Thanks for the recommendation! Sounds like a great book.
Small nitpick: you write that Janet Flanner wrote dispatches from Paris for The New Yorker magazine "from the 1920s into the 1940s." I remember reading her pieces well into the 1970s. And Wikipedia confirms that she wrote them "from 1925 until she retired in 1975." (She lived 1892-1978.)
During the 2024 campaign, after years of attacking the media as “enemies of the people,” Donald Trump presented himself as not a scourge of free speech but as its champion, promising to be a President who would reclaim this most fundamental right from the “left-wing censorship regime.” In his second Inaugural Address, on January 20, 2025, he pledged to reverse “years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression,” promising to sign an executive order that same day “to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” After pausing for a standing ovation led by his new Vice-President, the self-styled free-speech warrior J. D. Vance, Trump added, “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents. Something I know something about. We will not allow that to happen, it will not happen again. Under my leadership we will restore fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”
There are many brazen falsehoods that have shaped Trump’s second term thus far, but this might be the most offensive lie of them all—because it is this President’s systematic campaign to stamp out dissent and punish those who disagree with him that will be remembered as among the most singularly un-American aspects of his disruptive tenure. Donald Trump relies on the First Amendment when he belittles, denigrates, humiliates, and slurs his opponents. The First Amendment protected him when he lied during the campaign about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, and the First Amendment protected him last week when he reposted a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. But it is now clear that he sees the Constitution as something that applies only to those who agree with him. For everyone else, this is not the free-speech Presidency he promised but a free-speech crackdown without modern precedent.
On Tuesday evening, it was revealed that Trump’s Justice Department had sought to indict six members of Congress for the alleged crime of recording a video with a message for U.S. troops—that members of the military are not required to obey illegal orders—which enraged the President. In much of Washington, this development was greeted with horror, but also with a sigh of relief, because the grand jurors in D.C. who had been presented with the bogus criminal case took the extraordinarily unusual step of rejecting the proposed indictment against the “Seditious Six,” as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called them. On Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction against another effort by the Trump Administration to punish one of the six lawmakers, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain whom Hegseth had moved to censure and retroactively demote. In a scathing decision, Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Defense Department had “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms” and denounced its arguments as “horsefeathers!”
By all means, let’s cheer these heartening signs of the backbone and integrity of everyday Americans in the face of once unthinkable attacks on our democracy. But best to remember, too, that what Trump is pursuing here is an attempted criminalization of political speech the likes of which has never happened.
Scroll through the list of members of Congress who have been convicted of crimes over the two hundred and fifty years of American history. There have been plenty of crooks, Democrats and Republicans alike, who took bribes or extorted them. But you’d have to go back to 1798 to find the one disgraceful example of a congressman prosecuted for exercising his constitutional right to free speech: Matthew Lyons, of Connecticut, was convicted and jailed for four months after publishing an editorial critical of President John Adams in violation of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which, thankfully, have long since been repealed and repudiated.
The point is this: not even during the violent rupture of the Civil War or the Red Scare crackdown of the First World War or the worst excesses of McCarthyism did any President attempt what Trump has this week. He failed with one indictment and one grand jury, but he has three more years to go. Can anyone say confidently that he will not succeed when he tries once again to jail his political opponents for speaking out against him, as he seems so intent upon doing?
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker based in Washington, D.C., writes a weekly column on life in Washington and is a host of the Political Scene podcast.
Last week—after the Wall Street Journal broke more news about the Trump family’s dodgy crypto-business dealings and before the President shared a racist video of the Obamas depicted as dancing apes—the Amazon entrepreneur Jeff Bezos decided that one of his smaller properties, the Washington Post, has proved such a drag on his two-hundred-and-thirty-billion-dollar fortune that prudence required that he obliterate much of its newsroom.
Early in his proprietorship, Bezos endorsed a new motto for the paper: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It turns out that one of democracy’s most celebrated media institutions can be strangled in broad daylight.
On Wednesday, Bezos and the paper’s leadership fired a third of the staff. They shuttered or vastly reduced an array of sections. Lizzie Johnson, one of the Post’s leading foreign correspondents, received her digital pink slip while working in the war zone of Ukraine. Bezos did not offer his staff the decency of a public explanation, much less a gesture of generosity or regret. The publisher and C.E.O. Will Lewis did not appear on the “webinar” at which the cuts were explained to the staff. He did, however, manage to head off to the Super Bowl festivities. By Saturday evening, Lewis had resigned. His work was done. He will be succeeded by the paper’s chief financial officer, Jeff D’Onofrio, who has held posts at Tumblr, Google, and Yahoo.
As someone who worked happily at the Post for a decade a long time ago, and as an ardent reader of the paper, I am sick about all this. I feel like someone forced to watch an arsonist torch the house he grew up in. I cannot imagine how it must feel for the current staff and the hundreds forced to leave. If that is sentimentality or worse, well, then guilty as charged. The loss is terrible, the behavior is beyond heedless. The reporters and editors who remain at the Post will undoubtedly go on doing honorable work, but they must now do so for a proprietor who shows them no respect. And that is no way to live. (Ruth Marcus, a writer and editor at the paper for more than forty years, brings home superbly the anger and the sadness of the situation.)
Over the years, in these pages, I’ve written about both the former owner Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, the paper’s Watergate-era editor; for all their complexities, these were figures who built a great newspaper out of a mediocre one, who developed an institution that worked not only in the interest of financial gain but of democratic vitality. That standard of quality endured, but, by 2013, Don Graham, a decent man and a devoted publisher who inherited the leadership of the company from his mother, came to realize that the revolutions in technology and the declines in advertising were so severe that he no longer had the capacity to invest effectively in the paper. After a long search, he sold the Post to Bezos, a vastly wealthier owner who promised to be an effective custodian.
For a while that worked; under Marty Baron, the paper was fiercely competitive, and thrived during Trump’s first term in office. Bezos was a decidedly detached owner, but he gave the newsroom what it needed and invested in both journalism and the technological support it requires.
But during the Biden years, readership declined and, by 2024, as Trump headed toward a second election victory, Bezos clearly reassessed his interests and his sense of risk. His timidity prevailed. He quashed the paper’s impending endorsement of Kamala Harris. He sat in Oligarch Row at the Inauguration. He instructed the Opinion section to set a new, more conservative course. These were his prerogatives, many argued, but they were hardly wise. With every move, more subscribers fled—surely one of the worst own goals in the history of the news business.
Undoubtedly, Bezos believes that all the criticism that has come his way is naïve, self-righteous, and terribly unfair. How could his critics possibly understand the business the way he does? In some sense, every aggressive story on the Administration that the paper publishes allows Bezos to tell himself that he has not retreated at all.
For the sake of financial and moral context, perhaps this is as good a time as any to remind ourselves of the maritime interests of the Post’s proprietor. Some commentators have mentioned that Bezos, in order to better support the Post, might have held on to the tens of millions of dollars he spent to bankroll “Melania,” a documentary portrait of the First Lady worthy of a long run at the Pyongyang Cinematheque. Cooler financial heads will contend that this is a cheap point. The Post’s losses are more significant. And they are right. Better then to turn to one of the Amazon founder’s more expensive recreations, his 125.8-metre, three-masted sailing yacht, Koru. (No need to get into the details of Abeona, the seventy-five-million-dollar “shadow boat” that trails Koru and provides a helipad and adequate space for extra staff.)
Koru cost an estimated five hundred million dollars. This is double what Bezos paid for the Washington Post. Annual maintenance runs tens of millions of dollars. It is, to be sure, a very special boat. According to Architectural Digest, “Bezos’s superyacht has a classical style, with a navy-blue steel hull and a two-level white aluminum superstructure. The ship’s teak decks include spots for outdoor lounging as well as three Jacuzzis and a swimming pool. Robb Report notes that the hull features traditional portholes, while the upper deck windows are smaller than typical, which might help to foil paparazzi trying to capture guests inside.” If that information about the boat is not galling enough, there is more: the Journal published a story on Friday by Richard Rubin headlined “Trump’s New Tax Law Saved Amazon Billions.” But the Ukraine correspondent had to go.
In the world of tech, so many of the leading tycoons and V.C. geniuses have a way of convincing themselves that because they have made a fortune, because they know one big thing, they know everything. Everyone else is a Luddite or a dewy-eyed fool. Maybe Bezos will find a way to stay in good odor with a vindictive President and, at the same time, transform the Post so that it can “do more with less,” and all those other whiteboard phrases popular from Wall Street to Palo Alto. No one doubts that change, even painful change, is necessary. But the scale of the cuts last week, coupled with the lack of any sense of a strategy other than retreat, is beyond demoralizing. Bezos has made it plain that his commitment to the Post, to say nothing of his performative talk about democracy, has diminished to the vanishing point.
The Post is hardly the first major American publication to face a financial crisis. It wasn’t so long ago that the Times was caught in an existential fix. Who would buy it, people asked knowingly, the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim or Michael Bloomberg? And yet the Sulzberger family, with a tiny fraction of the Bezos fortune but infinitely greater determination and integrity, found a way to thrive.
Bezos, by contrast, is immersed in his primary business, a space race, an active vacation life, and much else. After a promising beginning at the paper, he just does not seem to have the focus or the courage to do what is necessary to guide the Post through an unstable and threatening era. With Trump in office, he refuses to see that, although the Post is valued less in financial terms than his yacht, he is responsible for a priceless commodity. Will he rock the boat? Will he ultimately do the right thing? So far, the evidence offers only misery.
Editor’s Note: Thank you, David Remnick, good article and journalism. The dying of a national newspaper, which all my life I was proud of say, “Independent,” but no more. –DrWeb
David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He has written hundreds of pieces for the magazine, including reporting from Russia, the Middle East, and Europe and Profiles of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton,…
In August, I reported that the President and his family had made $3.4 billion by leveraging his position. After his first year back in office, the number has ballooned.
By David D. Kirkpatrick, January 31, 2026 Illustration by Erik Carter At the start of Donald Trump’s first term, he promised that he and his family would never do anything that might even be “perceived to be exploitive of office of t
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Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion – The New Yorker
In August, I reported that the President and his family had made $3.4 billion by leveraging his position. After his first year back in office, the number has ballooned.
By David D. Kirkpatrick, January 31, 2026 Illustration by Erik Carter At the start of Donald Trump’s first term, he promised that he and his family would never do anything that might even be “perceived to be exploitive of office of the Presidency.” By contrast, his second term looks rapacious. He and members of his family have signed a blitz of foreign mega-deals shadowed by conflicts of interest, and they’ve launched at least five different cryptocurrency enterprises, all of which leverage Trump’s status as President to lure buyers or investors. Ethics watchdogs say that no other President has ever so nakedly exploited his position, or on such a scale. Trump recently explained to the Times why he cast aside his former restraint: “I found out that nobody cared.”
Is Trump right about the public’s nonchalance?
Last summer, I tallied how much money he and his immediate family had made off his high office. My method was conservative. It seemed unfair to begrudge Trump the profits from the many businesses he owned before entering the White House. So I excluded from my calculation preëxisting hotels, condos, and golf courses, along with plausible extensions of those long-standing businesses. Likewise, Trump is hardly the first President to trade access or potential influence for political fund-raising, and he generally cannot spend such money on personal expenses, so I set that aside, too. Lastly, I left out funny-money assets he couldn’t readily cash out without setting off a fire sale that would eviscerate their value, such as his shares in the company behind Truth Social, his social-media platform.
Even excluding all that, by August, the Presidential profiteering reached $3.4 billion. (You can review my judgments in the article, “The Number.”) And since then the First Family has kept busy. The end of Trump’s first year in office seemed an opportune time for an update. Did the family business slow down or speed up for the Trumps?
AMERICAN BITCOIN REDUX
Many investors and consumers understandably distrust cryptocurrency and digital finance. Crypto heists are alarmingly common, and the best-known uses of digital currency are money laundering and casino-like financial speculation. President Trump himself, before his most recent campaign, maintained that Bitcoin “seems like a scam” and that crypto “can facilitate unlawful behavior.” But an association with a sitting President can furnish a valuable credibility boost. Think of the premium that investors will pay for U.S. Treasury bonds compared to notes from some little-known bank. That appears, in a nutshell, to be the Trump family’s strategy with crypto.
The Trumps’ first windfall since my August tally occurred through American Bitcoin, a company that mines new bitcoin with the intent to hoard it. (Under the algorithm that created bitcoin, miners get paid in new tokens for the computer work of tracking digital transactions.) Last spring, Eric and Donald Trump, Jr., contributed their family name—and nothing else of obvious value—to a complicated series of transactions that yielded them approximately a thirteen-per-cent stake in American Bitcoin.
Eric, who is now listed as its co-founder and chief strategy officer, has become the company’s public face. If Eric and Donald, Jr.,’s father had lost the 2024 election, surely no one would have handed them such a large stake in a business that they had virtually no experience in and to which they had contributed so little—so their stake should be categorized as Presidential profit. In August, I calculated that the brothers’ thirteen-per-cent stake in the company’s computer hardware alone added at least thirteen million dollars to the family’s profiteering tally.
In September, the company floated shares on the stock market, capitalizing in another way on the cachet of the Trump name. American Bitcoin merged with a penny-stock bitcoin miner as a way of going public without the cost—or scrutiny—of an initial public offering. And the stock market, as expected, has put a far higher price on the company, in part because it owns a stockpile of bitcoin. The brothers’ stake now appears to be worth around two hundred million dollars. A caveat: Eric Trump, as a large and active investor in American Bitcoin, must report any sale of shares, and that might trigger a selloff. So it seems excessive to add it all to the Presidential-profit ledger. I will add only the approximate value of Donald Trump, Jr.,’s stake: about a hundred million dollars.
The number in August: $3.4 billion Additional profit: $100 million New total: $3.5 billion
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
David D. Kirkpatrick is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he started his career as a fact checker. In the interim, he worked for twenty-two years as a reporter for the New York Times, in New York, Washington, Cairo, and London.
In a prime-time address from the Oval Office last week, Donald Trump said, “We are poised for an economic boom the likes of which the world has never seen.” This was the sort of bloviating that has convinced many voters he’s hopelessly out of touch, but it did raise the question of how the economy is likely to perform in 2026, a midterm-election year. Given the data fog that the government shutdown created, the old joke applies more than ever: it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. But some things seem reasonably clear.
Right now, the economy is working in the Democrats’ favor. Concerns about affordability have refused to abate: the latest weekly poll by YouGov/The Economist indicates that Americans still consider “inflation/prices” to be the most important policy issue, and just a third of them approve of how Trump is handling it. Meanwhile, it looks like G.D.P. growth for 2025 will come in at about two per cent—one percentage point lower than it was in the last two years of the Biden Administration—and the unemployment rate is ticking up. When Joe Biden left office, it was four per cent; now it is 4.6 per cent.
Still, November is a long way away, and observers outside the Oval Office, including Jerome Powell and his colleagues at the Fed, have been raising their estimates of how the economy might perform in the New Year. “Fiscal policy is going to be supportive. And, as I mentioned, A.I. spending will continue,” Powell said at a press conference earlier this month. “The consumer continues to spend. So, it looks like the baseline will be solid growth next year.” Many economists on Wall Street concur. In releasing its global outlook for 2026 last week, Goldman Sachs upped its prediction for U.S. growth to 2.6 per cent: “The US is likely to outperform substantially . . . because of reduced tariff drag, tax cuts, and easier financial conditions.”
The A.I. boom certainly can’t be dismissed. According to analysts at Barclays, about half of all the G.D.P. growth in 2025 stemmed from “spending on data centers, chips, power grids, networking equipment and other AI-related capital expenditure.” Going into 2026, corporate investment in A.I. shows no signs of slacking. The Fed likely isn’t done cutting interest rates, and come next April and beyond, tax refunds stemming from the budget-busting One Big Beautiful Bill Act will also be material: according to the Tax Foundation, they will average about three hundred to a thousand dollars more than usual per household. Other things being equal, the refunds will likely give a boost to consumer spending.
With Trump in the Oval Office, however, other things are rarely equal. Disruption is his essence. A big reason for G.D.P. growth slowing this year and prices remaining stubbornly high is that Trump’s ever-changing tariff policies created an enormous amount of uncertainty and raised the cost of imported goods.
When economists talk of tariff relief, they are assuming that things will be more settled in 2026—but will they? Some businesses are still in the process of passing along the tariff hikes to consumers. The Supreme Court could well rule that Trump’s blanket levies, which he introduced using emergency powers, are illegal, but that wouldn’t necessarily be the end of them. The Administration would surely try to rejigger the levies using different legal authorities, which create another round of anxiety and uncertainty for businesses, particularly small businesses.
History’s Judgment of Those Who Go Along – The New Yorker
History’s Judgment of Those Who Go Along
Some civil servants and senior officials in the Trump Administration are experiencing bouts of conscience.
By Michael Luo, December 14, 2025 Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photographs from Getty The second Presidency of Donald Trump has been unprecedented in myriad ways, perhaps above all in the way that he has managed to cajole, cow, or simply command people in his Administration to carry out even his most undemocratic wishes with remarkably little dissent. Some civil servants and senior officials, however, are experiencing bouts of conscience. In March, Erez Reuveni, a veteran Justice Department lawyer, was pr
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History’s Judgment of Those Who Go Along – The New Yorker
History’s Judgment of Those Who Go Along
Some civil servants and senior officials in the Trump Administration are experiencing bouts of conscience.
By Michael Luo, December 14, 2025 Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photographs from Getty The second Presidency of Donald Trump has been unprecedented in myriad ways, perhaps above all in the way that he has managed to cajole, cow, or simply command people in his Administration to carry out even his most undemocratic wishes with remarkably little dissent. Some civil servants and senior officials, however, are experiencing bouts of conscience. In March, Erez Reuveni, a veteran Justice Department lawyer, was promoted to the position of acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation. He decided to personally take on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been wrongly sent back to El Salvador, in violation of a 2019 court order. On April 5th, Reuveni told his supervisor he would not sign an appeal brief that said Abrego Garcia was a “terrorist.” According to a whistle-blower complaint that Reuveni later filed, he said, “I didn’t sign up to lie.” He was suspended and then fired.
Other career prosecutors have chosen to step down. In February, when Trump officials moved to dismiss corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, it triggered resignations from Danielle R. Sassoon, the interim United States Attorney in Manhattan, and from Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, the two officials in charge of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. In September, Erik Siebert, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, resigned, after his investigations into Letitia James and James Comey stalled and Trump demanded that he be fired.
There has been turnover in senior ranks of the military as well. In October, Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, abruptly announced that he would retire at the end of the year. Tensions had reportedly been mounting between Holsey and the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, particularly over the admiral’s concerns about the legality of drone strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. Now military experts have raised the possibility of war crimes, as lawmakers investigate a drone operation on September 2nd that destroyed a boat and killed everyone on board.
Share this via Email Jon Stewart has been a leading figure in political comedy since before the turn of the millennium. But compared to his early years on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show”—when Stewart was merciless in his attacks on George W. Bush’s Administration—these are much more challenging times for late-night comedians.
Jimmy Kimmel nearly lost his job over a remark about MAGA supporters of Charlie Kirk, after the head of the F.C.C. threatened ABC. CBS recently announced the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s program. And Stewart now finds himself very near the hot seat: Comedy Central is controlled by David Ellison, the Trump-friendly C.E.O. of the recently merged Paramount Skydance.
Stewart’s contract comes up in December. “You’re going to sign another one?” David Remnick asked him, in a live interview at The New Yorker Festival. “We’re working on staying,” Stewart said. “You don’t compromise on what you do. You do it till they tell you to leave. That’s all you can do.” Stewart, moreover, doesn’t blame solely Donald Trump for recent attacks on the independence of the media, universities, and other institutions.
“This is the hardest truth for us to get at, is that [these] institutions . . . have problems. They do. And, if we don’t address those problems in a forthright way, then those institutions become vulnerable to this kind of assault. Credibility is not something that was just taken. It was also lost.”
In fact, Stewart also directs his ire at “the Democratic Party, [which] thinks it’s O.K. for their Senate to be an assisted-living facility.” “In the general-populace mind, government no longer serves the interests of the people it purports to represent. That’s a broad-based, deep feeling. And that helps when someone comes along and goes, ‘The system is rigged,’ and people go, ‘Yeah, it is rigged.’ Now, he’s a good diagnostician. I don’t particularly care for his remedy.”
This episode was recorded live at The New Yorker Festival, on October 26, 2025. Produced by The New Yorker and WNYC Studios
The “Daily Show” host talks with David Remnick about his contract with Paramount Skydance, the government’s attack on political satire, and how our institutions got so weak.
Jon Allsop A contributing writer who covers politics.
Yesterday, April M. Perry, a federal judge, barred the Trump Administration from deploying the National Guard in Illinois, for at least the next fourteen days.
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The New Yorker Daily Newsletter – October 10, 2025
Jon Allsop A contributing writer who covers politics.
Yesterday, April M. Perry, a federal judge, barred the Trump Administration from deploying the National Guard in Illinois, for at least the next fourteen days. “I have seen no credible evidence that there is danger of rebellion in the state,” Perry noted from the bench. J. B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, who had been resisting the deployments to Chicago (and who Trump said this week “should be in jail”), celebrated the ruling on social media, writing, “Donald Trump is not a king—and his administration is not above the law.”
President Trump’s dispatching of military personnel to American cities—including Portland, Oregon, where litigation is also pending—could be described in many such authoritarian-esque terms. Certainly, “popular” does not appear to be one of them. Earlier this week, CNN’s Aaron Blake pointed out that clear majorities among the public seem to be against the practice: a recent poll from Quinnipiac University found that fifty-five per cent of respondents disapproved of the deployment of the National Guard, compared with forty-two per cent who approved; on Sunday, CBS News/YouGov reported an even higher rate of disapproval, and the same rate of support—forty-two per cent.
The late science-fiction author Douglas Adams once posited that the number forty-two was the answer to the ultimate question of “life, the universe and everything.” It might, at least, be the answer to the question, How popular is Donald Trump? The aforementioned CBS News/YouGov poll also pegged Trump’s over-all approval rating at forty-two per cent, and several polling averages put him either at that figure, or a point or so to either side. This past Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel, a recent subject of Trump’s ire, crowed that, per another poll, he is more popular than the President. “At this point, finding a toenail in your salad has a seven-point lead over Donald Trump,” Kimmel said.
Trump obviously isn’t buying these figures. On Sunday, he accused Fox News of refusing “to put up Polls that correctly show me at 65% in Popularity, a Republican RECORD.” Whatever he actually thinks, he is behaving as if it’s correct, which is no surprise. What might be surprising is that so many ostensibly powerful people—G.O.P. leadership in Congress, heads of major corporations—seem so eager to accede to the imperial demands of a President who is not racking up imperial numbers.
I have a few theories about why they are bowing to Trump. First, America’s political divides appear so entrenched that when support for a single person or policy manages to break through, it creates a narrative boost that is disproportionate to actual support. Trump could still be bathing in the glow of his election win last year, even though he did not quite get fifty per cent of the popular vote and his approval rating since taking office has steadily declined.
At the same time, if you’re a corporation or university or media outlet considering bowing to one of Trump’s demands, it’s a safe-ish bet that the cost will not be universal public disapprobation. Plus, Trump is the President now, wielding that office in expansively transactional ways: G.O.P. lawmakers clearly do not want to get on his bad side; corporations—especially those with pending regulatory business before the Administration—have reason to be on his good side. Some corporations, in particular, may be taking advantage of this moment to pursue changes they wanted to make anyway—curbing costly diversity initiatives, for example, or disowning thorny content-moderation responsibilities. (Both this and the regulatory angle are potential explanations for CBS News putting Bari Weiss in charge, which I wrote about earlier this week.)
The bleakest theory is that major civil-society actors are betting that the power of Trump’s populism is untethered from his actual popularity, given his anti-democratic impulses and his win-at-all-costs mentality—that, in effect, Trump is no longer accountable to the public. But I don’t think this is true. As Jonathan Schlefer wrote for Politico last month, populist leaders in recent decades who have succeeded in undoing relatively strong democracies had approval ratings above eighty per cent—much higher, even, than the figure Trump accused Fox of suppressing. And the President’s imperial conduct isn’t omnipotent; Kimmel, of course, is still on the air.
Even if Trump’s approval rating were eighty per cent, that wouldn’t justify his authoritarian behavior; the Constitution guarantees minority rights for a reason. Flattering Trump, or caving to his demands, may be a savvy short-term bet, but I’m not sure it’ll prove smart in the long run. On Wednesday, CNN’s Blake noted what he described as “the most underappreciated aspect” of the National Guard story: that most Americans seem to oppose deployments not just as a waste of time and resources but on principle. He pointed to a question from a Times/Siena survey, which asked respondents if they were more worried about crime spiralling out of control in the absence of the Guard, or about Trump using troops to intimidate his political opponents. Concern over abuses of power prevailed: fifty-one to—you guessed it—forty-two per cent.
Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It – The New Yorker
Berners-Lee is building tools that aim to resist the Big Tech platforms, give users control over their own data, and prevent A.I. from hollowing out the open web. Illustration by Tim Bouckley. Annals of Technology
Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It
In 1989, Sir Tim revolutionized the online world. Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again.
Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It – The New Yorker
Berners-Lee is building tools that aim to resist the Big Tech platforms, give users control over their own data, and prevent A.I. from hollowing out the open web. Illustration by Tim Bouckley. Annals of Technology
Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It
In 1989, Sir Tim revolutionized the online world. Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again.
Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on “Jeopardy!,” his name usually goes for at least sixteen hundred dollars. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, in 1989, but people informed of this often respond with a joke: Wasn’t that Al Gore? Still, his creation keeps growing, absorbing our reality in the process. If you’re reading this online, Berners-Lee wrote the hypertext markup language (HTML) that your browser is interpreting. He’s the necessary condition behind everything from Amazon to Wikipedia, and if A.I. brings about what Sam Altman recently called “the gentle singularity”—or else buries us in slop—that, too, will be an outgrowth of his global collective consciousness.
Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain. An emeritus professor at Oxford and M.I.T., he divides his time between the U.K., Canada, and Concord, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Rosemary Leith, live in a stout greige house older than the Republic. On the summer morning when I visited, geese honked and cicadas whined. Leith, an investor and a nonprofit director who co-founded a dot-com-era women’s portal called Flametree, greeted me at the door. “We’re basically guardians of the house,” she said, showing me its antique features. I almost missed Berners-Lee in the converted-barn kitchen, standing, expectantly, in a blue plaid shirt. He shook my hand, then glanced at Leith. “Are you a canoer?” she asked. Minutes later, he and I were gliding across a pond behind the house.
Berners-Lee is bronzed and wiry, with sharp cheekbones and faraway blue eyes, the right one underscored by an X-shaped wrinkle. There’s a recalcitrant blond tuft at the back of his balding head; in quiet moments, I could picture Ralph Fiennes playing him in a movie—the internet’s careworn steward, ruminating on some techno-political conundrum. A twitchier figure emerged when he spoke. He muttered and trailed off, eyes darting, or froze midsentence, as though to buffer, before delivering a verbal torrent. It was the arrhythmia of a disciplined demeanor struggling with a restless mind. “Tim has always been difficult to understand,” a former colleague of his told me. “He speaks in hypertext.”
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
years ago I purchased a license for this image from #TheNewYorker. I’m dropping it here in extreme violation of the license. I hope they, as my hubby often does, forgive me.
Elon #Musk is already the globally most influential fascist. (No, I'm not talking just about #X, formerly #Twitter.)
For those wondering about #ElonMusk's unprecedented power in satellites 🛰 and mobile internet-based communications, here is the #Starlink background story again (via #NYT):
From The New Yorker- Cartoon by Paul Noth “And, again, sir, I’m so sorry that I called you America’s Hitler, and so relieved that you took it as a compliment.” Cartoon by Paul Noth #TheNewYorker #Humor
