How to Outsmart the Online Outrage Machine
This is an edition of the newsletter Pulling Weeds With Chris Black, in which the columnist weighs in on hot topics in culture. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday. Just over a week ago, The New Yorker published a story, “What’s Missing from Belle Burden’s Strangers,” that sent a certain corner of the internet into an absolute frenzy. The story probed the financial side of Burden’s hit divorce memoir and turned Twitter and Reddit into a battleground of amateur multi-generational wealth analysts, hotly debating money dynamics in relationships, prenuptial agreements, and the eternal question of memoir’s relationship with objective truth. Did Burden’s ultra-rich ex-husband have a crisis PR person leak sealed court documents to a writer at The New Yorker? We will probably never know how the nooks and crannies of a divorce settlement were made public, but the online debate on Sunday night was raging, on both sides: those who called her a fraud and the book a lie, and a more measured “Who cares, this book rocked” contingent …
