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)

 

Origin Story: Salon.2

What David Talbot and the small group of us who gathered around him to help launch “Salon Magazine” in the fall of 1995 didn’t know was that the publishing industry we all depended on was about to undergo a complete transformation.

And in the process, the world of print that had dominated communication since Gutenberg would be supplanted by a new digital universe rooted in the Internet.

The money that allowed Talbot and three colleagues — editors Gary Kamiya and Andrew Ross and designer Mignon Khargie — to leave their jobs at the San Francisco Examiner came from an executive in the tech industry, Richard Gingras at Apple.

It was only $50,000 but it allowed Talbot to try and implement his dream.

Neither Talbot nor his friends had any business experience, so they were soon joined by David Zweig, the company’s first publisher. Talbot then asked me to help out and I said yes.

I was just coming off a roller-coaster ride at KQED where in the space of a year and a half I went from being interim radio news director to special assistant to the president to executive vice-president of the public broadcasting company.

It was in the last role, as EVP, that I had learned the ropes of running a medium-sized company with hundreds of employees in a kind of crash-course-on-the-job kind of way.

It was this scant business experience, not really my journalism background, that Talbot hoped to tap into initially. And it proved to be a good fit, since I had honed my fundraising skill at KQED, including how to attract money from corporations, which is known as underwriting in public media lingo.

And a startup called HotWired had caught my attention for its ability to raise corporate funds for what looked like a web-based magazine.

This was relevant because Salon was going to be based on the web, at least initially, although none of us really knew what that meant, or that we would be pioneers in figuring that out.

The key figure during this period was Richard Gingras, the Apple exec who had come up with the funding. Gingras and I formed a close bond as we helped the editorial team navigate the hazardous path to launch.

Armed with a Mac laptop, I approached friends seeking $25,000 investments in the nascent company with some success. But much more significantly, I told an old friend and former writing partner, New York Times tech reporter John Markoff, what Talbot & crew were up to and he saw that this could make a good story.

Meanwhile, we were able to find two major investors -- investment banker Bill Hambrecht and Adobe co-founder John Warnock. They both agreed to get involved, more because they shared the magazine’s progressive political vision than any hope they would recoup their multi-million dollar investments.

But Markoff’s article was the key. One line in particular heralded the coming of the new order. “While start-up ventures like Salon may not immediately attract much notice from the more traditional publishing world, they are a real threat in the long term to existing publishers…”

(To be continued.)

HEADLINES:

• Pentagon secretly installs military influencers in civilian roles (WP)

• Trump says US will refill Strategic Petroleum Reserve using Venezuelan oil (Reuters)

• Energy experts have doubts about Trump’s newly proposed Venezuelan oil deal (NPR)

• Military leaders warn Hegseth against extending Iran war operations (WP)

• Postal Service Rule Could Bar Millions From Voting by Mail (NYT)

• Nepal flood death toll reaches 800, with more than 3,000 missing, as poor weather hampers rescues (CBS)

• Nepal rescuers race to reach hundreds feared trapped in hydropower tunnels (Guardian)

• One Dead and 15 May Be Missing at the Grand Canyon After Flash Flood (NYT)

• A U.S. strike on Iran breaks a month-long lull, and Iran fires back (WP)

• What new tariff walls in U.S.-Canada trade war mean for the economy’s critical metals (CNBC)

• Ford: Trump renaming Lake Ontario is ‘something out of “Saturday Night Live”‘ (The Hill)

• Canada erects giant ‘Lake Ontario’ sign as spat with Trump over name escalates (Guardian)

• ‘New York loves Canada’: US cities want their Canadian tourists back (FT)

• This El Niño Will Be Unlike Any in the Past Eight Decades (Atlantic)

• Global Warming Is Breaking The Link Between Two Major Oceans (ScienceAlert)

• Anthony Curcio and the trading-card fraud scandal that rocked PSA (BI)

• NASA’s newest telescope blasts off to answer universe’s big questions (WP)

• Olivia Rodrigo’s festival unites women and girls behind nonprofits promoting their well-being (PBS)

• Meta’s Day of Reckoning (WSJ)

• Data center controversies are transforming the midterm elections (AP)

• In a rare moment of unity, Americans are fighting Big Tech together (USAToday)

• Inside Meta’s Push to Put Robots to Work in Data Centers (Wired)

• Chippendales Recalls 4,000 Tons Of Tainted Man Meat (Onion)

 

Origin Story: Salon

When I was a kid, older people would sometimes say “I’ve known you since you were only a gleam in your father's eye."

That puzzled me at the time, but later on the phrase came to mind in quite another context. Let me explain.

In the early 1990s, I worked part-time as part of the editorial team at the old San Francisco Examiner. The “monarch of the dailies,” as it called itself, was the flagship of Media tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s empire.

Between researching and writing editorials for the newspaper’s afternoon editions, I would wander around the newsroom, chatting with people I knew, mostly reporters and editors but also “Will” — William Randolph Hearst III, who was at that time the newspaper’s publisher.

(I’d known Will since my days at Rolling Stone in the 1970s. He’d been a source for the explosive Patty Hearst/SLA stories I’d co-authored with Howard Kohn.)

But the most memorable conversations I had were with David Talbot, the editor of the Examiner’s award-winning Sunday magazine. Talbot strained against the budgetary limits inside a newspaper and dreamed of having his own independent magazine someday, 

It was when he was describing his vision that I saw the “gleam in his eye” I mentioned up top.

These conversations spanned several years. Finally, in the fall of 1995 I got a call from Talbot. His dream was on the verge of coming true.

(To be continued.)

HEADLINES:

• Nepal resumes flood rescue, seeks technical help and billions of dollars (CNBC)

• Bad weather hampers Nepal rescue (Reuters)

• China censors videos showing deadly flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border (BBC)

• Icelanders say no to restarting talks to join the EU (Politico)

• U.S. to Take Control of Much of Venezuela’s Proven Oil Reserves (WSJ)

• Trump hails ‘historic’ deal for US to control 65bn barrels of Venezuela’s oil (BBC)

• Judge blocks U.S. Postal Service on Trump’s mail-in voting plan (Reuters)

• The Fed confronts a powerful new economic force (WP)

• California lawmakers move to shield the coast from Trump’s oil agenda (Politico)

• Top Commanders Told Hegseth Not to Cut Civilian Protection Program, Poll Showed. He Did It Anyway. (ProPublica)

• Trump picked a trade fight with Canada. US defense firms may pay the price (The Hill)

• Is Donald Trump’s bid to brand Democrats as ‘radical’ communists working? (Guardian)

• How one billionaire’s crusade against homelessness became Trump’s playbook (WP)

• Measles cases in Pennsylvania rise to 460 amid ongoing outbreak (Reuters)

• British far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has been deported from the US, DHS says (CNN)

• The Race Equation (Reveal)

• The financial (and life) insights from Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5’ (WP)

• Inside Afghanistan’s Secret Schools for Girls (NYT)

• China’s super-rich fled Singapore. Now they want to come back (CNBC)

• In the middle of South Africa’s worst drought on record, a 16-year-old boiled orange peels, added avocado skins and left the mix out in the sun — her polymer beat the industrial water-absorber 76.1% to 74.7% at roughly a fiftieth of the price per tonne, and Google’s grand prize followed (ScienceBlog)

• They were Lyft drivers. Now they’re cleaning Waymos. (BI)

• OpenAI, Anthropic and 100 major companies sound alarm over urgent AI danger (Independent)

• The AI Backlash Gets Professional (Atlantic)

• Red Sox Fan Throws Back Son Who Caught Yankees Home Run (Onion)

 

Only in Whispers

(The following is a new, edited version of an essay from five years ago, just as the restrictions of the Covid pandemic were lifted.)

If we’ve entered a new reality, as per today’s top link from the Times*, I for one welcome it. Yes the coronavirus is horrible, the political/economic/culture wars are dispiriting, and all of it fades into insignificance as we stare global climate change in the face.

I accept all that. But we’ve been long overdue to make fundamental changes in the way we live anyway and maybe now is our chance. It’s time to take that less-traveled path in the woods and see where it leads.

Forests are one of the best places to think and feel. Trees communicate with each other through their roots, which connect far below the surface. They seek each other out, offer comfort and warn of danger.

When you’re in a forest, the trees may talk to you, but only in whispers.

The same is true of other wild places. I’ve hiked beaches all over the world and the more remote the beach the more it has to say. Every beach is connected to some distant shore by the tides that wash back and forth, carrying gifts in the form of driftwood, stones, shells, seaglass and the occasional message in a bottle from one land mass to another.

If all of this sounds silly, consider your dreams. We classify them into good ones and nightmares, but they persist either way and there’s no real escaping from them. Even waking up doesn’t help.

But we also have our rational side, that wonderful ability to apply logic and collect evidence before we make decisions. Most of us try to make sense of what we do, if only so we can explain it to each another.

There are all sorts of economic theories suggesting that the sum of many irrational choices by individuals add up to a collective rationality. I may not be getting that exactly right but isn’t that partly how economists explain the movements of the futures markets?

Quantum physics takes all of this out to the furthest place we’ve been able to venture intellectually, where time, space and consciousness all become moot. Starting with Einstein, physicists have been either getting clearer or cloudier as time passes. Take your pick.

Somewhere beyond the rational is the instinctive, where we know what we can trust when we hear it from the trees or the ocean or our dreams -- or our hearts. They propel us forward to explore.

This may be the path to a future where everything changes. We may be living with wave after wave of pandemics, natural disasters, and other disruptions. Our first instinct may be to huddle down in place, become more conservative, seek what is safe and familiar.

Or we may venture out, try to embrace the unknown and learn from it.

Everyone alive now is engaged in this struggle whether we acknowledge it or not. We have a will to survive but at times we get overwhelmed and want to give up. 

Don’t give up. The best part is yet to come.

* What if the Coronavirus Crisis Is Just a Trial Run? -- The year 2020 gave us a glimpse of something radically new: tensions in politics, finance and geopolitics intersecting with a natural shock on a global scale. (Adam Tooze/NYT)

HEADLINES:

• 37 Killed After Russian Strike on Weapons Depot as Ukraine Blames Negligence (NYT)

• Missing toll from devastating floods in Nepal and China passes 3,000 (CNN)

• Trump Says U.S. To Take Control of Big Portion of Venezuelan Oil (NYT)

• US Treasury imposes limits on Egyptian bank for doing business with Iran (FT)

• Fired Stars and Stripes staffers sue Pentagon, Hegseth (USAToday)

• The Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln Deserve Better (Atlantic)

• Putin sees U.S. as weakened by Iran war, intelligence reports say (WP)

• Six months on, the Iran war has changed the Middle East, but not in the way its architects had hoped (AP)

• Milo Yiannopoulos, a Right-Wing Provocateur, Is Arrested by ICE (NYT)

• ‘If it’s made in the US, I don’t buy it’: Canadians on boycotting Trump’s America (Guardian)

• The Canadian Menace (NR)

• Trump’s ‘Lake America’ move revives one of his biggest political flops (CNN)

• Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo spreads to 2 new health zones with a total of 60 areas now affected (AP)

• Trump Administration Proposal Would Give Part of Yosemite to a Developer (NYT)

• The Right Is Rediscovering the Fourth Amendment (Newsweek)

• Judge Throws Out Key 9/11 Confession as Tainted by Torture (NYT)

• U.S. economy created fewer new jobs in 2025-2026, it turns out. Just how bad was it? (MarketWatch)

• Fed Chair Warsh Seeks to Calm Concerns About Fed’s Grip on Elevated Inflation (NYT)

• Warsh signals rate hikes may be needed with US inflation stubbornly elevated (AP)

• The under-the-radar solution to America’s expensive ticket crisis (BI)

• In Trump’s Washington, Ballooning National Debt Stirs Little Action (NYT)

• Kacey Musgraves, Crossover Queen (New Yorker)

• Social media giants could face even stiffer penalties under California bill (Politico)

• ICE is arresting soaring numbers of immigrants with no criminal record (WP)

• ICE plans to buy robot ‘dogs’ for some immigration enforcement operations (NBC)

• S.F.’s AI boom is fueling a new wave of eviction fears (SFC)

• OpenAI and Anthropic are ruining San Francisco (SFGate)

• A US judge blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic, the latest turn in the Claude maker’s high-stakes fight with the military over AI safety on the ‌battlefield. (Reuters)

• As A.I. Money Floods the Market, San Francisco Renters Weigh Buyouts (NYT)

• New AI startup with ‘extreme’ work culture takes over S.F. office abandoned by Cruise (SFC)

• HHS Replaces Childhood Vaccination Schedule With List Of Recommended Animal Bites (Onion)

Lost Loves, AI and the Lake

Several stories in today’s mix call out for attention. There’s a new neurological study from Rice University that suggests that our memories are not fixed but flexible, i.e., retrieving a memory may change it in ways that alter it the next time we access it. 

Maybe that’s why some of us can’t tell the same old story the same way twice in a row?

Then there is the site “A Map of Us,” that contains lost love letters, which reminds me of the charming romcom, “Letters to Juliet.” It was a lost love that first motivated me to become a blogger.

On the more troubling side of the news, Bill Gates is suggesting that we need both national and international regimes to contain AI before it causes some serious harm. Others have warned us, but maybe this one will get some response from those who must act in Congress and elsewhere.

Finally, the sheer pettiness of Trump, trying to rename Lake Ontario to the absurd “Lake America” will not outlive his time in office.

As a proud Canadian, it will always be Lake Ontario to me.

HEADLINES:

• Hundreds killed in Nepal flood as fears grow of secondary disaster (CNN)

• U.S. and Canada Are Bracing for Prolonged Trade Dispute (WSJ)

• Trump signs order to rename Lake Ontario ‘Lake America’ amid Canada trade war (CNBC)

• Why the US‑Canada trade war could change how American farmers grow their crops for years (The Conversation)

• C.I.A. Chief Delivered Bleak Assessment of Russia’s War in Secretive Moscow Visit (NYT)

• U.S. weapons shortage from Iran war alarms allies confronting China (WP)

• Ukraine’s Most Potent Weapon: The Software Orchestrating Its Drone Army (NYT)

• ICE agent charged in Minneapolis shooting released from Texas jail (AP)

• Trump’s Coming Midterm Crashout (Bulwark)

• Trump has already found someone to blame if Republicans lose the midterms (CNN)

• RFK Jr. Suggests Pennsylvania Measles Deaths May Have Been ‘Fabricated’ By Shapiro Staffers (HP)

• The Supreme Court Isn’t Interested in Facts (Atlantic)

• DeSantis Administration Misspent $10 Million, Grand Jury Says (NYT)

• NYC’s millionaires vs. the pied-à-terre tax (BI)

• F.D.A. Approves New Covid Vaccines, and They Should Be Available Soon (NYT)

• Tropical Storm Dolly forms in the Atlantic, hurricane center says (Orlando Sentinel)

• Norway’s King Dies at 89 (AP)

• White House Construction May Have Contributed to Close Call With Trump’s Helicopter (NYT)

• The internet is overflowing with unsent love letters. (WP)

• Dolly Parton, Honky-Tonk Angel (New Yorker)

• How we remember may change our memories, study finds (Rice)

• A media M&A chill: The Paramount-WBD antitrust challenge may hold up more deals than one (CNBC)

• Will Meta’s Changes Benefit Young Users’ Mental Health? (NYT)

• ‘Blood in the water’: Why Meta’s $18 billion settlement won’t end company’s legal woes (NBC)

• Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong. (WP)

• Salesforce just put its entire CRM inside Claude — and says you’ll never need its app again (VentureBeat)

• China’s humanoid robots aren’t smart enough to take your job – yet (Reuters)

• How OpenAI let a mob of LLM agents game a test and ransack Hugging Face (ArsTechnica)

• ChatGPT may be changing how you’re writing (SFGate)

• They confided in ChatGPT. Their secrets ended up in court. (WP)

• AI is changing religion and religions are trying to change AI (Economist)

• Rest Of Fantasy League Losing Patience With Player Who Has Other Things Going On In His Life (Onion)

Old Guys

In the series called “Shrinking,” which is streaming on Apple, Harrison Ford plays a character I can identify with. He’s a grouchy old man in his 70s battling Parkinson’s.

The maddening thing with this disease is it can take different forms with a disquieting number of potential symptoms, both on the motor skill and cognitive levels.

Ford’s character experiences tremors, depth perception impairment, memory lapses, plus moments when he “freezes” and is unable (temporarily) to move.

There also can be balance issues, tiredness, vivid dreaming and a range of other symptoms as the disease progresses.

There are plenty of other characters in”Shrinking,” some better than others. It’s part drama, part comedy and partly a commentary on therapy.

But for those of us battling P.D., the show quite accurately captures what we’re dealing with, day in, day out. It is like our body is at war with itself. 

But the good part of “Shrinking” is it profiles resilience.

Resilience — we’re going to need a lot of that to get through the Trump era. In his own twisted way, he has inflicted the equivalent of a political Parkinson’s Disease on the entire nation.

HEADLINES:

• At Home and Abroad, Deference to Trump Turns Increasingly to Defiance (NYT)

• Iran has held new talks with neighboring Oman on management of the Strait of Hormuz, blockaded over nearly six ‌months of conflict, with Oman’s foreign minister saying he was hopeful a temporary corridor through the waterway could be announced soon. (Reuters)

• One US dollar now costs 2 million rials in Iran, and here’s what it can buy (Al Jazeera)

• Wiped out: US faces surging toilet paper prices amid trade war with Canada (Guardian)

• Hundreds killed, more than 1,000 missing in Nepal and China after Himalayan flood (Reuters)

• Flash flood on Nepal-Tibet border, hundreds of tourists missing (BBC)

• What triggered the catastrophic flood on the Nepal-Tibet border? (Reuters)

• CIA chief John Ratcliffe reportedly made secretive Moscow trip to warn Russia against attacking NATO (CNBC)

• Hegseth’s Purge of Top Generals Leaves the Army Rudderless (NYT)

• The Real Reason There’s a Munitions Shortage (Nation)

• Pentagon attack on Stars and Stripes is part of Trump’s war on media (The Hill)

• Active-duty Air Force officer who called for Trump impeachment faces three charges (Military Times)

• The scope of Hegseth’s damage to the U.S. Army comes into sharper focus (MS Now)

• Before Hegseth fired him, top general was advised to drop Kid Rock probe (WP)

• Judge Sides With Texas Over Minnesota on Extradition of ICE Agent (NYT)

• Immigrant dad of USS Lincoln sailor is released from ICE detention (NBC)

• USS Abraham Lincoln heads to Thailand for a brief stop after a lengthy deployment at sea (AP)

• 3 Secret Service Officials Are Said to Be on Leave Amid Inquiry (NYT)

• Lawyers gear up as Trump administration threatens election officials with arrest (WP)

• Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Clear-Eyed Solo Dissent Explains the Supreme Court’s Voting Assault (Slate)

• Immigration officers are being diverted to Trump’s voter-fraud effort (WP)

• I Worked for Trump. The Natalie Harp Saga Isn’t Surprising. (Bulwark)

• Russia’s baiting and switching Latin Americans to fight its war (The Hill)

• One Woman Conceived a Baby. One Carried Him. Who’s the Mother? (NYT)

• Rob Bonta Says No Paramount-WBD Settlement Talks Scheduled After He Canceled Monday Session (Deadline)

• F.D.A. Approves Drug Poised to Transform Care for Pancreatic Cancer (NYT)

• Invasive green crabs are bad for the environment, so New Englanders are starting to eat more of them (AP)

• Is R.F.K., Jr., Winning or Losing? (New Yorker)

• ‘Life of M’ constructs a portrait of how stardom hides a person’s core (NPR)

• Tim Curry, ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ Star, Dies at 80 (Variety)

• Dolly Parton Had the Voice, and Concerns, of an Earth Angel (NYT)

• Reporter Lisa Richwine talks Dolly Parton’s life and legacy on the Reuters World News podcast — listen now. (Reuters)

• Meta to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion in Landmark Settlement Over Social Media Addiction Claims (NYT)

• Microsoft employees reveal how much cash they’re burning on AI (BI)

• Everyone is making a U-turn on data centers as public support craters (Politico)

• MIT Says AI Is Forcing A Rethink Of College Itself (Forbes)

• AI can now credibly complete most undergraduate assignments, MIT warns (WP)

• Robots need help learning human skills. These AI companies are rushing to meet the demand (CNBC)

• Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong. (WP)

• A.I. Is Becoming So Powerful, It’s Stumping Those Trying to Contain It (NYT)

• New Meta Glasses Feature Reminds Users To Blink To Appear Human (Onion)

We Will Always Love Her

“What a life.”

— Barack Obama, in an X post on Tuesday

There has never been a death of a public figure that saddened me more than that of Dolly Parton. She was a great writer and story teller who kept it simple and told it straight. She wrote an astonishing 3,000 songs, each one uniquely hers.

She was also a major philanthropist. She created the Imagination Library, which has given away 332 million books to children around the world. She helped fund the earliest Covid vaccine research. She always helped those in need after disasters. Her generosity of spirit is every bit as impressive as her music.

The New York Times issued a special report titled simply “Remembering Dolly.” President Trump ordered the nation’s flags to be lowered to half-mast for a week. The Empire State Building was lit up pink in her honor at 9:25 p.m. — that’s 9 to 5.

“She was the rare person both sides of the political aisle loved. In a poll this year, 70 percent of Americans expressed a favorable view of Dolly — higher than anyone else on the list,” reports the Times.

Our world needs more people like Dolly Parton. She was a uniter, not a divider. Her legacy: We all need to try harder to be like her. 

May she rest in peace.

OBITUARIES AND REMEMBRANCES:

• Dolly Parton, Superstar Whose Songs Spoke to Millions, Dies at 80 (NYT)

• Dolly Parton: A Life Defying Expectations (WSJ)

• Larger than life (NYT)

• Dolly Parton, legendary country music superstar and philanthropist, dead at 80 (BI)

• Dolly Parton, country music icon, dies at 80 (NBC)

• Dolly Parton, country music singer and cultural icon, dies at 80 (WP)

• Dolly Parton, in her own words: The country icon's interviews with the AP over the decades (AP)

• Country music’s patron saint Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80 following a "brief battle with cancer" at a hospital in Nashville, her representatives said on Tuesday. Tributes to the country music legend poured in, including eulogies from fellow music superstars Reba McEntire, Jack White, Carole King and Taylor Swift. Parton was known for her country chart-toppers, outsized blonde hair and an equally outsized, bubbly personality. But another key part of her legacy was her devotion to philanthropy. [HuffPost]

• Remembering Dolly Parton (AP)

• Dolly Parton’s quiet decades-long life in California (SFGate)

HEADLINES:

• Canada slaps retaliatory tariffs on US goods worth $20 billion as trade war intensifies (Reuters)

• Wiped out: US faces surging toilet paper prices amid trade war with Canada (Guardian)

• Trump says U.S. could rename Lake Ontario as Lake America amid Canada trade war (WP)

• How Will the New Canadian Tariffs Affect the U.S. Economy? (WSJ)

• Can Democrats Win Back the Senate? Why Their Chances Are Improving. (NYT)

• Do I really buy that Texas could turn blue? (Silver Bulletin)

• Court Allows Trump to Pursue Mail Voting Limits, for Now (NYT)

• Hundreds missing and many feared dead after massive flash flood hits Nepal-China border (CNN)

• ICE arrests jumped to nearly 50,000 in July, the highest monthly total of Trump’s second term (AP)

• Darline Graham, With Push From Trump, Wins Senate Primary in South Carolina (NYT)

• Churches, libraries and breweries: Inside DHS’ covert surveillance operation (NPR)

• US set for largest mass visa revocation in history (AP)

• Squeezed by tariffs and Iran war, farmers say they face a new crisis (WP)

• Iran vows to retaliate after the US widens sanctions (Reuters)

• Paramount CEO David Ellison is at the final hurdle before buying WBD. So far, he can’t clear it (CNBC)

• Two unvaccinated people die of measles in Pennsylvania (BBC)

• Study’s Alarming Finding: At Least 1 in 4 N.F.L. Players Gets Brain Disease (NYT)

• Superpowers are discovering their limits, says UN chief (FT)

• China sends archaeologists to South America to trace ancestral links for the first time (SCMP)

• Trump Administration Has a Different Way to Drain Harvard Funding (NYT)

• Leaked Microsoft pay data shows how much some employees are making in AI, cloud, and other teams (BI)

• A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by A.I. (NYT)

• Report: More Americans Abandoning Lengthy Conversations In Favor Of One Really Big Word (Onion)