Society

Attorney and former media darling Michael Avenatti was convicted on two charges of extortion against Nike last Friday. His fate caused a deathly silence among some of the anti-Trump, cable news anchors who not so long ago were venerating him as a president-in-waiting. Former GOP ad men who were once flirting with running Avenatti for president were no longer returning phone calls. Avenatti was left abandoned in handcuffs, his invite to this year’s Sag Harbor Soirée lost in the mail. Alas, he’s no longer the holy spirit or the savior of the republic. Just a couple of days later, the establishment media — particularly CNN — had found their mea culpa on Avenatti; his months-long stardom was, of course, the fault of President Donald Trump.

There is nothing writers love to write about more than writers. We are an extraordinarily self-important breed. Find a group of plumbers, office workers or electricians and they will talk about anything except their line of work. When writers come together, though, the subject of conversation is invariably their peers and themselves. But I can hardly talk. Here I am, coming to you today not just to write about writers and writing but to write about a writer writing about writers and writing. (Did you make it through that sentence OK? I'm sorry for inflicting it on you. Have a drink or something. You deserve one.) What have we done to deserve this kind of self-absorption? Writing, at its best, adds a little truth and a little beauty to the world.

Conservative radio host and longtime political commentator Rush Limbaugh announced on his program Monday that he has advanced lung cancer and will be taking time off to receive treatment.Shortly after Limbaugh revealed his diagnosis, prominent leftists rushed to Twitter to celebrate the fact that someone they opposed politically may soon meet an untimely — and likely painful — demise.Former CNN host Reza Aslan, whose show Believer was canceled by CNN after he called the president a 'piece of shit' on Twitter, did a shoddy job of downplaying his joy at the Limbaugh news.‘Ask yourself this simple question: is the world a better place or a worse place with Rush Limbaugh in it?’ Aslan tweeted Monday evening.

After the helicopter crash that killed basketball star Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others, there has been a rash of speculation on social media that helicopters are inherently unsafe to fly. Perhaps the most extreme example is British businessman, Lord Alan Sugar, an experienced pilot, who says he will no longer fly in helicopters because they defy physics. He should know better. After a number of high-profile accidents, it might seem that helicopters have a poor safety record. In 2018, five people died when a helicopter giving a sightseeing tour of New York City crashed into the Hudson river. In the past two years there have been other deaths in Hawaii, the Grand Canyon and Manhattan.

How did you find out about the death of one of sport’s greatest legends? For me, it was while I was cooking dinner and idly scrolling through my phone, waiting for the oven to heat up. I saw a screenshot of a TMZ Instagram story posted to Twitter. 'KOBE BRYANT DEAD IN HELICOPTER CRASH', it blared. I did what anyone else does in this day and age and sent it down my groupchat. I had no idea whether it was true, whether it was a malicious prank, or hack, or anything else. I just wanted to be the one to share it first. As news spread across social media and screenshots turned into shots from the scene in Calabasas, the only certainty seemed to be that no one knew what was going on.

Celebrity is a remarkably enduring and powerful form of prestige. Who can imagine a world without it? Celebrities begin as people, become brands, then expand into empires. We have celebrity restaurateurs who become celebrity chefs and celebrity chefs who become restaurateurs. We have celebrity spin doctors and celebrity CIA analysts. We have celebrity comedians and celebrity revolutionaries; they’re often interviewed by celebrity journalists. We have celebrity architects, celebrity tycoons and celebrity statesmen. We have celebrity children of celebrities; celebrity ballerinas; celebrity vegans; celebrity plumbers; celebrity murderers. For decades celebrity told society stories about itself, some ennobling, some disgraceful.

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.