Category: Recommended

Every day Google and Facebook and other tech companies become more powerful and sophisticated by analyzing you and your choices—what you click on, how long you pause to watch an ad or a YouTube video—and the stories you write and the songs you record, and they charge advertisers money to access this information, and grow their own companies with it, but they don’t pay you for your contribution. They don’t even really acknowledge that you are contributing, as if artificial intelligence came from nowhere, instead of from data derived from you and me. “In the information age,” Lanier said, “we’re all workers and consumers and entrepreneurs at the same time.” What if, Lanier suggested, we got paid for our labor in this system? By recognizing the roles we play in building the future, Lanier said, we might give ourselves a chance to be meaningful participants in it. “When a person is empowered to make a difference, they become more of a full person,” he said. “They awaken spiritually.”

In the Stauffers’ case, most of the vitriol was aimed at Myka. One Instagram account, Cancel Myka Stauffer, which goes by the handle @mykastauffer.liar, has more than 11,000 followers. An online petition with more than 154,000 supporters demanded that Myka’s monetized videos with Huxley be removed from YouTube. Followers appeared angry not only on behalf of Huxley but also because Myka had committed the ultimate influencer sin: ghosting on those who’d become invested in her story right when the plot twisted.

As Trump seeks reëlection, some of the toughest criticism on his foreign policy is from other Republicans, including a scathing joint condemnation last week by seventy-five senior Republican officials from four Administrations. “Without question, Trump has denigrated our standing with friends and with foes. They all think less of us,” Richard Armitage, one of the signatories, and the Deputy Secretary of State during the George W. Bush Administration and Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan Administration, told me. “Our standing globally has not been this low since the end of the Cold War and probably not since before World War Two. . . . People don’t really care about us. They’re so over us because of this guy.”

The great irony, and outrage, of Pence’s speech is that, as the head of the White House’s coronavirus task force since February, he’s had a unique and closeup view of Trump’s actual response to the pandemic. The constant belittling of the virus’s threat; the claims that it would go away of its own accord; the quack remedies, including injecting disinfectant into stricken patients; the squabbling with governors, even Republican ones, who called out the inadequacy of his actions; the urging states to reopen their economies even as they failed to meet the guidelines that Pence’s task force had laid down; the months of defiant refusal to wear a mask; and, in the end, the decision to effectively give up on the whole thing and move on.

The problem, of course, is that America as we know it is currently in the midst of a mess not of Biden’s making but of Trump’s. Suffice it to say that, by the time Trump’s speech was over and the red, white, and blue fireworks spelling out “2020” had been set off over the National Mall, late Thursday night, more than three thousand seven hundred Americans had died of the coronavirus since the start of the Convention—more than perished on 9/11—and a hundred and eighty thousand Americans total had succumbed to the disease, a disease that Trump repeatedly denied was even a threat. His botched handling of the pandemic was the very reason that his Convention was taking place on the White House lawn in the first place.

While Lucky Peach’s culture was casual and frequently profane, former staffers say that Meehan revelled in his propensity for over-the-top insults and descriptions of violence, which struck a dissonant chord coming from their boss. Of a contributor who wouldn’t translate a piece he reported for the magazine, Meehan wrote in an email in 2016, “I’m gonna mouthbarf seeing that half-bald sweater-wearing pussy’s name printed in my magazine if he’s unwilling to do the basic legwork of the relatively simple fucking task at hand.” Multiple staffers describe Meehan recounting a time he threatened another employee by saying he would shove a “golf umbrella” up his ass and open it. (This former employee says Meehan never said this to him).

When Charlie Chaplin watched “Triumph of the Will,” his immediate impulse, according to Luis Buñuel, was to burst into laughter. The orator onscreen seemed to be an insane variation on Chaplin’s Little Tramp persona, down to the toothbrush mustache. The experience unnerved him, though, as it did many leftist filmmakers who witnessed the technical virtuosity of German cinema being applied to sinister ends. In 1940, Chaplin released “The Great Dictator,” a lavish satire of Hitler’s histrionics. Inevitably, Wagner is on the soundtrack, yet Chaplin makes the surprising choice to detach the music from the Nazi context. The ethereal prelude to “Lohengrin,” suggesting the sacred power of the Holy Grail, is heard twice in the film, serving first to puncture Nazi iconography and then to amplify a message of peace.

In March, 2018, BuzzFeed began publishing a series of articles based on the records and announced plans to publish them in its own online database. Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch was so alarmed that he asked city officials to identify the source of what he termed “stolen records” and to “hold those responsible accountable.” No such efforts were made, but the city’s law department directed the Municipal Library to restrict access to its archive of personnel orders, a library official confirmed. “I couldn’t believe that I was watching a progressive mayor remove from public view records of government misconduct from a public archive,” Conti-Cook said.

This strikes many people of color as disingenuous. “How about when the rights of Hispanics, Black Americans, and Muslims are trampled on?” an activist in Lansing said. “Where are these rallies? Where is all this outcry? We don’t see it.” Attorney General Nessel, who, as a private lawyer, successfully challenged Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage in a case that, along with others, was upheld by the Supreme Court, told me, “You didn’t see these people who now refuse to enforce the Governor’s orders saying, ‘Well, if you’re a county clerk and you don’t like the law, go ahead and start handing out marriage licenses to same-sex couples.’ These same sheriffs would have been horrified had that happened.”

It was a sign of impending doom, to some, when earlier this summer Parscale began coming in more often just as the target on his back swelled to carnival proportions. The polls? Trump trailed his almost-invisible challenger by double digits nationally and by a considerable margin in most battleground states. The messaging? Well, you try to “spin” six months in which 160,000 Americans died and at least 5 million more were infected by a virus you first said wouldn’t be much to worry about. Six months in which your best case for reelection — the greatest economy in the world — was destroyed too. The offense? Trump couldn’t even settle on a nickname for Joe Biden. Was he “Sleepy Joe,” or “Creepy Joe,” or “Beijing Biden”? That tiny Tulsa rally Parscale had organized — which followed weeks of massive hype — preceded a spike in coronavirus infections in the city that, local officials said, was probably born of the event, where the guest list included Herman Cain, who later died. Meanwhile, nationwide, there was civil unrest that Trump, whose political career had begun with a media tour to promote a racist conspiracy theory called birtherism, was unfit to handle. Yet there was an attitude, naïve and cocky, that led Parscale to compare the campaign to the Death Star, ready to fire but with no apparent idea where to aim. What was next? Locusts? How could the circumstances be any worse? The campaign was in a hole so deep it was actually historic — a deficit not just bigger, at this point in the race, than any an incumbent had ever overcome, but bigger than any an incumbent had ever even faced.