Reading Scared

As a writer, that there are people who want to ban books from libraries has always baffled me. Is telling stories so dangerous that children need to be protected from our words and the worlds we describe? Is it our characters, our ideas, our images?

What exactly are they so afraid of?

The New Yorker currently has a piece by Katy Waldman that explores some of these questions.

About the people behind the more than 2,000 book bans in 32 states over the 12 months through last June, she writes: “In their vision of childhood—a green, sweet-smelling land invented by Victorians and untouched by violence, or discrimination, or death—white, straight, and cisgender characters are G-rated. All other characters, meanwhile, come with warning labels.”

It would seem that these frightened people are trying to protect their children from life as it actually is and replace it with a fantasy world that literally doesn’t exist.

But banning books that contradict their views seems doomed to help turn their fantasies into nightmares. In my experience, normal children know that life isn’t a fantasy anyway, whether they gain access to banned books or not. The main way most children seem to acquire information, frankly, is from each other.

Much of the information they eagerly exchange is accurate so far as it goes; much of it is also inaccurate, a bit wildly so. They get better informed over time with good educations. Given this, what impact does banning a few books have on their chances to turn out okay?

I suspect that a less-informed, more ignorant group of their peers, prevented from exposure to a wide range of writers, passes on more bad information than otherwise would be the case. And that we therefore inevitably end up with a relatively uninformed adult population, susceptible to manipulation by despots.

A population like that is perhaps more likely, for example, to fall for a would-be authoritarian leader who lies and incites them to commit acts like, say, the January 6th riot.

It seems to me we would all be much better off to encourage the widest possible range of readings to enrich our children’s fertile young minds. If we truly love them and believe in their ability to discern good from evil, we have to trust they will ultimately develop the good judgment to sort most of these things out on their own terms.

Then again, I’m a writer, so this is personal as well as professional. To me, banning books is an act of pure violence, much like a homicide. It is the cold-blooded murder of somebody’s words. And we all become somewhat less than we could be as a consequence of such a crime.

LINKS:

• Atmospheric river brings more snow, rain and floods to California (BBC)

• Missing From Biden’s Budget: His Plan for Social Security (NYT)

• A Startling Document Predicted Jan. 6. Democrats Are Missing Its Other Warnings. (Politico)

• NY prosecutors invite Trump to testify in hush money investigation; decision on charges could come soon (CNN)

• The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has reportedly indicated to Donald Trump’s legal team that he could face criminal charges over hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. The former president has been offered the opportunity to testify before a grand jury next week, which would be an unusual step if prosecutors weren’t planning to proceed with charges. [HuffPost]

• ‘Spill’ of classified info derails Proud Boys trial (Politico)

• White Supremacist Propaganda Soared Last Year, Report Finds (NYT)

• COVID origins bill heads to Biden's desk (Axios)

• House votes unanimously to declassify intelligence on origins of Covid pandemic, sending bill to Biden (CNBC)

• Republicans push wave of bills that would bring homicide charges for abortion (Guardian)

• The Republican Party's major offensive against transgender Americans is moving to Congress, where the GOP has control of the House. Hundreds of anti-trans bills have already been introduced in state legislatures, but their ascension to the federal level signals a new phase in which the conservative movement wants to make attacking transgender people a nationwide project. [HuffPost]

• Chaos Inside Google as Execs Try to Figure Out How to Actually Use AI (Futurism)

• We Programmed ChatGPT Into This Article. It’s Weird. (Atlantic)

• How AI can save you time: 5 skills you no longer need to learn (Euronews)

• The labor shortage is pushing American colleges into crisis, with the plunge in enrollment the worst ever recorded (Fortune)

• Here’s Why the Economy Seems Weird (WSJ)

• European bank shares tumbled in the wake of a dramatic sell-off in U.S. bank stocks amid spreading jitters about the sector's vulnerability to the rising cost of money. The global rout was prompted by Silicon Valley Bank, a major banking partner for the U.S. tech sector, being forced to raise fresh capital. (Reuters)

• ‘Extraordinary’ sighting of orca with baby pilot whale astounds scientists (Guardian)

• UN leader Amina Mohamed: Taliban's restrictions on Afghan women 'have to be reversed' (ABC)

• Archrivals Iran and Saudia Arabia agree to end years of hostilities in deal mediated by China (CNN)

• The Biden administration has called for protecting mature US forests to slow climate change, but it’s still allowing them to be logged (The Conversation)

• What we know — and still don’t — about the missing MH370 plane (WP)

• German police: 8 dead in Jehovah’s Witnesses hall shooting (AP)

• Still Too Early To Tell If Pulling Chain Turned Overhead Fan Off (The Onion)

 

The Day Twitter Ate the Cookies

 (With all of the troubling news coming out of Twitter since Elon Musk took over, my thoughts go back to a simpler time when the company was still small and the occasional silly, serendipitous thing would happen. I first published a version of this piece on 7x7 in 2010, when Twitter was still a toddler.)

My friend Carrie (a pseudonym) works as a social media specialist. She doesn’t like to just sit around when there’s a problem that needs fixing. Thus when a bug blocked all of her (and many others’) Twitter followers one day, she decided to take matters into her own hands.

Using Google, she located the Twitter office on Folsom Street and set out for a visit, stopping by a local bakery along the way to buy several dozen cookies in the hope that they might help her gain entrée to one of the hottest companies on the planet.

When she showed up at the social networking site’s front door, it was locked, but by lucky coincidence, someone just leaving the office held the door open to let her in.

Once inside, she stood in the entryway wondering what to do next.

Then, in another stroke of good fortune, co-founder Biz Stone arrived in the office. He asked Carrie if she was there to speak to anyone in particular, and she blurted out "tech support."

He disappeared for a moment and then a young lady showed up to ask what was troubling her. Hearing the answer, she nodded and wrote down Carrie’s Twitter handle on the box of cookies and went back inside for a few minutes.

When she returned, she smiled and said, "We fixed your account. Everything should be okay now," but then she added: "Don't tell anyone about this. We can't have everyone showing up with boxes of cookies!"

Of course, San Francisco is home for many of those who have shaped web 2.0 but most of these pioneers live and work among us in relative anonymity, and their companies – although world famous – don’t tend to have flashy signs or dramatic architecture to advertise their presence.

So it still comes as a surprise to many San Franciscans that the headquarters offices for Twitter, Wikipedia, and Wired, among many others, are all down in SOMA, in unpretentious buildings they’ve walked past hundreds of times without ever realizing what’s going on inside.

Twitter, for example, by my count has now reached at least 334 employees. At least a few dozen of them like chocolate chip cookies.

LINKS:

• Biden budget would cut deficit by $3 trillion over next decade with 25% minimum tax on richest Americans (CNBC)

• Biden Will Release Dead-on-Arrival Budget, Picking Fight With G.O.P. (NYT)

• Mitch McConnell remains hospitalized after fall at DC hotel (ABC)

• McConnell suffered a concussion, will remain hospitalized a few days for observation (WP)

• Decline in democracy worldwide may be reaching ‘turning point’: researchers (The Hill)

• Jaded with education, more Americans are skipping college (AP)

• Russia Lacks Firepower to Keep Advancing, U.S. Intelligence Chief Says (NYT)

• Trump 2020 lawyer admits misrepresenting stolen election claims (Politico)

• 'Incredibly Angry': Fox News Staff Reportedly Fuming About Dominion Filings (HuffPost)

• Inside the simmering feud between Donald Trump and Fox News (WP)

• More states are proposing bills targeting LGBTQ rights. ‘It’s only getting worse,’ advocate says (CNN)

• The World Isn’t Slipping Away From the West (Foreign Policy)

• Microsoft’s AI-Powered Bing Search Engine Surpasses 100 Million Daily Active Users (Gizmodo)

• These 20 jobs are the most "exposed" to AI, ChatGPT, researchers say (CBS)

• When the robots come (InfoWorld)

• Artificial intelligence will destroy ‘laptop class’ workers (The Hill)

• Iconic leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky says chatbots are ‘marvels of machine learning’ but also the banality of evil, rebooted (Fortune)

• A majority of grocers plan to test a ChatGPT solution in 2023 (Supermarket News)

• U.S. Chamber of Commerce calls for AI regulation (Reuters)

• Shohei Ohtani and Japan: It's much more than just baseball (AP)

• The Scientific Breakthrough That Could Make Batteries Last Longer (WSJ)

• Do back-to-back disasters show first climate tipping point is upon us? (New Scientist)

• Will we eventually have to send our trash into space if we run out of room on Earth? (The Conversation)

• Astronomers detect water molecules swirling around a star (CNN)

• Methane from one of Earth’s largest wetland complexes is set to soar (Nature)

• A 3 Million-Year-Old Discovery May Rewrite the History of Intelligent Life on Earth (Vice)

• There are 21,000 pieces of plastic in the ocean for each person on Earth. That’s more than 170 trillion pieces of plastic, according to a new study. The amount is doubling about every six years. (WP)

• VIDEO: House Panel Holds Hearing on Covid Origins (AP)

• Bees teach their babies how to dance (WP)

• Area Man Outraged His Private Information Being Collected By Someone Other Than Advertisers (The Onion)

Public Acts

At the core of investigative reporting is the relationships we form with our confidential sources. That it involves mutual trust is an understatement. When it comes to biggest and most controversial stories, given the risks involved, it’s more like a matter of mutual survival.

I thought about this when the news broke that Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the highly classified Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, announced last week that he is dying of cancer.

Ellsberg the whistleblower arguably did more than anyone to end the Vietnam War, and in the process forged a half-century friendship with legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who’s written a touching piece about him here on Substack.

Sy Hersh was an early supporter of ours at the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), signing a fundraising letter that helped us survive. He, of course, had done his own part to raise awareness of the horrors of Vietnam with his explosive expose of the My Lai massacre in 1969.

I was one of those geeks who read the entire Pentagon Papers when they were published as part of my duties at SunDancemagazine, while editing a piece by Robert Scheer. They remain the single most authoritative history of that war from the perspective of the U.S. government, and remain a cautionary tale of imperialistic wars generally.

In another of those quirks of fate, the Washington Post reporter who figured out that Ellsberg was the Times source, Ben Bagdikian, was the dean of the U.C. Graduate School of Journalism who first hired me to teach there. (I subsequently taught courses, usually investigation journalism, there for 14 years ending in 2003.

Bagdikian, who was a supporter of ours at CIR from our founding days, had in his reporting role gotten some of the documents from Ellsberg that helped the Post catch up with the Times in its Pentagon papers coverage, as depicted in the film “The Post,” with Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep.

These are a handful of people who changed the course of history and there could be no better moment to recognize Dan Ellsberg for his courageous role than now while he is still with us.

(Thanks to Doug Foster for alerting me to Sy’s Substack piece.)

LINKS:

• My 50 Years With Dan Ellsberg (Seymour Hersh/Substack)

• Mitch McConnell hospitalized after fall in hotel (CNN)

• Russian missile barrage slams into cities across Ukraine (AP)

• House GOP plots new January 6 probes despite internal backlash over McCarthy giving Carlson footage (CNN)

• DOJ takes on the Jan. 6 Tucker Carlson tapes (Politico)

• Murdoch confided Trump was going ‘increasingly mad’ as Fox pushed false claims (WP)

• Ukraine Claims Bakhmut Battle Is Wagner’s ‘Last Stand’ (NYT)

• Russia's Wagner group has taken full control of the eastern part of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, its chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said. If the claim is true, it would mean Russian forces control nearly half the city. (Reuters)

• FBI tested by attacks, politically explosive investigations (AP)

• Walgreens drew a line on abortion pill access and is paying a price (WP)

• ChatGPT’s alter ego, Dan: users jailbreak AI program to get around ethical safeguards (Guardian)

• Prepare for the Textpocalypse (Atlantic)

• At This Rate, We Won't Remain AI's Masters for Long (Newsmax)

• DuckDuckGo dabbles with AI search (TechCrunch)

• Microsoft lets ChatGPT-powered Bing off its leash – I just hope it doesn’t backfire (TechRadar)

• How to Build Your Own AI Chatbot With ChatGPT API: A Step-by-Step Tutorial (BeeBom)

• Elon Musk apologizes after mocking laid-off Twitter employee (AP)

• The Country Is Paying for Merrick Garland’s Failure to Prosecute Trump (Nation)

• Trump Has Become the Thing He Never Wanted to Be — Boring (Atlantic)

• Tucker Carlson said he hates Trump ‘passionately’ (The Hill)

• Ivanka Trump throws brothers and father under bus in New York fraud suit (Independent)

• Biden's public approval rating edged up to 42%, its highest level since June, as inflation has eased in the United States and job growth has stayed strong, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed. (Reuters)

• Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say (NYT)

• Women are losing rights around the world. On International Women’s Day, the U.N. warned this week that years of progress toward gender equality is being lost. (WP)

• Young Afghan women train as midwives for out-of-reach villages (Reuters)

• Veterans testify of 'catastrophic' impact of Afghan collapse (AP)

• Afghan broadcaster airs rare all-female panel to discuss rights on Women's Day (Reuters)

• The commercial surrogacy industry is booming as demand for babies rises (CNBC)

• Scientists have revived a ‘zombie’ virus that spent 48,500 years frozen in permafrost (CNN)

• Astrophysicist Reveals Planet That Could End Life on Earth (SciTechDaily)

• Threat of rising seas to Asian megacities could be way worse than we thought, study warns (CNN)

• Career-Driven Man Beginning To Worry Entire Identity No Longer Tied To Job (The Onion)

 

Rebels

Gathering with friends last night reminded me once again what it is that makes San Francisco special. It’s the people who are drawn here to start things.

Like certain other large cities, there is a regular turnover in the local population —last time I checked it was 50 percent every five years — which would be disconcerting if not for the fact that there are always some amazing new people to meet around town.

I too came here 50 years ago to start things — magazines to be specific. San Francisco was a Mecca of sorts for magazines at that time. There were around 13 of them, including the one (SunDance) I worked on.

From one small group of rebels at SunDance on Fillmore Street, I eventually moved across town to another group of rebels, including Jann Wenner, Hunter Thompson, Annie Liebovitz, Ben Fong-Torres and Cameron Crowe, et.al., at Rolling Stone on Third Street.

That gang quickly became a lot more than “almost famous.”

Since then I’ve moved like a nomad among one small group of rebels to another, with stops at Salon, Wired Digital, Excite@Home, KQED, 7x7 and loads of other places. (Last night’s gathering was with the small team that produced a special issue of BIG magazine in 2003, an artistic tour de force celebrating San Francisco’s unique creative spirit.)

It occurs to me that one role I may have played over the decades is that of a honeybee, spreading the content DNA from one of these small groups to the next.

Besides all of the media groups, I met the founders and wrote about tons of tech startups, like Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, Getaround, Taskrabbit, Twitter and on and on. Creative people in a different realm from media but just as fascinating.

Now it is AI’s turn. San Francisco is once again at the center of a revolution that promises to transform our lives every bit as much as the Internet has done. It’s scary, yes, but exciting.

Change isn’t always good, but it can be.

(I said that.)

LINKS:

• Tucker Carlson, with video provided by Speaker McCarthy, falsely depicts Jan. 6 riot as a peaceful gathering (NBC)

• US Capitol Police chief rips into Tucker Carlson over ‘offensive’ use of January 6 footage (CNN)

• Fox News lawsuit evidence to be released (WP)

• Feds say Proud Boys associates fanned out to facilitate Jan. 6 breach (Politico)

• Q: Who's unsurprised by shocking Fox News revelations? A: Ex-Fox journalists (NPR)

• How Are Trump Supporters Still Doing This? (Atlantic)

• Strikes spread as French unions intensify pension reform fight (Reuters)

• Elon Musk publicly mocks Twitter worker with disability who is unsure whether he’s been laid off (CNN)

• Fed Chair Powell says interest rates are ‘likely to be higher’ than previously anticipated (CNBC)

• Crash Course: Artificial Intelligence Vs. Humanity (Bloomberg)

• AI creates pictures of what people are seeing by analysing brain scans (New Scientist)

• She created a relationship with a chatbot. 11 messages in, it got weird (CNN)

• You Are Not a Parrot — And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this. (New York)

• China’s ChatGPT Black Market Is Thriving (Wired)

• Protests Over Netanyahu’s Judiciary Overhaul Spread to Israel’s Military (NYT)

• The creeping threat of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt (Guardian)

• Atmospheric river timeline: Here's what to expect as storm now moves in Thursday (ABC)

• ‘Everyone should be concerned’: Antarctic sea ice reaches lowest levels ever recorded (Guardian)

• Nearly everyone is exposed to unhealthy levels of tiny air pollutants. 99% of the global population breathes in potentially dangerous amounts of these pollutants, known as PM 2.5, a new study found. (WP)

• Video Shows Ukraine Drone Fly Directly Into Open Hatch of Russian Tank (Newsweek)

• Ukraine is building up its forces for an offensive (Economist)

• The United States should change its "distorted" attitude towards China or "conflict and confrontation" will follow, China's foreign minister said, while defending its stance on the war in Ukraine and its close ties with Russia. (Reuters)

• Russia advances in Bakhmut by sending waves of mercenaries to certain death (WP)

• As Customer Problems Hit a Record High, More People Seek ‘Revenge’ (WSJ

• California will not do business with Walgreens, state Governor Gavin Newsom said in a tweet, days after the pharmacy chain said it would not dispense abortion pills in some Republican-dominated states. (Reuters)

• What to do if Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan (CNBC)

• Five women denied abortion care in Texas sue state over bans (Guardian)

• Nothing about D.A. Brooke Jenkins’ move to dismiss charges in an SFPD shooting smells right (SFC)

• Landlord Sends Reminder Water Will Be Shut Off For Maintenance Yesterday Morning (The Onion)

 

Tax Party

 Every year around this time, I get together with my younger kids and we do our taxes. It’s one of those small family rituals that the older I get the more I treasure. Filling out those tax forms — by now we all use TurboTax — is a way to relive the past year, sort of, and fill each other in on our scorecards.

Because that is what financial records amount to — gains and losses, ups and downs, a rendering of the past 12 months.

The kids are all in their 20s and at a very different stage of life from me. They are just starting out in their careers, whereas mine technically ended three-and-a-half years ago.

There is a synchronicity to our income levels, however, thanks to the reality of the bell curve of earnings. They are on the way up hopefully, and I’m on my way down, right back about where they are, at present.

For the purposes of simplicity, I’m going to say that a career typically lasts 50 years. If so, they may not hit their peak earning years for a couple of decades yet, whereas I hit mine a long time ago. Of course they are impatient and somewhat anxious. They have needs and desires now but those are well beyond their means for now.

If I were a rich man, I could just sweep in and meet some of those needs with financial gifts, and I wish I could do so. You know, be a Super Dad. As it is, I am the one of last resort because I have a small emergency cash fund that has come in very handy lately, due to some adverse circumstances in their lives. 

After we’d finished the taxes, we had dinner and talked. They spoke about how daunting the job market seems to be, how they worry about AI taking their jobs, how life seems so expensive these days. They seem frustrated by these difficulties.

They are, variously, a medical assistant, an historian and an artist. I’m an old writer.

It was far from a grim evening. We laughed and told each other funny stories and talked about our memories living together in the Mission when everything seemed much simpler. I assured them all will be well; they’ll be fine, come what may.

Afterwards, as I drove home through rain, I thought about how grateful I am that I have them in my life. But much later, trying to sleep, all I did was worry. How will they cope with the world to come and its complexities? 

Without me, not as a superhero, but at least as the guy who always showed up…

LINKS:

• Russia's Wagner boss suggests 'betrayal' in Bakhmut battle (BBC)

• Wagner representative barred from Russian army HQ in Ukraine, its boss says (Reuters)

• Ukrainian Soldiers, Nearly Encircled, Push Russians Back (NYT)

• How Trump’s big lie played out on the CPAC stage (Guardian)

• Fact check: Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC (CNN)

• George Conway Makes Ominous Prediction About Donald Trump (Newsweek)

• Fox libel defense at odds with top GOP presidential foes (AP)

• In California speech, DeSantis stokes fight over pandemic (WP)

• A New Battle in the War on Abortion Pills (NYT)

• Thousands of pro-Trump bots are attacking DeSantis, Haley (AP)

• Is it time to start considering personhood rights for AI chatbots? (LAT)

• Elon Musk recruits team to develop OpenAI's ChatGPT rival (Reuters)

• German publisher Axel Springer says journalists could be replaced by AI (Guardian)

• ChatGPT has thrown gasoline on fears of a U.S.-China arms race on AI (NBC)

• Elon Musk reportedly tried to sell Twitter's office plants to employees as part of his push for cash (Business Insider)

• Tennessee Law Limiting ‘Cabaret’ Shows Raises Uncertainty About Drag Events (NYT)

• Canceling student debt would help level the educational playing field. That’s why some people hate it. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

• Afghan universities open solely for men amid ‘heartbreaking’ ban on women (Times of Israel)

• A crisis over suspected poisonings targeting Iranian schoolgirls escalated as authorities acknowledged over 50 schools were struck in a wave of possible cases. It's unclear who is behind the attacks that have raised fears that other girls could be poisoned, apparently just for going to school. [AP]

• Obesity rose in adults ages 20 to 44, from 33% in 2009 to 41% in 2020, according to a new study. Diabetes rose from 3% to 4% over the same period. (WP)

• New remains of multiple extinct species excavated on Chilean coast (Jerusalem Post)

• Planets Remarkably Similar to Jupiter And Neptune Found Orbiting a Sun-Like Star (ScienceAlert)

• Why certain foods taste better the next day (WP)

• Demand Grows For Stricter Transit Regulations After Derailing Train Hits Airplane At 30,000 Feet (The Onion)

Going Away

 In an article called “The End of the English Major,” the New Yorker recently noted that “enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country,” and asks “What happened?”

That not a difficult question for anyone with college-aged kids to answer.

It’s the economy, stupid.* 

Paying for college is already a stretch for many families, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that majoring in rocket science, for example, is probably going to result in a far more lucrative career than any of the humanities, assuming those majoring in the latter can find decent jobs at all.

Of course, those are the words of a parent of three 20-somethings who all majored in the humanities and have struggled to fit into an economy that is daunting in ways it didn’t seem to be not that long ago.

Engineers, developers, coders of all stripes can find work, even though tech stocks may be down at the moment, but prospects are less clear for those who specialize in history, literature, or the social sciences generally.

There’s more than a little irony here that at the very time logical thinking as brought us AI and robotic replacements for many human activities, and we need those grounded in the humanities to keep our bearings as human beings, we are eliminating their jobs right and left.

What worries me is that by channeling so much effort into technology, and rewarding people accordingly, we are endangersing much of what makes us human in the first place.

*(James Carville.)

LINKS:

• Russia’s Wagner Troops Exhaust Ukrainian Forces in Bakhmut (WSJ)

• Russia’s population nightmare is going to get even worse (Economist)

• How an Afghan girls’ school principal fled the Taliban (Al Jazeera)

• After Afghan TV fame, a new life in Ohio (BBC)

• China boosts military spending by billions as US warns of potential Taiwan invasion (Fox)

• Pentagon Sees Giant Cargo Cranes as Possible Chinese Spying Tools (WSJ)

• Inside the Panic at Fox News After the 2020 Election (NYT)

• Florida bills would ban gender studies, transgender pronouns, tenure perks (WP)

• Trump asks judge to block Pence subpoena in DOJ probe (The Hill)

• Rupert Murdoch and Fox News sued for sharing Biden’s ads with Trump campaign before they aired (Independent)

• How CPAC turned into a circus with Trump as ringmaster (WP)

• Using A.I. to Detect Breast Cancer That Doctors Miss (NYT)

• Misplaced fears of an ‘evil’ ChatGPT obscure the real harm being done (Guardian)

• "Museum of the future AI apocalypse" opens in San Francisco (BoingBoing)

• The AI Disaster Scenario (Atlantic)

• ‘It’s like finding needles in a haystack’: the mission to discover if Jupiter’s moons support life (Guardian)

• California was hit with 12 feet of snow. Is it enough to ease the drought? (WP)

• Bringing Back Bison Is a Genetic Challenge (WSJ)

• Ocean treaty: Historic agreement reached after decade of talks (BBC)

• Children With Autism 'See' This Optical Illusion in a Unique Way (ScienceAlert)

• How fish evolved to walk – and in one case, turned into humans (The Conversation)

• A Murdaugh family death in 1940 was also suspicious — and eerily similar (WP)

• Chris Rock Eviscerates Will Smith in Live Netflix Stand-up Special (Rolling Stone)

• 27-Year-Old Lies About Every Single Aspect Of His Life To Keep Parents From Worrying (The Onion)

The Divider

 I almost titled this one, with apologies to Rudyard Kipling, “The Man Who Would Be King.”

Because as much as I hate to give him any attention whatsoever, Trump is back on the public stage, or at least one sick, twisted piece of that stage (CPAC), where he claimed on Saturday that the country he represents, “will be lost forever” if he does not prevail in 2024.

“This is the final battle – they know it, I know it, you know it, everybody knows it. Either they win, or we win. And I promise you this: If you put me back in the White House, their reign will be over, and America will be a free nation once again,” Trump said, according to CNN.

The former president also pledged that he will not withdraw if indicted in any of the several investigations still actively looking into his many questionable activities.

Regardless of how you view Trump and his policies, most reasonable people should agree that he is the last thing we need now in this country so badly divided and so badly needing to come back together.

LINKS:

• UK says Ukraine forces under increasingly severe pressure defending Bakhmut (Reuters)

• The West Tried to Isolate Russia. It Didn’t Work. (NYT)

• Oil Investors Get $128 Billion Handout as Doubts Grow About Fossil Fuels (Bloomberg)

• Canada joins the list of countries banning TikTok on government-issued devices. The European Parliament became the latest EU body to ban the app from staff phones this week and a U.S. House panel approved a bill giving President Biden the power to ban the app altogether. (Reuters)

• Elon Musk thinks we’re close to solving AI. That doesn’t make it true. (Vox)

• China’s Censors Are Afraid of What Chatbots Might Say (Foreign Policy)

• Investors are going nuts for ChatGPT-ish artificial intelligence (Economist)

• Robots are your new office security guard (Axios)

• The Vindication of Ask Jeeves (Atlantic)

• Twitter’s Revenue, Adjusted Earnings Fell About 40% in Month of December (WSJ)

• Trump Melts Down Over Murdoch Admitting Fox Lied About Election Fraud (Rolling Stone)

• CPAC’s sea of empty seats: Trumpworld celebs address half-empty ballroom as mainstream Republicans shy away (Independent)

• As 2024 race begins, special counsel advances with focus on Trump lawyers (WP)

• Trump says he won’t drop out of 2024 race if he’s indicted (CNN)

• The Supreme Court signals that a terrifying attack on voting rights will vanish — for now (Vox)

• The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things (New Yorker)

• Why Children Need Nurturing Fathers (WSJ)

• Biden Meets With German Chancellor Amid Concerns Over Ukraine and China (NYT)

• Chernobyl nuclear disaster altered the genetics of the dogs left behind, scientists say (ABC)

• First evidence for horseback riding dates back 5,000 years (AP)

• CEO Relieved AI Can Never Replace Him If He Already Contributes Nothing To Company (The Onion)