If you find Ed Sheeran traumatizing we don't want to hear it!!!!

Can you read this word: ******? Neither can I

One of the boons of having corporeal form is that it imposes certain limits. Henry Kissinger will die one day, for example. Arguably the best, least death-related of these limits is that in real life, you can’t hear that much. Some tragic figures have radar hearing that picks up on whispers from far away; sorry to them. But many able-bodied people go about physical reality like the boom mic in a really long Robert Altman scene — most sounds around them fade into the fuzzy background, throwing focus to just one or two signals at any given moment. This physical capability is how one hones in on a single conversation in a loud, crowded room or notices the beeping of a garbage truck on a Sunday morning. Sometimes that’s great; it’s usually better than the alternative.

The internet is not like this. With the right search term, you can hypothetically eavesdrop on anything: an anti-natalist birthing forum, a Letterboxd reviewer saying they want Harold and Kumar to “double-team them so bad,” even an article in The Atlantic. Experiencing Twitter in particular is like wearing a giant ear trumpet (or, as Chris Hayes put it recently, like having the ears of the all-hearing fennec fox), which is why it can be handy to tune some of it out. There are many ways to do this, but this blog is specifically about the “mute” function — which, if you have a Twitter, is probably familiar to you. You may have muted some words yourself. It’s a great way to minimize encounters with terms like “mercury in retrograde,” “dudes rock,” or “ted lasso.”

This isn't really Travis Scott's fault

Over the weekend, at least eight people were killed at Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival in Harris County, Texas, in a mass scrum of people rushing the stage for the rapper’s set. Many people were trampled; some of the passed-out bodies were crowd-surfed away from danger. According to the New York Times, though, the festival’s medical personnel were “overwhelm[ed]” by “the number of people who needed care” even before Scott’s got onstage. ParaDoc, the company that prepared the festival’s medical response plan, claims that isn’t true and actually the problems only started happening once the surge began. An executive for Harris County, which owns the venue where the show took place, told the Los Angeles Times that the event’s security plan, prepared by an Austin, TX company called ScoreMore, was “vague.” A nine-year-old boy is in the hospital with a swollen brain. “There’s families, all of these people wanting answers: the community, the country. And they deserve them,” the Harris County executive told the L.A. Times.

To be fair, ScoreMore’s plan, a draft of which was published by CNN this week, is actually quite specific in parts. Unfortunately, those parts are often the ones detailing how to respond to incidents based on the degree to which they “pose [...] a risk of liability.” Elsewhere, the plan pledges that “crowd management techniques will be employed to identify potentially dangerous crowd behavior.” What those techniques actually are is never mentioned, but the plan advises personnel to “not engage the crowd” if it’s “exhibiting threatening or destructive behavior.”

I’m not sure why everyone hates the guy so much

These days, when someone mentions a celebrity, it’s not enough to say that you’ve heard one of their songs, or seen one of their films. You have to be shook by Oscar Isaac’s most recent photoshoot, in which he was wearing cords and a shirt. You have to know what Dakota Johnson’s kitchen looks like, and you have to think it’s nice. You have to know a lot about Phoebe Bridgers, just generally.

Of course, the inverse of all this is that there is a group of celebrities whose names are marked, from whom you must perform your moral distance. Ellen DeGeneres. James Corden. Morrissey. Meghan Trainor? Chris Pratt. Jessie J.

I can kind of see how all of those people got themselves in this situation. Some have come out in support of far-right nationalism. Some are world-famous nightmares to their staff and all those around them. Some entered and won a talent show in China when they were already famous in their home country, which was weird.

I’m not interested in commenting on the merits of such an unspoken list. There are probably better things to do with your life, but also probably worse ways to mete out banal cruelty than to be snarky about some of the richest and most leisurely people alive. I am, however, interested in one guy who I think is on that list without reason. That guy is Ed Sheeran.

Just don’t get caught like Jeff Carpoff did

A Bay Area business owner was sentenced on Tuesday to 30 years in prison for a $1 billion Ponzi scheme that amounts to “the largest criminal fraud scheme in the history of the Eastern District of California,” according to Acting U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert. Jeff Carpoff, 50, pled guilty last year to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering for his role spearheading a scheme involving his company DC Solar, abusing tax credits, falsifying paperwork, using new investor money to pay back earlier investors, and leading a lavish lifestyle to make it appear like business was booming.

You could look at all of this and say, okay, objectively this is pretty bad. But, reading the details of what happened, I’m also struck by what a smooth con it was for a brief period of time (between the years of 2011 and 2018). If there were a playbook on how to pull off fraud, this would serve as at least one inspiration:

Or: Do rich people feel?

Something has been on my mind since Sunday evening that I am now bringing to you all. I cannot tell what the temperature is, let alone what time of year it is, on the television show Succession. The way content works now, you might be thinking that I should have written about this on Monday morning to capitalize on the 24-hour Succession discussion cycle. But I was on vacation, so here I am, begging you to try and remember an episode of television you watched 60 hours ago.

Back to business. As we know, Adrien Brody’s character, a new money billionaire/Waystar Royco shareholder named Josh Aronson was introduced on the most recent episode of the HBO show. He calls Logan and Kendall to his private island somewhere presumably in the northeast to suss out the future of the company, and whether he should remain on Team Roy in the upcoming shareholders meeting. As part of his plan, he takes Logan and Kendall on a long, meandering walk to a cliffside so they can ignore an elaborate seafood lunch on a cliff.