Society

So pack it all in then. Away with the wisecracking butterfly that sits on your shoulder during work meetings. Out with the Gamorrean Guards who play Texas Hold’em with you around a floating table. The metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg’s fever dream of a virtual-reality infused world, is dead. That’s assuming it was ever alive and kicking in the first place. To assess just how “real” the metaverse ever was, we need to go back to its inception in the fall of 2021. That was when Zuckerberg released a video of himself in suspiciously Steve Jobs-esque garb — black shirt and pants, sneakers — tooling around what he called a “home space” that brimmed with holographic bric-a-brac.

It's no secret that mainstream journalism awards have gone to the dogs. The Washington Post and the New York Times both received Pulitzer Prizes for their "reporting" on Russiagate, for example, though their stories desperately hinted at a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia that didn't actually exist. The NYT's Nikole Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer for the widely debunked 1619 Project. The Walter Cronkite Award has previously been given to NBC News's Chuck Todd for excluding so-called "climate deniers" from his broadcasts, a CNN journalist who described the 2020 riots in Kenosha as "fiery but mostly peaceful" was nominated for an Emmy, and the New York Press bestowed CNN's Jim Acosta with a "Truth to Power" award.

Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC has a plagiarism problem. It appears that, as with the cases of John Oliver and James Corden, Britain is not sending its best. The pundit also seems to be as much of a chameleon as Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, taking whatever position gets him ahead. Lee Fang, a reporter formerly at the Intercept, published an investigative piece on his Substack looking at Hasan’s journalistic (or, maybe, not-so-journalistic) history. "Writing" an article in 2000 taking up the cause of spanking disobedient kids, he took — almost to the letter — the text from a 1998 article in US News and World Report. A few alterations here and there to account for the difference in date, and voila!

TikTok’s time with the uber-connected Democratic PR firm SKDK is up. According to the Washington Post’s Technology 202 newsletter, SKDK "wrapped up its work for TikTok in recent weeks after assisting with its campaign to bring digital influencers to Capitol Hill." Politico reported that TikTok retained the services of the firm co-founded by Joe Biden’s current senior advisor Anita Dunn on March 9. To Cockburn, it seems like SKDK’s mission is complete. During its time representing the controversial Chinese app, the odds of a full TikTok ban — which seemed all but inevitable following CEO Shou Zi Chew’s disastrous congressional testimony later in March — have dwindled by the day.

The most consequential legal case for the American media in seventy years begins Tuesday. The defamation suit brought by voting technology company Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News will test how far First Amendment protections can be stretched. It will also determine whether the never-ending media circus surrounding Donald Trump pulled America’s pre-eminent conservative news brand too far into the former’s president’s carnivalesque realm to escape unscathed. The stakes for Fox couldn’t be higher. First — though, in this uniquely fraught case, not foremost — there’s the money. Dominion is claiming $1.6 billion in damages caused by Fox News’s broadcasts related to the integrity of the company’s voting machines during the 2020 presidential election.

Francis Collins, then head of the powerful National Institutes of Health, got right to the point. In a closed-door meeting with pharmaceutical manufacturer Edwin Thompson, Collins demanded Thompson back off his campaign to drastically cut back the use of prescription opioids for chronic, long-term pain. According to Thompson, Collins admitted healthcare regulators knew there was no science showing opioids were effective for anything but acute, short-term incidents. There was at the same time credible research showing the longer a patient remained on opioids, the greater the risk of addiction. Some studies even suggested long-term use increased pain sensitivity. But on that day in 2019, none of that mattered to Collins.

Last weekend I flew down to Miami to escape New York for a few days. I had to fly Spirit, because I have an undiagnosed condition that makes it impossible for me to buy flights at a sensible time in advance. The experience went as you would expect: I traveled through Spirit’s Potemkin terminal at LaGuardia, paid $90 for the privilege of a carry-on and spent the three-hour trip sandwiched in the back of a dinky airplane staring at a wing with “HOWDY” ominously painted across it. The Spirit Airlines business model — to provide a service for the bulk of your customers that is noticeably worse than what they are accustomed to in the hopes some people pay more to get the experience they're more familiar with — is apparently Elon Musk’s vision for Twitter.

“Thanks to the woke police, in 2023, Mark Twain would never win the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.” This David Spade joke isn't exactly L-O-L funny — it sounds more like something a crotchety senior citizen would growl at the TV about those wokey hokey cancel culture snowflakes. But nonetheless, people, particularly comics should feel able to speak freely. But sadly, there's some truth to Spade's gag, which he delivered on March 19 as part of his remarks at the awarding of the 2023 Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Comedy to his longtime collaborator Adam Sandler. It’s 2023 and that means that certain ideas are viewed as unfit for wider consumption.

This week I hosted my colleague Amber Athey on our District podcast to talk about her first book, The Snowflakes’ Revolt: How Woke Millennials Hijacked American Media. I began by asking her about the Donald Trump indictment, news of which broke on Thursday night via the New York Times and Associated Press, before Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office had announced the grand jury’s decision. The Times were regularly updating their coverage prior to Bragg’s confirmation about how four, and then five, sources with knowledge had tipped off their reporters about the decision.

The Wall Street Journal made an interesting hire last year that went mostly unnoticed, aside from minor trade publications. The NewsCorp-owned media outlet announced in May 2022 that they were bringing on Robin Turner to be the vice president of training, culture and community. Turner's charge was to work with Dow Jones newsrooms, including WSJ, to "drive DE&I strategy into all aspects of our global business." DE&I of course refers to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, those corporate and academic cultural programs that insist that historically marginalized groups require special treatment in order to overcome systemic oppression. DEI has become baked into the WSJ's news operation while simultaneously being excoriated by the paper's editorial board.

It was July 2, 1961. Ernest Hemingway was three weeks shy of his sixty-second birthday. He had been living comfortably in a cabin in Ketchum, Idaho, with his fourth wife, Mary. He liked it there. He liked the hunting and fishing and the clean air. Still he had a plan. That morning he padded to the basement in his pajamas and bathrobe. He unlocked the gun closet. He selected a favorite shotgun, a double-barreled twelve-gauge. He put a shell in each barrel. He put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth. Why pull the trigger now, after so many years of defying death? Eight months earlier he had checked into the Mayo Clinic as “George Saviers,” the name of his elderly doctor in Ketchum.