Taylor Lorenz

What do you want to be when you grow up? A pilot? A firefighter? An ICE agent? Since the explosion of the LA riots,  the online gaming platform Roblox has seen kids “role-play as ICE agents” and anti-ICE protesters. Despite Cockburn’s doubts, this is considered “fun.” Internet scholar Taylor Lorenz explained to Cockburn: “Roblox has become like this metaverse where kids and young people go to sort of mimic real-world events. They role-play as teachers, or they have a family.” It’s just like The Sims, but with round-ups and deportations. It seems the game is mimicking real life: just like the protests in California became violent, so did the simulated ones.

Chicago Big Little Lies season three is happening, says Young Sheldon Convention guests looking to play a game of IRL “Who? Weekly” were best off hanging out at the CNN-Politico Grill, which served free booze and local delicacies all week. Smoking was forbidden, sadly. On Thursday Cockburn caught up with Iain “Young Sheldon” Armitage — who confirmed that a third season of Big Little Lies is “happening” while he was mixing an ice cream float — and spoke to Dean Norris, AKA Hank from Breaking Bad. “I’m having a blast,” said Norris, “I’m having a brat summer.

Elon Musk has often clashed with members of the tech press — irritated by their “targeting” of him over minor matters such as how he runs his businesses and who he fires. He has a longstanding feud with contentious Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz — but is that all for show? That’s the astonishing claim of self-described “investigative journalist” Nicole Slaski, @coolndizabled on TikTok. In a video this week, Slaski talked about how she’d been speaking to a Thiel Fellow, John H. Meyer, who alleges he has been “falsely” imprisoned for arson — and says that Meyer had told her that Lorenz and Musk were in fact romantically involved with each other.  https://www.tiktok.

With her vote to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker, Nancy Mace has made herself the pariah of the House. And after donning a red, Scarlet Letter-style “A” on her chest to reflect this as she headed into House GOP meetings this week, she caught the ire of the Capitol Hill Fashion Police too. One of her colleagues intimated the “A” must stand for “attention” — and lamented that “there wasn’t enough bling” on it and that “a light-up version would’ve been better.” In a Congress filled with all but literal skeletons, Mace stands out for her relative youth. One staffer had no problem with her choice of outfits this week.

Journalists are OUT, influencers are IN. That’s the chief finding from a new report by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, which discovered that 55 percent of TikTok and Snapchat users, and 52 percent of Instagram users, get their news from “personalities,” compared to 33-42 percent who get it from mainstream media outlets or journalists on the same platforms. “This Reuters study once again validates what I have been saying for over a decade,” Taylor Lorenz told Cockburn, “content creators are the new media and it’s been that way for a while.” The Washington Post columnist has long banged the drum about the importance of emerging social media platforms and the importance of members of the media cultivating brands on them.