It’s raining tacos: this week on Fresh Powder

Stop spreading the news? Not exactly — just leave it out of my doctor’s office. Uproxx’s Brian Grubb wants the channel changed on waiting room TVs, from cable news to something a bit more lighthearted (think: food competitions and home renovation). “Waiting rooms are stressful enough. No one likes waiting for anything, especially not the things you have to wait for in a waiting room. Adding the element of cable news does not help this, at all, even in its most benign form, before you factor in the thing where cable news channels have become important symbols in political fights among people who have made the opinions of various blowhard haircuts a significant part of their personalities. I do not want to get into an argument about cancel culture while I am waiting to have my teeth cleaned. I do not want to even overhear one. I don’t even want to think about it, to be honest, ever, let alone before a person I barely know sticks a sharp object into my face. I do not think this is unreasonable. … The key is to find something that is inoffensive and not stressful. Hey, do you know what is inoffensive and not stressful? Guy’s Grocery Games.”

In other journalism

–  “The merger of two of the largest publishers in the United States — Penguin Random House is already the biggest by almost any metric — has the potential to touch every piece of the book business, including how much writers get paid, which books get priority at printing plants and how independent bookshops are run.” (NYT)

–  Championship athletes Alex Morgan, Sue Bird, Chloe Kim and Simone Manuel are launching a new media company for women’s sports. “The opportunity that Togethxr has is to change the way we view women in the media.”

–  A Message from the Staff of Reply All: “We now understand that we never should have published the series as reported.”

–  “Mostly, I was interested in knocking people off their pedestals. I also enjoyed being popular, controversial, discussed. I just wanted to see someone face consequences; no one who’d hurt me ever had.” An anonymous blogger of a popular Tumblr about shaming celebrities now wonders, “What was I trying to accomplish?” (NYT)