A while back, I spotted the follow cross-post <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/03/being-george-clooney-is-harder-than-it-looks.html" author="Azra Raza" source="3 Quarks Daily">Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks</a>. The screenshot below shows what this article looked like. This is an article that the main editor of <i>3QuarksDaily</i> felt a burning interest to share. Before him, though, Maureen Dowd of the vaunted gray lady, <i>The New York Times</i>, felt a burning desire to shared with the world just how hard it is to be George Clooney. <img src="{att_link}being_george_clooney_is_harder_than_it_looks.webp" href="{att_link}being_george_clooney_is_harder_than_it_looks.webp" align="none" caption="Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks" scale="75%"> This is, of course, mind-boggling if you're not part of this world. <ul>Did this article appear above or below the one about Palestinian children running into stray bullets and rockets? Or of Columbia University cooperating with the U.S. government persecuting its legal-resident students for being "antisemitic"? Or do we just not report on that stuff now? Or wait ... do we report on it <i>now</i>, now that it's Donald Trump doing it but not before, when Biden was doing it?</ul> It's all so confusing. What's a newspaper to do? It wants to pretend that it's doing journalism, but wants to lose neither <i>access</i> nor <i>prestige</i> nor <i>subscribers</i> nor <i>advertisers</i>. It know which side its bread is buttered on. So, it writes instead about how George likes to smoke but shouldn't.