The Jitdam Kapeel (the first sailing canoe to be built in the Marshalls in decades).
The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal’s “Best of the Web” at The Wall Street Journal written by the editor, James Taranto.
Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate
“An article on March 20 about wave piloting in the Marshall Islands misstated the number of possible paths that could be navigated without instruments among the 34 islands and atolls of the Marshall Islands. It is 561, not a trillion trillion.”—New York Times, April 10
Question and Answer
- “Here’s How Hillary Clinton Is Hoping to Win the UFO Vote”—headline, Puffington Host, April 12, 2016
- “What if We Put Servers in Space?”—headline, Fortune.com, Jan. 29, 2015
Bottom Story of the Day
“Newspaper Owned by Donald Trump’s Son-in-Law Endorses Donald Trump”—headline, WSJ.com, April 12
‘Ground’ Breaking Journalism
Salon’s Rachel Kramer Bussel has a shocking exposé on corporate malfeasance. It seems that an anonymous man walked into a St. Augustine, Fla., Starbucks and “ordered a giant white mocha, only to find his cup labeled with the words ‘Diabetes here I come.’ ”
The customer has two diabetic sisters, “so [it is] not funny,” he explained. Starbucks issued an apology, while Bussel dug deeper:
While it’s abhorrent that a member of a dining establishment’s staff would dare to judge the order of a customer—and we might question why such a person is even working for a company that offers 80,000 drink options, many of which presumably contain similar amounts of sugar, if they find them so offensive—the barista’s actions are part of a larger cultural trend of food shaming those whose dietary habits don’t conform with the current healthy eating trends du jour.
It’s one thing for consumer advocacy groups to work to educate the public about exactly what goes into their food, such as British group Action on Sugar, which found that one Starbucks drink, hot mulled fruit grape with chai, orange and cinnamon, contained 25 teaspoons of sugar. It’s quite another to essentially accost people with unsubstantiated judgments that only serve to demean those wise enough to make their own decisions about what goes into their body.
The story goes on in this vein. And on and on and on. And on.
You can just imagine the scene in the Salon newsroom. “Hey Bussel! A Starbucks clerk was rude to a customer. Get me 1,200 words!”
For more “Best of the Web” from The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto click here.
