Society

It’s good to be the queen, but it’s hard to be a prince. It’s getting harder still for Meghan and Harry, two ex-Royal Highnesses in search of a day job as of Saturday. They thought they could cash out, but now they’re being cast out. It’s going to be a hard Megxit. This can’t be what Meghan and Harry imagined would happen when they surprised the world — and surprised the British royal family too — by announcing that they were ‘stepping back’ from their royal duties in order to step into branding opportunities abroad.

A revolution is under way that will fundamentally change the way humans relate to their cars, so that the vehicle more closely resembles the living room with all the stress of driving removed and all the possibilities of distracting entertainment.Cars will soon become an extension of movie theater, concert venue and 3D videogame as the full potential of 5G communication is unleashed, along with a business imperative of advertisers wishing to monetize the opportunity of drivers being a captive audience for hours at a time.A taste of the future was glimpsed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month.

I was a young tech journalist in the years when Facebook and Twitter were growing fast. In retrospect, one of the biggest oversights made by the tech press (myself very much included) was that for the most part, we’d cover one product launch after another with little attention to the security or privacy implications. When a data breach or privacy scandal came along, we’d cover that, and all too often then let the story drop. But now a decade-plus later, our lack of media attention to security in social media seems glaring.Part of this was structural.

Here we go again. Just when it seemed that the rancor might abate and wounds might start to heal, along comes another express train of controversy to divide Britain. Brexit has been replaced by Megxit (as the tabloids are calling it) following the bombshell announcement by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex that they want to ‘step back’ as senior members of the royal family while continuing to have their cakes and eat them — or, rather, ‘work to become financially independent.’ Suddenly, those who strive tirelessly to rid Britain of its monarchy altogether have been galvanized. So man those ramparts! Re-arm! Let the venom flow once more! Some on the left are even calling for a referendum on the matter.

It’s the showbiz showdown of the century. In the red, white and blue corner, the heavyweight champion of bare-knuckle monarchy, Her 93-year-old Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, still undefeated despite all the sucker punches from her children, her grandchildren and the Russian Revolution. In the other red, white and blue corner, the gutsy lightweight king of the silver screen, 91-year-old Mickey Mouse, trained from beyond the grave by Walt Disney.It’s the Monarchy versus the Mouse, the Old World against the New. The prize is the monetizing of Harry and Meghan.

You win, America.First you broke away from us, but, frankly, we could live with that. Colony or no colony, Britain remained the world’s strongest power and we were happy to let you explore the barren landscapes of your nation while we got on with exploring the rest of the globe.Slowly but surely, though, you began to overtake us. Even the Great Depression could not halt your progress and after you came to our aid in World War Two, and our empire collapsed around our ears, we were forced to acknowledge that you had surpassed us economically and militarily.But we still had culture right?

Going viral is ordinarily pay-dirt for a small website: new readers, more subscribers, and a bigger slice of that sweet, sweet Google Ads revenue pie. Unfortunately for satirical Christian news-site the Babylon Bee, it went viral in the wrong way: it made fun of Democrats. Last week, its spoof story 'Democrats Call For Flags To Be Flown At Half-Mast To Grieve Death Of Soleimani' attracted 750,000 shares on social media. The headline and the body of the text are patently absurd and obviously satirical. Of course Democrats didn’t call for the flag to be flown at half-mast for Soleimani. It’s not like he was Osama bin Laden or anything. Donie O’Sullivan, who covers ‘disinformation, politics and technology’ for CNN, saw darker forces at work.

Ransomware, the locking up of large networks through hacking until payment is made, is exploding. Recent attacks have crippled more than 200 city and local government networks in Baltimore, Albany and Atlanta, while specific hacking tools have been successfully used against mortgage companies, universities, hospitals, banks and consulting firms. A report this month from the cybersecurity firm, Emsisoft, reveals that the cost of ransomware in the US last year was over $7.5 billion, involving 113 state and local governments, 764 health care providers and 1,233 schools. In 2018, the FBI received reports of 1,500 ransomware attacks (the latest available FBI figures) which does not include hundreds of attacks that were never reported with ransoms secretly paid.

The Newseum is officially closing its doors today after 11 years of operation in the nation’s capital and you won’t find me shedding a tear.Some journalists hailed the First Amendment-focused museum as a beacon of hope during a time when the media was facing dangerous attacks in America, like being called 'fake news' or only being allowed to ask one question during a press conference.But the Newseum was hardly the tribute to press freedom that it purported to be; rather, it was a money-hemorrhaging, unfocused building of stuff with a severe identity crisis.The most dynamic and engaging exhibit at the Newseum was arguably the lineup of front pages from the country’s most storied newspapers that sat just outside the front entrance.

An American pogrom is going on in the New York metropolitan area. I use the word deliberately. A pogrom — the word comes from Russian — is a murderous assault on Jews, either incited by or connived at by the authorities. The machete attack that wounded five people in a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York on Saturday night follows eight reported attacks in the week of Chanukah, the massacre at a kosher store in Jersey City earlier this month, a stabbing in Monsey, and a rising tide of assaults over the last three years.There is more than enough Jew-hatred to go around in our sick times. I have no doubt that soon enough we will be back to parsing the digital stormtrooping of the white nationalists or the apocalyptic perversions of the Islamists.

There I was, watching my old VHS copy of The Boys from Brazil, idly reading the lab reports on the swabs I took from my gentile neighbor’s kids when he wasn’t looking, and revising the bassoon part of a concerto I’ve been working on, when I saw something alarming trending on Twitter. Not ‘eugenics’, but ‘Bret Stephens’.‘What’s he done now?’ I asked in six languages, two of them not from the Indo-European language family.In today’s New York Times, Bret Stephens discusses Norman Lebrecht’s excellent new history of the Jews in modern times.

The neighbors got together for drinks and carols at the weekend. As an English Jew, I love the carols — all those old-time bangers from the time when midwinter really was bleak, all those Zionist lyrics about ‘royal David’s city’ and kings in Israel. I consider it a mitzvah, a religious obligation, to spread the joy, because there’s not enough joy to the world these days, so I play the piano, this year in an impromptu trio with an Irish American fiddler and an English literary critic who, it transpires, toots a mean descant on the trumpet. We spread the joy as a farmer spreads muck, but it’s the spirit that counts. Without rehearsal or premeditation, we turned ‘Silent Night’ into a Dean Martin drunk song.

It is increasingly clear that the 1619 Project, foisted on the American public in August by the New York Times, was ill advised. Fatuous, tendentious and tedious, 1619 is more advocacy than history, and is intended mainly to stoke the woke and to keep race on the front burner in the upcoming 2020 elections. No close observer of the Times over the past few years would have expected otherwise, for in its domestic coverage it reads at times more like a Midtown edition of the Amsterdam News than a national newspaper of record. While still indispensable in some ways, its editorial slant and, indeed, news coverage have become unmoored.

There is an epic moment in the latest Gerard Butler movie Angel Has Fallen where he gets to save the life of the US president (again). The bad guys launch a swarm of dozens of micro drones able to detect and kill dozens of Secret Service agents, destroying anything and anyone that might get in the way of their mission to kill the president.It’s a chilling moment in the movie that clearly demonstrates just how powerless mere mortals will be in the face of superior technology that can operate independently of any direct human control.As with so much in Hollywood these days, movie truth is remarkably close to a reality that has been prefaced since 1984 when the first Terminator movie appeared and suggested the idea of autonomous robots as terrifying killing machines.

If there is one positive thing to come out of the attacks on Jews in Jersey City last weekend, it’s that the pretense that anti-Semitism has a home in one part of American society but not in others is over. That doesn’t, of course, mean that some won’t try to keep the delusion alive but four dead in a kosher market at the hands of Black Hebrew Israelites will have to complicate their argument. For a long time, the left was able to provide cover for the frequent attacks on Jews in America by saying it was only white supremacists engaging in these attacks.

If we learned anything from the #MeToo movement, it is that powerful men in media and Hollywood believed themselves to be living in their own personal movies rather than the harsh truth of reality. They were the stars, directors, and producers, and they would always get the girl — even if the girl wanted nothing to do with them, or was actually just a potted fern in a restaurant.This explains why these A-List abusers keep sitting down for tell-all interviews against (one would hope) the better advice of their legal counsel. Rather than the sick perverts that they are, these men see themselves taking on the role of Frank Mackey in Magnolia, whose tough, sexist exterior will eventually melt away to reveal his wounded inner-heart to the audience, thus garnering our sympathy.R.