Turn Down the Silencing, I Can't Hear Myself Think

 

Ah I finally see the problem.

They're misspelling "amplifying" https://t.co/bvDwBgI3rm

— Screechy Ill-Speak (@Yastreblyansky) March 21, 2021

It really struck me, on this one, where the Dumbest Senator, Ron Johnson (United Russia–Wisconsin) complains about the treatment he's been getting for his amazing trick of explaining how he wasn't scared of the 6 January Capitol insurgents because he knew they were all good people who would never break the law (as they were flagrantly breaking a large number of laws and threatening to murder the vice president and Speaker of the House and whatnot), in contrast to those awful people from the Black Lives Matter, bad people presumably who break the law whenever they get the chance (though I don't know of a single example except Bree Newsome climbing that flagpole, and I'd offer to punch anybody who criticizes her for it but she could probably do it more effectively).  When he said, you know,

Don't seduce my clicks, bro!

Charlie Chaplin in City Lights (1931). Via designingsound.org.

Oh, Brooksy stopped into the office to deposit part I of his New Year's survey of magazine articles so good he almost decided to read them, and part 2 is out today:

Every December I read hundreds of long-form essays to select the Sidney Awards, and every year I regret that I spend so much of the other 11 months reading online trivia. Then, every January, I revert to Twitter.

David, David! Twitter is on the Internet, you know. We can easily find out what you do with Twitter in January, which is essentially nothing.

Your personal account, opened in June 2011, is still an egg (yes, I'm sure it's you because of the followees we have in common—Ana Marie Cox and Jake Tapper—not to mention a number of other familiar names including that of Anne Snyder) and you've only sent seven Tweets in the five and a half years. On only eleven occasions have you been interested enough in somebody else's tweet to "like" it, four of them in the past year, most recently on November 28 (a link to Benjamin Wittes's possibly premature judgment that there was nothing partisan about James Comey's letter to the Gang of Eight intelligence congresscritters which Chaffetz leaked as soon as he got it for unquestionably partisan purposes). You have committed one single retweet.

Your personal Facebook page is a little livelier than that—seven updates in 2016 out of a total of 13 since May 2012, of which the top two, November 22, are about incorporating Ms. Snyder into the profile picture, and a total of 58 likes since signing up—but I just want to stipulate that it's hard to imagine spending 11 months per year reading online trivia at such an exceedingly low level of interactivity. If you are that passive even as the amount of time you are spending on social media is enough to prevent you from reading long-form essays, you are seriously doing it wrong. There's a reason for calling them "social". Or else, of course, this picture is pure fiction.

It's certainly fiction when he claims he reads "hundreds of essays" in December. I'd be surprised if it was 20, counting the shoutouts to people he knows, like the poet Christian Wiman in Tuesday's column, whose essay "The Bright Abyss" has inspired three Brooks columns in the past two years, or Andrew Sullivan today, for an essay he already wrote about back in October, so I guess that's one essay he managed to look at before December. "Looks at" because to say he legit reads them is also fiction,