This is a weekly (sometimes) list of people I am mad at. This is the list for September 27, 2024.

1. Everyone loves the screaming, biting, round, slippery baby hippo, but when I run around screaming, biting, being round and slippery, no one seems particularly charmed.

2. I’m gonna be so mad during the next AAPI Month when me and the fucking hippo are on the same Instagram carousels.

3. I went to Italy a few weeks ago and a German woman stopped me while I was climbing up flight four hundred of a cumulative sixty hundred steps. “Ah,” she said, “You’re an American. You’re holding a water bottle.” How did we let Americans monopolize the concept of not dying of heatstroke? All their water is secretly juice!!!!

4. Speaking of traveling, I do think everyone should have to take an IQ test before they get a passport so that I’m not in a township of 300 people, only to hear a sweet little blonde thing say to her in-laws, “Not to change the subject, but did you guys hear about that migrant who ate someone’s cat on their lawn? I don’t know where it happened but I saw it was trending.”

5. Actually, legally, anyone who repeated the pet-eating hoax should be punished by me eating them.

6. Ben Affleck. Leave her alone! Let her move on! She needs to have like six more marriages to distract us from how she can’t sing and you don’t need to be involved!

7. Last weekend I went to Greenpoint (my first mistake), and a man started hitting on me by asking for my byline. He looked up my latest story — a deep-dive into Brad Pitt’s efforts to launder his reputation, including his new movie which is now streaming — and he proceeded to tell me I was “too smart” to write about such “stupid topics” that were all “beneath” me. Little did he know that actually, I am…so stupid.

8. Every day, God gives me a new battle, and these days it’s having to watch white men in media trip over themselves in the effort to defend Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr.’s wretched little text affair. Is she paying you? Did she promise you a glowing profile in a magazine where you, too, decapitate a whale or something? What’s there to defend about a woman engaging in what sounds like consensual but wildly inappropriate texting with a guy who has literal worms for brains? Suddenly, there are plenty of professional and amateur journalists online who seem to think holding Nuzzi accountable for an inappropriate relationship with a source who was running for president and also looks like a half-melted JFK candle left in a microwave oven is unfair because she is but a tender babe, a little girl of just three hundred and seventy two months old. Who knew we needed to repeat this, but here we are: do not sext your sources. It does not matter how old you are (young) or how old they are (four years younger than my father who fell asleep mid-FaceTime with me and then screamed himself awake and moodily said, “Every day, my bones get more and more tired”) — you should not be bashing your digital genitals against someone whose opinions, information, and tips you’re using in your work, directly or indirectly. None of any of this requires defending, and a white woman who has built her career through political reporting does not need a refresh on basic journalistic ethics. If you’re old enough to rent a car, you’re old enough to know not to sext Bobby Kennedy’s worst son. Everyone in this story is a grown-up, and it is in our best interest to treat white women in their 30s — even the hot ones! — like the grown-ups they are. I can’t believe I have to say this. “Don’t sext RFK Jr.” is like, the first thing they teach you in journalism school, and my school was so bad that they let me in.

9. On that note, don’t text a journalist anything, ever. It’s all on the record, and the record is ridiculous.

Scamfluencers has a bunch of new episodes for you. For Slate this week, I wrote about how everyone’s being a dork about Chappell Roan.