Bari weiss

For the illiberal left, it’s not enough that you submit to their cultural revolution. You must also underwrite it. This happens not only at the state level, with issues such as abortion and public-school curricula, but at the private level as well. A good recent example includes efforts by certain Wikipedia editors to censor mentions of a journalism award handed out recently to the journalist behind the so-called Twitter Files. Wikipedia: glad-handing for donations on the front end, while certain “master editors” censor factual events on the back end! On November 1, journalist Matt Taibbi received a journalism award for his efforts to uncover the incestuous relationship between Big Tech and censorious federal apparatchiks.

Their declared intention was to break the internet. In November 2014, the winter issue of Paper magazine, a stalwart of the New York arts and music scene for thirty years, featured an image immediately declared iconic by social media: Kim Kardashian, her neck wrapped in pearls, popping a Champagne cork and catching the bubbly white stream that jets over her head in the coupe glass propped on her prominent derrière. And that was just the cover — the internet quickly shared photographer Jean-Paul Goude’s more pornographic images of an oiled-up Kardashian stripping out of her black evening gown to show off her famous buttocks, before going full frontal with a slightly unnerving smile. The gambit worked to the tune of 16 million views for Paper in a single week.

Another day, another headline about Elon Musk. But as the new Twitter CEO has announced plans to resign in the future — only after finding a suitable candidate to replace him — we may see a bit less of him soon. But who would be foolish enough to replace him? Cockburn has put together a list of potential heirs. Jared Kushner The former senior advisor and current son-in-law to Donald Trump may not be accustomed to the tech world, but he does have the face for it. Kushner also is a proven ally of Musk, after appearing alongside him at the Qatar World Cup final last week. He’s also in the market for a job after turning down his father-in-law’s offer to help run Trump 2024...

When I first began thinking about restarting my email newsletter, Prufrock, after a nine-month break (during which I cycled the Blue Ridge Parkway twice, slept until six every morning, and read novels), one option I considered was Substack. I started Prufrock in 2013 when there were very few newsletters, especially on the right. It was basically Ben Domenech’s The Transom, Michael Brendan Dougherty’s The Slurve, and Prufrock. Sometime around 2016, everyone had a newsletter. Then came Substack in 2017, which grabbed people’s attention in 2019 when Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes agreed to run their new publication, the Dispatch, exclusively on the platform.

The recent high-profile departures at the New York Times of editorial page editor James Bennet and opinion writer Bari Weiss have left some on the business side of the news industry scratching their heads. Both exited amid ideological turmoil that Weiss detailed in a letter of resignation to the Times’s publisher A.G. Sulzberger, describing the 'hostile work environment' she endured at the hands of fellow editors and staffers. They were wholly intolerant, she said, of her role as a ‘centrist' at the paper. Bennet, said Weiss, had led the effort after President Trump’s election in 2016 to bring in 'voices that would not otherwise appear' in the Times.

‘Bari Weiss’s letter was tame,’ a New York Times insider tells me. ‘She could have named names. She could have said, “There are dozens of other instances of bullying and harassment.” Because there are.’ What took Weiss so long? Prominent writers at the Times never accepted her as a colleague. Instead, her colleagues on the opinion page sniped and leaked against her on Twitter from the first. Was it ‘tall poppy syndrome’ — resentment of a young writer who, in an era when legacy media seem to be in perpetual crisis, landed a plum job at the Times?