To the best of my knowledge, scientists haven’t studied the disorienting feeling that occurs when digital expectations meet physical realities, but if / when they do, I think they should call it the Floating Head Phenomenon.
The em dash police are people who’ve deputized themselves to spot AI copy. Basically, they’re text-based vigilantes. Like all vigilantes, they’re prone to fuck-ups. When they see an em dash, they pounce. They aren’t empowered to arrest, but to annoy.
As it turns out, social media has a history of confusing the left-wing writer and activist Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf, a writer who made her bones as a liberal feminist in the 1990s, before decamping to right-wing stardom in these bizzaro times.
Sometimes I crave barbecue chicken pizza. I realize this is heresy to many pizza lovers. Like its more famous heretical cousin, the Hawaiian pizza, barbecue chicken pizza is a regional take on pizza that draws the ire of pizza traditionalists across the internet. The most vocal pizza traditionalists come from New York, where pizza innovation is against the law, and pizza innovators are mocked without mercy and told to “go back to California,” as if that’s an insult, which it is not.
An unmasked man enters the donut shop. That sounds the setup to a joke, 2021’s answer to a priest and a rabbi walking into a bar. But this isn’t a joke. The unmasked man in the donut shop is real.