Boing boing who is osama

It involved a popular athlete and movie star named O. I won't bore you with the details, but he was accused of slashing his ex-wife and a young waiter to death. He was found not guilty though later found liable in a civil trial. Suffice it to say, it was a big deal. A huge deal. One day, an LAPD criminologist named Andrea Mazzola took the stand to talk about gathering evidence the day after the murders.

Her colleague, Dennis Fung, kept talking about O. Which leads me to this article on Boing Boing. Even if you've been living under a rock or cave in Tora Bora or without internet service like, in a compound in Abottabad , you know who "OBL" is, right?

We regret the error. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. It might not be a bad sign that so many teenagers didn't know who he was. For just shy of a decade, Americans all lived with a shared bogeyman in our minds, a name that was longhand for evil whether you were in Tulsa or Times Square.

Yet according to Yahoo Search trends, on May 1, the question was the fifth-most-searched phrase among all "Osama bin Laden" searches on the site. Web sites like Boing Boing and even a quickly contructed Tumblr published screengrabs of confused Twitter queries from users who'd seemingly never heard of him. More specifically: It was a failure of our education system and this was even before considering the grammar and punctuation. The instinct to take to Twitter as resource-of-first-resort said something frightening about the way the rising generation consumes information, and augurs dire things for the future of facts and truth; so does the ease with which we can block out anything we don't seek out specifically on the ever-specialized Web.

The myopic worldview, the fixation on pop culture seriously, there was a disproportionate amount of Bieber iconography went straight to the heart of why America gets a bad rep in some parts of the world.

But consider it from another angle: For those of us who were teenagers when the towers fell, our high school and college years were coated with an impossible-to-escape layer of fear.