While You Were Offline: Well, Now We've Seen a Man's Soul Leave His Body on Live TV

Oh, what a week it's been! Pornhub revealed the Fetish States of America (lesbians, congratulations on continuing your dominance of the straight male mind), the Republican presidential race literally turned into a discourse about penis size, and Kendrick Lamar dropped a new EP with no notice on Thursday night. But that's nowhere near all that happened over the last seven days. As we do this time each week, shall we take a trip together through the weird backwood swamp of this Internet we all call home?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60wWGMmO7M8
What Happened: He might have withdrawn from the race, but nonetheless, Chris Christie won Super Tuesday thanks to a performance presenting Donald Trump that got everyone talking.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: You've doubtlessly already seen Donald Trump's victory speech from this Tuesday's election results, but if not it's above.

What caught everyone's attention wasn't what Trump was saying, but what was happening behind Trump. Chris Christie's performance, somewhere between panicked and confused, very quickly became a thing, with people either worried or amused by what they saw.

Twitter was, of course, ready to weigh in with instant commentary:

Things reached such fever pitch that Christie was forced to hold a press conference in which he actually said, "No, I wasn't being held hostage; no, I wasn't sitting up there saying, 'Oh, my God" ... I understand everybody had a lot of fun with it; it doesn't matter to me. I've had a lot of fun on the Internet with people at times, too." Sure, perhaps. But this much fun?

The Takeaway: Of course, that was earlier this week. Things have probably changed since th—

What Happened: Does Kanye West use Pirate Bay? After a picture he tweeted appeared to suggest the answer was yes, the Internet pounced (and Kanye parried).

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Ah, what would a week on the Internet be without Kanye doing something ridiculous? This week, however, it was seemingly by accident, as this tweet (below) ended up revealing more news than he probably intended. Namely, that Kanye's browser tabs included The Pirate Bay, a fact that was not missed by many, likely to Ye's embarrassment.

It got stranger, as Kanye was seemingly torrenting Serum, the sound-editing software from Xfer Records, created by Deadmau5, who just so happened to have co-founded Tidal with Kanye. He noticed.

As should only be expected, this did not go down well with Mr. West.

It was an unusually underwhelming Twitter beef considering those involved, which of course meant that plenty of people noticed. No news as yet if Deadmau5 has launched a LivingMinni3 spinoff inspired by the exchange, sadly.

The Takeaway: Perhaps the funniest part of the entire thing was the suggestion by Kanye West's publicity team that it clearly wasn't actually Kanye's own computer, but a screenshot of someone else's that he was using to illustrate piracy's dangers.

What Happened: The first trailer for an upcoming biopic of musician/activist/all-round-badass Nina Simone dropped, reigniting an argument about whether or not Zoe Saldana was right for the lead role.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Nina Simone was an amazing, and amazingly complicated, woman—one watch of the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? makes that clear—which would make a biopic of her life an obvious choice. Less obvious, however, is the choice of actress to play Simone. Producers went for Avatar and *Star Trek'*s Zoe Saldana, and this week, audiences got their first look at her in the role.

If you're thinking, "Wait. Is Zoe Saldana wearing blackface in that movie?" then you're not alone. A lot of other people asked the same question.

The official Twitter account of Simone's estate was somewhat more direct.

Unsurprisingly, that tweet grabbed much attention when posted, but at least one person is standing up for Saldana: Robert L. Johnson, founder of BET—which just happens to be distributing the movie. "The most important thing is that creativity or quality of performance should never be judged on the basis of color, or ethnicity, or physical likeness," he said in a statement. Which might explain the origin of this hashtag:

The Takeaway: Yes, race is a complicated issue, and it's true to an extent that actors shouldn't be judged on their physical likeness to their (real world) roles. But, at the same time, didn't we just go through something like this?

What Happened: Lena Dunham got upset that a magazine had Photoshopped her appearance on its latest cover. Only problem is, it actually hadn't.

Where It Blew Up: Instagram, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Lena Dunham took to Instagram this week to complain about the fact that her photo on the cover of El Pais' Tentaciones magazine had been Photoshopped without her permission:

Her comments were picked up and widely shared, prompting new discussion about the use of Photoshop and retouching of women's photographs in popular culture.

There was just one problem, as the response from El Pais made clear. "Of course, we are aware that any media outlet needs to be responsible for what it publishes, but this photo was previously approved by the agency, the photographer and your publicist," the paper's open letter revealed. "We acquired the photo via the Corbis agency, and we used the original that they sent us without applying any kind of retouching." To prove it, they shared the original image (and to make nice, they offered Dunham a subscription to the magazine).

Dunham replied, once again, via Instagram:

The Takeaway: Is this a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing, because the left hand had agreed to being retouched so that the right hand couldn't even recognize it?

What Happened: We all love food, but you know what would make food better? America's greatest living actress, demonstrating her versatility once again.

Where It Blew Up: Instagram, media think pieces

What Really Happened: And talking about actresses and Photoshopping ... look, there's no way to properly introduce it, so we're just going to share some examples of the latest Instagram feed that people are going wild over.

Welcome to Taste of Streep, an Instagram account that really does just mash-up Meryl and food. It's a simple appeal, sure, but one that's won over a lot of people in the the last few days. It's easy to see why: Not only is it a gloriously stupid idea, but it's one that no one realized they needed until they saw it. We can only hope for high-quality rip-offs to debut any minute now: Vin Diesel morphed into the side of trucks, called "Van Diesel," perhaps.

The Takeaway: How could anyone hope to add anything to this?

Enjoy it while it lasts. It's only a matter of time before you've seen this kind of thing so often that you lose your appetite.