Though it’s been a few years since the last edition, this site has long offered a sporadic post category known as “Real or Fake?”. I explained its origins way back in 2009:

For years, I’ve enjoyed a game with some friends called “Real or The Onion?”. To play, one person presents a headline or story and everyone else must decide if this is an actual story or merely a fabrication by that excellent humor site The Onion. Invariably, these stories are in fact real, but sound as if they belong in The Onion. I suppose it’s not really much of a game, so much as a pithier name for “the activity of linking to articles that should be fake, but are in actuality real”.

Recently, however, I saw a very real headline about The Onion: “The Onion files Supreme Court amicus brief defending the right to parody”.

“The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks,” the brief says.

Good for them, and for all of us.