The death of empathy

Esquire's back-page feature, "This Way Out," is the first thing I read when the magazine arrives. It's always a snarky take on this or that -- and this month's topic is Recent Obits. The author: A.J. Jacobs.

These are the best two -- tongue-in-cheek but with a devastating point to make about our modern times. The death of civility. The death of a journalistic and social institution. (Keep in mind the names below are fictitious.)

Empathy Dies

The capacity to recognize and feel the suffering experienced by another sentient being, empathy succumbed to a long illness Friday. The cause was Greg Lipsky's comment on a YouTube video that showed a woman cracking her skull after tripping over a garden hose: "LOL, bitch!"

Empathy had been in decline for several days, in the wake of dozens of other comments, including "Hahahahaha" and "Taste the pavement." It was 10,500 years old.

Empathy's death closely followed those of its siblings, sympathy and compassion, according to the last surviving member of their family, sociopathy.

The evening news, purveyor of important information

The evening news, nightly television programs designed to convey the current state of the world, died suddenly Wednesday after a long battle with irrrelevance. It was 63. The cause was a CBS segment about the unlikely bond between a retired salesman and a gray Toulouse goose named Maria in Echo Park, Los Angeles.

In its prime, the evening news united America around an "electronic hearth" and sparked national conversations about such issues as racial unequality, Watergate, and the Vietnam War. In later years, it featured a lot of commercials for medical devices.

The evening news took a turn for he worse when one of its few remaining viewers -- Anne Sapoksy of Glendale -- was taught by her grandson how to open Internet Explorer. It is survived by people loudly shouting their point of view.

Genius.

See more? Here's an index of This Way Out.

Iamge: clipartguide.com