Enquiring minds want to know what fallout the National Enquirer story about Jeff Bezos, the proprietor of the Washington Post, will have on the Trump presidency. The Post, to the ire of Trump, has relentlessly pursued Trump, focusing on his illicit business activities.
Silicon Valley parents are famously strict about their children’s screen time, even as they dish out their ‘crack cocaine’ technology to the rest of the world’s youth. Last week, however, Tucker Carlson upped the ante: he called on Congress to step and ban children from smartphones, as they do with alcohol. Researchers have demonstrated a link between hours spent in front of a screen and depression and anxiety levels in children. But screen usage damage isn’t just in our heads; increasingly, it’s also in our hands. ‘Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior pediatric doctors have warned,’ reports the Guardian.
What connects the Ralph Northam story, the Covington story, and the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation story? Is it the dark side of social media? The perils of high-school? Catholicism in America today? It is all that. More than anything, however, it is abortion. Abortion is and arguably always has been the nuclear core of the culture war, yet these days it hides itself. The pitched media scraps between progressives and conservatives are often still about Roe v. Wade, we just pretend that they are not. We act as if the Ralph Northam story is about racism. It isn’t. It’s about what he said about fetuses, and the tasteless whooping for late-term abortions.
Cockburn was flattered to read BuzzFeed News’s claim that what Steve Bannon wants to read is a ‘Catholic Spectator’, but puzzled. The Spectator is a broad church, broad enough to accommodate atheists, Bible-bashers, even that notorious sinner Taki. But on further inspection, Cockburn realized that Bannon is talking about British weekly The Catholic Herald, and its launch in America. What the Herald should do, Bannon says, is cultivate ‘Catholic influencers and millionaires’, and to follow the strategy which has worked so well for BuzzFeed, by running listicles like ‘The 25 most influential Catholics in the US.’ Catholic BuzzFeed, perhaps? The ways of the Lord are more mysterious than Donald Trump’s tax returns.
Jim AcostaChris CillizzaChris CuomoOliver DarcyManu RajuJim SciuttoBrian StelterJake TapperJeffrey ToobinFareed Zakaria.
About a year ago, I found myself at an eclectic dinner party. In our mix were men and women of all ages in all stages of their careers. Conversation turned to the #MeToo movement and the way it had changed the national conversation about sexual harassment and assault. A high-powered lawyer at the table confided in us that several of his male friends and counterparts had come to him after noticing a troubling pattern. These men — who were working for different companies, across a wide array of industries — were committed to mentoring men and women. They were eager to ensure that their colleagues were being treated equally and being afforded equal opportunity, regardless of gender.
It’s a rough life, being a liberal media mogul. Balancing your aura of caring for your staff and their rights with the cut-throat demands of your investors is testing at the best of times...imagine how hard it gets when your business hits the skids. So pour one out for Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s CEO, for whom this week isn’t looking any easier than the last. After suffering the embarrassment of having BuzzFeed News’s major Russia scoop unraveled by Robert Mueller’s office, Peretti had the unenviable task of laying off hundreds of employees across the country. Their entire national desk was culled along with many other BuzzFeed News staffers, in cuts brutally staggered over several days.
A curious incident last night as The Baffler, an esteemed (or once-esteemed) left-wing political and literary journal, suddenly retracted a highly-touted pro-Bernie tract by Amber A’Lee Frost. The piece, entitled ‘It’s Bernie, Bitch,’ made an acerbic and amusing case for why all socialists, leftists, and ‘progressives’ should suck it up, quit the belly-aching, and back Bernie Sanders in 2020 because he’s the only hope for achieving social democracy in the foreseeable future. Whatever you might think of Bernie’s potential candidacy, the piece was interestingly argued and well-written. Presumably why it has since emerged on Jacobin.
Robert Mueller’s office possesses evidence showing that Donald Trump instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress! My goodness, what a bombshell. When the BuzzFeed story alleging this was first published Thursday night, the reaction was as painful as it was predictable. Journalists and fellow-traveler Twitter personalities lit up social media with grand, gleeful pronunciations about the imminent downfall of the Trump presidency. You could almost hear the champagne corks being popped. Within what seemed like mere seconds, the report was blared across all the major TV networks, and the reporters who broke the news were touted as once-in-a-generation heroes. Plaques and monuments in their honor entered the early stages of construction.
Has there ever been a more fitting corporate meltdown than that endured by Facebook over the last two years? After perhaps swinging an election or two in 2016, the company has been dragged bawling through the mud more times than an Medieval Estonian peasant caught stealing horses. There have been non-apologies and listening tours, rebrands and reach-outs, Senate committee hearings, slap-downs and back-pedals, faked humility and conspiracy theories, inquests and campaigns and furious denunciations, ponderous op-eds and stock-price massacres, would-be trust-busters on the make, crisis management PR operations and parade ground about-faces.
For over half a century, we’ve been misunderstanding Martin Luther King. Our secular minds are programmed to see him as a civil rights activist, but as another MLK Day comes and goes, it is time to see King as he saw himself: as a priest and a prophet. Today, we tend to understand prophecy as focused on prediction. The nature of biblical prophecy and the word’s classical origins have been forgotten. Pro, the prefix of the Greek word prophetes means ‘fore’, but also ‘forth’. To be a prophet is to ‘fore-tell’ but equally to ‘forth-tell’ – to be a divinely-inspired forecaster or to preach moral, spiritual and political messages. King saw his role as the latter.
If reports are true, Jeff Bezos’s penis is on the verge of going viral — waltzing off alone into the great unknown of cyberspace and there, under the glare of a billion eyeballs, having its power as an agent of chaos and shame amplified immeasurably. As you read this, you can be sure battalions of Bezos lawyers are working around the clock to keep the Bezos penis where it has hitherto always been: billeted, shrouded, presumably, in the comfortable privacy of mankind’s finest breathable linens. Good luck to them, for they will have their work cut out.
It was really only a matter of time before a men’s shaving company began virtue signaling about #MeToo and toxic masculinity. Welcome to the brave new world of ‘woke capital’ – Gillette and their cringeworthy ad is just the latest example. Their short film, which basically plays on familiar denunciations of guys as insufficiently sensitive, is all about showing how much Gillette cares about making the world a better place that is an absolute utopia full of neutered men. Of course, Gillette does not seem to care so much about...treating their workers with basic decency, but...details. Gillette is far from alone in their attempt to showcase their exquisite dignity and compassion.
It was the tweet posted by the New York Times that caught my eye: ‘Silicon Valley is backing a novel idea: instead of charging students tuition, students go to school for free and are required to pay back a percentage of their income after graduation, but only if they get a job with a good salary.’ It is all happening at the Lambda School, a new online learning start-up that this week won millions of dollars in backing from a glittering line up of venture capitalists – including Google Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, the actor turned Shark Tanker, and Geoff Lewis, an acolyte of Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal.
Conservative American Catholics – especially those working in the media – are gulping nervously every time they check Twitter. The reason? A diminutive prayerful lady with a rosary in her handbag. She’s called Dawn Eden Goldstein, and she’s a Catholic convert who writes about ‘healing painful memories’ – but seems more interested in creating them on Twitter. Dawn’s particular bête noire is the Catholic Herald magazine, which made the mistake of inviting her to a lunch at the Metropolitan Club to celebrate the launch of its US edition. Here she picked up the information that a couple of the magazine’s directors had been invited to breakfast with Steve Bannon.
The number of American adults who smoke has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded, a mere third of what it was 70 years ago. Decades of aggressive public health campaigns and advertising bans are responsible for this remarkable decline. As norms and mores changed, smoking became situated somewhere between bear baiting and regularly dining at Cracker Barrel as a form of utterly deviant behavior. Those who continue to smoke belong to the struggle towns and junklands of Middle America. They are usually adult men without much of an education, living below the poverty line; they are the very backbone of Trumpism.
This week, the star reporter of the German magazine Der Spiegel was fired after it was revealed that he had been fabricating stories for several years. Here, Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn expose the many inaccuracies in his article about their town, Fergus Falls, Minn. In February 2017, my husband and I attended a concert at our local theater, and were sipping some wine in the lobby before the show started. Several people came up to us at separate times excitedly, and asked, ‘did you meet the German guy yet?!’ I hadn’t, but my spider senses perked up when I heard that he worked for Der Spiegel, a magazine based in Hamburg, and that he was writing about the state of rural America in the wake of Trump’s presidency.
A couple of years ago, in high summer, my wife and I attended Mass in St Patrick’s Cathedral, as we do every time we visit New York. It is, in general, a bracing experience for Catholics who have been paddling in the tepid pools of Irish Catholicism. The celebrant, a middle-aged man with the physique and personality of a matinee idol, gave a startling sermon about the gospel of the day, Matthew 10:34, in which Jesus declares, ‘I have come to bring not peace but a sword.’ In his homily, the priest tore into sentimental notions of Christianity and the corruptions of concepts such as compassion and mercy.
Reading Andrew Sullivan reminds me of a Latin tag the novelist Iris Murdoch favored: corruptio optimi pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst. Sullivan is an intelligent and well educated man. He is capable of writing quite movingly about religion, especially about the challenges our media-saturated age — we really are, as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’ — pose to that reservoir of quiet thoughtfulness that any spiritual life worth the name requires. Back in 2012, Sullivan wrote a little paean to St Francis, a well-to-do young man, who sold everything he had and devoted himself to a life of poverty and renunciation, practices that Sullivan described as the ‘core’ of Jesus’s message.
If the Weekly Standard closes down by year’s end, as is widely expected and as Spectator USA first reported, the country will have lost one of its few remaining writer’s magazines. But for most people, the caliber of writing from Andrew Ferguson or Christopher Caldwell or Matt Labash is not what stands out about the Weekly Standard. Its reputation is tied to the Iraq War and to its founding editor’s reinvention of himself as the most acerbic NeverTrumper on Twitter. The latter has led the New York Times and other outlets to blame the closed-mindedness of conservatives toward criticism of Trump for the magazine’s demise.
