Twitter is putting InfoWars’ Alex Jones in timeout for a week after he posted a link to a video in which he urged followers to get their “battle rifles and everything ready at their bedsides” in case Chinese Communists attacked Americans in the middle of the night. Other media platforms, including Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube, blocked Jones earlier this month, but Twitter held out, saying Jones had not violated its terms of service.

In the last week of 2016, I lined up at the box office to see Rogue One, the Star Wars prequel. I had not heard much about it beforehand, so I was startled by the appearance of Grand Moff Tarkin (villain of Star Wars: A New Hope), played by the original actor from 1977. Peter Cushing had been dead for 22 years, but his head was masterfully superimposed on the body of a live actor. The appearance of a young Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in the last moment of the film enhanced the creep factor, as her death on Dec. 27 was still headline news.

The CEO of Twitter defended late Tuesday his company’s decision not to ban Infowars’ Alex Jones the way other social media platforms have. Jack Dorsey explained that Jones had not violated Twitter’s terms of service. Dorsey said the company did not want to take “one-off actions to make us feel good in the short term, and adding fuel to new conspiracy theories.” Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple all have deleted accounts, videos, and podcasts of Jones’ in the past week.

Social media platforms are cracking down on Infowars’ Alex Jones. Facebook announced Monday it had deleted pages belonging to Jones and suspended his account, while YouTube, Spotify, and Apple removed videos and podcasts he created. Jones’ followers consider him a journalist and commentator who tells stories the mainstream media ignore, while others call him a conspiracy theorist who incites violence. The social media platforms that banished him said he violated their terms of service for hate speech.

Recently I wrote an article about three public intellectuals who are influencing the minds of young people: Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. They’re three very different styles of thinkers. Peterson is a dour-faced, thinking-out-loud Jungian psychologist in Toronto who can pontificate about life’s inevitable sufferings for three hours. Shapiro is a barb-tongued, Orthodox Jewish pundit who led the Never Trump movement.

CNN’s Jim Acosta gave a dramatic performance this week when he demanded that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders disavow President Donald Trump’s declaration that certain media outlets are the “enemy of the people.”

Acosta nearly ordered Sanders: You should say otherwise, right here, right now.

On July 21, Los Angeles lost one of its greatest cultural icons. Jonathan Gold, a Los Angeles Times food writer born and raised (and beloved) in LA, died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 57, leaving behind his wife of 28 years and two children ages 23 and 15.