The Nameless Horror

If you’ve ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you’ve ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or “drug paraphernalia” in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.

These all had one thing in common: They seemed too tidily packaged, too neat, “too good to check,” as they used to say, to actually be true. Any number of reporters or editors at any of the hundreds of sites that posted these Platonic ideals of shareability could’ve told you that they smelled, but in the ongoing decimation of the publishing industry, fact-checking has been outsourced to the readers. Not surprisingly—as we saw with the erroneous Reddit-spawned witch-hunt around the Boston Marathon bombing—readers are terrible at fact-checking. And this, as it happens, is good for business because it means more shares, more clicks.

This is not a glitch in the system. It is the system. Readers are gullible, the media is feckless, garbage is circulated around, and everyone goes to bed happy and fed. BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti admitted as much when explaining, that, when he’s hiring, he looks for “people who really understand how information is shared on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and other emerging platforms, because that is in some cases as important as, you know, having traditional reporting talent.” Upworthy editorial director Sara Critchfield seconded the notion. “We reject the idea that the media elite or people who have been trained in a certain way somehow have the monopoly on editorial judgment.”

Long, but very much worth reading, especially if you’ve ever been inclined to share any old piece of trash on Facebook.

• Linkery: [A Nice Round-up Of Daily Mail Shock Stories from 2013

  The Poke:](http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2013/12/27/a-nice-round-up-of-this-years-daily-mail-shock-stories/) / news, fail /

My mom, Anne Sexton, killed herself at 45, and I swore I’d never do the same. Then, at 44, my world fell apart The following is excerpted and adapted from “Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide,” published by Counterpoint.

• Linkery: Almost Human: The Surreal, Cyborg Future of Telemarketing / tech, society /