The new season of Leon Neyfakh’s Fiasco podcast relives a bleak chapter of US history when a white man became a folk hero after shooting four black youths
The scuzzy new “supervillain” movie "Joker” has caused a strange moral panic among the left, who are equating the empathetic portrayal of the Joker to sympathy for the circumstance of “incels” – troubled men rejected by potential sexual partners. But New Yorker critic Richard Brody found a novel left-wing angle in his attack. He constructs an edifice of racism, plucking specific notorious attacks from the pages of New York City’s notorious crime history and overlays them on specific, superficially similar violent scenes from the movie then nervily called out the filmmakers for not hewing to the truth of the actual events (again, in a fictional movie about a comic-book character).