Kat Rosenfield

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.

For some people, the video of police officer Derek Chauvin callously kneeling on the neck of the unarmed, pleading George Floyd looked like many things. A travesty. A horror. A stark reminder of the brutality and injustice of American policing, and an urgent call to stand up, dig deep, and demand change.But for the subjects of an article published in the Washington Post on Wednesday, the video prompted a different kind of deep digging.‘Blackface incident at Post cartoonist’s 2018 Halloween party resurfaces amid protests’, reads the headline, a prelude to 3,000 words of groundbreaking work in the field of offense archaeology.

The cardinal rule of a good milkshake-ducking: it's not over until the duck has been declared racist. So it goes for Alison Roman, the popular (or formerly so) New York Times food writer who earlier this month became a loathed and villainous avatar of privilege after some ill-considered remarks about celebrity lifestyle-empresses Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo sparked a storm of backlash. The scandal ultimately became big and beefy enough to make the mainstream news: Teigen announced to her 12 million Twitter followers that Roman's comments had wounded her. Roman apologized, and then apologized again, and then stopped posting at all. The tide of takes inspired by the controversy will keep rolling until June.