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The Historic Collapse of Journalism

I have never gotten over a story The New York Times ran in its Sunday magazine back in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It was a lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s chief adviser for “strategic communications.” It was written by a reporter named David Samuels.

These two made a striking pair — fitting, I would say. Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer living in Brooklyn when, by the unlikeliest of turns, he found his way into the inner circle of the Obama White House. Samuels, a freelancer who usually covered popular culture celebrities, had long earlier succumbed to that unfortunately clever style commonly affected by those writing about rock stars and others of greater or lesser frivolity.

Rhodes’ job was to spin “some larger restructuring of the American narrative,” as Samuels put it. “Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics.” A professional flack straight out of Edward Bernays, in plain English. A teller of tales trafficking in manipulable facts and happy endings. “Packaged as politics:” a nice touch conveying the commodification of our public discourse.

Rhodes and Ned Price, his deputy, were social-media acrobats. Price, a former C.I.A. analyst and now the State Department’s spokesman, recounted without inhibition how they fed White House correspondents, columnists, and others in positions to influence public opinion as a fois gras farmer feeds his geese.

Here is Price on the day-to-day of the exercise:

“There are sort of these force multipliers. We have our compadres. I will reach out to a couple of people, and, you know, I wouldn’t want to name them…. And I’ll give them some color, and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space and have huge followings, and they’ll be putting out this message on their own.”

Rhodes gave Samuels a more structured analysis of this arrangement:

“All the newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what is happening in Moscow or Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

I wrote at length about the Times piece in Salon, where I was foreign affairs columnist at the time. There was so much to unpack in Samuels’s report I hardly knew where to begin. In Price we had a complete failure to understand the role of properly functioning media and the nature of public space altogether.

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Swiss Face Up to 3 Years in Prison For Violating Heating Rules

People in Switzerland who violate the country’s new heating rules which forbid setting the temperature above 19°C (66.2F) in the colder months will face up to three years in prison.

Yes, really.

Under the new rules, buildings that use gas heating systems are restricted to 19°C, while hot water can only be heated up to 60°C and radiant heaters are banned entirely.

It will also be forbidden to heat swimming polls and saunas.

Depending on the severity of the violation and the individual’s economic situation, fines will range from 30 to 3,000 Swiss francs ($30 to $3,050), while people could also be imprisoned for up to three years.

Utility companies and larger businesses would face even more severe penalties for breaking the energy rationing rules.

Despite the brazenly authoritarian restrictions, Economy Minister Guy Parmelin asserted, “We are not a police state,” although he acknowledged police would perform “spot checks” to try to catch violators.

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Eric Adams increases restrictions on New Yorkers’ right to buy firearms

New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams has pledged to enact door-to-door investigations, including knocking on the doors of applicant’s neighbors, before issuing gun permits to Big Apple residents.

As part of New York’s new gun safety law, NYPD officers will knock on neighbors’ doors as part of the background check investigation requirements of potential gun permit holders.

According to the New York Post, during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Thursday morning Adams said, “It is really about using the good, old-fashioned methods of doing an investigation.”

Adams continued, “When I became a police officer, people knocked on my neighbor’s doors and interviewed them and asked what type of person am I.”

Following the US Supreme Court’s decision overturning a 1913 state law mandating individuals to show “proper cause” for carrying firearms in the state, New York officials added extra requirements for individuals seeking concealed carry weapons permits that went into effect on September 1.

Adams, a former police captain, added, “And I think those are the same skills that’s going to be used to look at not only social media but also knocking our neighbors’ doors, speaking to people, finding out who this individual is that we are about to allow to carry a firearm in our city.”

As part of the background checks, applicants will be subjected to an in-person interview, as well as be required to provide four character references, a list of former and current social media accounts spanning three years, and disclose the names of their spouse or any other adults living in their home.

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Irish Teacher Gets Jail Time After Refusing to Use a Transgender Student’s Preferred Pronouns

A teacher in the Republic of Ireland has been suspended from teaching and later jailed on contempt charges after he refused to address a transgender student by their preferred pronouns.

Enoch Burke was arrested on Monday for violating a court order that barred him from teaching at Wilson’s Hospital School in Westmeath, the news site RTE.ie reported. In addition to being barred from teaching, Burke is not allowed to set foot on the property, per the court order.

Judge Michael Quinn later found Burke guilty of violating the High Court’s mandate. He was then sent to Mountjoy Prison, where he will remain until either he purges his contempt, or the court gives further orders.

The teacher stood by his refusal even when faced with jail time, telling the judge that “it is insanity” that he would be arrested and taken to prison for refusing to violate his Christian beliefs. “I love my school, with its motto Res Non Verba, ‘Actions not words,’ but I am here today because I said I would not call a boy a girl,” Burke told the court.

The saga began when Burke, who teaches politics and German at the school in Multyfarnham, County Westmeath, refused to address a transgender pupil as “they” instead of “he.” He was soon placed on administrative leave by school officials pending the outcome of an investigation and disciplinary process.

Burke refused to stay away from campus, however. He continued to refuse despite an injunction that barred him from teaching or even setting foot on Wilson’s campus.

On Friday, the judge issued an order to arrest Burke after he was found sitting in an empty classroom at the school. He was arrested at the school on Monday and taken directly to court, where he told the judge that he would not comply with the injunction.

“I am a teacher and I don’t want to go to prison,” Burke told the court. “I want to be in my classroom today, that’s where I was this morning when I was arrested.”

“Transgenderism is against my Christian belief. It is contrary to the scriptures, contrary to the ethos of the Church of Ireland and of my school,” he added.

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Synthetic Embryo With Brain and Heart Formed Without Using Eggs or Sperm.

Asynthetic embryo with cells capable of forming a brain and a beating heart was developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge using mouse stem cells. EuroNews described the effort as “yet another success in the unfolding race to develop embryos from human and mouse stem cells.”

The team, led by Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, developed the embryo model without using any eggs or sperm. The researchers used stem cells, specifically three types found in early mammalian development.

“By inducing the expression of a particular set of genes and establishing a unique environment for their interactions, the researchers were able to get the stem cells to ‘talk’ to each other,” explains a summary of the work.

“The stem cells self-organised into structures that progressed through the successive developmental stages until they had beating hearts and the foundations of the brain, as well as the yolk sac where the embryo develops and gets nutrients from in its first weeks.”

The synthetic embryo model developed by the Cambridge team is unique, as it reached a record level of development where the entire brain, including the anterior portion, began to develop.

The findings, which took researchers over a decade of work, could potentially be useful in understanding why some pregnancies fail along with developing synthetic organs for patients awaiting transplants.

The research also opens “new possibilities to study the mechanisms of neurodevelopment in an experimental model,” according to Zernicka-Goetz.

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