Aspen Ideas speaker and World Economic Forum member David Brooks published a column titled "The Thought Leader" yesterday that he originally wrote in 1995 and called "How to Become Henry Kissinger." The key takeaway is that David Brooks is still awful.
Court documents allege that R. Kelly has been raping girls as young as 14 for years, a large number of young girls, and few seem to care because the girls are black. That's the gist of this long piece in the Village Voice which is hard to read but also hard to ignore.
Long ago, I worked for an EPA contractor, and this story that the highest-paid official at the EPA did literally no work for years is not even remotely surprising. The EPA is our most inept government agency by a wide margin.
Top notch startup-bro psychoanalysis: I Want or I'm Afraid?
Business Insider, of all places, has a pretty thorough roundup of startup bros being terrible. Speaking of BI, Blodget made #7 on the Hack List. Read that, then read all of them and then just be glad that Alex Pareene exists. This is a secret tape of me reading Pareene and I'm not even ashamed.
Follow-up Tabs on the 60 Minutes NSA report: The Guardian corrects some facts. Esquire points out that the NSA's side of the story is still creepy as hell and self-contradictoryeven if you let them tell it their own way. And Slate shows how Miller's questions were almost perversely bad. Still, the TV news magazine can't be expected to just fold up, and indeed 60 Minutes is already teasing a hard-hitting investigative report that it's calling "The Crayola Conspiracy."
Potpourri: CHRISTMAS GIFS. A $2 million advance for "a big book about New York for people in Kansas." Google Maps described in the form of a romance novel for some reason. Beyonce tweets mapped. Ignorant, faux-avuncular hatemonger Mike Huckabee to launch The Huckington Post, for when the lies already available to you online are not quite vile enough. North Korea forgets everything. Spite-ey senses... tingling!
I wish we didn't live in a world where the opening of a new Whole Foods was news anywhere, let alone New York City. But sadly we live in this world, so here: a new Whole Foods opened in Gowanus, and wow that bread is quite large.
Today's Song: Creep, covered by Poor Remy with banjos
Wow: such face
~There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in tabs.~
Today in Tabs is a daily compendium of useful, interesting, infuriating and arbitrary selections from the cultural detritus perpetually sleeting through my browser and social media feeds. It claims neither completeness nor coherence, and is not warranted or even rumored to be suitable for any purpose. Tabs are provided "as-is" and neither Newsweek nor Today in Tabs accepts any responsibility for harm, whether acute anhedonia, general malaise, or terminal nonchalance. Tell a friend to subscribe though, it'll be hilarious.