Today’s Big Story

America, the Gullible

Are people today too gullible to withstand political propaganda?

Don’t believe everything you see on the internet. (Unless, it’s a daily newsletter you can really trust.) But, in all seriousness, we all need to be paying attention—especially as the presidential race hits a fever pitch in its final month. Americans, particularly those with an uncritical partisan bent, are far too easy to fool.

Think you’re too clever to fall for it? Maybe. But plenty of educated elites who should know better—billionaires, elected officials, journalists—keep falling for fakes, conspiracy theories and outright lies. As Axios points out, human gullibility is not a new phenomenon. But “social media and polarized politics are exposing it at industrial scale, fueled by a poisonous cocktail of bad actors, media illiteracy and plummeting trust in traditional news.”

And America’s enemies are taking note, too. An Associated Press report in August said the Kremlin is hiring Russian public relations firms and stepping up its efforts to spread election disinformation in the United States. The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump and Biden’s decision to drop out made them alter their playbook, but the effort continues. Russia poses the biggest threat, but China and Iran are cautiously expanding their efforts, as well, U.S. intelligence authorities said.

Yes, there’s the quickly-debunked, but no less weird, discourse about immigrants eating people’s pets that was spread by Trump, his running mate and surrogates. And the pro-Harris accounts that falsely claimed last week that former Bush aide Karl Rove was campaigning for her in Pennsylvania. “It's amazing what people come up with and what they'll fall for,” Rove tweeted. But the real-world implications for all this online chatter is serious.

The deadly hurricanes that swept across the Southeast in recent weeks exposed the staggering extent to which people have become prone to conspiracy theories, spurring threats against emergency responders. "The truth is, it's getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality," The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel wrote in an article about misinformation and conspiracies headlined: "I'm Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is."

Never before have so many people been so exposed to so much misinformation. And given the increasing ubiquity of AI-generated content … many fear that this is only the beginning.

The Internet Archive Under Attack

Hackers breached the site, whose outsize cultural importance belies a small budget and lean infrastructure

It’s an important site. I’m sure you’ve visited “the Wayback Machine” before. It’s an organization dedicated to the gargantuan task of preserving the vast, ever-shifting record of human activity that is the internet. You might not have known that it’s a nonprofit based in an old church in San Francisco—and operates on a smaller annual budget than a public library. And it’s currently under siege.

Hackers struck the Internet Archive last week, leaking the information of millions of users and defacing it with a message taunting the nonprofit’s website for running on a shoestring budget. To prevent further leaks, the Internet Archive’s team took the site, including its popular Wayback Machine, offline. It’s the first time in its almost 30-year history that it has suffered an outage of longer than a few hours, founder Brewster Kahle told the Washington Post. Most of the site remains offline a week later.

It’s just the latest in a series of hits. Since 2020, the Internet Archive has been dogged by lawsuits over its digitization of copyrighted books and music. According to NPR, the costly fines from the lawsuits could amount to a death blow for the archive. But if it goes, where is the record of what’s been published online?

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Welcomes a New Class

The Rock Hall inducted 16 artists or other musical figures for 2024

Pure pop kicked off the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Saturday as Dua Lipa and Cher sang “Believe” before ceding the stage to a medley of rump shakers by funk masters Kool & the Gang, rock classics by Foreigner and Peter Frampton, and a powerhouse performance by gospel icon Dionne Warwick. (Can I just say, let’s all hope to age like Cher and Warwick, right?)

The inductees this year also included: A Tribe Called Quest and Dave Matthews Band, along with posthumous recognition for Jimmy Buffett, MC5, Alexis Korner, John Mayall, Norman Whitfield and Big Mama Thornton. Mary J. Blige, who is credited with creating a completely new category of music, Hip-hop soul, was inducted by Dr Dre. And Jack Black inducted Ozzy Osbourne as a soloist, describing Osbourne as “the Jack Nicholson of rock” and “the motherf#cker who invented heavy metal.”

According to Vulture, the event held at Cleveland’s sold-out Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse was a five-and-a-half-hour marathon of a soirée, saying “it was just … a really long ceremony with really long speeches.” The ceremony is currently available to watch in full on Disney+. But for those refusing to indulge in another streaming service, there will be a shortened special airing January 1 on ABC.

The McRib Comes Out of Retirement (Again)

But it’s now prepared in a totally different way, and some are disappointed by the change

McDonald’s has brought the McRib sandwich back to the menu—wait for it—in the United Kingdom. But don’t worry, the cult-favorite pork sandwich is expected to come out in the United States sometime between November and December 2024.

The beloved (at least by some) menu item usually makes an appearance at the fast food giant’s American restaurants in the fall. The McRib returned to some U.S. locations last fall, and before that in 2022, during what McDonald’s deemed the sandwich’s “farewell tour”. But like an aging rock star or retiring pro athlete, that last tour usually isn’t the last time we see them.

The rib-shaped pork patty was first introduced by the Golden Arches back in 1981, before being “permanently removed” from menus in 2005. This is not the case in Germany and Luxembourg, however, where the sandwich proved so popular after its initial release that it has remained a full-time menu item ever since. However, customers in the U.K. have noticed something different about the McRib now: in the olden days, the pork was submerged in barbecue sauce before it was put on a bun and the pickles and onions were added. This time around, though, the sauce is in a tube and is applied directly to the bun along with the pickles, onions and meat. So, while the ingredients are very much the same, the application has changed drastically, and many feel that change is going to be for the worse.

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