I get my news mainly from five sources:
- The Daily Show
- The Onion
- The Today Show
- The Washington Post’s Express
- Hearsay from various weblogs
Of those, the first two are “fake news” sources, and the third really only counts as maybe 50% real news. When I read the Express (usually when I’m not reading a novel), I read most of it, but often I’ll do the Su Do Ku first and then not have time for anything else. Weblogs are pretty good at linking to certain stories, but I’ll often miss out on a swath of news relating to topics that those writers just don’t care about. So if you really look at it, my primary source of news comes from comedy writers. And I’m pretty much okay with that.
On the topic of fake news, The Onion just redesigned, and I like it. I’m not sure I love it, but I hated their old layout and thought it was much worse from the one they had had before. Khoi Vinh’s written up a litlte piece about the design work. At first I was very worried they had gotten rid of my absolute favorite part, which are the little headlines that don’t have articles that ran down the side. Often enough an Onion headline is the funniest part of an article, so these were always like little bonuses. I looks like they’ve just moved them down the page some under the “From the Print Edition” header. As discovered elsewhere, this section of the paper featured, about a month ago, what I think may just be the paragon of internet humor. It manages to combine farce, photoshopping, and the web’s strange fixation on posting pictures of cats: “War On String May Be Unwinnable, Says Cat General”.