Society

In general, there is no point in reading articles you know are bound to make you mad. Life is too short. Read a good book. Enjoy a walk with your loved ones. Learn how to fashion something out of wood. Sometimes, though, an article crosses our path and we are gripped with the despair and anger one might feel watching a drunk driver veer across a crowded street.One such article is GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch's introduction to the magazine’s ‘New Masculinity’ issue. ‘When I found out that I would be the editor-in-chief of GQ,’ Welch writes:‘...most people said stuff like “Amazing!” and “Congrats!” But one particularly perceptive friend reacted in a way that I'll never forget. “Yikes,” she said.

Cockburn just happened to be loitering outside Fox News Channel’s Washington bureau Friday when one of the network’s most-talked-about anchors announced on air that his show was ending its run. Shepard Smith’s abrupt departure flabbergasted just about everyone on the East Coast — including, it turned out, his Fox colleagues.‘A personal moment now,’ the anchor said as he closed the 3 p.m. hour’s Shepard Smith Reporting. ‘I’ve witnessed and reported on the events that shaped our reality. Together with my colleagues, we’ve written a first draft of history and endeavored to deliver it to you while speaking truth to power without fear or favor, in context and with perspective. I am eternally grateful for the opportunity.

It seems like it should be quite the scandal: one co-founder of Facebook chastising another publicly for a business decision that has, allegedly, had major social reverberations. In response to Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren calling out Facebook for loosening its restrictions on political advertising, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes took to Twitter. ‘I have a feeling that many people in tech will see Warren’s thread implying FB empowers Trump over Warren as unfair,’ Hughes wrote. ‘But Mark [Zuckerberg], by deciding to allow outright lies in political ads to travel on Facebook, is embracing the philosophy behind Trumpism and thereby tipping the scales.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. You have no phone service, no television, no GPS for the car and no road atlas because you threw it out in 2009. Planes aren’t flying, and that spinning sound you can’t hear is the sound of space hardware floating out of our control. So dependent have we become on satellites for everything from communications to traffic control that a day without them would mean catastrophe. In the new space race, victory won’t mean landing on the moon or sending a rocket to Mars, but developing a new arsenal to wage and win war in space.

Oh dear, Robert de Niro is doing his 'swearing about Donald Trump' routine again. It’s a tired act. It’s also really quite sad. Cockburn saw him on CNN earlier this morning and thought he looked like a vain old goat. Of course de Niro has his big new Netflix film, Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, to plug and cursing on live TV is a great way to draw attention to yourself. It's also pathetic. ‘Fuck ’em! Fuck ’em!’, he said, when Brian Stelter asked him about the criticism he receives for talking about Trump. Stelter reminded him he was on a Sunday morning show, and he issued a perfunctory ‘sorry’. As if it wasn’t premeditated. https://twitter.

When I moved to New York City in 2006 to take a job in digital media, it seemed like you could fit everyone who worked for a startup or online media outlet in the city into a single room. If you worked in 'technology', you probably worked for a telecom, Bloomberg LP, or maybe an advertising technology company. New York’s startups in the original tech boom had been notably flimsier than those in the Bay Area, so few had made it through the early 2000s, and then there had been the September 11 terrorist attacks. For those of us who actually did work for startups (or in proximity to them, as I was a satellite-office journalist covering the industry for a Bay Area-based outlet) we had a distinct inferiority complex in a city that notoriously likes to be second to no one else.

In Cockburn’s grubby corner of the journalism world, New York Times writers Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly are at the center of a serious controversy. To promote their new book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation, the two journalists had an excerpt published in the Times featuring a new sexual assault allegation against Justice Kavanaugh. Unfortunately for Pogrebin and Kelly, the excerpt failed to mention that the alleged victim does not recall the assault. While the New York Times has been criticized for its journalistic malpractice, it seems only fair to hear about the new book from the authors themselves. On Wednesday night, Cockburn slinked into the prestigious National Press Club to see the two authors discuss their new book.

Jews being hit with rocks. Jews being chased down and punched. Jews being beaten with belts. Jews being stabbed on the street. Jewish school buses being set on fire. Jewish women having their wigs ripped off. Swastikas being painted on sidewalks. Jews being forced to take off their kippot. These are scenes that could be straight out of 1940s Nazi Germany, or perhaps from France today, but they’re not. These recent assaults have all happened in Brooklyn, New York. The worst part is, no one seems to care. Every so often a video is shared on Twitter — like this recent one, showing four assailants chasing down and assaulting a Hasidic Jew. Jewish community leaders come together to condemn it, and increasingly, to ask why nothing is being done. https://twitter.

The attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities by Houthi rebels using a fleet of 10 drones loaded with explosives has caused serious damage and will result in a global production cut of around five percent. The Houthi strike was the second aimed at Saudis oil facilities after a previous effort last month resulted in minimal damage. The Houthi drones were likely supplied by Iran, which has a large drone fleet and has been arming the rebel group in Yemen for years. Saudi Arabia is likely to launch retaliatory strikes against both the Houthis and Iran. Drones have become a new frontier in warfare allowing activist groups and nations access to a potent weapon that can be used for surveillance or as a remotely piloted bomb.

The Climate Apocalypse is upon us. More carbon monoxide has been discharged into the atmosphere in the last 50 years than in the whole of human history that went before. Carbon traps heat and the world is getting hotter. Heat holds water vapor and so rainfall is getting more frequent while heat waves last longer. Ice at the poles melts and coastal cities face inundation as sea levels rise. But the doom confidently predicted by many climate scientists around the world is being met by optimism among other scientists who are employing innovative technologies that may transform the debate and offer hope for us all. These technological breakthroughs will impact all aspects of climate change from carbon emissions to food production and all forms of energy.

Eighteen years ago, I was only a child. My first indication that something bad had happened on September 11, 2001 was that a birthday party my whole class had been slated to attend was canceled. Instead of heading to a celebration, I waited with the rest of my classmates for our parents to come and take us home. Except my mother didn’t take me home. We went straight to the supermarket. I remember watching, mouth agape, as my mother piled what seemed like hundreds of boxes of spaghetti, cases of water, and canned goods into the wagon. None of us knew what would come next, and she wanted to be prepared. That commitment to preparation came from fear. A fear that was rational and justified, and which grew out of a realistic sense that the sands had shifted. We were at war.

The Great American Vaping Panic is reaching its ghastly conclusion. As I write this, five people have died in hospital and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating 450 reports of people going into seizures after vaping. Politicians are demanding a renewed clampdown on an e-cigarette industry that was being blamed for a youth ‘tobacco epidemic’ long before these events unfurled. The market leader, Juul, is under investigation by the FDA, its products are banned in the company’s hometown of San Francisco and it may not be long before they are banned nationwide. Moral panics rarely come out of nowhere and there is a grain of truth in this one. Dozens of people, mainly young men, have been hospitalized after vaping in recent weeks.

Ever since being beaten and robbed by Antifa in Portland in June, I have continued to receive threats of violence, which have prompted attention from police. But the scale of the abuse I received on Tuesday morning after waking up was unprecedented. The source of the rage? A Daily Beast hit piece headlined, 'Right-wing star Andy Ngo exits Quillette after damning video surfaces.' This was followed by another story in the Washington Examiner, shared in a tweet, which said I was out at Quillette 'after controversial video surfaces showing him doing nothing to stop or report violent attack.' This was followed by more hit pieces on VICE and Media Matters.

Andy Ngo has flown the Quillette nest. The Portland-based provocateur, famous for his hate crime-debunking Twitter threads, CCTV coverage of Antifa protests and narrative-driven writing on Islam, left his role as subeditor for the Australian Intellectual Dark Web magazine this week. The circumstances of his departure are unclear, but the timing is suspect: last Thursday a Portland Mercury reporter circulated a video that shows Ngo near to members of the far-right group Patriot Prayer immediately prior to a violent clash with Antifa. Ngo himself is yet to comment. https://twitter.com/alex_zee/status/1164406638519803905 Quillette editor Claire Lehmann said this was a coincidence.