Greg Palast’s 2009 jaw-dropping article on the 20th anniversary of Exxon’s Valdez oil disaster made us angry. In fact, it made us furious. And one of the most infuriating things about it was that no one else was furious because no one was paying any attention at all. We featured it in our newsletter with the headline “News To Make You Furious”. Maybe we couldn’t bring much additional attention to it, but we thought it was important enough to make an effort. But all good things (or in this case, bad ones) must come to an end, and it’s time for our monthly mashup of malignancy to meet its maker…
Once we’d started it was hard to stop, because there was a seemingly unending string of appalling things being completely ignored. News To Make You Furious was born. Since 2009 we’ve added stories on modern slavery, the Nigerian Delta, SLAPP suits, Indian suicide, income inequality, ALEC, climate change, tax shelters, media consolidation, depleted uranium, and so sadly many more. But all good things (or in this case, bad things) must come to an end. Our limited newsletter staff spends lots of time on Furious and ending it will lift a large weight from their hunched shoulders. But more importantly, there’s just so much other infuriating news out there! It’s one thing to do a deep dive on the police technique of parallel construction when people are fixated on Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke (2013), but quite another to focus on prostituting God for fun and profit while people are fixated on covid, fascism, and race riots (2020). We think the issues we’ve covered are critically important, but EVERY story these days is critically important and “furious” seems to be just a baseline emotion for all of them. The news has caught up with us.
For the fans of Furious out there (and you know who you are) we won’t abandon you completely. You won’t get Furious every month, but when we run across especially angst-inducing news our Rabid Reporters of Wrath will break into our regular newsletter programming with a dispatch. If you find yourself becoming calm and tranquil in the meantime, you can get your addition of angst from our new Vault of Venom, where we’ve archived more than 50 painful and painfully detailed looks at some of the most infuriating issues no one’s paying attention to.
But we’re most excited that we’ll be putting those hunched shoulders of our Furious staff to a new grindstone… our newest column, the “Department of Reality Studies”. 
It’s a look at scientific and technological triumphs happening every day, as well as the threats faced by a reality-based society. Click here to try our first edition, and who knows… with the state of the world today, “Reality Studies” may do as much to make you Furious as “News To Make You Furious” ever did!
