Following the news in 2014 is a bit like flying a kite in flat country during tornado season. Every so often, a whirlwind of outrage touches down, sowing destruction and chaos before disappearing into the sky.
These conditions are hardly new. Over the past decade or so, outrage has become the default mode for politicians, pundits, critics and, with the rise of social media, the rest of us. When something outrageous happens—when a posh London block installs anti-homeless spikes, or when Khloé Kardashian wears a Native American headdress, or, for that matter, when we read the horrifying details in the Senate’s torture report—it’s easy to anticipate the cycle that follows: anger, sarcasm, recrimination, piling on; defenses and counterattacks; anger at the anger, disdain for the outraged; sometimes, an apology … and on to the next. Twitter and Facebook make it easier than ever to participate from home. And the same cycle occurs regardless of the gravity of the offense, which can make each outrage feel forgettable, replaceable. The bottomlessness of our rage has a numbing effect.
This desensitization makes it tough to clock exactly how modern outrage functions. Is it as awful as it sometimes feels? More useful than it might seem? Should we be rending our garments about our constant rending of garments? Or should we embrace the new responsiveness of the social and hypersensitive Web?
And so—in an effort to answer these and other questions—we resolved to keep track of what people got outraged about every day of 2014. Since January, a phalanx of editors, writers, and interns has been scanning the horizons for funnels of fury. They used a Google doc and a bot that reminded us about the project any time someone used the word outrage on IM. The rage-a-day calendar above contains the fruits of their labor: a comprehensive listing of what was outrageous and whom it outraged, for every single day of the year.
The results, we think, are illuminating. People were upset about TV stars and wheelchairs and lattes and racism and war. Some days, people were upset about Slate. (Other days, we caught the outrage current and rode it a ways ourselves, as Jordan Weissmann details below.) Though it can be jarring to see something as nation-shaking as Ferguson alongside something as trifling as the cover of a magazine, it’s fascinating to look at how our collective responses skipped from the serious to the picayune without much modulation in pitch. So please explore the calendar above. Vote on which outrages still outrage you, and which you can’t believe anyone ever cared about. And read the thoughtful essays below, each of which examines some aspect of outrage culture, and explore the way it shapes our world.
by Julia Turner, Slate | Read more:
Image: Interactive by Allison Benedikt, Chris Kirk, and Dan Kois. Art by Holly Allen, Juliana Jimenez, Derreck Johnson, Lisa Larson-Walker, Natalie Mattews-Ramo, Vivian Selbo, and Ellie Skrzat
