Jay Leno

Friday

Stephen L. Miller

O.J. Simpson was Patient Zero for our media culture

In the 2017 film I, Tonya, a biopic based on the Tonya Harding conspiracy and attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, Martin Maddox (actor Bobby Cannavale) describes himself as a reporter for Hard Copy and calls it a “a pretty crappy show that ‘legitimate’ news outlets looked down on — and then became.” There was an entire spurt of tabloid news programming that spawned up in the 1990s, Hard Copy being one of them, along with Inside Edition, which gave us Bill O’Reilly.

Wednesday

Bethany Mandel

Adam Carolla mocks the Covid tyrants

The last two years have felt a lot like a cosmic joke. I sometimes like to recap it to myself, just in the hopes of actually believing everything that’s going on. There’s a virus that strikes the elderly and obese and spares children, and two years later the most common mitigation strategy is putting ineffective and dirty cloth masks on schoolchildren. For adults in many blue areas, we’re forced to wear masks in a restaurant from the door to our table. In New York City, it’s even worse: you have to show proof of a vaccine that doesn’t prevent transmission in order to enter an indoor space, and also wear a mask. Yet it was at just the moment that life became laughably absurd that comedians stopped daring to tell jokes.