Inside TMZ’s Culture of Toxic, Relevant News: Here’s What’s Happening in the World Today
The Daily 5 is Sharp’s essential reading list for what’s happening in the world today. Make sure to follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the Sharp Insider newsletter to stay up to date.
1. The New Yorker takes on TMZ
“TMZ resembles an intelligence agency as much as a news organization, and it has turned its domain, Los Angeles, into a city of stool pigeons.”
What exactly is a stool pigeon, you ask? You’ll have to read this fantastic feature to find out.
2. Let’s be glad we don’t live in America
The death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia this weekend threatens to push the country into a full-blown constitutional crisis. After President Obama announced he intended the fill the vacant Supreme Court seat, Republicans in Congress moved to block the nomination process entirely, choosing instead to wait for the next president’s nomination.
Scalia was one of the most conservative Justices on the Supreme Court, and replacing him with a Democrat-appointed judge would shift the political balance of the country’s highest court for decades to come.
For both parties there’s a certain political calculus at play here. By blocking the nomination in an election year, GOP majority leader Mitch McConnell risks upsetting the broader electorate, who may tire of Republican obstructionism; for Democrats, should Obama’s appointee not be confirmed, liberal voters may be more motivated to support the Democratic candidate in November’s general election to ensure a left-wing appointment.
+1: It’s not Trump who has lost his mind, but the entire Republican party.
+1: Ted Cruz speaking Spanish is basically just El Generalissimo.
3. Don’t worry, it’s not just you. Dating really is different these days
Websites and apps have done to dating what websites and apps do to everything — disrupt, in the elegant parlance of Silicon Valley.
But beyond anecdote- and cherry-picking, how exactly have these changes affected dating and sex in 2016? The Atlantic breaks down a recent survey released by OKCupid, who has crunched over a decade’s worth of personal answers on the subject. The results may surprise you.
4. A Doctors Without Borders hospital in Syria was destroyed after a deadly airstrike
At least seven are dead after airstrikes this morning levelled a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French name Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Roughly 40,000 people will be without medical care, MSF posted on Twitter. The strike, which MSF France president Mego Terzian believes was carried out by Syria or Russia, comes just days after an upcoming ceasefire was announced by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
5. Pope John Paul II had an “intense relationship” with a woman
“Hundreds of letters and photographs that tell the story of Pope John Paul II’s close relationship with a married woman, which lasted more than 30 years, have been shown to the BBC.”
There are no signs that the Pope broke his vows of celibacy, but the letters do suggest an intimate nature to his relationship with this woman, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a Polish-born American philosopher.
