The Zen and the Damaged

By Willem Marx Source The studio lights come up, illuminating a stenciled graffiti panda behind the anchor chair, and the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, bounds onto the stage. The onetime candidate for Egypt’s presidency seems to have buffed up and grown taller, while the eyes behind his familiar tortoiseshell [...]

By Helen Lewis-Hasteley Source I was on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme this morning to talk about satire with John Oliver of The Daily Show (the link is here – it’s about 2 hours 38 minutes in). We hopped around a few issues but one of the most interesting was whether big broadcasters such as [...]

By Nosheen Iqbal Source While the UK has to make do with 10 O’Clock Live, everyone from Israel to Iran has their own take on The Daily Show

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Amro Hassan Source Reporting from Cairo —— Bassem Youssef is barefoot, pacing around the dining room of his apartment in the tony Maadi neighborhood where he has assembled a crack team of twentysomething bloggers and activists.

by Ari Siletz Source I’m guessing VOA’s new Perisan news network director, Ramin Asgard, was among the crowd at Kambiz Hosseini’s Berkeley talk for the same reason I was:

By Tara Bahrampour Source If you had told Kambiz Hosseini 10 years ago, when he was a poor immigrant pumping gas in a small Oregon town, that one day Jon Stewart would bound eagerly into a greenroom looking for him and asking, “Where are my dudes?!” – he would have given you a blank look. [...]

By Jim Horne Source TUESDAY’S PUZZLE — There is a certain timelessness about typical New York Times crosswords. They eschew topical references for several reasons: there is a long lag between construction and publication, syndicated solvers get the puzzles more than a month after that, and most important, puzzles live long and happy lives well [...]

By Noreen Malone Source Because the left is so gauche.

By Robert Love Source Fake news is back, but our tolerance for it isn’t what it was before journalism donned the mantle of authority.

By Courtney E. Martin Source If Marshall McLuhan was right that “the medium is the message,” in the case of wildly popular fake news, the message must be: Laugh your head off or you’ll just end up crying your eyes out.