Kids these days

Everyone's a little different when it comes to getting those pesky large numbers into headlines. You can be extra-formal and insist on the zeroes, or you can guess that your audience can figure out B for "billion" and T for "trillion." You can use M for "million," unless the greisly voice of your first editing teacher is shouting from beyond the grave that M really means "thousand," for which you can't use T (above), so you probably fall back on K.

G for thousand is a little more tabloid (in the spinning-front-page-indicates-passage-of-time sense), partly because it's tightly restricted. It doesn't mean "thousand," it means "thousand dollars" (or pounds, for which the OED has a cite from 1958). So somebody at Fox reached one shelf too far for the hed above, but you have to admit it has sort of a grapefruit-in-the-face charm to it.

A terrible beauty is born

Let the record show that on this date, 5th inst., in the year of our Lord the two thousand and eighteenth, foxnews.com has published its first house-brand editorial cartoon to illustrate a frontpage story. (At least, the first that I recall seeing, and I try to keep up with these things.)

The story itself is hardly a surprise:

Once upon a time, former intel chiefs employed a restrained and nonpartisan tone in the public eye. Now, they're diving right into the mud of today's rancorous political fights.

And the current battle between law enforcement circles and congressional Republicans over the controversial memo on alleged surveillance abuse has pulled Obama-era spy guys even deeper into the brawl.

... but the cartoon is an unusual treat. No details in the story or on the website beyond the "Branco" signature, which along with the tone and style suggests the cartoonist A.F. Branco.

The 1A cartoon itself, of course, isn't new; it's hard to miss if you keep up with isolationism, exceptionalism and the old-school Tribune. Here, indeed, is the Trib's Carey Orr from this date 70 years ago, longing for some "party discipline":

As a field of study, you have to admit it beats the heck out of Photoshop.