Words worth considering from Alan Jacobs:
Any real self-reckoning by American journalists should begin with the recognition that they do have “rigor and standards” but apply them in wildly inconsistent ways, depending on whether the reporting at issue flatters or challenges the beliefs of the assumed audience and of the newsroom itself.
The whole Jeffrey Goldberg/Signal chat story has the feeling of something that should be momentous, especially today after The Atlantic published the "war plans" portion of the chat thread. This information is something that, without doubt, a journalist shouldn't be privy to. Yet I can't quite shake the feeling this will simply turn out to be just another bump along the rocky road of Trump 2.0. What John Gruber posted yesterday hit the nail on the head: these guys are morons. No amount of public reckoning will bring the administration around to the idea that what they've done is wrong.
As a federal election gets underway in Canada, election officials are taking steps to guard against the spread of misinformation in the run up to the vote. According to the CBC, Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault has been in touch with the likes of X and TikTok about misinformation concerns. “We’ll see what action actually takes place during the election. Hopefully they won’t have to intervene, but if there are issues, hopefully they will be true to their word,” Perrault told the CBC.
Given recent statements made by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, misinformation spread on social media might be the least of Perrault’s worries.
Here’s a link to the 2004 Ron Suskind article quoted in Heather Cox Richardson’s post from March 21. Below is the quote plus the preceding paragraph, which provides some interesting context.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Where are the boys? I am in the town, looking outward. Time is space; the distance between me and the boys unravels the years before me. Come back to us, boys; come back to me. The multitudes within me are expanding and I am breaking at my seams. I am becoming my own universe, and the boys are nowhere to be seen.
That is the second-last paragraph of a piece written by Timothy Faust, published by Vice March 23, 2015. It is called I Played ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ on a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out and the whole thing is brilliant. I randomly came across a link to the article in a tweet by Paul Weedon, for which I am grateful.
Christian Lorentzen writes in the Washington Post:
But the American magazine is in a state of decay. Now known mostly as brands, once sumptuous print publications exist primarily as websites or YouTube channels, hosts for generic scribblings, the ever-ubiquitous “take.” Meanwhile, a thousand Substacks bloom, some of them very good, with writers in the emancipated state of being paid directly by their readers. Yet even in this atomized, editorless landscape, perverse incentives apply. Are you thirsty for another post about cancel culture or wokeness? Me neither. Yet culture war still largely rules the day.
This piece is a bit of a mess, starting off as something of an indictment of the decline of magazines, but quickly turns into a lament for the sort of publication that used to regularly publish the writer’s work.
However, it does point to one more shift in the publishing landscape, one that hasn’t been noticed quite as much as that affecting newspapers. Magazines like Bookforum (the object of Lorentzen’s piece) were once quite common, and articles published in literary or “intellectual” periodicals once played an outsized role in the broader discourse.
The opinion pages of daily newspapers relied frequently on fodder provided to them by publications such as the Atlantic, the New Yorker, or Harper’s. A magazine would publish a 10,000 word, mildly controversial think-piece and columnists would weigh in with 750 words of their own. Up and coming authors would have the opportunity to get valuable exposure with the sort of audience that would give their career a significant boost. Essayists had a forum in the days before the web provided such a forum to everyone. It’s hard to find a single publication now that can throw around this sort of cultural weight.
Now many of these publications are nowhere near as prominent as they once were. I would imagine if a site like Substack were to offer subscription bundles one might see a further erosion of this format. Book reviewers and essayists would be able to cast aside the need to accept a salary in exchange for their platform and could reach out to readers individually. This appears inevitable at this point.
I appreciate Lorentzen’s lament, however. At various times in my life I’ve been a subscriber to Harper’s, the Paris Review and the New York Review of Books. Each of these is still publishing, but each is also somewhat dated in their own way. Each has stayed true to its format, but the format has become an artifact of yesteryear. I feel a bit embarrassed that I had not heard of Bookforum before reading this piece, but was pleased that one of the writers tipped in it, Max Read, is among those I subscribe to on Substack. I hold some sentimentality for the literary magazine, but at this point I’m looking ahead to its successor rather than pining for the past.
If the New York Times has declared the Covid-19 pandemic over, I suppose it is. I was on the website having a look around and noted the Covid dashboard, now located much further down the page than it has been, had been changed. It now only shows a map of the United States, and the accompanying data is also focused on the U.S. When I searched for the world dashboard, I discovered the page has been archived as of March 10.
The Times says “global data on cases and deaths is no longer reported by our data source.” That source is Johns Hopkins University, which announced on Feb. 10 that it would be ending its data tracking on March 10. The post at JHU also indicates the data spanning Jan. 22, 2020 – March 10, 2023 will remain accessible going forward.
Of interest is the Lancet article where JHU announced the development of the online tracking dashboard in February 2020. I believe the value of this information, which was delivered in a real-time manner, to the public throughout the pandemic cannot be understated. I would hope this sort of service can be used as a model for any future public emergency.
Jason Kottke linked to a new media startup called Heatmap today on Mastodon. As the name implies, the focus of the publication is climate change, and all that is related. Here is founder and editor in chief Nico Lauricella from his welcome post:
I started Heatmap because I wanted to read it. I was hungry to discover the details, nuances, and hard choices of climate change, because that’s where the most interesting and important parts of any story lie. I wanted stories that go beyond the basics and approach the topic as the all-encompassing epic it is.
I don’t know what to think about this. While climate change is something that affects us all and should be broadly on everyone’s radar, I don’t know if this sort of site will work in the long run. We already see a lot of reportage in this space from legacy media and online sites that feature a broader focus. That’s before you take into consideration Substack sites that concentrate on the subject.
The site is charging $80 for an annual subscription, which is not very much if you compare it to the cost of some Substacks, but quite a lot when compared to a lot of legacy media. There’s already some advertising on the site, and looking at which companies advertise on Heatmap could be an interesting trainspotting-esque hobby all to itself. Which companies want to brand associate with this sort of reporting? Which sorts of brands do prospective readers associate with?
The masthead is not very large, but the names on it speak to the subject-matter focus. Lauricella was most recently EiC at The Week, and executive editor Robinson Meyer was a longtime staff writer at The Atlantic, meaning they’ve got some writers with solid experience running these sorts of small, web-based operations in Lauricella and writing about climate in the case of Meyer. Other writers include Jeva Lange who also worked at The Week, Neel Dhanesha most recently at Vox, and multimedia editor Jacob Lambert.
It will be interesting to see where this goes. Meyer in particular comes with a long track record of climate reporting, and his work will likely continue to find a broad audience. The history of startup online media is fascinating, and if there is space for a new publication, climate change might be a decent bet.
Strange to pull something for my China notes from a post about economist Scott Sumner’s trip to Chile and Argentina, but here we are. I’d noticed recently that Sumner had not posted in awhile, but three posts popped up yesterday all of a sudden. He’s on a trip to South America and wrote about some of the things he’s encountered.
Most of his post was about his failed attempt to cross the border from Chile into Argentina, but at the bottom there were some brief notes about his time in Chile. Among them was this comparison:
BTW, that’s why I’m skeptical of China GDP skeptics. China also looks almost exactly like you’d expect a country to look with its reported GDP/person (which is well below Chilean levels.) These things cannot be faked; it’s easy for any tourist to observe a country’s general level of economic development.
Speaking of China, it’s obvious that Chile has a close relationship with that manufacturing powerhouse. You see lots of Chinese cars on the road, and lots of trucks hauling natural resources that are likely being exported to China.
It’s an interesting way to view development, and one that should be obvious, I suppose. Go to a country, travel broadly, and observe. I’ve done this myself: The city of Calgary has a very high GDP per capita (nominal) at $58,659 USD. When I compare different markers of development with other places I’ve lived in Canada such as roads/highway infrastructure, public transit, parks, and public amenities, it becomes clear that there’s more money here than, say, London, Ontario ($35,635 USD).
Here in Calgary, each area of the city has at least one fantastic recreation centre, featuring an indoor pool, gymnasium, fitness centre and other amenities. London has one public indoor pool. In Ottawa ($42,478 USD), which is a comparable to Calgary in population (London is not), things are a bit better, but only newer neighbourhoods have indoor pools, and the overall scale of the facilities is much smaller.
The thing I find interesting about the China/Chile comparison, is that Chile is the developmental superstar of South America with GDP per capita of $17,283 USD. When a comparison, and not entirely favourable one, is made with China it makes one pause and remember how long it takes for countries to develop. China has developed a great deal, especially in the past 30 years, but outside of Beijing (GDP per capita $28,258 USD), Shanghai ($26,693 USD) and the Hong Kong ($49,700 USD)/Guangdong area, development is still a long way off from countries further along the development curve. The northern coastal city Tianjin, with nearly 14 million people, has a GDP per capita of $17,754 USD, only a bit higher than Chile.
Using gross domestic product as a measurement of development is debatable, but there’s something to Sumner’s eye test. It also gives us a potential guide to understanding how an ascendant China is fitting into broader global community.
Marc Andreessen, partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has started a Substack, which follows the trend that everyone must somehow have a Substack. This is all fine, because everyone should be writing something somewhere, and if they are writing on Substack, sure.
Most of his writing, from what I read in his his inaugural post, will be along the same lines as what he posts on Twitter. Yet there’s one line in the post that is key, as I believe it to be true (emphasis mine):
What will I write about? A lot of tech, business, and investing, of course. But beyond, into history and philosophy — who are we, how did we get here, what are we doing, where are we going? And then back around to the societal impact of technology, which is the story of our time.
The societal impact of technology is indeed the story of our time. Andreessen has a lot of skin in this game, but really this narrative has been true at least since Gutenberg built his first printing press back in the 1440s, if not longer. Being aware of the ways technology affects society is vital to understanding our world. We can see this in phenomena ranging from what people spend money on, to how elections unfold, to the evolution of our collective mental health, all the way to how humans experience their everyday reality.
I probably disagree with Andreessen as often as I think he is right (even he doubts his own veracity: “Anything I say today I may disagree with tomorrow, in fact I frequently won’t even remember tomorrow”), but he is certainly someone worth hearing out, if only for the level of influence he has with the others who occupy this space in our society.
The Mojo Wyre 