Saturday, July 29, 2023

Just Say 'Aye'

With age comes wisdom, so they say, but also with advanced age often comes confusion, disorientation and in some cases the onset of dementia.

Not to mention falls, strokes, heart attacks and other calamities. So most of us retire before those things happen rather than continue in high-stress jobs.

This became a relevant political conversation this week when 90-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein got confused when it was her turn to vote and instead launched into a lengthy statement. Her colleagues had to instruct her to “just say ‘aye’” before she awkwardly complied.

At least she laughed at her own gaffe, which was a sign that she remains sentient — for now.

A scarier moment happened earlier in the week when 81-year-old Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell simply froze during a press conference and stood there speechless for 30 seconds or so.

He may have been suffering what neurologists describe as a “mini-stroke,” which can occur when there is a temporary shortage of blood to the brain, and is often an indicator of worse things to come.

(McConnell insists he is “fine.”)

These two events illustrated the vulnerability of our political system when leaders stay in office beyond the point they can assure us that they are fully capable of carrying out their duties. Of course this also highlights the age of the incumbent, President Biden (80), as well as that of his putative opponent next year, Trump (77).

Personally, I think they all should consider leaving office at this point. In addition, Trump was never qualified to hold public office in the first place — at any age.

At least Feinstein, McConnell and Biden have largely distinguished themselves as government officials, whether you agree with them politically or not.

But there comes a time for everybody to call it quits and leave the battle to the next generation, and for this group of 80+ year-olds, their time has arrived.

LINKS:

  • As McConnell Tries to Convey Business as Usual, His Future Is in Doubt (NYT)

  • McConnell says he plans to serve his full term as leader despite questions about his health (AP)

  • Why Did Economic Forecasters Get Their Recession Call Wrong? (New Yorker)

  • ‘These are my tapes’: Trump rips new charges in classified docs case (CNBC)

  • Why Jack Smith waited until now to charge Trump for secret Iran document flaunted on tape (MSNBC)

  • Supreme Court May Have Handed Jack Smith New Tool Against Trump: Lawyers (Newsweek)

  • The Boss and His Botched Coverup (New Yorker)

  • The White House said there's no possibility of a presidential pardon for President Joe Biden's son, Hunter, a day after a federal judge rejected a plea deal for him over felony tax and gun charges. [HuffPost]

  • How Supreme Court Justices Make Millions From Book Deals (NYT)

  • Blistering US heatwave spreads from south and scorches 190m Americans (Guardian)

  • The Economic Cost of Houston’s Heat: ‘I Don’t Want to Be Here Anymore’ (WSJ)

  • Dangerous fungus is becoming more prevalent. Scientists believe climate change could be to blame (AP)

  • African leaders press Putin to end Ukraine war (Reuters)

  • Russia’s Wagner boss appears to hail Niger coup, tout services (Al Jazeera)

  • Typhoon Doksuri swept into southern China, unleashing heavy rain and violent gusts of wind that whipped power lines and sparked fires, uprooted trees, and ripped off part of a stadium roof. (Reuters)

  • EPA says three widely used pesticides driving hundreds of endangered species toward extinction (Missouri Independent)

  • Scientists woke up a 46,000-year-old roundworm from Siberian permafrost (WP)

  • What my $30 hamburger reveals about fees and how companies use them to jack up prices (NPR)

  • Fatigue Can Shatter a Person (Atlantic)

  • Chinese AI arrives by stealth, not with a bang (Reuters)

  • ‘A certain danger lurks there’: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI (Guardian)

  • 10 ways artificial intelligence is changing the workplace, from writing performance reviews to making the 4-day workweek possible (Insider)

  • History offers some clues for navigating the skills gap in the AI era (Fast Company)

  • Artificial intelligence is powering politics – but it could also reboot democracy (Guardian)

  • AI-Generated Data Can Poison Future AI Models (Scientific American)

  • Being Eaten Alive By Shark Not Nearly As Terrifying As Man Had Imagined

    (The Onion)

 

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Friday, July 28, 2023

Trapped!

 Donald Trump has been mocking and ridiculing Special Counsel Jack Smith for a while now but it appears that Smith may have cornered the former President in a legal trap from which it may be nearly impossible to escape.

The walls are closing in, so to speak, as Smith adds on major charges in the classified documents case and prepares to indict Trump in the election interference case.

And it’s worth remembering these are only two of at least four serious criminal cases against Trump in four different jurisdictions.

Furthermore, Trump appears to be convicting himself of some of the charges just about every time he opens his mouth. That is no doubt at least one of the reasons his attorneys have been increasingly desperate to meet with Smith’s team. 

It may be too soon to determine how this all plays out politically, since Trump insists he is the victim of a conspiracy to get him. And if it turns out he is right about that, in the end it will have been a conspiracy of his own making.

All joking aside, it may be Jack Smith who has the last laugh in this matter.

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Thursday, July 27, 2023

Is Confidentiality Permanent? (Reporter's Notebook)

Recently, the issue of what to do with the files of an aging journalist going into a full-time care facility came up — should they be donated to a university library or similar institution? 

As that question was being debated among friends of the journalist, one raised a related, far thornier question to me on the side: 

How could we collectively protect the identity of the journalist’s confidential sources once the files became publicly available? This journalist had specialized in highly controversial stories and had relied on confidential sources extensively.

After all, the promise of confidentiality in such cases is theoretically permanent, or at least as long as disclosure could cause harm to the sources or their families.

Some journalists say that once a confidential source passes away, the promise no longer applies so they can disclose the identity. But what about the case when it’s the journalist who dies first or becomes incapacitated?

Disclosing their sources’ identities might still cause harm.

Throughout my career, I frequently dealt with confidential sources, my own or those of reporters that worked with or for me. We followed strict protocols for how we used confidential information, including taking measures to protect the identities of the sources.

But rarely did we consider the long-term implications. The recent case described above caused me to re-examine the issue and I have to say I don’t yet have a definitive answer.

This is simply a use case that slipped through the cracks, I’m afraid. Which is another way of saying I’m open to suggestions.

But of one thing I’m sure. Expunging all of your records of any traces of your confidential sources is an option. It’s just that that too might have unforeseen consequences.

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Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Tomorrow's Slice

"Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an unhappy person. Quite the contrary. I just know there’s a hole in my life and I’ve got to fill it — soon.” -- Ben Whittaker (The Intern)

______

One editor I respect who looked over my draft memoir back when I was writing it told me maybe it should be called "Slices," because my entire career/life seems to have occurred haphazardly in multiple pieces. It was hard for him to see a pattern.

That sounds about right to me. Furthermore, I suspect that I am not the only person who has tried to make sense of his life only to discover that the main theme seems adapting to change.

But what excites me about the present moment is the next slice of life, though I don't know what it will be yet. At least now I'm relatively free of baggage, literally and figuratively. And after many pieces of my previous self have been sliced away, many more remain for the cutting board of the future.

Sort of like aged cheese, which the French swear by.

I'm not settled geographically, really, or required to be any specific place. I have no job or professional obligation; I own next to nothing, I owe next to nothing, and I am not anyone's emotional property. 

In other words, I am pretty close to a free agent. You can be cynical and say that means I've got nothing left to lose, and you may be right, but that doesn't necessarily mean I have nothing left to give.

Which I hope is what matters.

These days I am trying to stay out of the mainstream as much as possible in favor of alternative paths, as I have done most of my adult life.

These blog posts represent one of those alternative paths.

As for options, I suppose I could go back into the workforce but on the other hand maybe I've done enough of that. Not that I couldn't be tempted by the right offer since there are plenty of good things I could help to accomplish with more money. But after being the primary breadwinner in my families for 55 years, maybe it's best for me to avoid returning to that role.

The fact is I don't know what I'm seeking but like Ben Whittaker, I know there's a hole in my life that needs filling -- sometime soon.

(This essay is from two years ago in August 2021.)

LINKS:

  • Xi Jinping’s foreign minister ousted after month-long unexplained absence from public view. (CNN)

  • Putin Is Running Out of Options in Ukraine (Foreign Affairs)

  • Putin appeared paralyzed and unable to act in first hours of rebellion (WP)

  • The Taliban Have ‘Infiltrated’ U.N. Deliveries of Aid (Foreign Policy)

  • Taliban salon ban a blow to Afghan women's freedom (Reuters)

  • Defying Unrest, Israel Adopts Law Weakening Supreme Court (NYT)

  • Biden sues Abbott over his floating border wall hours after he taunted president that he’d ‘see him in court’ (Independent)

  • UPS, Teamsters reach labor deal to avoid strike (CNBC)

  • The GOP is rushing headlong into huge election losses in 2024 (The Hill)

  • A New Kind of Fascism — Something menacing and novel is taking shape with the possibility of a second Trump term. (Atlantic)

  • Bernard Kerik, an ally of former President Donald Trump who worked closely with Rudy Giuliani in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, has given thousands of documents to special counsel Jack Smith, his lawyer said. Kerik, pardoned by Trump while serving prison time for tax fraud, insisted there was nothing "nefarious" going on and said he had not turned on Trump or Giuliani. [HuffPost]

  • Ron DeSantis' team says he is uninjured after a car accident in Tennessee (NBC)

  • Extreme heat wipes out coral reef in Florida: "100% coral mortality" (CBS)

  • OpenAI Quietly Shuts Down Its AI Detection Tool (DeCrypt)

  • AI Companies Are Trying to Have It Both Ways (Atlantic)

  • ‘Barbie’ Movie Gives Left and Right Another Battlefront, in Pink (NYT)

  • Visiting the Trinity Site featured in ‘Oppenheimer’ is a sobering reminder of the horror of nuclear weapons. (The Conversation)

  • The Berkeley home where J. Robert Oppenheimer lived, partied and fell in love is on the market (SFGate)

  • Heatwave Causes Roast Birds To Fall To Earth In Perfect V-Formations (The Onion)

 

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Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Links

 LINKS:

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Monday, July 24, 2023

Origin Story (Salon)

(NOTE: The original version of this essay is from July 2021. I’ve made a few edits.)

Over the past weekend, my post-pandemic socializing continued with a lunch at the Bernal home of journalists David Talbot and Camille Peri. David is best-known as the founder of Salon, which from a journalistic perspective was one of the more important startups to emerge in the early days of the web.

Talbot had been an editor at Mother Jones and the San Francisco Examiner, where he ran the Sunday magazine, but he had a bigger dream -- to start his own publication.

I'd heard about this from him for some years until finally in 1995 he got his chance. Richard Gingras, then an executive at Apple, staked him with a small pot of money and with that, David gave notice at the Examiner.

There wasn't very much funding at all but Talbot somehow convinced three colleagues -- editors Gary Kamiya and Andrew Ross and designer Mignon Khargie -- to give up their steady jobs and join him in his quest.

The group was rounded out by publisher David Zweig, bringing the staff to five and they settled pro-bono into an architect's office down on the waterfront.

At Talbot's invitation, I joined them too, not on the creative side but on the business side. That made sense because I was just coming off a stint as EVP of KQED, the large public broadcasting company in Northern California, and I knew my way around the Bay Area fundraising world.

While the other journalists, none of whom had a clue about business, developed an editorial plan, I helped Zweig establish a business plan, which proved to be a daunting task. First and foremost, the team needed much more money, so I set about meeting with potential investors in San Francisco bars with a Mac laptop furnished by Gingras. It was loaded with a prototype of the magazine.

What made all of this complicated is that Salon would be on the web, at that time a nascent, unstable platform that as yet was devoid of any real journalism. 

While I was able to convince a few investors to kick in $25,000 apiece, 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. Like any good journalist, he saw that this might 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. 

Markoff’s article was the key. When the magazine launched, it proved to be an instant sensation, and over the years through many ups and downs it has persisted, though it has never to my knowledge actually turned a profit.

But profits aside, the reason Salon mattered is it was one of the first sites featuring original content, proving that traditional journalism could compete with the free-for-all that characterized the early Web. (Microsoft launched a similar site called Slate the following year. It persists too.)

After Salon launched, I left to join HotWired and return to my first and true love -- journalism. But then I rejoined Salon a few years later as Investigative Editor/Managing Editor and Washington bureau chief and finally SVP during its heyday of the Clinton impeachment drama.

Over the 25 years since Salon launched, several people have mistakenly referred to me as one of the founders of Salon. I was more like what in basketball is known as the Sixth Man during that launch period in the fall of 1995. 

But I did play a key role.

A whole slew of other talented people joined Salon’s team early on. But last year as I was cleaning out my apartment I discovered a relic from the earliest days of Salon. It was what must have been one of its first phone directories, a plain piece of paper with the staff's phone extensions in the architect's office down by the Bay.

On it were eight names -- one Gary, one Andrew, one Mignon and three Davids -- Talbot, Zweig and Weir. The other two were Laura Miller and Cynthia Joyce.

Oh, and there was also a printer called Gingras, but that is another story...

[NOTE: As with all such memories, these are simply mine and others may recall the events portrayed differently. According to my operating philosophy, this is the natural way of things. Our memory is as unique as our DNA.]

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Sunday, July 23, 2023

Madam President?

The prospect of a Biden-Trump rerun in the 2024 presidential election is widely proclaimed as inevitable, but it’s worth remembering that anything might happen to upset that matchup between now and Election Day next November.

Trump’s gathering legal woes could soon reach a tipping point, which means the Republican Party may be forced to find an alternative, and a growing field of contenders have already begun positioning themselves accordingly.

On the Democratic side, the only announced candidates besides Biden so far are crackpots (like RFK Jr.) but everybody is uncomfortably aware that Biden is not getting any younger. He also is scoring consistently low in the public opinion polls.

Stepping into a potential void on the Democratic side, should that prove to be necessary, could be the 51-year-old governor of Michigan. In “How Gretchen Whitmer Made Michigan a Democratic Stronghold,” the New Yorker profiles this potential candidate, who remains little known outside of the Midwest.

The main headline of the article is “The New Blue Wall.”

We live in a country divided electorally into two almost equal halves — red and blue — and the outcome in 2024 will hinge on a relative handful of voters in a handful of swing states.

Michigan is one of them. Whitmer won the state house in Lansing by stitching together a coalition with suburban women voters at its core. She has a moderate, pro-business, pro-union, pro-choice, anti-extremist message that resonates widely in the Midwest and other battleground areas of the country.

She also survived a bizarre kidnapping plot after Trump ignited his base against her.

With the GOP stuck in the mud with Trump and his angry, rural grievance crowd, there is little chance for the red side to compete for Whitmer’s core constituency as long as Trump heads up the ticket.

So Whitmer could theoretically be the younger fresh face both parties may need to win. In interviews with the New Yorkerand CNN, among others, Whitmer has denied Presidential ambitions — for now.

But the election isn’t for another 16 months or so and a lot can and probably will change by the time Election Day rolls around…

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