Biden's Comeback

What seems to be happening in the wake of Joe Biden’s disastrous debate Thursday night is straight out of the American political playbook. It’s called The Comeback.

We all know the narrative. Our hero gets knocked down, beaten and bloodied, but he refuses to give up.

Instead, he gathers himself and returns to the fight.

Ultimately, according to the dominant narrative, he prevails. Against all the odds, he will be the winner.

In Hollywood, this formula yields entire series. The hero never gives up but just keeps mounting his comebacks, even if they become ever more implausible to a skeptical observer.

But that’s fiction.

Real life, unlike the movies, is governed by biological limits. We age, become weaker, lose our vitality, and ultimately perish. Only a tiny handful of us defy the odds and remain viable physically and mentally far into our eighth, let alone ninth decade.

Which brings me to Biden.

Of course, Democrats are rallying behind him in his ultimate battle. That’s partly because of how evil his opponent is. Donald Trump truly is evil incarnate.

So now, according to the emerging narrative, after the awful debate, Biden is going to bounce back and vanquish Trump in the end. Good will triumph over evil. Money is being raised. Rallies are being held. Talking points are being distributed.

In the meantime, is anyone actually thinking about the human being at the center of this story? What’s best for him?

The person I saw in the debate seemed confused, disoriented, lost. He wasn’t just having a “bad night,” as some are saying now. He was out of it.

He may have been suffering “sundowning dementia,” which is common among elderly people at night. Or, his odd expressions suggested another explanation — “facial masking” familiar in Parkinson’s patients.

Hey, I’m not a doctor and therefore not qualified to reach conclusions about this —but I am a journalist and my job is to ask the questions.

So here’s one: At what human cost, this comeback?

(Thanks to Mary Sturges for help on this essay.)

HEADLINES:

• Supreme Court rules for Jan. 6 rioter challenging obstruction charge (NBC)

• Supreme Court Overrules Chevron Doctrine, Imperiling an Array of Federal Rules (NYT)

• Supreme Court says city's homeless camping ban not 'cruel and unusual' punishment (ABC)

• Will Biden Stick it Out or Bow Out? How the Democratic Ticket Could Change. (Barron’s)

• To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race (NYT Edit Bd)

• Oklahoma public schools are required to teach the Bible, state superintendent says (WP)

• Slowing U.S. Inflation Fuels Expectations of Interest Rate Cuts (WSJ)

• Who could replace Joe Biden? Here are six possibilities (Guardian)

• A Fumbling Performance, and a Panicking Party (NYT)

• Expanding extremist groups in Africa could look to attack the US (AP)

• AI and heat waves pose dual threats to the power grid (Yahoo)

• Goldman Sachs Deploys Its First Generative AI Tool Across the Firm (WSJ)

• Goldman Sachs' AI countdown is ticking. Partners explain how junior and senior bankers could be affected. (Business Insider)

• Meta’s LLM Compiler is the latest AI breakthrough to change the way we code (VentureBeat)

• RFK Jr. Mutes TV To Share Own Answer To Debate Moderator’s Question (The Onion)

 

The Wired Revolution.5

 

(This is the final in a five-part series)

Sometime later in 1997, along with the arrival of cooler weather and light rain in San Francisco came the final plans for a house-cleaning at Wired Inc. The in-house coup d'é·tat would result in the removal of scores of people, including the founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe.

In their stead, the company was going to be dismantled and sold off in pieces. The founders would be rewarded with a fair amount of compensation for their efforts, so they would be “fine.“ Not so much everyone else.

At the top of the corporate hit list was my name. The very fact that made me irreplaceable in the old order — my relationship with Louis — made me all too disposable in the new one.

I was to be replaced, naturally, by one of those sycophants who was always clamoring for my time in one-on-ones. 

So, on a late afternoon when the sun was going down to the west, suddenly and strangely there were no further meetings on my calendar. It was wide open. Then I was suddenly summoned to Louis’s office. 

I walked in to see three people waiting, none of smiling. Just three senior execs stiff and grim in manner. I was thanked for my service, given a small severance check, and summarily dismissed. 

Louis was one of the three and he looked immensely sad at my fate. But he had nothing to say. This was not of his doing. And that, I suppose, is the end of my story at Wired.

Like other difficult transitions in my life, I had prepared myself emotionally as much as possible for this moment. I’d packed up my family pictures and prepared my goodbye message. As I drove away from 660 Third Street, however, with tears in my eyes, I realized that you never can fully prepare for this kind of thing, so just remember that it was never about you and your fate in the first place.

EPILOGUE

The most significant accomplishment during my tenure on Third Street was Wired News, which survived the purge in 1997 and exists to this day.

And in one of life’s strange ironic twists, my oldest daughter, who would soon become an award-winning journalist herself, worked as as an intern at Wired News during the first decade of the new millennium.

None of her colleagues knew that her father had been one of the executives involved in creating their company or what that experience had been like. 

Many years later, now that our society has become divided by conspiracy theories, fake news and social media demagogues, I remember how hard a few of us tried to prevent that outcome.

I’d be less than truthful if I said we fully anticipated how bad the media collapse would turn out to be. We had inklings and we saw the danger signs, but we could not imagine the world as it’s turned out to be.

The problem is once the old media world — like Humpty Dumpty — teetered and fell off of the great digital wall of the Internet and burst into a thousand pieces, how were we ever going to put it together again?

The answer is, sadly, I don’t know that we can.

And that might be the end of this very tragic story, but for this one remaining truth: We have to try.

***
The Day After

From the moment Joe Biden walked out on the stage for last night’s debate with Donald Trump, it was apparent that he was going to have a bad night. He looked like a disoriented elderly person struggling to keep up, not a vigorous candidate for president.

From the perspective of an objective observer, what ensued over the subsequent 90 minutes was an unmitigated disaster for the Democratic Party.

It also was very sad because Biden is a good man who has been a terrific public servant.

***
Recently, I have been dealing with some of the less desirable inevitabilities of aging. As a stroke survivor and one diagnosed with Parkinsonism, I’m aware of the physical declines that are becoming undeniable.

As much as I hate to admit it, sometimes my gait resembles that of Biden’s — slow, shuffling, tentative.

But mentally at least, I’m still as sharp as I’ve ever been — at least that is the consensus of the family members and friends who see me most often.

Still, for physical reasons alone, I have to begin making plans for alterations in my living situation that may prove necessary in the foreseeable future.

These are exceptionally difficult conversations for me to have. They break my heart.

***

It is in the context of my own health challenges that I watched Biden struggle last night, mentally as well as physically. In my opinion, for his own good, it is time he stepped aside from running for re-election and finish out his term with as much grace and dignity as possible.

He in no way able to serve another four-year term in the way he would wish to.

Assuming he withdraws soon, that will clear the way for V-P Kamala Harris to mount a realistic challenge to Trump, and give her a fighting chance to prevail.

Let’s be clear about the stakes. Our democracy cannot afford for Trump, the most dangerous person in the land, to return to office.

At the White House, it is time for the Bidens to have that most difficult of conversations. Even if it breaks their hearts.

HEADLINE:

Relieved Trump, Biden End Debate After Realizing Neither Of Them Really Wants To Be President (The Onion)

The Wired Revolution.4

(Fourth in a series.)

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

This was a time of invention.

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

So I became that person.

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

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

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

There were endless subjects to talk over because initially we were in essence a multimedia company covering everything. The staffers usually wanted to meet me in groups — there were several on each team. But a few specific individuals preferred to meet me one-on-one — these were the more personally ambitious types.

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

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

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

You might say the music was different but the venue the same. Meanwhile, at the corporate level of Wired Inc., big plans were afoot. Louis and the leadership wanted to take the company public and cash in like the dot.com entrepreneurs the magazine celebrated, and they put together an all-star cast of VC’s to do it. But when they first tried to do that in the summer of 1996, a temporary hiccup in the stock market for red-hot tech stocks caused them to withdraw the offer.

Later in the year a second try at an IPO failed as well, which was a much more serious signal that trouble lay ahead. But by then I was too busy managing our scores of workers and our emergence as a viable web-based media company to give it more than a passing thought. 

On the industrial level, we were becoming extremely proficient not only at launching new websites, but building production systems to push out our voluminous flows of content. Publishing stories on the web required a series of editorial and technical steps by staff members with different skills and this all had to be done by hand. (Automated platforms like Wordpress appeared years later.) 

So we had to devise our own process that ushered each piece through the various stages of production quickly and efficiently until it was ready to go live.

I insisted that one of those steps be fact-checking. Among our numerous correspondents was a young fellow named Matt Drudge in L.A., who seemed to have his finger on the pulse of rumors circulating around Hollywood and Washington D.C. But we discovered many of his reports required serious fact-checking before we could publish them.

(In the spirit of the times, very soon one of Drudge’s rumors would almost take down the President of the U.S., but that’s another story.) 

The traditional production schedule of a daily or a weekly print outlet simply couldn’t work for us since we were able to publish pretty much anytime we wished, which was all the time. This was the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, which had just been ushered in by the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the maturing of cable TV, but there were no real news industry standards yet for how to manage organizations on the web facing that kind of “always-on” reality. 

That meant that some of us at the top had to be always-on as well. 

Looking for advice, I started to meet with a handful of other Bay Area executives pondering similar workflow problems at CNET, Knight-Ridder, Yahoo, @Home and others. 

The specific website issues were basic ones: How to position banner ads, display color-coded links, indicate sponsored content and the like. Some of the folks in our ad-hoc group went on to help form the nonprofit Online News Association in 1999.

Meanwhile, throughout 1996 and the first half of 1997, Wired was aggressively entering into new partnerships and business deals. The global news service Reuters embedded a personable editor named Dick Satran in our newsroom as we negotiated a deal to distribute our digital news globally.

This was a major development. Now the Wired brand could circle the globe like the Associated Press with a strong technology focus. We felt we could quickly take over ownership of this new content space. That was an external goal we set for ourselves.

Internally, in order to rationalize the chaotic jumble of sub-brands into a cohesive whole, we decided to rebrand the entire enterprise Wired Digital, with one main product called Wired News. Our prior identity as HotWired would have to hit the dust. This was a logical but difficult decision that required all of my skill managing up to convince Louis that it was the right thing to do.

In the aftermath of the failed IPOs, Louis had become somewhat isolated from the senior execs on the digital side, so they asked me to convince him of the branding change, since he and I continued to have our spirited weekly discussions as always.

Plus I fully supported the change myself; HotWired seemed dated by then.

Louis didn’t like the idea, but I worked with him and eventually he came around to it.

As part of this transition, we had to sell off some of our popular but less relevant properties, notably the successful alt-health channel "Ask Dr. Weil," edited by Steven Petrow. We sold it to Time Inc., which led to a personal reunion for me with Time senior executive Dan Okrent, an old colleague from The Michigan Daily days (1966-9). 

As I showed Okrent around our shop, we compared notes on our separate journeys since college through competing media worlds -- him at the pinnacle of the traditional media world in New York; me at the bleeding edge of new media world in San Francisco.

We both knew our worlds were colliding head-on in real time; neither of us knew which one, if either, would prevail. 

In order to fill out the staff for Wired News, we hired a few experienced editors to provide guidance to the younger staff members, since few of the latter had actually attended journalism school or spent time at newspapers, magazines or broadcast media companies. What I hoped was that we would create a blend of the old and the new that preserved journalistic standards while breaking new ground.

And we did break stories, for example by revealing clues in the html coding behind the website of the Heaven’s Gate cult about why 40 of them committed mass suicide in San Diego in 1997.

But during the spring and summer of 1997, despite our best efforts on the digital side, dark storm clouds were beginning to appear on Wired Inc.'s horizon. The failed IPOs had undermined confidence in Louis's leadership and an ambitious set of younger execs had been moved into positions of influence inside the company by outside investors.

They began plotting a coup.

Aware of these rumblings for management change, I chose to double down on my loyalty to Louis and his vision; especially because my dozens of young staff members were literally pouring their hearts out building a new media company according to that vision -- one where their own dreams might also have a fighting chance to come true.

This was all probably going to be ending badly for me, I began to realize, but it wouldn’t be the first (or the last) time for that to happen. Besides, loyalty to the person who had believed in me and given me the freedom to build a successful product called Wired News was the right thing to do — for me, for him and for my staff.

In fact the hourglass for all of us was quickly running out. 

(To Be Continued)

HEADLINES:

• Supreme Court allows White House to press social media companies to remove disinformation (CNN)

• Trump trusted more than Biden on democracy among key swing-state voters (WP)

• Trump expressed concern that returning classified docs after subpoena could result in criminal charges, according to sealed notes (ABC)

• Since 2020, county-level officials in five key states have tried to block the certification of vote tallies. Experts fear it’s a test run for thwarting President Biden in November. (WP)

• A high-ranking Republican in Maricopa County, Arizona, said earlier this year she would “lynch” one of the county’s top election officials if he walked into the room. [HuffPost]

• Why Jamaal Bowman Lost (Atlantic)

• Cop: Jeff Bezos’ WaPo CEO Deceived Police, Framed U.K. Prime Minister (Daily Beast)

• The Ten Commandments and the First Amendment (WSJ)

• Attempted coup in Bolivia fails after president calls on country to mobilize in defense of democracy (CNN)

• Gaza remains at high risk of famine as the war continues and access to aid is restricted, though delivery of supplies had limited the projected spread of extreme hunger in northern areas, a global monitor said. (Reuters)

• Is Putin's Ukraine obsession distracting him from a rising threat at home? (NBC)

• Kenya's youth-led protest movement leaves President William Ruto fumbling for a response (Reuters)

• They took part in Apache ceremonies. Their schools expelled them for satanic activities (Guardian)

• Generative AI Can’t Cite Its Sources (Atlantic)

• A.I. Will Fix the World. The Catch? Robots in Your Veins. (NYT)

• Library Drops Dewey Decimal System By Organizing All Titles Under ‘B’ For Books (The Onion)

The Wired Revolution.3

(Third in a series)

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

For me, if the parallels from my time at Rolling Stone two decades earlier weren't already in mind, they now became inescapable. From a window next to my desk at HotWired I could look directly into the office across the street at 625 where Howard Kohn and I had written our three-part series about Patty Hearst and the SLA (1975-6).

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

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

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

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

I was hopeful they were wrong on both counts, but 30 years later, it’s clear my optimism was misplaced. The devastation to the media world is obvious for all to see. Just look around. So many newspapers have closed that in most cities it is a surprise to discover that one still exists. Thousands of once-important newspapers have closed their operations since the Web started disrupting their business models circa 1994.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were heady times.

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

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

(To be continued.)

HEADLINES:

• When will the heat end? Never. (CNN)

• Bowman Falls to Latimer in a Loss for Progressive Democrats (NYT)

• This time last year, Hollywood writers were on strike. Now, many can’t find work (NPR)

• Waymo ditches the waitlist and opens up its robotaxis to everyone in San Francisco (Verge)

• Who’s the Boss at the Washington Post? (WSJ)

• Washington Post Publisher Says He Aided Hack Inquiry. Scotland Yard Had Doubts. (NYT)

• Washington Post publisher Will Lewis spikes newsletter after sponsor break (Financial Times)

• Even among world leaders, Biden and Trump are old (WP)

• Former President Donald Trump suggested that President Joe Biden submit to a drug test before this week's debate. Trump has claimed Biden would be "all jacked up" on illicit substances when they meet in Atlanta. [HuffPost]

• US surgeon general declares US gun violence an urgent public health crisis (CNN)

• Infant death rate spiked in Texas after restrictive abortion law, study finds (WP)

• A group at the center of conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo’s network funneled $750,000 to an influential new lobbying operation that pushes anti-LGBTQ+ legislation around the country, HuffPost has learned. Leo has helped Trump select Supreme Court justices. [HuffPost]

• Should Social Media Come With Warning Labels? (NYT)

• Billionaires Just Poured About $67 Billion Into These 5 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks (Motley Fool)

• Google brings its Gemini AI to Gmail to help you write and summarize emails (TechCrunch)

• These robots learned tennis and boxing after observing people (Popular Science)

•  Why American tech companies need to help build AI weaponry (WP)

• Tourist Immediately Breaks 34 Sacred Local Customs While Deboarding Airplane (The Onion)

 

The Wired Revolution.2

(Second in a series.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was sort of like their semi-cool Dad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Let him rant!" 

We ran the piece unedited. My job was secure. 

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

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

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

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

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

If I was going to head up this brilliant, unruly band of web revolutionaries, by acting as “the adult in the room” (as some of them called me), I was going to have to do it my way.

(To be continued)

HEADLINES:

• Supreme Court agrees to review Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors (CBS)

• Julian Assange flies out of UK after reaching plea deal with US government (Independent)

• Biden-Trump debate offers rare chance for change in stubbornly tight race (ABC)

• Our contributors rewatched the 2020 Biden-Trump debates for clues. Here’s what they predict will happen Thursday (CNN)

• Pro-Trump extremists are sure he will win. That could be dangerous. (WP)

• When abortion access is on the ballot, it wins. But that’s not an option for many states (AP)

• Hollywood’s exodus: Why film and TV workers are leaving Los Angeles (LAT)

• Unrelenting heat wave shifts focus to Central and Southeast U.S. (Axios)

• As climate change wreaks planetary chaos, researchers forecast more economic effects (WP)

• Netanyahu warns a Lebanon war could be next (AP)

• The top US general is making a rare trip to Africa to discuss ways to preserve some of the US presence in West Africa after Niger decided to kick out the US military in favor of partnering with Russia. (Reuters)

• Why do some planets have moons? A physics expert explains why Earth has only one moon while other planets have hundreds (The Conversation)

• Social Media Broke Slang. Now We All Speak Phone. (Atlantic)

• India’s AI boom — Microsoft and Amazon to build massive AI data centres in the world’s most populous country (Financial Times)

• Generative AI As A Killer Of Creative Jobs? Hold That Thought (Forbes)

• Department Of Transportation Announces $1 Billion Investment In Horses (The Onion)

 

The Wired Revolution

(Late 1995) 

After helping a tiny group of entrepreneurs launch Salon, I was invited over to tour the headquarters of Wired magazine by one of the magazine's editors who knew me from my years teaching at U-C Berkeley.  

The magazine’s office culture was casual with cubicles, computers, rock music playing in the background and a few dogs lounging around.

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

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

Right after I left the office, I made a call home to say, "I've just found the next place I want to work." I put the word out on my network -- if anyone heard of a job at HotWired, throw my name into the mix.

It took several weeks for the call to come from HotWired offering me a job as producer of what would be the web's first daily political news site, called The Netizen.

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

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

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

We launched the website in something like 28 days. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(To be continued)

HEADLINES:

• Death toll at Hajj pilgrimage rises to 1,300 amid scorching temperatures (AP)

• US heat wave continues to bring scorching temperatures along East Coast (The Hill)

• Washington Post publisher retains ties to past business ventures (WP)

• For Post’s Lewis, Credibility Dies in Silence (Politico)

• Readers Don’t Trust Dirty Tricks (Atlantic)

• Trump cranks up false, inflammatory messages to rake in campaign cash (WP)

• Turner says US is at ‘highest level of a possible terrorist threat’ (The Hill)

• What Happens When Migrants Arrive in America’s Suburbs? (WSJ)

• Can you inherit memories from your ancestors? (Guardian)

• What the Arrival of A.I. Phones and Computers Means for Our Data (NYT)

• Is artificial intelligence making big tech too big? (Economist)

• A peek inside San Francisco’s AI boom (WP)

• Scientists: ‘Don’t Get Mad, But We Accidentally Found The Cure For Homosexuality’ (The Onion)

 

Inverness

 

The Third Act

 Growing up in Michigan, summer was something to be relished and the season we looked forward to during the long, cold, snowy winters.

In California, the seasons feel more muted and subtle.

But one constant from my youth through old age is the cadence of a lazy afternoon when it’s hot outside. A glass of lemonade over ice, a hammock in the shade, a good book — those are the elements that help pass the time.

And time passes, whether we value this particular moment or not, wherever we are.

I’m on a brief vacation from the news, a long weekend out on the coast. There’s a timelessness here, as if I’m inside an old photo from long ago.

Back before the hoopla, the excitements, the crowds, the headlines, the marriages, the divorces, the hirings, the job losses, the parties, events, speeches, awards, letdowns and pick-me-ups.

Back before now. Back before my third act.