Society

If you are among the vanishing few who believes that what America’s fractured politics really needs is more Sunday talk shows, then former White House press secretary Jen Psaki has come to the rescue. Psaki, a partisan Democrat and former Biden administration mouthpiece, debuted her new show Inside With Jen Psaki on — what else? — MSNBC earlier this month. She occupies the 12 p.m. spot, sparing her competition with more established anchor shows on more frequently watched networks. “Inside of what?” one might ask. The politest answer would be “inside” the much hated Washington Beltway echo chamber, but one might then ask whether a career Democratic comms operative with no experience as either a journalist or a politician really counts as an “insider.

Homer goes right at it: “Sing Goddess, the Rage of Achilles.” Adapted to our times: “Sing, Bragg, your rage against the Trumpies.” Alvin Bragg, who grew up in a section of Harlem aptly named Striver’s Row, is by most accounts one angry man. Since he was elected New York County’s district attorney in 2021, he has set himself to punishing the city for what he takes to be generations of wrongful prosecution of black offenders — and incidentally most other lawbreakers. His policy writ large has been to treat all felonies as misdemeanors, which are promptly dismissed.  He occasionally compromises in favor of prosecution but only if the crime has aroused a special level of public outrage. Bragg’s tenderheartedness towards criminals, however, has limits.

TikTok’s CEO is gearing up for a grilling in Congress, but he’s got some new, powerful allies in his corner: a political consulting firm whose founder lavished praise on Mao Zedong and is now one of Biden’s top aides — and a socialist congressman who thinks banning the Chinese spyware is racist. Shou Zi Chew, the company’s CEO, is headed for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where Republicans are planning to press him on the national security concerns posed by the video app’s parent company ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Chew is an odd person to push back against claims by Republicans — and, increasingly, some Democrats — that TikTok is inextricably linked to the CCP.

King Rupert has met his Catherine Howard. That's right: at the tender age of ninety-two, media mogul Rupert Murdoch is set to marry for the fifth time.  The announcement came in the Murdoch-owned New York Post, where Rupert claimed that he “was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love, but I knew this would be my last. I am happy.”  On Saint Patrick’s Day, and less than one year after his divorce to Jerry Hall, he proposed to his sixty-six-year-old partner Ann Lesley Smith, an American journalist who is getting married for the third time. “We both look forward to spending the second half of our lives together,” Murdoch said. Cockburn loves the optimism. Smith said, “It’s a gift from God for both of us. We met last September.

The White House Correspondents Association sent an email to its members Monday begging them to practice "decorum" during White House press briefings. The email was sent in response to an incident earlier in the day when Simon Ateba, a correspondent for Today News Africa, accused White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre of "making a mockery" of the First Amendment by refusing to call on him at briefings for seven months. In a bizarre clip, Jean-Pierre stands at the podium dismissing Ateba, while the White House press corps hiss "decorum!" at him. KJP is flanked by the cast of Ted Lasso, who were at the briefing to talk about mental health. https://twitter.

Silicon Valley has finally started to breathe easy, though not too easy. It has been a tense few days for everyone in the technology industry. Startup founders, their employees, their investors, lawyers, accountants, doctors, and countless others who make a living from the innovation ecosystem have been suffering from collective apprehension. The culprit was the seemingly sudden failure of Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB, as it was known around Silicon Valley. SVB, which started as a small regional bank in 1983, transformed itself into a technology-focused bank in the early Nineties. Its rise reflected the growing fortunes of the technology industry at large.

The job of a royal — if you can call it that — is to serve the public. Back across the Pond, the late Queen was revered for what was repeatedly branded her “quiet dedication” to “the British people.” Which is why it’s so disheartening to hear that her son Prince Andrew “favors a US broadcaster” for an attempted comeback interview. The Mirror writes that he has been "approached by at least two major US broadcasters with offers of an interview taking place in the UK." In going stateside, the Duke of York would be denying the smallfolk of the United Kingdom the chance to fully relive one of the best television moments of the century to date.

Ever since the shock of the 2016 election, there has been an explosion of handwringing in Washington about the danger of information silos. This moral panic took on a newly aggressive character in the age of fake news and Covid — and has expanded to target Fox News, social media and even newsletter businesses like Substack as culprits in a world segregated by news sources. The old guard gatekeepers who occupy long-in-the-tooth media institutions, growing ever thinner as advertising dwindles, are united with the octogenarian politicians who still consume the thin gruel they pass off as ideas. Their enemy: those dangerous citizens who have too much freedom to speak and be heard.

Wednesday’s hearing on the origin of Covid-19 by the select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic was long overdue. It has been more than three years since the pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2, was first detected in Wuhan, China. Yet far too little has been done in the United States to find out how the pandemic started. Separate investigations by US intelligence agencies have led to one assessment of a lab leak with moderate confidence by the FBI, a scattering of low-confidence assessments — the Department of Energy leans toward a lab origin while four agencies lean toward a natural origin — and two agencies undecided.

In my new book, The Snowflakes’ Revolt, I examine how progressive millennials have infiltrated and influenced American media over the past decade, taking ideas from college campuses into the newsroom and pushing the editorial line further to the left than ever before. Among the many prominent organizations where this has happened is Politico. One sign of the shift at this Washington news mainstay came in December 2020, when staff revolted after conservative commentator Ben Shapiro guest-authored the outlet’s flagship newsletter, Playbook. A few months later newsroom activists, unsatisfied by Politico’s response to their concerns, quickly seized on a new culture war battle — transgender issues.

Remember the UFO that one of our fighter jets shot down with a missile? Reports now indicate it was a $12 balloon from Hobby Lobby — while the missile was supposedly worth around $400,000. This seems to me like a summary of the current state of things. It’s Quixote running towards windmills. It’s the hypochondriac class trying to run the country. There’s been a strange epidemic of objects floating overhead. Some have been reported to be Chinese spy balloons, while some people believe they’re extraterrestrial. The sky isn’t the only place where these objects have been spotted; there was also that iron ball that rolled out of the ocean in Japan.

In winter 2019, Leslie Elliott enrolled as a graduate student in Antioch University’s Mental Health Counseling program. At first, she found it to be a stimulating master’s program — informative and clinically relevant. Then she took a required course in “multicultural counseling.” “We were taught that race should be the dominant lens through which clients were to be understood and therapy conducted,” says Elliott, a mother of four who’d majored in psychology. Elliott’s professors taught her, for example, that if clients were white, she was supposed to help them see how they unwittingly perpetuate white supremacy. “We were encouraged to regard white clients as ‘reservoirs of racism and oppression.