Getting Wired.4

(Fourth in a series.)

Whether we were aware of it or not, our creative teams at HotWired (Wired Digital) in 1996-7 were helping design the future of media. There was no roadmap but there was a sense of urgency. And as one of those ostensibly in charge, I figured the kind of manager the staff really needed was one who knew when to stay out of their way.

This was a time of invention.

But our staffers also desperately needed someone with a direct channel to Wired co-founder and CEO Louis Rossetto. Without Louis’s blessing, many of their promising new ideas would die on the vine.

So I became that person.

Politics of the left-right variety had very little to do with how the events I am chronicling here unfolded. Politics of the inter-personal variety would have everything to do with the outcome, however.

Before I could lobby Louis on my staff’s behalf, I had to understand in detail the ideas they were proposing, which ranged from simple to complex, original, flaky, redundant, cynical, silly or promising. So I established an open-door style of management, which wasn’t terribly difficult because there were no doors on my office. We all sat together in one big open space spread over two floors connected by a spiral staircase in the middle.

There were a few airless conference rooms so we gathered there when we could, although as the sleep-deprived father of a new baby, I occasionally had trouble staying alert in them. But my assistant booked consecutive 15-minute sessions from early morning until evening for me every workday and repeated cups of coffee took care of the rest.

There were endless subjects to talk over because initially we were in essence a multimedia company covering everything. The staffers usually wanted to meet me in groups — there were several on each team. 

It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the Gen X cohort. They were a tad older than my oldest child, who was born when I was at Rolling Stone. They were a bunch of smart, cranky iconoclasts stretching the limits of Internet technology to tell stories in new ways. They were cynically idealistic with a creative spirit that was infectious. They were rebellious.

They reminded me of the Rolling Stone crowd, actually, from 20 years earlier. They had their own interpretation of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, which was displayed usually — but not always —after closing time, sometimes on the roof. A few of them partied hard. But I didn’t join my staff members in any of these activities. While they partied, I was singing babies to sleep to “You’re So Pretty” by the Cranberries.

But I did know that the neighborhood around our office still contained some of the same bars and clubs we’d hung out at back in my RS days, although probably under new management. Over the years, South Park had gentrified from a quaint tree-lined loop where black families lived in a tight community into what was now a disjointed hipster lunch hangout/epicenter of the digital revolution.

You might say the music was different while the geography stayed the same. 

(To Be Continued)

HEADLINES:

• Middle East live: Trump threatens Iran after JD Vance hails ‘great progress’ made in Switzerland talks (Guardian)

• Vance Heads to Talks as Strait of Hormuz Re-emerges as Point of Tension (NYT)

• US denies Iran’s claim to have closed Strait of Hormuz over Israeli attacks in Lebanon (BBC)

• US-Iran Nuclear Talks Stall as Fighting Rages On in Lebanon (Bloomberg)

• U.S. and Iran give it another try (Reuters)

• Iran Can Now Sell Oil. How Fast Can It Ramp Up? (WSJ)

• War-weary Iranians see glimmers of relief as Trump deal takes shape (WP)

• Trump acknowledges ‘real problems’ at reflecting pool after $14m makeover, blaming ‘vandalism’ (Guardian)

• Trump deepens the dustup with Italy’s Meloni, who says his ‘unprovoked attacks are senseless’ (AP)

• Ukraine’s war robots are surging into the kill zone (BI)

• Defending Reason in a Darkening Age (New Yorker)

• How Trump conquered the Republican Party (Silver Bulletin)

• Signs point to Ebola’s rapid spread in Congo (Reuters)

• Giants ‘Pride Night’ cap controversy prompts investigation into MLB for religious discrimination (Yahoo)

• Saturn’s Icy Moon Is the Perfect Place to Settle, NASA Scientist Argues (Futurism)

• From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn’t stop anyone (TechCrunch)

• U.S. wants more power for AI data centers (Reuters)

• The secret to how chatbots persuade you (WP)

• Man Souring On ISIS After Reading ‘Controversies’ Section Of Militant Group’s Wikipedia (Onion)

Getting Wired.3

 (Third in a series)

Early in 1996, our workforce at HotWired expanded. We had outgrown the original office adjacent to Wired magazine, so we moved a block south to another converted warehouse at 660 Third Street.

For me, if the parallels from my time at Rolling Stone two decades earlier weren’t already in mind, they now became inescapable. From a window next to my desk at HotWired I could look directly into the office across the street at 625 where Howard Kohn and I had written our three-part series about Patty Hearst and the SLA 20 years earlier.

One of many similarities between the two companies was the almost constant stream of celebrities who wanted to visit us when they came to San Francisco. At Rolling Stone, it had been rock stars, of course, but also journalists, professors, actors and politicians.

HotWired was no different, but the visitors now included future billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, as well as what seemed like every other aspiring Internet entrepreneur on the planet. Also there were tech-savvy musicians like Brian Eno and politicians like Bill Bradley, a former Olympic basketball player and senator who was running for president.

Among those who visited with me were reporters from the Washington Post, Newsweek, the L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, NPR and the major TV networks. They marveled at the scene as I sprinkled my newly memorized web terms liberally into sound bites that made me sound like much more of an expert than I was.

But many of the reporters also confided to me that this whole scene made them uncomfortable because if the digital revolution succeeded it seemed likely to threaten our profession. Not to mention what it would mean for our society at large.

I was hopeful they were wrong on both counts, but 30 years later, it’s clear they were not wrong. The devastation to the media world is obvious for all to see. Just look around. So many newspapers have closed that in most cities it is a surprise to discover that one still exists. Thousands of once-important news operations have closed their operations since the Web started disrupting their business models circa 1994.

Old media companies couldn’t just “give it away” when it came to content. They needed the revenue from subscribers and sponsors and newsstand sales and classified ads to keep operating. One of the early harbingers of their doom was the overnight success of Craigslist, launched across town in 1995 by an unassuming fellow named Craig Newmark.

San Francisco newspaper executive Phil Bronstein reminded me many years later that I had warned him when Craigslist first appeared that he should try to get the Hearst Corp. to buy it and that they they might regret not doing so later. That was an understatement.

Newspapers have not been the only victims. TV and radio have suffered greatly from the digital revolution as well, losing audiences and advertising share. As have magazines. Book publishing has been decimated.

Meanwhile, the new media world has splintered into a thousand shards of digital sites catering to niche audiences and even more niche opinions. Losing the media industry was one thing. Losing our democracy is quite another. Fringe theories, conspiracy thinking, extremist movements have all flourished in the Digital Age, ultimately threatening our most precious freedoms in the process.

But that was not the story as we envisioned it back at HotWired in 1996.

At that moment, a stock market frenzy was making Internet millionaires out of 26-year-olds right and left, and it was widely known that Wired, too, was preparing for its own IPO -- initial public offering — later that year.

One of the documents I carried around with me as a reminder of where we headed was the Wired prospectus for potential investors. It described how Wired Inc. would help lead the rise of an Internet economy to become a global media empire.

No small part of that vision hinged on the efforts of our team at HotWired, since the kinds of multiples envisioned in the prospectus could never be generated by an analog magazine alone.

So at HotWired we were experimenting with a wide range of content strategies, including a search engine (HotBot), advertising models (the banner ad was a HotWired creation), the earliest web blogs (like Suck), interactive bulletin boards, audio programs (presaging podcasts) and digital video, which included a TV program called Netizen TV.

We also foresaw the future of interactive broadband video. We were involved with Microsoft and NBC when they created MSNBC with that in mind. I was among a small group of Wired execs who flew to New York during the negotiations that led to the cable network’s formation — we ate steak and smoked cigars and toasted a future we thought might include Wired and by extension each of us.

They were heady times.

For the first time in my working life, I held options to purchase shares in my employer’s company that would vest over time — four years to be exact. And as a vice-president, my holdings were large enough to potentially make me a modestly wealthy man in the process -- a prospect that had never even occurred to me before.

But hey, I’m getting ahead of myself in the story, which is much bigger than the fate of any one person. Back then in 1996, pretty much anything still seemed possible.

(To be continued.)

HEADLINES:

• Secret Vetting and Blocked Promotions: Inside Hegseth’s War on Diversity (NYT)

• Israel and Hezbollah continue strikes despite ceasefire agreement (BBC)

• U.S.–Iran talks are put on hold as fighting escalates in Lebanon (NPR)

• Oil tanker traffic in Strait of Hormuz jumps after U.S. and Iran implement deal to open sea lane (CNBC)

• Iran says it’s closing Strait of Hormuz over Lebanon fighting amid push to resume US talks (CNN)

• Hormuz Reopening Brings Relief for Global Economy (WSJ)

• U.S. intelligence warns Israel is likely to undermine Iran peace deal, officials say (WP)

• Trump approval on Iran low even as tentative deal to end fighting emerged (AP)

• Trump’s Iran deal could place his legacy in the hands of Tehran (Guardian)

• Vance’s Defense of Iran Deal Rests on Vague and Misleading Claims (NYT)

• Pulte seeks major cuts in first day as intel chief (Politico)

• White House delays the release a of US voting machine study as midterms near. (Reuters)

• Mexico’s Laws Have a New Target: Journalists (NYT)

• Italy’s Meloni says Trump ‘made up’ story that she ‘begged’ him for photo at G7 (BBC)

• Hegseth appears out of step in criticisms of NATO allies (PBS)

• Democratic socialists surge in mayoral races across the US as anti-Trump fervor rises (AP)

• Ukraine is putting weapons stations on ground robots to make ‘small tanks’ that hunt Russia’s infiltration teams (BI)

• The Most Promising Ebola Vaccine Has Been Sitting on the Shelf for 15 Years (Wired)

• US to end funding of South Africa’s HIV programmes over claims of Afrikaner persecution (BBC)

• The modern American retirement is online (BI)

• The profound meaning and mystery of deathbed visions (WP)

• Rise of the robots: China releases plan aimed at increasing consumers’ AI options (SCMP)

• Tech Workers Maxed Out Their A.I. Use. Now They’re Trying to Minimize It. (NYT)

• McDonald’s Warns Corporate Employees To Beware Emails From Sender Purporting To Be Grimace (Onion)

Getting Wired.2

By the time I joined the HotWired team in late 1995, I’d been working in media for almost 30 years. This was not necessarily a good thing in the eyes of my new colleagues, who were busily upending the analog media world I came from with a digital alternative they considered far superior.

“Content wants to be free” was a standard rallying cry at HotWired, which was not yet two years old and was undergoing a massive growth spurt fueled by corporate advertising revenue. We were hiring people almost as fast as we could; I joked to friends that our interviewing strategy was to lock the door behind candidates so they couldn’t leave once they were inside.

But nobody wanted to leave -- if you were Gen-X and into creative media work in the mid-1990s, this is exactly where you wanted to be.

As for me, I was twice as old as most of the other employees, and my career had been almost entirely in the alternative media, not the mainstream. From my days in the underground press to SunDance to Rolling Stone to the Center for Investigative Reporting and from New West to Mother Jones and public radio plus other stops along the way, I had pretty much remained outside of traditional journalism institutions.

But in those jobs I did adhere strictly to the values and standards of traditional journalists.

My new colleagues were early-stage writers and reporters and editors and designers and photographers and engineers and interface experts and audience research specialists and several other categories of workers, almost all of them in their mid-to-late 20s.

To most of them, I was probably sort of like a nutty uncle.

They used a techno lingo unfamiliar to me, with terms like web browser, domain name, interactivity, bandwidth, interface, pixels, TCP/IP, url, html, coding, style sheets, IP address, network domain and on and on -- so many strange words that I scribbled them down on a scrap of paper and kept it in my pocket exactly as I did with foreign language phrases when visiting non-English-speaking countries overseas.

After a few months, I finally got around to asking someone what all of these words actually meant. He smirked and quipped: “Don’t worry what they mean; just sprinkle them liberally into your speech and your market value will triple.”

As I pondered that, the daily political site my team produced called The Netizen began to flourish. We rapidly built a large audience during the early months of election cycle 1996, which attracted the interest of Wired’s co-founder and CEO, Louis Rossetto.

He had a reputation as an articulate visionary but an extremely difficult boss; many employees seemed fearful of his outbursts. He was a fierce advocate of libertarian political views, a lifelong Republican, pro-corporate and bluntly dismissive of leftist ideas.

So when Rossetto first summoned me to a private meeting I really didn’t know what to expect. Most of my previous work had appeared in left-leaning publications, and he probably assumed my politics were defined by that. Maybe he wanted to suss me out.

From our very first meeting, the Louis I got to know was quite different from his image. He was smart and opinionated, true, but also quiet-spoken, thoughtful and happy to debate the issues of the day with me at great length. Most importantly, he was committed to remaining open-minded about how we covered those issues in The Netizen.

That kind of tolerance was essential if I was to remain part of the Wired organization, which I already knew I wanted to do. Louis and I quickly developed a mutual trust that allowed us to argue through the various sides of the issues we were covering and agree to disagree when we could not reach a consensus.

Meanwhile he never interfered in my actual editorial choices, though they repeatedly differed from what I know he would have preferred.

The ultimate test came when one of our cantankerous Netizen columnists decided to write a piece savagely critical of Wired itself. He decided to lambast the institution and everything it stood for in his daily column.

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! This surely would be too much for Louis to handle, I thought.

As the hit piece was about to post, I was gathering up my family pictures from my desk to put in my briefcase since I assumed that I’d soon be out of a job again. But first, as a courtesy to Louis I let him know what was coming. His response was shocking and refreshingly direct:

“Let him rant!”

We ran the piece unedited. My job was secure.

For me, that moment confirmed that Rossetto was committed to his principles, which started with free speech for everyone.

Looking back on that incident, I realize that by then dealing with bosses other people considered difficult was becoming something of a habit for me; after all, I’d studied under one the masters, Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. Others may have feared these men and their legendary outbursts, but I genuinely liked them and developed a deep fondness for both Jann and Louis that lasted well past my jobs with them.

A few months after the “Let him rant” episode, Louis suddenly summoned me to his office again for an unscheduled meeting. Again, I assumed there must be bad news of some sort, but instead he surprised me by saying he wanted to move me to the top of the org chart as V.P. of Content Management for all of the websites in the HotWired network.

I was content producing The Netizen and hadn’t sought this role at all but of course I agreed to it, especially because it came with a hefty raise, and at home we had another baby on the way.

In my new role, dozens of people now reported to me, including my former bosses who were about half my age and seemed stunned by the change.

(To be continued)

HEADLINES:

• Opening his presidential center, Obama urges resistance to ‘cynicism and despair’ (CNN)

• Israel and Hezbollah agree to a ceasefire after intensified fighting threatens U.S.-Iran talks (NBC)

• Vance postpones Iran talks trip (Axios)

• The Iran War Was a Spectacular Failure (New Yorker)

• Vance Issues Blunt Warning to Israel as He Defends Trump’s Deal (NYT)

• Read the full text of Trump’s preliminary U.S.-Iran agreement to end the war (NPR)

• US lifts naval blockade as Iran’s supreme leader says Trump made deal ‘out of desperation’ (BBC)

• Iran announces plans to bring in maritime fees for strait of Hormuz (Guardian)

• Traffic flows through Hormuz as U.S.-Iran deal takes effect, questions remain (Reuters)

• Hegseth Berates NATO Allies for ‘Shameful’ Response to U.S. War in Iran (NYT)

• Drone strikes beyond the battlefield pump up market for technology to repel them (Reuters)

• Labour Mayor Wins U.K. Special Election, Clearing Path to Challenge Starmer (NYT)

• President Trump Has a Pool Problem. The Nation Has Thoughts. (WSJ)

• ‘Everything has its own order and purpose’: The rainforest ‘farms’ defying modern agriculture (BBC)

• Ancient Sherwood Forest oak tree reputed to have sheltered Robin Hood has died (CNN)

• What does the AI revolution mean for you? (WP)

• Bernie Sanders unveils plan to give the public direct ownership of AI companies (AP)

• The surprisingly simple ways AI can be tricked into breaking its own rules (WP)

• New York City Mayor Presents Knicks With Key To His Car (Onion)

 

Getting Wired

Late in 1995, I was invited over to the headquarters of Wired magazine by one of the editors, John Battelle, who knew me from my years teaching at U-C Berkeley.

The magazine’s office had cubicles, computers, rock ‘n roll playing in the background and a few dogs lounging around.

But the real attraction lay on the other side of a common kitchen area where HotWired, the online side of Wired magazine, was located.

It was a striking scene. Row after row of 20-somethings sat working on laptops perched on doors balanced over sawhorses, with the Chili Peppers blasting and a whiff of marijuana in the air. A couple of my former interns stood up to greet me and showed how they were designing content for a wide range of websites.

Right after I left the office, I called home to say, “I’ve just found the next place I want to work.”

Several weeks later, HotWired offered me a job as producer of what would be the web’s first daily political news site, called The Netizen.

Although the starting salary was barely half what I’d previously been making, and I did have the needs of a new family at home to consider, I accepted the offer without hesitation and said I could start the next day.

On day one, I was introduced to a small staff of producers and designers with hardly any journalism experience. But they were smart, highly motivated and ready to invent something.

I quickly hired two of the brightest young journalists (and former students) I knew from Berkeley and set out to work with the developer team -- the head engineer was a former colleague from Mother Jones, and we set a crash course to build The Netizen.

We launched the website in something like 28 days.

It was a presidential election year, so we hired three experienced political writers as our correspondents and they fanned out across the campaign trail to cover the re-election effort of incumbent Bill Clinton and his Republican challengers, including the eventual nominee, Bob Dole.

I had been assured complete editorial independence for the operation, and it quickly attracted a large audience among the early adopters then flocking to the web. Day after day we published smart, snarky takes from all sides of the political spectrum with a decidedly libertarian streak, in accordance with the dominant philosophy of Silicon Valley.

For me it was exciting -- my young staffers were quickly developing editorial skills, and we were able collectively to generate controversy almost without trying.

Email was still a new phenomenon, and the feedback from readers that poured in upon publication included some that were outright abusive, often misogynistic, which disturbed me and was a harbinger of things to come.

Thinking back with the benefit of hindsight, I had an early glimpse of how hate, lies and conspiracies might flourish in this new environment, but I didn’t know what to do about that at the time.

Free speech was free speech, I told myself somewhat naively. And outside of the negative stuff, I liked the chaotic two-way communication cacophony of the web. It was a free-for-all.

Our readers blasted off at our writers in ways traditional journalism never had experienced. Those of us from legacy media were used to being the last word on a topic. In this new media, as I told a Poynter symposium, we were only the first word. It was a conversation, not a broadcast.

Everyone on staff handled it in relatively good spirits as The Netizen quickly rocketed into position as one of the leading news sites on the web.

If I was the pilot, it felt like I was guiding a ship far out into space, destination unknown.

(To be continued.)

HEADLINES:

• U.S. and Iran sign deal ahead of schedule (Axios)

• The Text of the Deal (NYT)

• Trump says the US will resume bombing if Iran doesn’t comply with agreement (CNN)

• Questions linger over U.S.-Iran deal as details remain murky (PBS)

• Trump Does Not Understand the War He Lost (Atlantic)

• Trump is in a sea of trouble over Iran (Spectator)

• Moscow hit by largest Ukrainian attack since start of Russia’s full-scale war (BBC)

• Fed Holds Rates and Leans Toward Fighting Inflation With Future Increases (NYT)

• Trump says intelligence chief pick’s hearing is off and Pulte will remain for now (WP)

• Senate delays Jay Clayton’s nomination for intel director after Trump post (NBC)

• The death rate in ICE immigrant detention centers more than doubles under Trump (Reuters)

• Georgia Republicans Shelve Redistricting as Anger Grows (NYT)

• El Niño is here, so what does it mean? (NPR)

• Inside the push to keep RFK Jr.’s vaccine agenda alive (WP)

• News sites are the new newspapers: People are abandoning them for social media (Nieman)

• How Ukraine Uses A.I. to Knock Deadly Russian Drones Out of the Skies (NYT)

• The private school choice boom leaves behind many kids in public school (AP)

• The White House’s capricious controls on Anthropic (FT)

• China isn’t trying to beat the U.S. at AI — it’s playing a completely different game (Fortune)

• The Cloud Has Sound: The Unrelenting and Unseen Cost of A.I. Data Centers (NYT)

• E.T. Admits Shock At Not Even Being Called For Cameo In ‘Disclosure Day’ (Onion)

 

Peace on Earth? (Maybe)

I’d comment on the Iran peace deal, but I can’t because the details are secret. It doesn’t appear that Trump got anything from this war other than what was already had. And this cost us many billions of dollars.

Oh, and somebody should probably tell Israel.

So onto other matters.

Update on my tomato plant wars: Although we’ve never identified the animal that stole our plants, the garden has provided a large number of new plants that sprung up from last year’s plantings.

So I am now tending to over a dozen new plants. Enemies beware. 

This is truly a World Cup house and as France won its first match, 3-1, the place erupted into a state of bedlam. My grandchildren are not only French fans, three of them are French citizens as well.

So, there will be a good deal more cheering to come at our house this summer, I presume.

HEADLINES:

• Trump turns his attention to Ukraine ahead of Iran deal: ‘I’m going to do whatever I can’ (CNBC)

• Trump insists Iran deal will open Strait of Hormuz ‘toll-free’ as he meets world leaders (BBC)

• Trump claims victory over Iran, but deal is silent on nuclear weapons (WP)

• Trump’s Iran Deal Looks Worse Than Obama’s—And I’m Glad He Made It (Bulwark)

• Doubts swirled around the US-Iran interim deal to end the war in the Middle East as shippers said it could take weeks for confidence to return after any reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and fundamental questions remained unanswered. (Reuters)

• Oil Futures Extend Decline on Optimism About U.S.-Iran Deal (WSJ)

• Higher prices for gas, groceries and flights will outlast the Iran war, experts say (AP)

• NATO’s Permanent Crisis (Foreign Affairs)

• Records reveal $600M estimate for Trump’s ballroom project, with half from taxpayers (WP)

• Federal Judge Blocks Idaho Law Criminalizing Transgender Bathroom Use (NYT)

• US primaries in Oklahoma, Georgia, others: Key takeaways from the results (Al Jazeera)

• Trump’s favored candidate won in a closely watched Alabama Senate contest. Find four takeaways from races in Alabama, Oklahoma and Georgia here. (WP)

• COVID-19 vaccine linked with lower risk of heart attack, stroke: Study (The Hill)

• As the US approaches its 250th birthday next month, two out of five Americans do not believe it will endure another 250 years, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll ‌that highlighted deep divisions over how the nation views itself. (Reuters)

• The Newsground turns to coffee to fund investigative journalism (Nieman)

• Giants players’ ‘Pride Night’ hat stance criticized by broadcaster Mike Krukow (NBC)

• SpaceX is buying AI coding startup Cursor (BI)

• The hidden risk of Trump’s Anthropic crackdown (Axios)

• How Anthropic lost the White House’s trust — and then its flagship product (WP)

• Humanity isn’t ready for the coming intelligence explosion (Economist)

• Study: More Americans Foregoing College In Favor Of Letting The Carnival Sort Them Out (Onion)

Are Manners Obsolete?

(I first published a version of this essay six years ago and it feels quaint. Lots has changed since then, with the coming of AI, and being polite is hardly our main concern.)

One legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic is the increased use of robots in our society. Among their advantages, they don’t need masks or social distancing and they don’t take sick days, vacations or parental leave.

They also don’t easily take offense when treated badly or need to be thanked for doing a good job. In fact they don’t require any emotional involvement whatsoever.

As robotized services including Alexa and Siri have become more embedded in our offices and households, a question that occurs to me is what long-term impact are they having on the way we communicate with each other.

It starts, as do all things, with the children. Kids quickly learn to ask Siri or Alexa to do something in a commanding voice, which then becomes anger if the robot cannot comply with their wishes quickly enough.

I wonder how a child growing up in such circumstances will treat his or her employees in the future?

When voice commands first became a thing, I found myself speaking in a respectful voice and often thanking Siri for her help. Siri never replied. The engineers who developed her apparently hadn’t bothered to work “you’re welcome” into her vocabulary.

Thus, my politeness fell on deaf ears.

And although this type of software is supposed to be intelligent, i.e., it learning from interacting with us, in my experience our robotic friends are in no way learning to be more polite.

As for humans, when we are not rewarded for being polite, we tend to become less so over time. Gradually, for example, I’ve learned to issue simple straight-out commands to my voiced units. There is no point in engaging in social niceties with an entity that doesn’t respond accordingly, is there?

But what I am conditioning myself to become?

When it comes to the people who have designed the relevant software in this case, many of them value direct, logical and blunt sentences. Social skills simply are not at a premium during an intense Agile development cycle.

As our society populates the environment with robots, maybe the ultimate effect will be that nobody will have much of a reason to be nice anymore.

This would, of course, resemble our political culture, where it seems politeness and respect for others became extinct some time ago.

Indeed, being not nice is often a virtue in modern America. And those who cheer on the misogynist, racist, homophobic demagogues at political rallies? They resemble nothing so much as robots.

The news summaries in an age like this might as well be compiled by robots as well, but in fact I’ve done the ones that follow in the old-fashioned way. They are hand-picked. Please enjoy them.

HEADLINES:

• US, Iran agree to ceasefire, sending stock futures higher and oil lower (Yahoo)

• Iran war day 109: Tehran, Washington, sign MoU electronically (Al Jazeera)

• Trump Winds Down the War He Started With Goals Unmet (NYT)

• Trump’s Iran Deal Is a Humiliation for Him—and Good News for the World (Nation)

• Authorities in southern Lebanon warned people displaced by three months of war between Israel and Hezbollah against rushing home despite ‌the US-Iran deal, as Israel said it would not withdraw troops from the south. (Reuters)

• 82nd Airborne Deployment to Israel Went Unannounced (Military.com)

• FBI foiled alleged plot to attack White House UFC event, Kash Patel says (NBC)

• Eight Crew Members Dead in B-52 Crash at Air Force Base (NYT)

• ‘An awkward family gathering’: Trump and G7 leaders convene in France amid geopolitical divergences (CNN)

• Newsom Says Trump’s Justice Department Is Investigating Him and His Wife (NYT)

• Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland (New Yorker)

• Trump ties FISA renewal to his stalled voting bill (Axios)

• Inside the Trump administration’s rapid rollback of gun regulations (WP)

• Voters are turning out against toxic pesticides. Will the Senate listen? (The Hill)

• As the U.S. turns 250, this historian has blunt advice: ‘America has to grow up’ (NPR)

• Vance’s fraud task force is sweeping up legitimate small businesses (WP)

• Britain Announces Social Media Ban for Children (NYT)

• What the ‘60 Minutes’ fiasco reveals about press freedom today (The Hill)

• ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ Ratings Show Huge, Dramatic Swing (Yahoo)

• MLB sends warning letter to three Giants relievers for their anti-Pride Night protest (McCovey Chronicles)

• The US Government Is Letting a Key Data Center Regulation Expire (Wired)

• How a warning from Amazon led the White House to shut down Anthropic’s Mythos model (Fortune)

• AI robots can go rogue – a researcher on how easily it happens (Conversation)

• Bots Now Outnumber Humans on the Internet. Here’s What That Actually Means (CNET)

• Why AI Is Incorrigibly Didactic (Atlantic)

• How to Run a News Company in the Age of Polarization and A.I. Slop (NYT)

• MLB Demands Return Of All Foul Balls (Onion)

 

The World at Play

Among the options for ways to learn about and experience the larger world, travel is the best choice. If you go to enough places on several continents you begin to develop an appreciation for the diversity of human choices and conditions.

If you cannot travel, you can read books, watch films and try to meet those in your community who come from different countries and backgrounds. There also are ethnic restaurants, festivals and parades.

And then there’s sports, which brings me to the World Cup.

In our house there is a hand-drawn wall chart listing every matchup for all the teams playing in this year’s World Cup competition. My grandchildren drew it and filled in their predictions for all the games before the first match had been played.

Five of them did this by debating the merits of each squad from around the world, based on their knowledge as soccer players themselves and as fans.

We’ve had the games playing on TV all weekend. At one point, I found myself sleepily watching the match between Australia and Türkiye broadcast in Spanish with my 15-year-old granddaughter, who is fluent in French.

We both understand just enough Spanish to sort of follow the commentary, which was exuberant and fast-paced.

For those uninterested in the World Cup, or in sports generally, I can understand the irritation at all the hype.

But then again, this is the whole world coming together to play games and cheer their teams on in peace, not war, which is a lot better than the alternative.

HEADLINES:

• Iran and US agree deal to end war as Israel says its forces will stay in Lebanon (BBC)

• U.S. and Iran reach deal to extend ceasefire and open strait (Axios)

• U.S.-Iran deal explained: What we know — and what remains unresolved (CNBC)

• Trump Claims Strait Will Be ‘Permanently Toll-Free’ Under Agreement With Iran (NYT)

• Trump Celebrates While America Capitulates (Atlantic)

• A deal is only the beginning of the end of the US-Iran war (Economist)

• So Much for Leaving Abortion Up to the States (Atlantic)

• The White House UFC fights are a spectacle. And a reflection of America. (WP)

• Hospitals See Diseases Resurge as Vaccinations Decline (NYT)

• Congress has lost its grip on funding the government (WP)

• Russia Is Rich in Ballistic Missiles. Ukraine Is Short of Ways to Stop Them. (NYT)

• Pilot and 11 skydivers dead after Missouri plane crash, officials say (CNN)

• Trump at 80: A President ‘Really Uncomfortable’ With Aging (NYT)

• As UFOs go mainstream, the jury is out on what the existence of alien life might mean for religion (AP)

• Germany and Japan Are Rearming Again, 80 Years After World War II (NYT)

• Why American Christianity Ended Up Like This (New Yorker)

• US asks Anthropic to block global access to top AI models: Why it matters (Al Jazeera)

• The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes (NYT)

• Why it’s nearly impossible to build a robot without China (Japan Times)

• For centuries, math has been a human endeavor. Does AI mean it’s over? (WP)

• The skills people still perform better than AI, according to workplace experts (AP)

• Study: Crying Not Linked To What You Said But The Way You Said It (Onion)