I don't care what you say about a "wasted" "vote", I'm Team @DevinCow 2020
Good morning, dearests. It’s raining again in San Francisco, and it’s taking all of my willpower not to empty out my airline points and hop a plane to the tropics. But worry not, dear readers, in San Francisco I remain, as it never rains (or constantly rains?) on the internet.
OMG, this story has EVERYTHING I’VE EVER WANTED AND MORE. You see, forever Trump BFF Devin Nunes and eternal Clinton hunter Rep. Devin Nunes sued still-my-favorite-social-media-network-don’t-@-me Twitter. Why, pray tell, would a sitting congressperson decide to sue said company? Because he claims that two twitter parody accounts, @DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow, committed the EGREGIOUS ACT of defamation against his spotless character. What makes this story EVEN MORE DELICIOUS than an elected official suing over a fake online cow with 1,204 followers and a bio that reads “Hanging out on the dairy in Iowa looking for the lil’ treasonous cowpoke” is the fact that this lawsuit unleashed a tidal wave of Streisand effect, and now Devin Nunes’ Cow has over 354,000 followers, including yours truly. The internet can be a glorious jerk sometimes, and I love it. And Washington Post, I SEE YOU with this headline: Devin Nunes is having a cow.
No, I haven’t watched the Theranos documentary yet, because I plan on having popcorn for dinner and diving into that weirdness on Friday night, because nothing says party like mainlining tech schadenfreude. But in the meantime, am I going to devour every supporting piece about the sordid tale? Yes, yes I am, starting with The Reporter Who Took Down a Unicorn.
Charlie Warzel, formerly one of BuzzFeed’s amazing tech reporters and now NYT opinion columnist, wrote a stark take on just how far and wide the video of the New Zealand massacre spread before tech companies were able to contain the virus. And in doing so, Warzel asks us to look beyond the corporate messaging from both companies and take a hard look at the “stewards of our broken online ecosystem,” and “whether connectivity at scale is a universal good or an untenable phenomenon that’s slowly pushing us toward disturbing outcomes.”
And finally, the San Francisco Jewish community and our synagogue family mourn the loss of Rabbi Larry Raphael, Rabbi Emeritus of Sherith Israel, former Dean of Hebrew Union College, scholar, writer, murder mystery expert, and definition of menchy human. Rabbi Larry oversaw my conversion to Judaism, never once turning down a request for me to come into his office and ask basic-but-lengthy questions about ethics, history or Talmudic conflict. He's the reason I figured out that liberal Reform Judaism was the vessel that could hold and cradle my spirituality. I just can’t believe that I won’t get another casual check-in phone call from him asking how I’m doing. May his memory be a blessing.
Be kind to each other.
Xoxo Amy