The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the city of Charlottesville, VA can’t collect its business license tax from freelance writers. Writer Corban Anderson, represented by the Institute for Justice, will get a refund of the taxes he had been assessed.
The city does not list freelance writing as having to pay the tax, but the city held that a “catchall provision” in the law let it tax writers.
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On May 28, Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was involved in a collision and then charged with DUI. This would be mostly a matter of local interest. Since then, a story has spread on the Internet that the charges against him were dropped. This suggests string-pulling and would be an important story if it were true. In fact, no reliable news outlet has confirmed it. Snopes calls it an unfounded rumor. Anything could happen in the future, but as of my writing this, there’s no evidence that the story is true.
It’s hard to tell where made-up stories originate. A tweet by Congresswoman Lauren Boebert asserted the charges were dropped. Donald Trump, Jr. lied on Twitter. Another source was some “news” sites that employ bottom-of-the-barrel freelancers and instruct them to write articles with a partisan spin. They’re called “pink slime” sites. Why pink, I don’t know. They may have names that sound newsy and uncontroversial. Some sites of this kind don’t use human writers at all, just artificial intelligence.
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When you report or comment on a news story, the first step is to understand what it says. Low-quality websites have ways of appearing to say more than they do. They aim to create a panic and attract links. A careful reading may show there isn’t much substance to what happened.
Let’s look at a Daily Mail article claiming that an application called “New Profile Pic” “hoovers up your details.” A careful reading shows that doesn’t mean much.
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A while back I wrote about how the New York Times excluded certain words from Wordle. It wouldn’t recognize “slave,” “lynch,” and “COVID,” though other potentially alarming words were allowed.
Now “fetus” has joined the list of banned words. The Times changed the puzzle in the middle of the day and apologized. It’s not clear what it was apologizing for, but its statement said, “We want Wordle to remain distinct from the news.” This is a hopeless goal. The Times’ news stories and Wordle draw on the same vocabulary.
People who didn’t refresh their browsers might have seen the earlier puzzle even after it was withdrawn.
A Reddit group lets people announce their novels and asks the authors to include any appropriate trigger warnings. The implied assumption is that fiction routinely contains passages that will trigger anxiety attacks or PTSD and that readers ought to be warned. It’s part of a trend calling for trigger warnings everywhere.
This approach has a couple of problems. A trigger warning is a spoiler. Shocking events in a novel aren’t as effective if the reader knows about them in advance, even in general terms. Imagine “Bambi Meets Godzilla” with a trigger warning. Second, it’s not clear whether they help. Psychologists have argued that treating people as fragile may only make them more fragile.
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