This month, I have been mostly starting my life over from scratch (aka #ThePlan):

• “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting,” Ten Years On — John Scalzi: Ten years ago this week I thought I would write a piece to offer a useful metaphor for straight white male privilege without using the word “privilege,” because when you use the word “privilege,” straight white men freak out, like, I said then, “vampires being fed a garlic tart.” Since I play video games, I wrote the piece using them as a metaphor. And thus “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is” was born and posted.
• Cartoon Copy Shop — by Keith Knight:
  
• DeSantis Betting That Republicans Want a Stupider Version of Trump — Andy Borowitz: According to a source close to DeSantis, the Florida Governor has decided to “run to the stupid of Trump” to pick up the support of voters who now consider the former President too intellectual. “When Trump recently said that he got the booster, that was the last straw,” the source said. “In the eyes of a lot of Republicans, Trump is basically Fauci now.”
• Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship — Caitlin Johnstone: Arguably the most significant political moment in the United States since 9/11 and its immediate aftermath was when Democrats and their allied institutions concluded that Donald Trump’s election was a failure not of establishment politics but of establishment narrative control. From that point onwards, any online media creator who consistently disputes the narratives promoted by the same news outlets who’ve lied to us about every war has seen their view counts and new follows slashed. By mid-2017 independent media outlets were already reporting across ideological lines that algorithm changes from important sources of viewership like Google had suddenly begun hiding their content from people who were searching for the subjects they reported on.
• This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• As Florida Attempts to Make it Illegal, an Argument for the Sacred Work of White Discomfort — Robert P. Jones in Religion Dispatches: The beloved hymn, “Amazing Grace,” captures this dynamic. In the very first stanza, a Christian singing that hymn identifies as “a wretch” in need of salvation. The familiar refrains—“I once was lost, but now I’m found/Was blind but now I see”—begin with lament and confession. Grace is amazing precisely because God accepts us despite our own shortcomings. But we don’t come to salvation, nor do we grow in discipleship, without honesty and this experience of exquisite discomfort. Moreover, the sacred role of discomfort isn’t limited to sin in individual hearts. The Bible is replete with language about the sins of one generation being visited down three or four generations (Exodus 20; Numbers 14; Deuteronomy 5; Jeremiah 32). This transmission isn’t mystical but is both genetic and cultural. Just as abuse begets abuse and addiction begets addiction, prejudice begets prejudice.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith: