Michael Moynihan for the Daily Beast:

As best I can tell, everyone on the Internet is upset, their tender feelings inflamed by insensitive jokes, panting with exhaustion from the endless search for new outrages, demanding that people they don’t know offer them abject apologies for saying things they don’t like. This, it seems, is why the Internet exists—to remind us that different people who think different things are funny, that some people think nothing is funny, and others who get a perverse joy in watching well-known people, fearful their bank accounts will deflate, prostrate themselves before the public, expressing “disappointment” in their true selves.

So how does one achieve forgiveness from the permanently offended? Well, in the most extreme situations, there is always the shame-faced march to rehab (“It was the booze that inspired my Wagnarian fits of anti-Semitism, because such profanities don’t exist in my heart”). There is, however, a much cheaper option: the ritualistic public apology. As public pressure mounts on the offender, threatening to damage their own “brand” or a company’s earnings, a carefully crafted apology is released into the wild, America’s wounds are salved, and the braying mob moves on to its next victim. Nothing has changed, of course, but nothing was meant to have changed.

The whole article is thought-provoking and truly these kind of apologies need to go.