In Other News

I’ll tell you the kind of story that puzzles me. Saturday evening, a mountain lion is sighted in Golden Gate Park. This has happened before. Apparently this one ran up a tree.

Twenty-four hours later, on Sunday evening authorities report the mountain lion “safely leaves area.”

But wait a minute! Golden Gate Park is surrounded on three sides by the city of San Francisco — miles and miles of city.

On the fourth side is the Pacific Ocean.

So how exactly did the big cat get out of the area? The statement by officials made it almost sound as if the animal had hitched a ride with a trucker or caught a boat headed out to sea.

I suppose an animal that size could escape quietly if it headed south through the quieter parts of the Sunset without being seen by anyone, but certainly the dogs would know and they would raise a fuss, right?

No further reports of sightings as of press time…

HEADLINES:

• Mountain lion spotted near SF’s Golden Gate Park safely leaves area (SFGate)

• Germany’s Merz on the ropes after far right delivers devastating blow (FT)

• German far-right AfD wins Saxony-Anhalt election, falls short of majority (Al Jazeera)

• U.S. Energy Secretary Wright says Iran nuclear deal may never happen (CNBC)

• Iran touts military response as US maintains blockade, hits tankers (Al Jazeera)

• US envoys hope for new Ukraine-Russia talks soon after visits to both capitals (Reuters)

• Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon purge (FT)

• Trump administration files another Supreme Court emergency appeal over USPS mail ballot rules (ABC)

• Midterm mail ballots start to go to voters as litigation over Trump’s order creates uncertainty (AP)

• Michigan’s Democratic candidate courts Muslim voters (Economist)

• Canada’s Biggest Newspaper Targets US States Over Trump’s Tariff ‘Tantrums’ (Newsweek)

• His shop straddles the US-Canada border. A historic friendship is crumbling on both sides. (CNN)

• The Real Risk of a Trade War With Canada (Foreign Affairs)

• Chimpanzees once used for vaccine research get health checks as part of long-term care (AP)

• 5 Killed and 5 Injured as Cargo Plane Overruns Runway at Miami Airport (NYT)

• These teachers are moving from AI policing to AI acceptance (WP)

• China’s New Graduates, Facing a Dire Job Market, Must Also Contend With A.I. (NYT)

• These teachers fight AI cheating with classes that force students to show they are learning (WP)

• Kenyans Did College Students’ Homework for Years. Then A.I. Arrived. (NYT)

• Tesla Launches New Model Of Explosions (Onion)

War.gov

I suppose it was inevitable that with the start of football season Hegseth & Bros. would air an ad for the U.S. military featuring guys dressed up with the latest gear looking like they are players in a video game.

The ad end with a screenshot of the foreboding “War.gov.”

The appeal to a certain sort of young male is as old as time. That it comes in the wake of the death of Gloria Steinem is a reminder (as if we needed one!) that we still live in a patriarchy.

Steinem always reminded us that wars, terrorist acts, domestic violence, mass shootings and similar horrors are almost exclusively the province of men. A society that fails to provide a check on runaway masculinity is one doomed to more of the same.

It is no coincidence that Hegseth has drummed females out of our armed forces and is subjecting military personnel to testosterone level testing. Higher levels of testosterone are often associated with more aggressive behavior in animals, including humans.

Football is, of course, our most violent sport. Many who play it will suffer serious injuries, some life-altering. Some will suffer irreversible brain damage.

At the same time, the game provides a great show, which is why millions of us enjoy watching it. But I would enjoy watching it just a bit more if it wasn’t framed inside a reminder of what is deeply wrong with our current administration in Washington.

HEADLINES:

• US strikes three Iranian oil tankers after IRGC attack on American naval ships, Central Command says (Reuters)

• A More Confident Iran Emerges After Six Months of War With the U.S. (NYT)

• Putin orders pause on strikes on Kyiv as Witkoff and Kushner arrive in Moscow for peace talks (CNN)

• Living with war in Kyiv (Reuters)

• China dealt blow as US-backed firm takes over Venezuelan oilfields (SCMP)

• U.S. military turns off ad trackers on phones and computers (Reuters)

• The mystery behind an audio clip that helped upend a Senate race (WP)

• Trump Officials Draft Plan to Pay At-Home Parents, Using Funds for Working Ones (NYT)

• Trump says ‘stupidity causes inflation’ and threatens to stop trade with foreign countries in retaliation for higher interest rates (Forbes)

• Why the U.S. job market remains resilient in face of global pressures and inflation (PBS)

• Trump piles onto his Fed chair pick (Reuters)

• Inside the USS Abraham Lincoln’s Nine Months at Sea: Loneliness, Fatigue, Pride (WSJ)

• When ‘12 Angry Men’ becomes one angry man (The Hill)

• More People Have Died From 9/11 Than on 9/11 (Reveal)

• Icons Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem never officially retired—why that’s a choice for some and requirement for others (CNBC)

• I worked 13-hour days building my startup while working at Apple (BI)

• Peace Through Strength (War.gov)

• The Trump Administration Is Running a Military Recruitment Ad on TV. The Pentagon Says It’s Working. (Vanity Fair)

• I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity to rank the 10 jobs most likely to be replaced by AI — here’s what they all agreed on (Tom’s Guide)

• OpenAI feared its technology could reshape elections. Now campaigns are using it. (WP)

• Court Filings in A.I. Suit Invoke Copyright Law, Culture and Sports (NYT)

• Rockstar Leaks Worsen As Hackers Release Fully Playable Copy Of ‘GTA IX’ (Onion)

Losing It

Two somewhat related stories caught my eye this week:

• “People are saying less each year. Scientists think that’s a problem.” — from the Post.

• “What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing?” — from the Times.

Both stories are about the changing behavior young people are exhibiting in response to artificial intelligence and other factors.

Much has been made about the so-called Gen Z “stare,” which is a a neutral, deadpan face with wide or fixed eyes and no emotional reaction in situations where a verbal response would be expected.

Some think this is a consequence of the social isolation children faced during the Covid lockdowns. And there is a general consensus that heavy consumption of social media is somehow involved. 

Meanwhile, the direct correlation between AI and a marked decline in students’ writing skills has been firmly established.

“Educators are worried that many students can no longer write essays without AI,” reports the Times. “And it’s costing more than just grammar skills.”

A majority of high school students are turning to AI for help with their homework, including writing assignments. Not everyone thinks this is a bad thing.

“The scholars who study writing and cognition are rarely reflexively opposed to AI,” says the Times. “Many have spent decades anticipating a leap in computer-assisted writing, just like the one we are living through. They tend to be excited by the technology’s potential.”

Still, if students turn to AI instead of doing the hard work of learning to write on their own, many educators think they will suffer as a result.

“Cognitive research confirms that writing is a powerful aid in helping us to retain information we read. The work of writing forces us to stress-test our ideas, allowing the writer to respond to counterarguments and cite sources. Revision is a practice of self-critique and self-improvement, and can be social, as well, if feedback is elicited. Writing can also be empowering, allowing us to share our experiences and express our views. It can even be healing, which is why therapists sometimes suggest keeping a journal.”

Last year, according to the Times, “a small study from M.I.T. showed that individuals who wrote in partnership with A.I. chatbots recorded lower brain activity while they wrote, compared with those who worked without chatbots. The writers who used AI struggled to remember what, exactly, they had written, and felt little ownership over their work.”

Additional research suggests using AI can degrade critical thinking skills.

One thing is certain. AI is here to stay and as is the case with all disruptive technologies, the way humans interact with each other will be deeply affected.

But if it means we forget how to tell each other stories, spoken or written, that would be a very sad ending.

HEADLINES:

• US envoys Witkoff, Kushner arrive in Moscow for talks on peace in Ukraine (Reuters)

• Pentagon Subjects Roughly 50 Members of the Joint Staff to Polygraph Tests in Expanded Leak Hunt (NYT)

• Lindsay Clancy judge declares mistrial – what happens next? (Guardian)

• U.S. added 162,000 jobs in August, but wage growth continues to lag inflation (NBC)

• Unemployed Americans say they’re stuck in a job-hunting nightmare (BI)

• U.S. Diesel Prices Set New High (NYT)

• Supreme Court hands Trump another win — a monkey wrench into voting by mail (The Hill)

• Judge Once Again Blocks Mail-In Ballot Rules (NYT)

• Democrats just got one seat closer to retaking the House (Silver Bulletin)

• Democrats eye expanded Medicare coverage if they take U.S. House (WP)

• Germany’s far-right AfD party is poised for power in a state election (NPR)

• How could US-Iran conflict end? Three experts give their views (BBC)

• A deadly strike on an Iranian wedding was likely a direct hit by a US munition (Reuters)

• US urged to consider military strikes to stop China achieving AGI first (SCMP)

• The Texas experiment (FT)

• ‘Too lazy to do the job’: Democrats dump on Fetterman after WSJ report (WSJ)

• Planting billions of trees in China to fight climate change backfired, altering the water distribution across the entire country (Earth.com)

• Two trapped workers are pulled alive from Nepal tunnel more than a week after deadly floods (NBC)

• President Plans to Use Qatari Jet for Overseas Flight Despite Security Concerns (NYT)

• Psychedelic ‘Furthur’ bus rolls back into San Francisco for new Grateful Dead exhibit (AP)

• Second complete map of a fruit fly brain completed (ArsTechnica)

• Wendell Berry, 1934–2026 (Bulwark)

• ChatGPT-6 Astra is here — this one prompt shows what it can really do (Tom’s Guide)

• South Korea’s AI rally is reshaping romance, reality shows and academic preferences (CNBC)

• We managed financial crises. AI is a risk of a different kind. (WP)

• After OpenAI’s Bots Went Rogue, Watchdogs Were Kept on a Short Leash (NYT)

• God Struggling To Remember Why He Made So Many Ugly People (Onion)

Origin Story: Salon.6

After spending the first three decades of my career in San Francisco, in the summer of 1999 I agreed to become the Washington bureau chief for Salon. The company had just gone public in June that year, so the coffers were full of investors’ money, and CEO David Talbot offered me incentives to move my family across the country.

I had just one condition before accepting Talbot’s offer — that I could take my crackerjack fact-checker, Daryl Lindsey, with me to the nation’s capital. If I was going to help direct our national political coverage, Daryl would be a key asset in that work.

My small staff included two young reporters — Jake Tapper and Alicia Montgomery, who would go on to make names for themselves at CNN and NPR, respectively. I also edited a fascinating debate-style series of columns between David Horowitz on the right and Joe Conason on the left.

Working as a journalist in the nation’s capital was a revelation. Whereas back in the Bay Area, everyone in the media community seemed to know who I was, here in the center of government I was a small fish swimming in a very large pond.

The yawning gap between the two political parties was almost absurdly stark to see up close. I remember watching Sen. Ted Kennedy and his Democratic colleagues stand up and sit down in lockstep as they listened to fellow Democrats or rival Republicans speak on a panel.

It was a scene right out of Saturday Night Live or The Onion.

I eventually met Ted Kennedy at a reception at his house for another left-wing publication, American Prospect, as it was opening its Washington office. Among the perks of being with Salon was people like Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton’s close aide, would return my calls.

Something unexpected that surprised and intrigued me was the quality of some of the writing in conservative publications, like the Weekly Standard and the American Spectator. I thought that the logic of the arguments advanced by some of the younger conservative writers was worthy of Salon’s consideration.

But when I expressed these ideas in the weekly staff meetings I attended by telephone, they were met by silence back at the home office. The culture wars were forcing people to take sides, and the core group of Salonistas knew firmly which side they were on.

My views were less predictable, for example I sometimes agreed with Horowitz rather than Conason in their weekly exchanges. In a sense, this was the journalist in me coming out, always willing to weigh both sides of an argument.

In the end, I knew I would always side with the progressives, but I found their certainty about complicated issues almost as unsettling as that on the right.

In addition, it was alienating to try and operate in a remote office far from headquarters. There was political infighting back in San Francisco that eventually affected my place in the pecking order.

And I didn’t appreciate that.

So when family reasons made a move back to San Francisco desirable I made a phone call to an old friend, Salon’s original benefactor, Richard Gingras. He offered me a lucrative position at an Internet giant, Excite@Home in Redwood City on the peninsula.

With that, my run with the Salonistas came to an abrupt end. I never regretted my time with the organization, and I loved the people there so I continued to support them from the outside. On occasion, I still wrote articles for them.

But much like that song about San Francisco, I knew that I’d left a big part of my heart behind at Salon.

(End of the series.)

HEADLINES: 

• Trump asks Supreme Court to OK sweeping changes for mail ballots (CNN)

• Federal judge considers whether to extend ban against U.S. Postal Service mail voting changes (PBS)

• A judge suggests that Trump mail-in voting rules could cause ‘major disenfranchisement.’ (NYT)

• Beware big swings in midterm forecasts (Silver Bulletin)

• U.S. strikes Iran again as Tehran targets American allies in Gulf region (PBS)

• China’s support for Iran shows its limits as US ramps up pressure on Tehran (Al Jazeera)

• Pentagon cuts access to classified information amid Iran war concerns (WP)

• Panetta: Hegseth is ‘undermining the strength’ of the US military (The Hill)

• Lindsay Clancy defense wants juror removed, saying they won’t ‘listen to the law’ amid deadlock (NBC)

• Federal Prosecutors Charge ICE Agent With Lying About Minnesota Shooting (NYT)

• Fox News abruptly parts ways with scandal-tarred star Maria Bartiromo (NPR)

• Trump to Break Ground on Arch Before Getting Approval (NYT)

• ‘Supersizing before our eyes’: UN warns of record El Niño approaching (Guardian)

• People are saying less each year. Scientists think that’s a problem. (WP)

• What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing? (NYT)

• What Happened in Minneapolis (New Yorker)

• ‘We badly need to raise our boys more like our girls’: Gloria Steinem – a life in quotes (Guardian)

• Olivia Rodrigo has a lot on her mind. But she’s still choosing joy (NPR)

• Widespread AI outage underway (Axios)

• Mark Zuckerberg opposed AI regulation proposal in a private call with Trump (BI)

• Cornell leads project putting robots to work in US orchards (Cornell)

• ‘Welcome to the AGI era’: OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra (VentureBeat)

• Dark Horse Emerges In Competition For Most Insane Coworker (Onion)

Origin Story: Salon.5

 On Jan. 17,1998 an obscure link aggregation site called the Drudge Report revealed that Newsweek magazine was sitting on a story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff about an affair between President Bill Clinton and a 22-year-old White House intern.

Because we’d published some of Drudge’s stuff at HotWired, I knew he needed careful fact-checking but also that when it came to gossip circulating in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. he was more often right than wrong.

Four days after Drudge, the Washington Post published the story, thereby breaking an unspoken taboo in mainstream media against reporting on the private lives of public figures. 

This development was one of the reasons David Talbot wanted me back at Salon — to help manage the coverage going forward of what was clearly going to be a major sex scandal.

It felt like “deja vu all over again” for me, a flashback to the early days of the Patty Hearst saga at Rolling Stone. As much as I disliked these types of stories personally, I would benefited from covering them professionally.

When confronted by reporters, Clinton had uttered his infamous statement: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”

But it turned out that the intern, Monica Lewinsky, had confided about the affair to a colleague, Linda Tripp, who had secretly taped their conversations. 

When Tripp discovered that Lewinsky had denied the relationship with Clinton in an affidavit for another sex scandal, the Paula Jones case, she delivered her tapes to Ken Starr. 

During his grand jury testimony that followed, Clinton minced words again, saying "it depends on what the meaning of the word is is.” Finally, in August 1998, he admitted to the affair.

This set up the first impeachment of a president since the 1868. It was at this moment, as the House prepared to begin proceedings that Salon published a bombshell. 

Under Talbot’s byline, we ported that:

Henry Hyde, the Republican Representative from Illinois who was going to chair the impeachment trial, had had a five-year extramarital affair years earlier with a woman named Cherie Snodgrass. We published a photo of the two with our report.

We had received a tip about Hyde’s affair over the previous months but it was a phone call to David Talbot from a 72-year-old retiree named Fred Sommer that finally got our attention. Sommer claimed that the woman’s ex-husband, Fred Snodgrass, had told him about the affair during a game of tennis, saying it had ruined his marriage.

We were able to confirm Sommer’s account by contacting various sources including Cherie Snodgrass, who gave us the photo.

As we prepared to go to press, we contacted Hyde’s office about the affair and surprisingly he confirmed that it was true, though dismissing it as a “youthful indiscretion.”

Now we knew we had a story that would guarantee Salon’s notoriety as a muckraking force to be reckoned with. In the furor that ensued, Talbot handled most of the media queries, but I made several television appearances as well.

Unlike 23 years earlier, I was no longer an inexperienced youth writing for Rolling Stone. Now I was a middle-aged editor with graying hair well-versed in the ways of media, and I easily brushed aside questions about the ethics of running our story, citing the editorial we had run along with Talbot’s story:

“In the brave new world that has been created by the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the private lives of public figures are no longer off-limits.” We didn’t like it but it was true.

Today, 30 years later, with the MeToo movement behind us and political sex scandals almost commonplace, that appears to have been a turning point in journalism history. 

That story put Salon on the map. It now occupied center stage on the national media landscape. 

For me, it was an opportunity to move to the belly of the beast, Washington,D.C.

(To be continued.)

HEADLINES:

• Trump says U.S. prepared to strike Iran “anytime we want” after carrying out “very heavy attack” (CBS)

• Iran retaliates with missiles and drones, defying Trump’s warning (WP)

• What is Iran’s Castle Breaker missile, used against US bases? (Al Jazeera)

• Iran attempted cyberattacks on range of U.S. infrastructure, sources say (NBC)

• Trump Proposes Renaming Strait Of Hormuz ‘Trump Strait’ (Forbes)

• Gloria Steinem, a potent voice of US feminism and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, dies at 92 (AP)

• Trump Administration Begins Blitz to Find Elusive Voter Fraud Ahead of Midterms (NYT)

• Postal Service work to comply with Trump’s executive order is rushed and sloppy, a whistleblower contends (AP)

• Trump’s oil deal could scuttle Venezuelan democracy, opposition fears (Politico)

• ‘Below the dignity of the office’: Canadian officials condemn Pete Hegseth cadet post (BBC)

• Carney tells Trump ‘Stop trying to be tough’ (AP)

• US and China arm for space warfare (Reuters)

• USS Abraham Lincoln’s crew of 5,000 arrive at notorious Thai resort after 270 days at sea (Guardian)

• The Court’s Ballroom Decision Is a Sign of Deeper Problems (Atlantic)

• Deadlocked Lindsay Clancy jury wraps up fifth day of deliberations without a verdict (CNN)

• ‘A friend I can trust’: How Americans described their relationship with AI (WP)

• New York City Bans A.I. in Elementary and Middle Schools (NYT)

• Judge Tells RFK Jr. to Stop Using Fake AI Studies on Teen Pregnancy (TNR)

• Four-legged robot learns to jump through tight gaps without human help (InterestingEngineering)

• Can you beat this AI writing detector? (WP)

• AI Strategist Suggests Calling Data Centers ‘Computer Parties’ (Onion)

Origin Story: Salon.4

When I rejoined Salon as an investigative editor in early 1998, it had been almost a decade since I had left the Center for Investigative Reporting.

During that period, I had added radio, TV and the web to my print journalism experience and I was beginning to appreciate the unique strengths and weaknesses of those various forms of media.

What was exciting about the Salon job was the opportunity to do investigative reporting on the web. With the ability to link to our source material, we now could be much more transparent with our audiences about our methods and our documentation.

We also could potentially involve our audiences in the investigation by issuing call-outs for tips, sources and leads.

At Salon we did all of this, which led to dozens of promising tips, one of which would lead us to Salon’s biggest story as well as a remarkable moment in U.S. political history. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; first there was much work to do.

I had almost (but not quite) forgotten that investigative reporters could be difficult to manage. There was the usual stuff — big egos, fights over wording, the density of fact-laden stories — but also the gnarly business of exposing powerful figures at the risk of massive lawsuits that could tie you up for years.

It was high-stress work but for some reason people thought I was good at it.

Salon’s corps of muckrakers included a freelancer named Murray Waas, who was almost single-handedly countering the Republican-led effort to undermine President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary with what was broadly known as the Whitewater Scandal.

This involved some real estate purchases by the Clintons in Arkansas. The scandal deepened when early in the Clinton presidency, Vincent W. Foster Jr., a close friend of the Clintons and a deputy White House counsel, was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in a Civil War park maintained by the National Park Service just outside the District of Columbia.

As outlandish theories about Whitewater and Foster’s suicide proliferated on the right, Waas and Salon responded by systematically rebutting all the allegations dogging the Clintons and documenting what Hillary called a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to undermine her husband’s presidency. 

The first lady was widely mocked in the mainstream media for this claim, but at Salon we documented that conspiracy piece by piece.

Leading the charge against the Clintons was special prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr, a former federal appeals court judge and a harsh critic of Bill Clinton.

In addition , the Republican-controlled Senate appointed a Special Whitewater Committee to conduct a wide-ranging probe that merged with Starr’s and eventually morphed into an investigation of allegations that Bill Clinton had engaged in various sexual improprieties and infidelities.

That would become the biggest sex scandal in American political history, and we at Salon found ourselves smack dab in the middle of it.

(To be continued.)

HEADLINES:

• Iran war ramps back up as Tehran accuses U.S. of bombing wedding party, attacks Gulf states (CBS)

• U.S. strikes Iran after new Hormuz Strait shipping attacks: Centcom (CNBC)

• Ed Markey wins: Key takeaways from Massachusetts primary election results (Al Jazeera)

• Six Takeaways From the Massachusetts Primaries (NYT)

• Postal Service plans may keep voters from getting ballots, whistleblower says (WP)

• Canada’s Carney slaps Trump admin for ‘doing memes ... throwing shade’ (CNBC)

• Wall Street Putting Close to 85% Odds of Paramount/ Warner Deal Getting Done (Barron’s)

• Germany blames Russia for drone attack on airport, announces countermeasures (WP)

• Texas’ halt on powering data centers reflects US reckoning over ‘ghost’ demand (Reuters)

• GOP hard-liners threaten rebellion over stopgap funding bill (The Hill)

• House Clears Bill to Avert an Election-Season Shutdown (NYT)

• Dozens of federal judges describe intensifying threats in new report (WP)

• Scientists attached transmitters to narwhals in the Arctic. The data they brought back was alarming (CNN)

• Florida bans Flock cameras and other license plate readers from state highways (NBC)

• Bond Sell-Off Threatens to Squeeze Borrowers Around the World (NYT)

• Lindsay Clancy jurors are deadlocked, judge sends them back for more deliberations (NBC)

• US sailors arrive in Thailand’s Pattaya after record 250 days at sea (BBC)

• Under Trump, SFO is now a de facto immigration detention center (SFC)

• Chinese shipper is collecting intelligence for Beijing with concealed equipment. (Reuters)

• George W. Bush’s Code of Silence (New Yorker)

• We asked scientists: Is it okay to use a little bit of cannabis? (WP)

• Decades After Tupac’s Murder, a Talkative Gang Member Is Convicted (NYT)

• Apple's new CEO, John Ternus, takes over from Tim Cook after 15 years (AP)

• House Censures Republican Accused of Sexually Harassing Two Aides (NYT)

• The Hugging Face hack could indicate cultural issues at OpenAI (TR)

• Activists Decry Meat Industry’s Practice Of Separating Calves From Their Cool Uncles (Onion)

Origin Story: Salon.3

When it launched late in 1995, Salon became an instant sensation. Founder David Talbot had hired some more talent, including Scott Rosenberg (technology), and Laura Miller (books) to round out his creative team and the content they produced was superb.

From the start, Salon presented an intriguing mixture of entertainment, politics and culture viewed through a liberal political lens. The content was often provocative in a way most traditional newspapers and magazines were not.

“Is Salon more tabloid-like?” Talbot said in answer to one query. “Yeah, we've made no secret of that.”

Over the next decade, Salon would play a key role in the culture wars disrupting American society by embodying and epitomizing what came to be known as “San Francisco values,” i.e., diversity, equity, LBGTQ inclusion, sexual freedom, and liberal political positions.

“We swim in the soup of San Francisco,” Talbot explained. “There are a lot of odd fish we've plucked out of the bay here and it gives us some of that Left Coast, Weird Coast style."

I was not one of his odd fish. After my initial three-month stint helping Salon launch, I had departed to join Wired magazine’s web play, HotWired. (I’ve already detailed my Wired years in the six-part series, “Getting Wired,” in June.)

Salon was by far the best site on the web for book lovers and cultural coverage generally, but many early adopters were geeks, and HotWired served that audience better. 

Politically, Salon was liberal, whereas HotWired was libertarian.

Differences aside, what both sites lacked a functional business plan. The content they served up was free, so how would they generate enough revenue to keep going once the initial thrill for investors was, to quote B.B. King, gone? 

Salon had some advertising and sponsorships but it was increasingly dependent on its two big investors, Bill Hambrecht and John Warnock. Both poured millions into the venture because they believed in its political slant. Talbot was quick to spend the money on writers and artists.

Meanwhile, my adventure at Wired contained lots of thrills of a different kind before it all came to an unhappy end late in 1997 when the company was sold and broken into pieces. 

By now, I was one of the relatively few experienced journalists with web expertise, so by early 1998 I was entertaining some potential offers when Talbot called.

He said that he wanted me to come back to Salon. The site was making a name for itself with some political muckraking and he wanted me to return to my roots as an investigative journalist.

That was an offer I could not refuse.

(To be continued,)

HEADLINES:

• Whistleblower claims USPS plan for Trump’s mail voting order could ‘derail’ midterms (NPR)

• Army Secretary Resigns After Ouster of Leaders (NYT)

• Nepal flood death toll crosses 1,000, rescuers reach remote areas (Reuters)

• What we know about deadly Nepal-Tibet floods (BBC)

• U.S. strikes Iran to prevent Hormuz mine threat (Axios)

• Iran’s economy in crisis as US launches new sanctions campaign (Guardian)

• Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video clip that he said showed Iran’s oil hub Kharg Island being blown to smithereens. An Iranian official dismissed it as “laughable.” (Reuters)

• United Arab Emirates intercepts an Iranian drone (AP)

• Trump pushes Apple to change ‘Lake Ontario’ to ‘Lake America’ on its maps (BBC)

• The world may have less time than it thinks on climate change (Economist)

• Ex-Congressman George Santos Receives Kalshi’s First-Ever Lifetime Ban (WSJ)

• James Clyburn says supporting Clarence Thomas for supreme court ‘was mistake’ (Guardian)

• Trump says he will report NBC host to FCC for ‘rebuke or punishment’ (WP)

• White House Ballroom Construction Can Proceed, Supreme Court Says (NYT)

• Trump still teases a third presidential run, but he’s talking more and more about life after 2028 (AP)

• Death Toll Rises in Grand Canyon Flood as Search Efforts Continue (NYT)

• Lionel Messi retires from Argentina international duty: ‘A decision that hurts my soul’ (The Athletic)

• Employers are begging colleges to help Zoomers learn how to talk (BI)

• It’s One of Our Greatest and Most Controversial Novels. How Should It Be Taught? (NYT)

• Meta whistleblower says $17B settlement doesn’t do enough to save kids’ lives (Politico)

• F.T.C. and 22 States Claim in Lawsuit That Amazon Secretly Inflated Ad Prices (NYT)

• AI Burnout Hits the People Charged With Defending Hospitals and Banks From Hackers (Bloomberg)

• We tested how AI chatbots would handle foreign propaganda. They did surprisingly well (NPR)

• People Who Obviously Used ChatGPT Almost Always Use 14 Dead-Giveaway Phrases (YourTango)

• Help Wanted: ‘Forward-Deployed’ Humans for the A.I. Era (NYT)

• Dept. Of Interior Sets Aside 2.3 Million Acres For Future Trumps To Enjoy (Onion)