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ICYMI: It's No Longer Possible To Distinguish Parody From Real Life
A woman live-streams Wednesday's City Hall protest to her Facebook followers from across the street. (Photo by Julia Wick/LAist)
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In today's very special edition of our daily link roundup, we present six news items that sound too horrific/crazy to be true, and you can guess which are parody and which are reality! (Answers at the bottom of the post)- The Oxford English Dictionary has announced their word of the year, and... drum roll please... the winner is "post-truth." It's an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and belief,” according to the OED.
- According to the guy who literally wrote A Brief History of Time, we have a mere millenium left before we have to find a new planet to live on. Thanks for the fun news, Stephen Hawking!
- A bill proposed in the Georgia state legislature would not only ban women from wearing hijabs and niqabs in public, but it would do it by amending a 1951 anti-masking law originally passed to fight the Ku Klux Klan.
- Despite having remained relatively under the radar for most of the past century, Sinclair Lewis's 1935 satirical political novel It Can’t Happen Here (which many say foreshadowed Trump's rise to power) is now SOLD OUT on Amazon, 81 years after it hit shelves.
- A prominent Trump surrogate actually referenced America's universally-viewed-as-a-black-mark-on-our-history World War II-era Japanese internment camps as a possible "precedent" for a Muslim immigrant registry.
- A Colorado abortion doctor—one of the few remaining doctors to perform late-term abortions in the U.S.—has said that the congressional panel investigating him is essentially painting a "target" on his back. "When they do this kind of thing — this has been the pattern for decades — they identify doctors to be assassinated," Dr. Warren Hern told a Colorado paper.
[Answers: Oops! We forgot to include any parodies. These are literally all real news stories. This is real life. What a time to be alive, amirite?]
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You come to LAist because you want independent reporting and trustworthy local information. Our nonprofit newsroom doesn’t answer to shareholders looking to turn a profit. Instead, we answer to you and our communities. We are free to follow facts wherever they lead and to hold power to account without fear or favor. Our only loyalty is to our readers and listeners and our mission: to inform, engage, and strengthen Southern California’s communities.
If this story helped you, please become a monthly member today to help sustain this mission. It just takes 1 minute to donate below.
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