Facebook and antitrust: A slam-dunk case, or a decades-long fight in the making?
It’s not surprising that the announcement last week of an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook has gotten a lot of media attention. Mammoth cases like this one (which involves the Federal Trade Commission and 46 states) are extremely rare. There have only been half a dozen or so of this magnitude in the last 50 years, and only the Microsoft case from the late 1990s and possibly the AT&T breakup even come close to this one in size and impact. But the history of such cases shows that what almost inevitably happens is not a swift victory for justice (however one might define that term) but years, and in some cases decades of protracted legal wrangling, a process that is almost mind-numbingly boring for most people, satisfying no one apart from the legions of corporate lawyers and academics for whom it provides something close to full employment. After all that, the ending is likely to be a carefully negoti
The New Yorker Fell Into the “Weird Japan” Trap
Elif Batuman was duped by a source’s fabrications about the country’s rent-a-family industry. What went wrong?
Chris McGrath/Getty Images
It has not been a good year for anyone, but it’s been an especially bad year for the fact-checkers of highbrow magazines. In November,
The Atlanticappended an extraordinary editor’s note to a story written by Ruth Barrett, née Shalit, disclosing that Barrett, among other exaggerations and falsehoods, had encouraged a source to fabricate details about her life, including that the source had a son when she did not. Barrett came clean, sort of, admitting that “on some level I did know that it was BS” and “I do take responsibility.”
Opinion | The New Yorker publishes editor s note invalidating award-winning feature on Japan washingtonpost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from washingtonpost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.