Why is the Lori Loughlin-Felicity Huffman college admissions scandal so fun?

Slate

"I know that the people involved in this debacle are real people, with real emotions, caught up in a mortifying scandal that has also humiliated their children," says Willa Paskin of the Fuller House star and the Desperate Housewives alum indictment for college admissions fraud. "But have you scoped the details on this thing??? The FBI called this Operation Varsity Blues because they, too, are apparently ’90s nostalgists. The scheme involved, at some point, photoshopping the prospective students’ heads onto the bodies of other student athletes. Huffman used the phrase 'ruh roh' in this context: 'Ruh Ro! Looks like (my daughter’s high school) wants to provide own proctor.' At least one of the admitted students is already a paid Instagram influencer. This is a genuine scandal—a big, messy to-do and a disgrace—but it also, thankfully, euphorically, does not involve the grifts of our commander in chief, nuclear realpolitik, or our dying planet. It is powerfully representative of so much of our national dysfunction, but will not immediately result in the death of democracy or any other human beings. In contemporary America, I believe this is what passes for a lark."

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• Watch video of Macy arriving in court this afternoon
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• Olivia Jade Giannulli, one of Loughlin's "influencer" daughters, has 1.9 million YouTube subscribers and 1.3 million Instagram followers