monster he created would go
offline for good. The site was
briefly silenced in 2015, after
users reported the presence of
child porn there.
On Monday, 8chan was offline
once again, after another alleged
mass shooter appears to have
used the site to promote a white-
nationalist manifesto. (The al-
leged shooter in El Paso — who
would be the third mass shooter
this year to promote such a
manifesto on 8chan — killed
22 people at a Walmart and
shopping center on Saturday.)
It’s not clear at the moment how
long 8chan will remain down.
That will depend on the deci-
sions within a complicated chain
of companies involved in hosting
and protecting the site, and how
many partners 8chan’s operators
will be able to keep.
SEE ANALYSIS ON C4BY ABBY OHLHEISERThe website 8chan thrived be-
cause 4chan, its predecessor,
wasn’t extreme enough. In 2014,
when the anonymous extremists
of the Internet wanted to orga-
nize harassment campaigns
against female gaming journal-
ists and developers, 4chan started
cracking down. 8chan welcomed
the activity and became the new
home of misogynist, racist, coor-
dinated abuse on the Internet.
8chan’s founder, Fredrick
Brennan, promised to protect the
site’s users, including those who
wanted to post about every ex-
treme idea. There were forums
dedicated to pedophilia, suicide
and harassment. Technically,
8chan banned illegal activity, but
those rules were rarely enforced
by Brennan, who no longer con-
trols the site and wishes theThe incidents, at least for now,
don’t appear to have a lot in
common. One shooter allegedly
was a racist who posted an anti-
immigrant manifesto online
shortly before he opened fire in
broad daylight at a Walmart. The
other wore a mask and
bulletproof vest as he stalked
SEE HESSE ON C4Violence Archive.
This weekend, two young men
killed a total of 31 people. Twenty-
two in El Paso, and then, less than
a day later, nine in Dayton, Ohio
— events that have managed to
hold onto the headlines even in
gun-numb America, because of
their quick succession, their
cumulative gore.stalked female students in the
hallway while calling them sluts?
Maybe the one who once
beckoned me to the park
pavilion at a class picnic and
then randomly started kicking
me? I’d pretended it was a joke,
because how else to explain such
a bizarre act; we’d barely spoken
before that.
I know we worried about a
particular varsity soccer player; I
know we debated whether
another guy’s submission to the
literary magazine was creative or
genuinely ominous. I know most
of the young men we worried
about turned out just fine, or
they hurt themselves more than
they hurt others, or they did hurt
others, but they didn’t kill
anyone.
I think of these young men of
my youth every time there’s a
mass shooting, which is always:
There have been more than 250
this year, according to the GunIt will sound
either morbid or
histrionic, but the
students in the
safe Midwestern
town where I
grew up spent a
lot of high school
talking about
which of our
fellow classmates were likely to
one day kill us all. Or maybe
they’d kill people outside of
school — we allowed for that
possibility, too — but whatever
happened would involve
someone bursting through a
door with a gun. This was the era
of Columbine, and that incident,
800 miles away but all over the
news, had provided us a way to
verbalize the erratic scariness
that some young men emitted:
the sense they might turn their
resentment into horror.
Was it going to be the young
man who wore combat boots and
KLMNO
Style
TUESDAY, AUGUST 6 , 2019. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/STYLE EZ SU C
THE RELIABLE SOURCE
Celebrities such as
Rihanna tore into
President Trump after a
weekend of violence. C2
TV FINALE
HBO’s ‘Euphoria’ gave a
brutally honest answer to
what growing up Gen Z
might be like. C3CAROLYN HAX
Friend with an icky
boyfriend wonders why
no one goes on double
dates with them. C8KIDSPOST
The mosquito has a sort of
Swiss Army knife of tools
that tells it when fresh
blood is close by. C8BY ROBIN GIVHANACTUALLY, SUMMER IS BADThe shallow end of society
There isn’t
enough chlorineor booze in
the world to make
some of usfeel good about
the pool partyWASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION; ISTOCKBecause people, whether they realize it or
not, are monsters.
“The last thing I would want to do is hang
out with a bunch of other adults, half-
dressed, drinking a watered-down Aperol
spritz,” says Cenk Papila, a Toronto-based
writer and fashion stylist. “I also generally
just hate pools. I find them to be dirty. And
please don’t get me started when everyone
wants to get into the hot tub together. It’s
like a cesspool.”
As it has with so much in this world,
social media has made pool parties even
worse than they’ve always been. Instagram
has escalated them into thirst traps of
preening bodies and unicorn rafts as mas-
sive as a cruise liner.
The pool parties of summer nightmares
are not intimate gatherings of a few close
friends who have seen you at your worst and
love you just the same. It’s not the informal
SEE POOL ON C3The last in a series of stories calling into
question the supposed joys of summerPool parties are summer’s great lie. They
are not fun; the swimming is beside the
point. Pool parties reek of sunscreen, alco-
hol and the flop sweat of anxiety.
A pool party is near-strangers standing
around half-naked while noshing on a menu
of hot dogs, burgers and salmonella salad.
You are stuck in a wet swimsuit with wet hair
and wondering if you are now a giant petri
dish of bacteria because, yeah, somebody
definitely peed in that pool. Speedos belong
on Olympians; cannonballs aren’t funny;
and the lukewarm booze just turns it all into
a throbbing headache of sun-baked misery.
Why, for the love of all that is kind and
just in this world, would people go out of
their way to host such a dispiriting few
hours on what would otherwise be a lovely
summer day? Why?Why are mass shooters
almost always men?
Monica
Hesse
JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST
Flowers placed through a bullet hole in a window in Dayton, Ohio.
Thirty-one people died in separate rampages over the weekend.ANALYSISWill silencing 8chan stop
the worst people online?
BY KATHERINE A. POWERSAny devoted audiobook listen-
er can attest: Spending nine hours
(or more) in the company of a
terrible reader — a shrieker,
mumbler, droner, tooth whistler
or overzealous thespian — is an
experience that can truly ruin a
book. A narrator’s voice is not
merely a delivery system, an el-
ement extraneous to the text, but
an integral one — fulfilling, en-
riching, injuring or sinking a
book.
The worst offenders may be
found in the classics section.
Since these works are out of copy-
right, narrators can do what they
like with the text for the cost of
production alone. Thomas Har-
dy’s “Far from the Madding
Crowd,” for instance, exists in a
dozen unabridged versions: John
Lee’s (Tantor) is superb, and Na-
thaniel Parker’s (Audible Studios)
and Joe Jameson’s (Dreamscape)
are excellent if a little fast. (Audi-
ble is owned by Amazon, whose
chief executive Jeff Bezos owns
The Washington Post.) A few oth-
ers are good enough, but there are
also some excruciating perform-
ers, among them a drawling old
fogy; a governess on an elocution
bender; a sprinter whose words
tear along in a blur; and a man
who seems to be recording from
inside a tin can.
Perhaps there is something
about Hardy that brings out an
especially unhandy company.
“Huckleberry Finn,” on the other
hand, exists in more than 30 un-
abridged versions and has attract-
ed admirable readers and only a
few bunglers. Among the excel-
lent versions are Stephen L. Ver-
non’s (A.R.N. Publications), Gro-
ver Gardner’s (Blackstone), Alan
Munro’s (Trout Bay Media) and
Jim D. Johnston’s (Combray Me-
dia).
This brings up the matter of
taste. There are, it astonishes me
to discover, some listeners who
don’t especially care for the voices
of the award-winning British nar-
rator, John Lee, one of my favor-
ites, and Simon Prebble, all of
SEE BOOK WORLD ON C3BOOK WORLDA narrator
can make a
pronounced
di≠erence
The audiobook for Anna
Burns’s “Milkman” is deftly
narrated by Bríd Brennan.