The Leaf

 When I was a boy in Michigan, one summer afternoon I was lying on my back in a field staring up at a large tree. It was one of those cloudless, windless days, hot and still, and I was lost in my day dreams. 

After a while, I realized that I had been staring at a single leaf that for no apparent reason was turning on its stem. As far as I could see, this leaf was identical to all the other leaves on that tree, but it was the only one moving.

I watched it for a while, utterly perplexed.

When I mentioned this incident to friends, one suggested maybe an insect or other small creature had caused the motion. Another suggested that perhaps the stem was weakened by disease and the leaf was preparing to fall.

But nobody knew for sure.

Over the sixty years since that afternoon, I’ve sometimes thought about that leaf when I encounter people who differentiate themselves by standing out from the crowd. It is an aspect of being a journalist that when I meet such people I seek explanations. 

In that context, returning to that day in Michigan, one leaf turning might be a story. Many leaves holding in place most often is not.

The problem with this set of assumptions is that by focusing on the exception to the rule, we may give the impression that the rule is no longer in order. An example of this is crime reporting. Covering one shocking crime, through a megaphone, can create the illusion that an entire city is “awash in crime” when the fact is the opposite is true. 

In fact, the horrific crime we are telling you about was actually just an anomaly, an outlier event. That is what made it a big story.

***

Of course, there is an entirely different way to tell that story. The solitary leaf I saw may have been ahead of its time — portending a climate disaster to come when all the other leaves remained quiet, steady in place, doing what they were expected to do.

In this version, the swinging leaf was a whistleblower, a ‘canary in the coal mine,’ an indicator of bigger problems.

Enter the investigative reporter, who picks up on the signal and spots a pattern that may provide an explanation for the turning leaf. After observing hundreds of trees, with many thousands of leaves, and interviewing numerous scientists, none of whom can say for sure, the reporter writes a more nuanced story based on the data.

In this new story, we learn that there are many such single leaves on many trees turning slowly on windless days where no one is there to see. But it is also possible that if no one saw them that it didn’t really happen. (Quantum physics.) Then again, perhaps there is a new disease affecting our trees that we need to address if we are to save the forest.

Meanwhile, the people reading this nuanced, carefully documented story are still thinking about that one leaf, turning without any known reason on a windless day. Just like the storyteller, perhaps they can’t see the tree for the leaves.

To say nothing of the forest.

(An earlier version of this essay appeared last April.)

HEADLINES:

• House Judiciary Committee subpoenas Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (CNN)

• Fani Willis acknowledges a ‘personal relationship’ with prosecutor she hired in Trump’s Georgia case (AP)

• Manchin dismisses Mayorkas impeachment (Politico)

• Analysis shows destruction and possible buffer zone along Gaza Strip’s border with Israel (AP)

• Israeli forces shelled the outskirts of the last refuge on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, where the displaced, penned against the border fence in their hundreds of thousands, said they feared a new assault with nowhere left to flee. (Reuters)

• US hits hard at militias in Iraq and Syria, retaliating for fatal drone attack (AP)

• Greta Thunberg cleared after unlawful protest arrest (BBC)

• Meta spent billions to close offices and lay people off. Now we know why. (Business Insider)

• Another shockingly good jobs report shows America's economy is booming (CNN)

• Inflation has fallen. Why are groceries still so expensive? (WP)

• Congressional Democrats tell Biden to do more on abortion after Ohio woman's arrest (NPR)

• A Suddenly Media-Shy Speaker Can’t Answer Questions. He’s on the Phone. (NYT)

• Pentagon to MAGA world: You need to calm down over Taylor Swift (Politico)

• Is Taylor Swift a Biden psyop? Here’s the far-right’s ‘evidence’ (Independent)

• Michigan school shooter's mother blames her husband in trial testimony (BBC)

• Joshua Schulte, who sent CIA secrets to WikiLeaks, sentenced to 40 years (WP)

• I Tested a Next-Gen AI Assistant. It Will Blow You Away (Wired)

• This robot can tidy a room without any help (Technology Review)

• Amazon made an AI bot to talk you through buying more stuff on Amazon (Verge)

• It’s too expensive to replace human workers with AI—for now, says MIT study (CNBC)

• Should we make our most powerful AI models open source to all? (Vox)

• Walmart Releases Wolves Into Stores To Manage Shoplifter Density (The Onion)

The Meaning of Life? 3.0

 (credit: KaterBegemot/wiki commons)

When you consider the physical evolution of the human species over the full sweep of time, our bodies have been changing only very gradually. Slowly it seems we get a bit bigger, a lot heavier and much less hairy.

So what about our behavior?

Well, we’ve gotten more sophisticated in using tools, building nests, crafting comfortable clothing, inventing vehicles that let us zoom around the planet at will, establishing routines that optimize pleasure and a bunch of other lifestyle stuff. 

We’ve improved our medical knowledge and expanded our lifespans. 

And we’ve been able to accomplish these things partly by inventing technologies, many by accident.

But if we had a giant mirror and could reflect down on ourselves as we are living now, you might conclude we are still exhibiting the behavior of monkeys in a zoo who have gotten a hold of a hijacked truckload of portable digital toys.

We’ve got them firmly grasped in our hairless little hands and we are staring at them when we are not turning them over and over, marveling at their magic. We look up now and then, looking side to side as of to make sure nobody’s going to discover us at this guilty pleasure, lest they swoop in and take them away from us.

We smile that smile of secret pleasure and we just keep looking at those screens as we hop around place to place on our way to nowhere in particular.

***

Technology is inherently neither good nor bad. It is officially neutral like Switzerland, although neutrality is also a relative concept. But if there are imperatives to the evolution of our species they probably include a technological component, i.e., we are going to continue to experiment and develop technologies that extend our ability to live our lives the way we thinkwe want to, and that extend our reach — physically, mentally and even possibly emotionally.

AI and robotics are just the latest examples.

No government or religion can stop this process though some will try.

But technological progress is also inherently disorienting and disruptive. It was becoming commonplace ten years or so back to describe each new upheaval of one of our traditional industries in terms that it had just been disrupted by the internet, or by a digital device, or a software application.

Suddenly it seemed that all of the middlemen, all of the intermediaries who made our society hold together were being thrown out of work. The technical term is that they were disintermediated.

Travel agents? Disintermediated.

Secretaries? Disintermediated.

Used car salesmen? Disintermediated.

Taxi drivers? Disintermediated.

Publishers? Disintermediated.

Journalists? Disintermediated.

I could go on (and on and on and on) but you get the idea. Some of the disrupters asked why did we need these people anyway, when we could just manipulate the new technologies to do everything without them.

Well, that’s a good question. But you know that old thing about being careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Beyond being an exceptionally odd phrase and concept, it’s nevertheless got more than a smidgeon of wisdom to it.

Because maybe we got something pretty valuable from those intermediaries who used to be in our lives. Something we need every bit as much as food, water, clothing, blankets when it’s cold and fans blowing fresh air when it’s hot.

We need to be cared for; we need to be taken care of now and then; we need to be loved.

Conversely, most of us need to be able to take care of other people. We need to be able to feel that we are needed.

It gives our lives meaning. It gives our jobs meaning. We need to feel we are helping makes things better, not worse.  

As for fortune or fame, to quote Bob Dylan, “neither of them are to be what they claim.” (“Tom Thumb’s Blues”)

But using your time here to try and make the world just a little better for others, including those to come? That means everything.

(NOTE: I published the first version of this essay two years ago, the second last year. This is draft 3.0)

HEADLINES:

• Grave peril of digital conspiracy theories: ‘What happens when no one believes anything anymore?’ (AP)

• A State Supreme Court Just Issued the Most Devastating Rebuke of Dobbs Yet (Slate)

• Impeaching Mayorkas Achieves Nothing (WSJ)

• One Big Reason Migrants Are Coming in Droves: They Believe They Can Stay (NYT)

• Climate activist Greta Thunberg goes on trial in London for blocking oil conference (ABC)

• The European Union overcame Hungary veto’s threat to seal a 50 billion-euro aid package for Ukraine (AP)

• Why Yemen’s Houthi rebels welcome conflict with the US (CNN)

• Red Sea supply chain inflation may be peaking already, new trade data suggests (CNBC)

• Biden signs executive order sanctioning West Bank settlers (WP)

• Israel and Lebanon are prepping for a war neither country wants (AP)

• China is facing a brutal reality as it desperately tries to fix its population decline problem (Business Insider)

• Farmers descended on Brussels to press EU leaders to do more to help them with taxes, rising costs and cheap imports, throwing eggs at the European Parliament, starting fires near the building and setting off fireworks. Their revolt is fueling a narrative that the EU is riding roughshod over farmers. (Reuters)

• A judge in London threw out a lawsuit by Donald Trump accusing former British spy Christopher Steele of making “shocking and scandalous claims” that were false and harmed his reputation. [AP]

• Security fencing to surround Trump’s D.C. trial site, an echo of Jan. 6 barricades (WP)

• Can This A.I.-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me. (NYT)

• OpenAI says mysterious chat histories resulted from account takeover (ArsTechnica)

• Mistral CEO confirms ‘leak’ of new open source AI model nearing GPT-4 performance (Venture Beat)

• Generative A.I.’s Biggest Impact Will Be in Banking and Tech, Report Says (NYT)

• Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show (The Onion)

 

Closing Loopholes

 The Senate hearing on Wednesday attempting to hold the tech giants accountable for child safety on social media was a bipartisan effort. The senators were united in their outrage against tech executives, but whether they actually will do anything legislatively remains uncertain.

In that context, Section 230 from the 1996 Communications Decency Act once again comes to mind. To date, it is the governing law and it prevents the tech companies from being held liable for harmful content.

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1))

Here are some of my previous thoughts on this critical issue from December 2020 in a piece titled, “First Amendment Alert.”

***

There's a headline in Monday's Post that reads "Trump Leaves Press Freedom in Tatters." That is true as far as it goes, but the problem is far deeper and more multi-faceted than the negative impacts of Trump's time in power.

Yes, he labeled reporters "enemies of the people" and led chants at his rallies of "lock them up" while pointing at the press corps in attendance. That was terrifying and disgusting.

But what was more damaging was that he championed conspiracy theories that represent the polar opposite of what journalists strive to provide, which of course is fact-based information.

Beyond all that, even careful observers may have missed Trump's latest attempt to damage freedom of speech by undermining Section 230 of the Community Decency Act (1996), which is the legal underpinning that as a practical matter allows free speech to exist on the Internet.

It essentially allows companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook to avoid liability for the material posted by users, and is the bedrock of how they have been able to grow into massively profitable companies. Problematic content like that harmful to children or disinformation that disrupts election integrity can be hosted with impunity.

Angry at Twitter for labeling some of his tweets as unverified allegations, Trump threatened to veto a critical defense bill unless Section 230 was repealed. But strong bipartisan support for the bill and for 230 rendered his threat harmless, as a veto would have been overridden by Congress.

But as much as it pains me to say this, Trump had a valid point when he contested Twitter's right to edit the content of his tweets.

Think about it: Should a giant social media company to be the arbiter of what is true and what isn't? Do we want them to regulate free speech and, by extension, a free press? And Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, whether we like it or not, constitute the new public square.

A reasonable case can be made that these platforms have violated their Section 230 protection by intervening in Trump's rants and cautioning readers against his opinions. These corporations seem to be acting like editors and doing what we do all the time in journalism. Yet we are not protected by Section 230; rather we are subject to libel and slander laws.

I imagine that if and when these issues get litigated, we will be confronted once again by the broadly agreed-upon limits to free speech, and by extension freedom of the press, which is the "don't yell fire in a crowded theater" argument. 

This phrase originated in an opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment. The case was later partially overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which limited the scope of banned speech to that which would be likely to incite imminent lawless action (i.e. a riot). [Wikipedia]

An additional limit imposed in various degrees by democratic societies concerns hate speech, including Nazi propaganda. Here again, we face the philosophical quandary that when it comes to speech, how free is free?

Just because most of us are appalled by certain statements do we believe they should be totally banned?

This whole subject troubles me deeply. I've lived my entire adult life fighting one way or another for a free press and advocating for free speech for everybody. We've all seen how authoritarian regimes limit these freedoms as an essential tool for maintaining power, so that is an outcome I am afraid of under a despot like Trump.

Clearly, words are powerful, indeed at times the pen may be more powerful than the sword. But we may have reached a point in history where we are compelled to revisit James Madison's fundamental admonition: "The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable."

In 2020’s America, we the people are deeply divided on that very proposition.

HEADLINES:

• Mark Zuckerberg, Linda Yaccarino among tech CEOs grilled for failing to protect kids (NPR)

• Zuckerberg apologizes to families of kids harmed online as Senate grills tech CEOs (ABC)

• 2024 Matchups: Biden Opens Up Lead Over Trump In Head-To-Head, Haley Leads Biden 1 On 1, But Trails When Third Party Candidates Are Added (Quinnipiac)

• FBI director warns Chinese hackers aim to 'wreak havoc' on U.S. critical infrastructure (NBC)

• Google spent billions of dollars to lay people off (Verge)

• House Republicans vote to advance effort to impeach DHS Secretary Mayorkas (CNN)

• How the Border Crisis Shattered Biden’s Immigration Hopes (NYT)

• US: Umbrella group Islamic Resistance in Iraq responsible for strike that killed 3 troops in Jordan (AP)

• U.S. Presses for Long Cease-Fire to Pave Way for End of Gaza War (WSJ)

• Gaza hostages-for-prisoners ‘framework’ deal on the table (WP)

• Ukraine’s Latest Challenge: Festering Tension Among Top Leaders (NYT)

• Trump must still cough up at least $90M in E. Jean Carroll verdict — and soon — even though an appeal means she has to wait for it (Business Insider)

• Judge dismisses Disney suit against DeSantis alleging retaliation over ‘don’t say gay’ dispute (WP)

• 23andMe’s Fall From $6 Billion to Nearly $0 (WSJ)

• ChatGPT now lets you pull other GPTs into the chat (Mashable)

• One of the Internet’s Oldest Software Archives Is Shutting Down (Wired)

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT meets toughest challenge yet: Scots Gaelic (ReadWrite)

• Twin Labs automates repetitive tasks by letting AI take over your mouse cursor (TechCrunch)

• Hurd says he was ‘freaked out’ by briefing while on OpenAI board (The Hill)

• Facebook Apologizes For Giving Mark Zuckerberg A Platform (The Onion)

Talking

When sociolinguist Deborah Tannen published her book "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation" in 1990, it helped me understand a pattern I'd noticed during my years in journalism. 

Many of my male colleagues, including me, seemed to get ahead in media companies faster and win more awards than our female colleagues, despite the fact that we were not better reporters or writers.

If anything, when it came to interviewing sources, women seemed to be the better listeners, generally, so they often got better and deeper information than we did.

Tannen's book at least provided a context for all of this. She wrote:

"For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships ... For most men, talk is primarily a means to preserve independence and negotiate and maintain status in a hierarchical social order."

Although she was talking mainly about personal rather than professional relationships, her book proved useful in my teaching jobs. I started pointing out to my women students that they might use their conversational preferences to their tactical advantage when interviewing men in positions of power.

Also, women journalists inside the company faced a similar challenge and therefore an opportunity. In that era, female colleagues tended to speak less in meetings, and when they did have something to say it more often was to raise a question, whereas the men favored making declarative statements and staking out a position.

The men also interrupted the women much more frequently than vice versa.

I'm not pretending that I was some sort of genius for noticing this stuff, but I could see that the whole situation was pretty unfair. And when around the same time coverage of the pay disparities between men and women surfaced, the whole thing started to sicken me.

I developed the kind of bad feeling I always get when confronted with injustices. All too easily, I knew, it could have been me on the outside, left out, feeling diminished. Despite whatever successes I had had, there were plenty of failures too, setbacks, betrayals and disappointments -- mainly but not exclusively dealt me by men.

And to be fair, there were some pretty mean moves put on by women colleagues as well, including behind-the-back betrayals that hurt a lot. In fact, they still hurt to this day. So I concluded neither sex had any claim to a higher degree of morality or decency in the media environment; it really boiled down to how each individual behaved.

Systemic discrimination existed, yes, but the impact of that reality varied widely person by person. Some turned out to be kind; some turned out to be mean.

Not to sound cynical, but I'm not sure all that much has changed to this day. At least at work, men and women still seem to misunderstand each other pretty much as ever. But least there is a much broader consciousness of the problem than in the past.

In that spirit, I haven't met the person yet who couldn't try just a little bit harder to understand the other gender. And that includes me. Maybe we just have to switch roles now and then. Isn't that what the Golden Rule is all about?

(This essay is from three years ago in 2021.)

HEADLINES:

• The U.S. and Iran say they don't want a war, but the risks are mounting as Biden readies retaliation (NBC)

• Biden faces treacherous political choices in answering deadly attack (WP)

• Mix-Up Preceded Deadly Drone Strike in Jordan, U.S. Officials Say (NYT)

• The GOP's Biden and Mayorkas debacles subvert impeachment at the worst time (MSNBC)

• Mike Johnson Finally Admits Why He’s Killing the Border Deal (TNR)

• President Biden has said he’d shut the US-Mexico border if given the ability (AP)

• Jack Dorsey's Block lays off 'large number' of staffers, adding to wave of tech industry cuts (Business Insider)

• UPS is cutting 12,000 jobs, citing softer demand and higher costs (NBC)

• Wall Street Journal plans layoffs, restructuring in D.C. (Axios)

• Rep. Cori Bush under DOJ investigation over campaign spending on security, denies wrongdoing (ABC)

• Trump ties himself in knots on US-Mexico border in brazen political move (Independent)

• Texas border city on edge as Gov. Abbott dials up battle with Biden (WP)

• The Accusations Against the Atlanta Prosecutor Fani Willis: What We Know (NYT)

• The first human patient has received an implant from brain-chip startup Neuralink and is recovering well, the company's billionaire founder Elon Musk said. (Reuters)

• ‘Smoking gun proof’: fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show (Guardian)

• US disabled Chinese hacking network targeting critical infrastructure (Reuters)

• DOJ charged an Iranian operative with hiring Hells Angels bikers for assassinations in the US (Business Insider)

• To beat Trump, we need to know why Americans keep voting for him. Psychologists may have the answer (Guardian)

• ChatGPT finally has competition — Google Bard with Gemini just matched it with a huge upgrade (Tom’s Guide)

• Meta’s free Code Llama AI programming tool closes the gap with GPT-4 (Verge)

• Chiefs Fans Try To Name A Single Taylor Swift Song (The Onion)

 

Treasures

 During my first divorce, as I moved my stuff in my car to a friend’s house across town, everything got jumbled together in boxes, so it was hard to sort out. A month later, I moved again, this time to another house where I would spend most of the coming year.

Slowly, as I settled in, I unpacked the boxes and sorted through old letters and books, some reaching back to my childhood. My son, then about eight, had just become a big baseball fan, rooting for the Giants, playing little league, and collecting baseball cards. I told him about my own card collection back in the Fifties, when I was around his age.

He came over to spend the night one Saturday and I dug through my boxes to see whether any baseball-related stuff had survived the many moves I'd made since childhood. Out tumbled an old scrapbook, circa 1958, with prime baseball cards of legendary stars including Willy Mays, Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, among others, glued inside.

We both gasped. Collectively, these old cards might be worth a small fortune! We were both looking for positive signs that our future might turn out to be brighter than it appeared to be at that time, so this was potentially good news.

This was long before the likes of eBay, so I checked directly with collectors, who explained the cards might be valuable assuming they could be removed from the scrapbook without damaging them.

Alas, upon further investigation it turned out that removing them would destroy them. So we just left them in the place where had I pasted them all those decades ago. 

We still loved having them and he would show them to friends when they came over. Eventually, I realized the only real value they had was they helped us create a memory of one moment together. And over time, I’ve come to treasure that memory much more than money anyway.

(I first published this story last year.)

HEADLINES:

• As Biden vows retaliation after drone strike kills US troops, Republicans push for bigger response (ABC)

• U.S. Failed to Stop Attack in Jordan Due to Mixup Over Drone Identity (WSJ)

• The White House blamed an Iran-backed militia for the deadly strike. (NYT)

• Surging Red Sea violence could imperil a fragile Yemen (WP)

• Hamas said that releasing hostages it is holding would require a guaranteed end to the Israeli offensive in Gaza and withdrawal of all invasion forces, reiterating its position after Israel held a meeting with Qatari and Egyptian mediators. (Reuters)

• McConnell bedeviled as Trump, GOP move goalposts on border (The Hill)

• The huge wedge between McConnell and Johnson: Donald Trump (Politico)

• Texas seized part of the US-Mexico border and blocked federal Border Patrol agents. Here’s what happened next (CNN)

• After Trump’s $88 million judgments, new penalty could come soon (WP)

• Republican legislatures in some states are trying to keep abortion off the ballot (AP)

• Amelia Earhart's long-lost plane possibly detected by sonar 16,000 feet underwater, exploration team claims (CBS)

• Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands (AP)

• “The Algorithm” Does Not Exist (Mother Jones)

• OpenAI's ChatGPT breaches privacy rules, says Italian watchdog (Reuters)

• Can AI fix lost and found? (TechCrunch)

• ChatGPT Keeps Claiming Its Aunt Is Britney Spears (The Onion)

People Like Us

 Recently, I met with a group of young people at the early stages of their careers in journalism. They are interns at a company where I used to work.

They were bright, thoughtful and inquisitive. Talking with them took me back over 50 years ago when I was like them, i.e., just starting out.

Now perhaps more than ever, we need people like them. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Perry Bacon, Jr. writes that “Journalism may never again make money. So it should focus on mission.”

Bacon recites the most recent round of layoffs in media companies, including his own:

“And it’s now clear billionaires aren’t a panacea for the news industry. The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, and other super-wealthy individuals who have purchased news outlets haven’t been as successful making money in journalism as in their other businesses and have cut staff to minimize their losses.”

In Bacon’s view, journalism organizations have to focus on their public service missions as opposed to making money, because they can’t make money in any event.

He’s right, of course. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, but not the right to make a profit in the process.

But in order to exercise their press rights, reporters and editors need to be able to make a living. That is at the heart of the crisis in journalism — it is a very difficult way to do so.

And it always has been. My own career is a cautionary tale. I had over 20 different employers in 50 years, despite spending 12 years at one place — the Center for Investigative Reporting.

I often held two or three jobs at the same time; it was a terrific struggle to support my family and raise the kids. So if I were just starting out, would I do it all over the same way again?

You can bet I would. There’s no better field than journalism for people like us. 

HEADLINES:

• 3 U.S. troops killed in drone attack in Jordan (NBC)

• Houthi Attacks Disrupt Shipping, Draw U.S. Into Direct Conflict (WSJ)

• CIA Director William Burns holds Hamas hostage talks with Mossad chief, Qatari prime minister (CBS)

• Where Is Hamas Getting Its Weapons? Increasingly, From Israel. (NYT)

• Nikki Haley taunts Trump and he takes the bait. Will she keep it up? (WP)

• Top border negotiators stump for their deal ahead of possible vote next week (Politico)

• Republicans unveil impeachment articles against head of homeland security (Guardian)

• 25 Republican governors back Texas in escalating border standoff with US government (BBC)

• Johnson throws cold water on border deal (Politico)

• Russia projects confidence as it pursues alliances to undermine the West (WP)

• Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid off in the first weeks of 2024. Why is that? (NPR)

• Falling inflation, rising growth give U.S. the world’s best recovery (WP)

• Ukraine says it uncovers mass fraud in weapons procurement (Reuters)

• ‘S.N.L.’ Wonders What Men Will Do After Football Season Ends (NYT)

• Gen Z might be the MAGA movement’s undoing (WP)

• New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text (Quanta)

• How MLMs are poisoning the media (Axios)

• New open source AI coding tool surpasses its inspiration: Google DeepMind’s AlphaCode (Venture Beat)

• The Cult of AI (Rolling Stone)

• Supportive Parents Encourage Child’s Interests In Anything Within 15-Minute Drive (The Onion)

Making America Dumb Again

 (Disclaimer: With what follows, I do not mean to imply any inadvertent disrespect to those who sincerely hold Donald Trump to be their preferred candidate for president of the U.S.)

If the average IQ of American adults is 97.43, as it is reported to be, one can only speculate what that number is for Trump’s most fervent supporters. While it is clear they are not the sharpest blades on the skating rink, they do stick by their man, you have to give them that.

Mind you, he is a convicted sexual predator, a liar, a cheat, a bully, a coward and a would-be dictator, but that only makes him more lovable in the eyes of the MAGA crowd.

I sometimes think Trump’s real goal is to make America dumb again — for the spelling impaired, that would be MADA.

His hardcore support is from people whose IQ makes the subzero temperatures of the upper Midwest seem warm by comparison. Normally, we would feel sorry for such people, but not when they hold the fate of our democracy in their grubby little hands.

The rest of us should be grateful that Nicki Haley is staying in the race for the Republican nomination, at least for now. She acts as a lightening rod for Trump’s anger-management problem. As long as she’s around, he’ll continue making a sexist fool of himself, turning off the moderate voters in swing states who could prove determinative come November.

There is an image of Trump I conjured recently that I can’t get out of my mind. It’s of him as a bloated King Kong, hanging onto the tip of the Empire State Building, swatting away uselessly at the various lawsuits swirling around him.

It’s to be death by a thousand cuts, apparently. $83.3 million to this victim of his sexual assault, loss of his business license in that one, who knows what penalties will be forthcoming in the federal court cases or perhaps in Georgia.

When he finally splatters to the earth on West 34th Street, his supporters will no doubt persist in their praise of their monster. Then, and only then, can the rest of us breathe a sign of relief.

HEADLINES:

• Biden endorses emerging deal to give US new power to clamp down on border crossings (CNN)

• Nikki Haley taunts Trump and he takes the bait. Will she keep it up? (WP)

• Big tech is thriving despite the layoffs (Axios)

• U.S. doesn’t anticipate big gains by Ukraine against Russia in 2024, officials say (WP)

• UNRWA claims: UK halts aid to UN agency over allegation staff helped Hamas attack (BBC)

• World Court stops short of Israel ceasefire order (Reuters)

• Oil tanker on fire in Gulf of Aden after Houthi missile attack (CNN)

• Leading Museums Remove Native Displays Amid New Federal Rules (NYT)

• Death, guns and ‘corrupt cop’ claims: saga that gripped New Orleans reaches its end (Guardian)

• A California community sees a dip in immigration. Where have all the people gone? (NPR)

• Boeing's 737 problems ripple across the aviation industry (Reuters)

• Fight over border intensifies as Texas governor pledges more razor wire (Guardian)

• Fire Blanketed Lahaina in Toxic Debris. Where Can They Put It? (NYT)

• Most parents are still giving money to their young adult kids, survey found (Business Insider)

• Dozen funding totals struck as Congress races to avert another shutdown cliff (Politico)

• Many Black men wonder what Biden has done for them (WP)

• Elon Musk says to expect roughly 1 billion humanoid robots in 2040s (Fox)

• New Study Finds Humans Shouldn’t Spend More Than 5 Consecutive Hours Together (The Onion)