Hey Ricochet, remember how much fun we used to have with our weekend contests? For those of you too young to remember those, here were some of my favorites.

Now that I’m back, it’s time for another one! This will be in a new format, so read the rules carefully. It’s inspired by my now-constant lament that were an alien to descend to our planet and read an American newspaper, he would conclude that the only events taking place outside our borders (if we can still call them that) were either happening in Gaza or involved crashing airplanes. Now, I’m not denying that Gaza and plane crashes are newsworthy stories, of course they are. But some 90 percent of what’s written about them isn’t even, strictly speaking, news—it’s just an infernal rumble of repetitive invective, shedding vastly more heat than light, indeed, sucking the light of intelligence and wisdom out of the world, as if the Internet itself had paradoxically been transformed into a communicative black hole (you get my drift), and in the process draining scarce news-gathering resources from other news stories that are every bit as significant, if not more.