Notable News Articles

  (Illustration by Natalie Vineberg/The Washington Post; screenshots from Ben Palmer's YouTube; iStock) By  Drew Harwell Ben Palmer, a stand-up comic in Nashville, has built a following online with his signature style of elaborate deadpan pranks, stumbling his way onto court TV shows and pyramid-scheme calls to poke fun at the latent absurdities of American life. Then in January of last year, he had an idea for a new bit: He’d set up a fake tip line that people could use to report anyone they thought was an undocumented immigrant. It was darker than his other stunts, but it felt topical, the kind of challenge he wanted to try. At the very least, he thought, he might get a few calls he could talk about at his next show. Instead, his tip line has received nearly 100 submissions from across the country: people reporting their neighbors, ex-lovers, Uber drivers, strangers they saw at the grocery store. One tip came from a teacher reporting the parents of a kindergarten student at ...

  Illustration by Emma Kumer/The Washington Post; iStock By Peter Whoriskey Amid a wave of high-profile killings and political violence in the United States, investigators have been confounded regularly by the absence of a recognizable agenda. The assailants in several cases — shootings, a bombing, a planned drone attack — resisted familiar labels and categories. They were not Democrat or Republican, or Islamist militant, or antifa or white supremacist. They were something new. In their manifestos, these attackers declared their contempt for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization. Law enforcement officers and federal prosecutors have begun to describe these attacks as a contemporary strain of nihilism, an online revival of the philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truths and meaning in the universe. Recent assailants who have been tagged as nihilists include the following: A 15-year-old shooter in Madison, Wisconsin, w...