witchfinders general who police popular discourse? Almost everyone has been on the internet long enough to have something on there that could hurt them. If everyone was canceled, perhaps no one would be? Let’s call it the Cockburn guide to mutually assured cancellation.

There's a joke about a guy who gets anxious on airplanes. The passenger next to him, trying to be helpful, suggests ways he might relax. A drink? A Xanax? A movie, or a nice nap? The anxious man shakes his head, annoyed. He can't relax. He can't lose focus. He can only sit, gripping the arm rests, staring straight ahead in a state of white-knuckled, sphincter clenching terror. Why? Because his terror is the only thing keeping the plane in the air. This notion of anxious acting-out as our sole line of defense against chaos — call it the Control Freak’s Fallacy — isn’t new, but it is certainly having a moment in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Remember how all those celebrity endorsements worked out for Hillary Clinton in 2016? In the end, it seems, even a Beyoncé and Jay-Z concert wasn’t enough to warm voters to HRC. Or perhaps people just don’t actually much care what famous people say about politics. Team Biden is not about to run away from the avalanche of star support coming its way as we approach November. But Biden 2020 likes to think itself more socially media savvy than most commentators have realized. Fame has been democratized, after all, and we now live in an age of ‘influencers’. It’s not about A-listers anymore. It’s about followers and engagement. So brace yourselves for #TeamJoeTalks, a new effort to engage potential voters through their smartphones, which will launch today at 3:30 p.m.

What do veganism, fashion, and architecture all have in common? According to Gen Z, they’re all racist.America’s teens and twenty-somethings have taken up the mantle of civil rights by reposting informative guides to Critical Race Theory on their Instagram Stories. Cockburn’s nieces were kind enough to send him a few links.You might think that these posts inform the zoomers about topics like fatherlessness, abortion, the welfare state and other serious issues that disproportionately face the African American community. However, these guides are almost entirely composed of far-left talking points, creating a social media echo chamber of unabated cultural Marxism and cringe.

Twenty years ago, the death of Bianca Devins would have been a small town horror story. Tragic. Brutal. Stomach-turning. Essentially local. A jealous man stabbed her to death in a fit of outrage before trying, and failing, to kill himself. Something of this kind happens too often for anyone to hear about them all. Bianca Devins's killer did something different, though: he took pictures of the 17-year-old’s dead body and posted them online, to a private forum on the app Discord. He also took pictures of himself after his suicide attempt and uploaded them as well. Little information on the murder is reliable. Rumors spread that Devins's killer was an 'incel' and a 'stalker'. Other rumors spread that he was in fact her boyfriend.

On July 10, 2019, after a week, my order of Instagram model Belle Delphine’s ‘GamerGirl Bath Water’ arrived in the mail. It was a frustrating process to obtain the now-sold out tub, labeled on Delphine’s website as ‘for sentimental purposes only,’ and I had to jump through several hoops before the order could be shipped. https://www.instagram.com/p/BzZFu2AnbZ8/ After paying $33 for order #10100, I waited four days, before receiving an email from the model asking me to reply with a clear statement of understanding that ‘the water should not be consumed, poured upon my body or opened should the seal be broken.

To peruse any of the tens of thousands of Instagram accounts devoted to food, some of them with nearly a million followers, is a jaunt into the pornographic. The photo captions alone seem straight out of paperback erotica. ‘See this naughty Asian pear get humiliated by sticky globs of caramel-infused pistachio milk while creepy cranberry sorbet watches,’ some of them might as well read. ‘This moist blood orange bundt cake is loaded with drippy pink glaze and grew up without a father.’ On Instagram, like Pornhub, you can sort by fetish. Got a thing for cakes and pies? Stylish editorial displays? Pizza? Seasonal vegetables? There’s a feed for every perversion, even at least one devoted to sprinkles, which is legitimately unsettling.