New NPR Chief Katherine Maher's Guide to the Holidays (Updated)

What might America's future national holiday calendar look like? A trip around the calendar with new NPR chief Katherine Maher, current world champ of unintentional comedy, offers a clue

Titania McMaher.

Katherine Maher, the new head of NPR, was a minor character in the Twitter Files. She was CEO of Wikimedia when the company was (like Twitter) being invited to election tabletop exercises at the Pentagon and “Industry meetings” with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She also scored the rare personal triumvirate of being a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum young global leader, and a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Labs.

She took a job heading NPR in January, shortly before senior editor Uri Berliner set off a nuclear newsroom stink-bomb by publishing a tell-all article at The Free Press about station failures on stories like Russiagate. Berliner’s piece triggered a frenzy of anti-NPR Schadenfreude, which led to furious examinations of Maher’s sitting-duck tweet history. Maher’s timeline reads so much like the Titania McGrath site spoofing overeducated nonsense-babbling white ladies that it’s difficult to believe she’s real — she even looks like the fictional McGrath, if Titania had more money to spend on personal upkeep.

Maher’s commentary dating back to the early Obama years is a gold mine of unintentional comedy. She’s gotten the most heat for using phrases like “As someone with cis white mobility privilege,” and “Sure, looting is counterproductive, but…” She also made an impressive Usain Bolt-like surge past Hillary Clinton in the Intersectional Gibberish Olympics:

When I spent what I admit is an embarrassingly long period reading her social media history, I was struck by the random, unquenchable nature of Maher’s anger. Maher at rest, commenting on literally nothing at all, sounds like this:

When some poor sap tweeted about “Hereticon,” a conference of canceled-type speakers proclaiming “dissent is essential to the progressive march of human civilization,” Maher made an instant leap from a snapshot of ironic fifties conformism to a dead-serious KKK metaphor:

Maher is now in her second consecutive hugely influential role in American culture, yet her idea of happiness seemingly would involve torturing The Muppets until they give up the location of the patriarchy’s secret headquarters (inside a volcano shaped like Elon Musk’s head of course!). Reading, one wonders: does this person have a vision of enjoyment that doesn’t involve self-mortification? Out of curiosity, I took one tour with her through the holiday calendar, starting with Thanksgiving. The comprehensive list: