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    The Lede review: Calvin Trillin on the golden age of American reporting

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    For decades, Calvin Trillin has been one the most celebrated journalists in New York. This splendid collection of his pieces is filled with reminders of what makes him special: he is equally good at the serious stuff and “pieces meant to amuse”.The press is the subject that knits these stories together. It occurred to Trillin that these articles “amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like” since he entered the game. Many are from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. They provide the flavor of the glory days of print journalism, when newsstands were stuffed with magazines and papers written by giants like Murray Kempton, Molly Ivins and Edna Buchanan – and giants in their own minds, like RW Apple Jr – each of whom gets their due here, in Trillin’s 32nd book.His title, The Lede, is the coin of the realm for every old-fashioned scribbler. Trillin sets the tone on page four:
    A veterinarian prescribed antibiotics Monday for a camel that lives behind an Iberville Parish truck stop after a Florida woman told law officers that she bit the 600-pound animal’s genitalia after it sat on her when she and her husband entered its enclosure to retrieve their deaf dog.
    Every good lede leaves the reader with a certain amount of mystery. Trillin points to this one: “While the veterinarian was caring for the camel, was anyone attending to that Florida woman?”The book is replete with the best lines of other journalists but Trillin’s phrases are the funniest, like the one he wrote after Time Warner announced that the magazine that gave the company half its name was to be “spun off – a phrase that to me has always conjured up a business enterprise caught in the final cycle of a giant washing machine, with desks and office machines flying through the air and middle-management types being blown away, head over heels, like so many tumbleweeds”.Or this one, describing Richard Nixon’s difficulties “with trying to buy an apartment in East Side co-ops that persist in treating him as if he were Jewish or a tap dancer”.Time is one of the places Trillin has labored. In the 60s, all its writers were men and all the researchers were women. For one of scores of beguiling details, Trillin quotes the biography of one Time founder, Briton Hadden, which asserted that he designed the system with the idea that “putting a male writer and a female researcher together in a quasi-adversarial situation would create a sexual dynamic that could lend energy to the process”.Trillin wrote a much-loved novel, Floater, about his Time experiences. It describes one of the researcher’s duties as finding “some reason why any sentence suspected of being even remotely graceful must be changed in a way that makes it boring or awkward”. (When I was a reporter at the New York Times its copy editors had exactly the same habit, which was a big reason I quit.)RW Apple Jr was a national political reporter, a Vietnam correspondent and London bureau chief for the Times, equally famous for his scoops and the size of his expense account. Trillin’s profile begins with the book that made Apple famous, Gay Talese’s portrait of the Times, The Kingdom and the Power. Talese reported that Apple boasted that he personally killed a few Vietcong, which “led an older reporter to say, ‘Women and children, I presume.’”Trillin was chairman of the Yale Daily News and Apple chairman of the Daily Princetonian when they met, in 1956. Apple was kicked out of Princeton a second time “after he began to spend every waking hour” at the paper. “By his standards, I have occasionally acknowledged to him, I failed to throw myself wholeheartedly into the job of running a college newspaper,” Trillin wrote. “I graduated.”The book celebrates Kempton and Ivins, two of my favorite journalists, more wholeheartedly.Kempton’s extraordinary erudition made colleagues “look forward to a courtroom recess” when he “might muse on some human characteristic that somehow linked, say, Montaigne and Bessie Smith and [New York crime boss] Frank Costello”. Kempton “was uncanny in his ability to find some way in which almost anyone who had been smitten was morally superior to those who had done the smiting”.Ivins was celebrated for skewering Texas politicians, but here Trillin remembers Paul Krugman’s description of her prescience after she died in 2007. Krugman recalled that when most reporters swallowed the Bush administration’s fantasy that American invaders of Iraq would be greeted as liberators, Ivins identified the real danger: “The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war’?’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrillin has plenty of serious things to say about reporting, including the dangers faced by journalists who mistake themselves for the people they’re covering. “You could argue that reporters, no matter how much money they make, forget at their peril that they are essentially cabin-class people traveling first class on an upgrade,” he writes. “When they acquire protective feelings toward the important people they enjoy seeing socially, they tend to get scooped.”Like many great reporters, Trillin’s principles were forged in the civil rights movement, which he covered for Time. This collection ends with a tremendous recollection of those years – and the limited relevance of objectivity in the coverage of that story.“I didn’t pretend that we were covering a struggle in which all sides – the side that thought, for instance, that all American citizens had the right to vote and the side that thought that people who acted on such a belief should have their homes burned down – had an equally compelling case to make,” Trillin writes.As America barrels towards a showdown between one party committed to democracy and another addled by racism and xenophobia, the usefulness of objectivity in an age like this is becoming more questionable every day.
    The Lede is published in the US by Random House More

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      Will Shortz, New York Times Crossword Editor, Says He Is Recovering From a Stroke

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      Mr. Shortz, who has been with The Times for three decades and also hosts NPR’s “Sunday Puzzle,” said on Sunday that he had a stroke in February but was recovering.Will Shortz, crossword editor of The New York Times and the host of NPR’s “Sunday Puzzle,” is recovering from a stroke, he said on Sunday.Mr. Shortz, who is 71 and has been with The Times for three decades, shared the health update in a recorded message that aired on Sunday at the end of the puzzle quiz segment during the NPR program “Weekend Edition Sunday.”“Hey guys, this is Will Shortz. Sorry I’ve been out the last few weeks. I had a stroke on February 4, and have been in rehabilitation since then, but I am making progress,” he said in the message. “I’m looking forward to being back with new puzzles soon.”Ayesha Rascoe, the host of “Weekend Edition Sunday,” wished Mr. Shortz a speedy recovery.“We here at ‘Weekend Edition,’ we love Will and I know that everybody at home does too and we are rooting for him and we are so hopeful and know that he will feel better soon,” she said during the segment.Mr. Shortz, who last year celebrated his 30th anniversary as crossword editor at The Times, also founded the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, spent 15 years as the editor of Games magazine, and has appeared weekly as the puzzle master on “Weekend Edition Sunday.”“When I was a kid, I imagined a life where I’d be sitting in an attic somewhere, making my little puzzles for $15 each, somehow surviving,” he said in a 2017 interview with The Times. “I actually wrote a paper in eighth grade about what I wanted to do with my life, and it was to be a professional puzzle maker.”Despite skepticism from his middle school teacher about that dream, Mr. Shortz went on to self-design a degree at Indiana University in enigmatology — the scientific study of puzzles as it is related to semiotics, culture and cognition. He also studied law.In 1993, Mr. Shortz became the Times’s fourth puzzle editor, and, in an interview last year, he recalled telling his hiring editor at the time that he hoped to “maintain the quality and intellectual rigor of the Crossword” while bringing in young contributors, fresh themes and modern vocabulary.The content of the crosswords, he said, should have lasting cultural impact, which he defined as “at least five to 10 years.”Mr. Shortz could not be immediately reached on Sunday for further comment about his recovery, and when he might return to work.Jordan Cohen, a spokesman for The New York Times, said in an email that the newspaper had been in “regular contact” with Mr. Shortz and wished him “the best on his path to what is expected to be a full recovery.” Mr. Cohen added, “We look forward to having him back at work when he is ready.”A spokeswoman from NPR shared Mr. Shortz’s aired statement by email on Sunday, but did not immediately respond to questions about when he might return to work. More

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      For Democrats Pining for an Alternative, Biden Team Has a Message: Get Over It

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      When it comes down to it, a lot of Democrats wish President Biden were not running this fall. Only 28 percent of Democrats in a new survey by The New York Times and Siena College expressed enthusiasm about his candidacy and 38 percent said flatly that Mr. Biden should not be their nominee.But even as many Democrats both in Washington and around the country quietly pine for someone else to take on former President Donald J. Trump, who leads nationwide in the poll by 5 percentage points, no one who matters seems willing to tell that to Mr. Biden himself. Or if they are, he does not appear to be listening.Surrounded by a loyal and devoted inner circle, Mr. Biden has given no indication that he would consider stepping aside to let someone else lead the party. Indeed, he and the people close to him bristle at the notion. For all the hand-wringing, the president’s advisers note, no serious challenge has emerged and Mr. Biden has dominated the early Democratic primaries even more decisively than Mr. Trump has won his own party’s nominating contests.The Biden team views the very question as absurd. The president in their view has an impressive record of accomplishment to run on. There is no obvious alternative. It is far too late in the cycle to bow out without considerable disruption. If he were ever to have opted against a second term, it would have been a year ago when there would have been time for a successor to emerge. And other than someone with Biden in their name, it is hard to imagine who would have enough influence to even broach the idea with him, much less sway him.“There is no council of elders and I’m not sure if there was that an incumbent president, no matter who it was, would listen to them,” said David Plouffe, the architect of President Barack Obama’s campaigns and one of the strategists who helped him pick Mr. Biden as his vice-presidential running mate in 2008. “He thinks, ‘Hey, I won and I beat the guy who’s going to run against me and I can do it again.’”Members of Mr. Biden’s team insist they feel little sense of concern. The president’s closest aides push back in exasperation against those questioning his decision to run again and dismiss polls as meaningless this far before the vote. They argue that doubters constantly underestimate Mr. Biden and that Democrats have won or outperformed expectations in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 and even a special House election this year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The New York Times Wins 3 Polk Awards

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      The Times was honored for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. And ProPublica won a prize for revealing the lavish gifts and luxury trips given to Justice Clarence Thomas.The New York Times on Monday won three George Polk awards, including two for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. The prizes were among the five that honored journalism on that conflict and the war in Ukraine.Long Island University, the home of the journalism awards, announced the winners in 13 categories, which were selected from 497 submissions of work done in 2023.“As horrific as the outbreak of war in the Middle East and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine were, they provided us with no shortage of magnificent reporting, done at great peril, from which to choose,” John Darnton, the longtime Polk Awards curator, said in a statement.This year is the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Polk Awards, which will be celebrated with an event in April inviting all past recipients. Sixteen will be honored as George Polk career laureates, including Dean Baquet, a former New York Times executive editor; Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer at The Times Magazine; the CNN chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour; and the former Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron. The awards are named for the CBS journalist George Polk, who was killed in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war.The staff of The New York Times was awarded the foreign reporting prize for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, which included extensive reporting on Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s aggressive military response in Gaza. Times reporters showed that Israel had known of Hamas’s plan of attack for more than a year but ignored warnings and was ill-prepared.Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud of The Times won the award for photojournalism for their photographs of the conflict from inside Gaza, capturing the horrific toll of Israel’s airstrikes on civilians, including the death and injury of many children.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      My Iowa: Covering the Caucuses as a Native or a Newcomer

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      One of our reporters grew up in Iowa City and was inspired to become a journalist after witnessing the caucuses in action. Another touched down here for the first time two months ago. They compared notes.KELLEN BROWNING If you were trying to think of a city that feels like the polar opposite of San Francisco, Des Moines would be a pretty good bet.When I learned in November that I had two weeks to pack up my life in the Bay Area and move to Iowa for the winter to report on the Iowa caucuses, I called up Sydney Ember, a colleague who drew this assignment four years ago, for advice. She reassured me that driving in the snow would be easy, and said she had almost died only three times on the icy roads during her time in Iowa covering the 2020 Democratic primary race.Armed with that comforting knowledge — and some new coats — I took off for Des Moines. In just six short weeks, I’ve driven more than 3,400 miles in my rental car, attended rallies for all of the leading candidates and spoken with dozens of voters. But while I was moonlighting as an Iowan, one of my colleagues on staff is the real thing.Anjali Huynh, a politics reporter who grew up in Iowa City, has watched all of us reporters try to become Iowa experts, and — I can only imagine — rolled her eyes at our inability to blend in with the locals. As I prepared to wrap up my stint here, I wanted to chat with a real Iowan about her state, and share some of what I have learned.Here’s our conversation.ANJALI HUYNH What was your reaction when you first heard that you were going to be sent to Des Moines, somewhere you haven’t been before?KELLEN I have not spent time in the Midwest, so I was looking forward to it, but I also just had no idea what to expect. In my head I had visions of cornfields and flat terrain, a stark contrast to the slopes of San Francisco. When I first got out here, my first impression of downtown Des Moines was: “Wow, it’s so quiet. I guess people are just at home because it’s kind of cold out.” But Iowa is simply a much more sparsely populated state, and I soon came to realize that’s just how it was.ANJALI How cold was it?KELLEN It was like 40 degrees, which I now view as warm. But, I’m curious: What has it been like for you, who grew up in Iowa City, seeing people like me parachute in?ANJALI It’s been very odd. Part of why I got into journalism was because of the caucuses. In 2016, the first event I ever attended was for Senator Bernie Sanders in my hometown, because I heard that Josh Hutcherson, the guy who plays Peeta in “The Hunger Games,” was going to campaign alongside him.I was 14. I remember being in awe of how many people were there, all to see this guy from Vermont. That was the first time I realized the power that Iowa had in drawing all these candidates here.Campaign signs in Des Moines, where Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot Republican presidential candidate, spoke over the weekend. Hilary Swift for The New York TimesSo in 2020, ahead of the Democratic primary, I persuaded a local newsmagazine to let me follow the candidates. I went to the Iowa State Fair for them, and while covering the candidates, I remember seeing all the national journalists and the way they were talking about and ramming past fairgoers, and just feeling frustrated. I knew that if I made it to some sort of a national stage, I wanted to do it better, to talk about Iowans not just using tropes, but making sure I actually understood why they believed what they believed.KELLEN That’s something I have tried to do by having the opportunity to be on the ground here for six weeks. ANJALI Is there anything that surprised you about Iowa?KELLEN I truly did not realize the whole “Iowa Nice” thing was real. Campaign operatives or strategists who have been doing this for a long time have asked me, “Oh, did you bring mittens? Do you need them?”But Anjali, I wanted to ask what you’re expecting from the caucuses today. What do you make of the process in general?ANJALI I’m still talking to a lot of voters who are undecided. I’ve been covering Vivek Ramaswamy over the last week, and I’ve encountered so many people at his events who say they’re between him and any number of other candidates. Many Iowans wait until the last second to decide whom they’re going to support, so those final pitches do matter.There are a lot of issues with the caucuses; the fact that they’re at a very set time, on a certain day, in person, does make them inaccessible to some people.But there’s a certain beauty about seeing the process unfold, seeing neighbors who really value this process come together and convince one another to support a particular candidate. Iowa has a more diverse array of perspectives than it gets credit for — there aren’t just farmers here — and you can especially see that during the caucuses.Vivek Ramaswamy at an event last week in Des Moines. Hilary Swift for The New York TimesKELLEN My biggest takeaway is that I’ve really enjoyed talking to voters face-to-face who take this very seriously and take their civic responsibility very seriously. And they’re willing to talk to the media.I was speaking with these two couples in Sioux Center the other day after a Trump rally, and they said: “You know, we don’t really like The New York Times very much. We don’t trust it.” We had a 20-minute conversation. I was explaining where the media was coming from: We report the truth. Our stories are accurate. And they said, essentially, “The media has lost the trust of people” and they’re relying more on what they see around them, and on alternative news sources, like Tucker Carlson.There’s this divide now in the country about what is factual, and that makes it very hard to get through to people. But I appreciate that we were able to talk face-to-face about this rather than through a screen.ANJALI Do you have any funny moments from the trail?KELLEN The funniest moment for me was a question from a 10-year-old girl from Nebraska who asked Vivek Ramaswamy, if he became president, whether he would ask China’s leader, Xi Jinping, for a giant panda for her zoo. And he said he would try.ANJALI What about general Iowa highlights?KELLEN Going for runs around Gray’s Lake in Des Moines. There are some incredible sunsets in Iowa. There are several great bridges in Des Moines that light up at night. Some of the food has been really good.A bridge over Gray’s Lake in Des Moines, where Kellen Browning went on runs during his stint in Iowa.Kellen Browning/The New York TimesEven when campaign events took me to rural parts of the state, I found them charming. The Fruited Plain Café in downtown Sioux Center, for instance, is a cozy place to take refuge from the cold. And at one point, I accidentally drove into Nebraska. Anjali, what’s your favorite place in Iowa that’s not Iowa City?ANJALI Dubuque in the fall is beautiful. Last time I went, they had a winter market going on.KELLEN I’ll have to come back at a time when it’s not negative 18 degrees outside. More

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      The Best Sentences of 2023

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      Over recent days, I took on a daunting task — but a delightful one. I reviewed all the passages of prose featured in the For the Love of Sentences section of my Times Opinion newsletter in 2023 and tried to determine the best of the best. And there’s no doing that, at least not objectively, not when the harvest is so bountiful.What follows is a sample of the sentences that, upon fresh examination, made me smile the widest or nod the hardest or wish the most ardently and enviously that I’d written them. I hope they give you as much pleasure as they gave me when I reread them.I also hope that those of you who routinely contribute to For the Love of Sentences, bringing gems like the ones below to my attention, know how grateful to you I am. This is a crowdsourced enterprise. You are the wise and deeply appreciated crowd.Finally, I hope 2024 brings all of us many great things, including many great sentences.Let’s start with The Times. Dwight Garner noted how a certain conservative cable network presses on with its distortions, despite being called out on them and successfully sued: “Fox News, at this point, resembles a car whose windshield is thickly encrusted with traffic citations. Yet this car (surely a Hummer) manages to barrel out anew each day, plowing over six more mailboxes, five more crossing guards, four elderly scientists, three communal enterprises, two trans kids and a solar panel.”Erin Thompson reflected on the fate of statues memorializing the Confederacy: “We never reached any consensus about what should become of these artifacts. Some were reinstalled with additional historical context or placed in private hands, but many simply disappeared into storage. I like to think of them as America’s strategic racism reserve.”Pamela Paul examined an embattled (and later dethroned) House speaker who tried to divert attention to President Biden’s imagined wrongdoing: “As Kevin McCarthy announced the impeachment inquiry, you could almost see his wispy soul sucked out Dementor-style, joining whatever ghostly remains of Paul Ryan’s abandoned integrity still wander the halls of Congress.”Damon Winter/The New York TimesTom Friedman cut to the chase: “What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil.”Maureen Dowd eulogized her friend Jimmy Buffett: “When he was a young scalawag, he found the Life Aquatic and conjured his art from it, making Key West the capital of Margaritaville. He didn’t waste away there; he spun a billion-dollar empire out of a shaker of salt.” She also assessed Donald Trump’s relationship to his stolen-election claims and concluded that “the putz knew his push for a putsch was dishonest.” And she sat down with Nancy Pelosi right after Pelosi gave up the House speaker’s gavel: “I was expecting King Lear, howling at the storm, but I found Gene Kelly, singing in the rain.”Bret Stephens contrasted the two Republicans who represent Texas in the Senate, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz: “Whatever else you might say about Cornyn, he is to the junior senator from Texas what pumpkin pie is to a jack-o’-lantern.”Jamelle Bouie diagnosed the problem with the Florida governor’s presidential campaign: “Ron DeSantis cannot escape the fact that it makes no real sense to try to run as a more competent Donald Trump, for the simple reason that the entire question of competence is orthogonal to Trump’s appeal.”Alexis Soloski described her encounter with the actor Taylor Kitsch: “There’s a lonesomeness at the core of him that makes women want to save him and men want to buy him a beer. I am a mother of young children and the temptation to offer him a snack was sometimes overwhelming.”Jane Margolies described a growing trend of corporate office buildings trimmed with greenery that requires less maintenance: “As manicured lawns give way to meadows and borders of annuals are replaced by wild and woolly native plants, a looser, some might say messier, aesthetic is taking hold. Call it the horticultural equivalent of bedhead.”Nathan Englander contrasted Tom Cruise in his 50s with a typical movie star of that age 50 years ago: “Try Walter Matthau in ‘The Taking of Pelham 123.’ I’m not saying he wasn’t a dreamboat. I’m saying he reflects a life well lived in the company of gravity and pastrami.”And David Mack explained the endurance of sweatpants beyond their pandemic-lockdown, Zoom-meeting ubiquity: “We are now demanding from our pants attributes we are also seeking in others and in ourselves. We want them to be forgiving and reassuring. We want them to nurture us. We want them to say: ‘I was there, too. I experienced it. I came out on the other side more carefree and less rigid. And I learned about the importance of ventilation in the process.’”The ethical shortcomings of Supreme Court justices generated some deliciously pointed commentary. In Slate, for example, Dahlia Lithwick parsed the generosity of billionaires that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have so richly enjoyed. “A #protip that will no doubt make those justices who have been lured away to elaborate bear hunts and deer hunts and rabbit hunts and salmon hunts by wealthy oligarchs feel a bit sad: If your close personal friends who only just met you after you came onto the courts are memorializing your time together for posterity, there’s a decent chance you are, in fact, the thing being hunted,” she wrote.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesIn The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri mined that material by mimicking the famous opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice.”Also in The Post, the book critic Ron Charles warned of censorship from points across the political spectrum: “Speech codes and book bans may start in opposing camps, but both warm their hands over freedom’s ashes.” He also noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.”Rick Reilly put Mike McDaniel, the sunny head coach of the Miami Dolphins, and Bill Belichick, the gloomy head coach of the New England Patriots, side by side: “One is as open as a new Safeway, and the other is as closed up as an old submarine. One will tell you anything you want; the other will hand out information on a need-to-go-screw-yourself basis. One looks like a nerd who got lost on a stadium tour and wound up as head coach. The other looks like an Easter Island statue nursing a grudge.”Matt Bai challenged the argument that candidates for vice president don’t affect the outcomes of presidential races: “I’d argue that Sarah Palin mattered in 2008, although she was less of a running mate than a running gag.”David Von Drehle observed: “Golf was for decades — for centuries — the province of people who cared about money but never spoke of it openly. Scots. Episcopalians. Members of the Walker and Bush families. People who built huge homes then failed to heat them properly. People who drove around with big dogs in their old Mercedes station wagons. People who greeted the offer of a scotch and soda by saying, ‘Well, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere!’”And Robin Givhan examined former President Jimmy Carter’s approach to his remaining days: “Hospice care is not a matter of giving up. It’s a decision to shift our efforts from shoring up a body on the verge of the end to providing solace to a soul that’s on the cusp of forever.”In his newsletter on Substack, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appraised the Lone Star State’s flirtation with secession: “This movement is called Texit and it’s not just the folly of one Republican on the grassy knoll of idiocy.”In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Emma Pettit experienced cognitive dissonance as she examined the academic bona fides of a “Real Housewives of Potomac” cast member: “It’s unusual for any professor to star on any reality show, let alone for a Johns Hopkins professor to star on a Bravo series. The university’s image is closely aligned with world-class research, public health and Covid-19 tracking. The Real Housewives’ image is closely aligned with promotional alcohol, plastic surgery and sequins.”In The Los Angeles Times, Jessica Roy explained the stubborn refusal of plastic bags to stay put: “Because they’re so light, they defy proper waste management, floating off trash cans and sanitation trucks like they’re being raptured by a garbage god.”In The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., Josh Shaffer pondered the peculiarity of the bagpipe, “shaped like an octopus in plaid pants, sounding to some like a goose with its foot caught in an escalator and played during history’s most lopsided battles — by the losing side.”Space Frontiers/Getty ImagesIn Salon, Melanie McFarland reflected on the futility of Chris Licht’s attempts, during his short-lived stint at the helm of CNN, to get Republican politicians and viewers to return to the network: “You might as well summon Voyager 1 back from deep space by pointing your TV remote at the sky and pressing any downward-pointing arrow.”In Politico, Rich Lowry contextualized Trump’s appearance at his Waco, Texas, rally with the J6 Prison Choir: “It’d be a little like Richard Nixon running for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, and campaigning with a barbershop quartet made up of the Watergate burglars.”In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols observed that many Republican voters “want Trump, unless he can’t win; in that case, they’d like a Trump who can win, a candidate who reeks of Trump’s cheap political cologne but who will wisely wear somewhat less of it while campaigning in the crowded spaces of a general election.”Also in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson needled erroneous recession soothsayers: “Economic models of the future are perhaps best understood as astrology faintly decorated with calculus equations.”And David Frum noted one of the many peculiarities of the televised face-off between DeSantis and Gavin Newsom: “In the debate’s opening segments, the moderator, Sean Hannity, stressed again and again that his questions would be fact-based — like a proud host informing his guests that tonight he will serve the expensive wine.”In The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen mulled an emotion: “Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it,” he wrote.Also in The New Yorker, David Remnick analyzed the raw, warring interpretations of the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7: “There were, of course, facts — many of them unknown — but the narratives came first, all infused with histories and counterhistories, grievances and 50 varieties of fury, all rushing in at the speed of social media. People were going to believe what they needed to believe.”Zach Helfand explained the fascination with monster trucks in terms of our worship of size, noting that “people have always liked really big stuff, particularly of the unnecessary variety. Stonehenge, pyramids, colossi, Costco.”And Anthony Lane found the pink palette of “Barbie” a bit much: “Watching the first half-hour of this movie is like being waterboarded with Pepto-Bismol.” He also provided a zoological breakdown of another hit movie, “Cocaine Bear”: “The animal kingdom is represented by a butterfly, a deer and a black bear. Only one of these is on cocaine, although with butterflies you can never really tell.”In The Guardian, Sam Jones paid tribute to a remarkably durable pooch named Bobi: “The late canine, who has died at the spectacular age of 31 years and 165 days, has not so much broken the record for the world’s longest-lived dog as shaken it violently from side to side, torn it to pieces, buried it and then cocked a triumphant, if elderly, leg over it.”In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rendered a damning (and furry!) judgment of the organization that oversees college sports: “Handing the N.C.A.A. an investigation is like throwing a Frisbee to an elderly dog. Maybe you get something back. Maybe the dog lies down and chews a big stick.” He separately took issue with a prize his daughter won at a state fair: “I don’t know how many of you own a six-and-a-half-foot, bright blue stuffed lemur, but it is not exactly the type of item that blends into a home. You do not put it in the living room and say: perfect. It instantly becomes the most useless item in the house, and I own an exercise bike.”Also in The Journal, Peggy Noonan described McCarthy’s toppling as House speaker by Matt Gaetz and his fellow right-wing rebels: “It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.” In another column, she skewered DeSantis, who gives off the vibe “that he might unplug your life support to recharge his cellphone.”On her website The Marginalian, the Bulgarian essayist Maria Popova wrote: “We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb.”Finally, in The Mort Report, Mort Rosenblum despaired: “Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024.” More

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      in Elections

      A Majority of Americans Support Trump Indictments, Polls Show

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      Recent polls conducted before the Georgia indictment showed that most believed that the prosecutions of the former president were warranted.Former President Donald J. Trump’s blistering attacks on prosecutors and the federal government over the cascade of indictments he faces do not appear to be resonating much with voters in the latest polls, yet his grip on Republicans is further tightening.A majority of Americans, in four recent polls, said Mr. Trump’s criminal cases were warranted. Most were surveyed before a grand jury in Georgia indicted him over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election, but after the federal indictment related to Jan. 6.At the same time, Mr. Trump still holds a dominant lead over the crowded field of Republicans who are challenging him for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who continues to slide.The polls — conducted by Quinnipiac University, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, ABC News/Ipsos and Fox News — showed that Americans remain divided along party lines over the dozens of criminal charges facing Mr. Trump.The takeaways aligned with the findings of a New York Times/Siena College poll last month, in which 22 percent of voters who believed that Mr. Trump had committed serious federal crimes said they still planned to support him in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup with Mr. DeSantis.Here are key findings from the recent polling:Most say a felony conviction should be disqualifying.In the Quinnipiac poll, 54 percent of registered voters said Mr. Trump should be prosecuted for trying to overturn the 2020 election. And seven out of 10 voters said that anyone convicted of a felony should no longer be eligible to be president.Half of Americans, but only 20 percent of Republicans, said that Mr. Trump should suspend his presidential campaign, according to the ABC News/Ipsos poll. This poll, which surveyed American adults, was the only one of the four surveys conducted entirely after Mr. Trump’s indictment in Georgia.When specifically asked by ABC about the Georgia case, 63 percent said the latest criminal charges against Mr. Trump were “serious.”Republicans, by and large, haven’t wavered.The trends were mixed for Mr. Trump, who is a voracious consumer of polls and often mentions them on social media and during campaign speeches. He has continually argued that the indictments were politically motivated and intended to short-circuit his candidacy.In a hypothetical rematch of the 2020 election, Mr. Trump trailed President Biden by a single percentage point in the latest Quinnipiac poll, 47 to 46 percent. Mr. Biden’s advantage was 5 percentage points in July.At his campaign rallies, Mr. Trump has frequently boasted how the indictments have been a boon for his polling numbers — and that rang true when Republicans were surveyed about the primary race.In those polls that tracked the G.O.P. nominating contest, Mr. Trump widened his lead over his challengers, beating them by nearly 40 points. His nearest competitor, Mr. DeSantis, had fallen below 20 percent in both the Fox and Quinnipiac polls.Mr. DeSantis, who earlier this month replaced his campaign manager as he shifts his strategy, dropped by 6 to 7 percentage points in recent months in both polls.Trump participated in criminal conduct, Americans say.About half of Americans said that Mr. Trump’s interference in the election in Georgia was illegal, according to the AP/NORC poll.A similar share of Americans felt the same way after Mr. Trump’s indictments in the classified documents and the Jan. 6 cases, but the percentage was much lower when he was charged in New York in a case related to a hush-money payment to a porn star.Fewer than one in five Republicans said that Mr. Trump had committed a crime in Georgia or that he broke any laws in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.When asked by Fox News whether Mr. Trump had engaged in illegal activity to overturn the 2020 election, 53 percent of registered voters said yes.But just 13 percent of Republicans shared that view.A plurality of those surveyed by ABC (49 percent) believed that Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime in Georgia.Support for the Justice Department’s charges.Fifty-three percent of U.S. adults said that they approved of the Justice Department’s decision to bring charges against Mr. Trump for his attempts to reverse his electoral defeat in 2020, The A.P. found.At the same time, the public’s confidence in the Justice Department registered at 17 percent in the same poll. More

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      in US Politics

      Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, dies aged 92

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      Daniel Ellsberg, a US government analyst who became one of the most famous whistleblowers in world politics when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US government knowledge of the futility of the Vietnam war, has died. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his family on Friday.In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care.“I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!”On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added.“In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, ‘If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner …’“Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation and well-wishes. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.”Tributes were swift and many.Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said Ellsberg “was widely, and rightly, acclaimed as a great and significant figure. But not by Richard Nixon, who wanted him locked up. He’s why the national interest should never be confused with the interest of whoever’s in power.”The Pulitzer-winning journalist Wesley Lowery wrote: “It was an honor knowing Daniel … I’ll remain inspired by his commitment to a mission bigger than himself.”The writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said: “One of the few really brave people on this earth has left it.”The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said: “Huge loss for this country. An inspiring, brave, and patriotic American. Rest in power, Dan, rest in power.”The Pentagon Papers covered US policy in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967 and showed that successive administrations were aware the US could not win.By the end of the war in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans were dead and 304,000 were wounded. Nearly 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, as were about 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas and more than 2 million civilians in North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.The Pentagon Papers caused a sensation in 1971, when they were published – first by the New York Times and then by the Washington Post and other papers – after the supreme court overruled the Nixon administration on whether publication threatened national security.In 2017, the story was retold in The Post, an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg in which Ellsberg was played by the British actor Matthew Rhys.Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps in the 1950s but went to Vietnam in the mid-60s as a civilian analyst for the defense department, conducting a study of counter-insurgency tactics. When he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was working for the Rand Corporation.In 2021, a half-century after he blew the whistle, he told the Guardian: “By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.“By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.”In 1973, Ellsberg was put on trial. Charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property adding up to a possible 115-year sentence were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, part of the gathering scandal which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.Born in Chicago on 7 April 1931, Ellsberg was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, completing his PhD after serving as a marine. He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter.After the end of the Vietnam war he became by his own description “a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing”.Ellsberg contributed to publications including the Guardian and published four books, among them an autobiography, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and most recently The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.In recent years, he publicly supported Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who leaked records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who published Manning’s leaks, and Edward Snowden, who leaked records concerning surveillance by the National Security Agency.On Friday, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the Guardian team which published the Snowden leaks in 2013, winning a Pulitzer prize, called Ellsberg “a true American hero” and “the most vocal defender” of Assange, Snowden, Manning and “others who followed in his brave footsteps”.Steven Donziger, an attorney who represented Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest against the oil giant Chevron, a case that led to his own house arrest, said: “Today the world lost a singularly brave voice who spoke truth about the US military machine in Vietnam and risked his life in the process. I drew deep inspiration from the courage of Daniel Ellsberg and was deeply honored to have his support.”In 2018, in a joint Guardian interview with Snowden, Ellsberg paid tribute to those who refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam.“I would not have thought of doing what I did,” he said, “which I knew would risk prison for life, without the public example of young Americans going to prison to make a strong statement that the Vietnam war was wrong and they would not participate, even at the cost of their own freedom.“Without them, there would have been no Pentagon Papers. Courage is contagious.”Three years later, in an interview to mark 50 years since the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he said he “never regretted for a moment” his decision to leak.His one regret, he said, was “that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, ‘Don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.’” More

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      in US Politics

      Traffic review: Ben Smith on Bannon, BuzzFeed and where it all went wrong

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      Ben Smith is a willing passenger on the rollercoaster also known as the internet. He reported for Politico, was founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and did a stint as a columnist for the New York Times. Then he co-founded Semafor. Graced with a keen eye and sharp wit, he has seen and heard plenty.People and businesses crash, burn and sometimes rise again. BuzzFeed News is no more. The New York Times trades 75% higher than five years ago. Tucker Carlson is off the air. Roger Ailes is dead. Twitter ain’t what it used to be.Smith’s first book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, captures the drama with light prose and a breezy tone. He observes that internet news morphed from being a vehicle for the left into the tool of the right. It’s a lesson worth remembering.Technology is agnostic. The market yearns to build the better mousetrap. Secret sauce seldom stays secret for long. Barack Obama demonstrated a then-unparalleled mastery of electoral micro-targeting; in turn, the first Trump campaign harnessed Facebook and social media in a manner few envisioned.Traffic is the narrative of an industry and its personas. Smith spills ink on the overlapping relationships between the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous rightwing website, Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge. He stresses that ideology tethered to accessible if potentially inflammatory content gains eyeballs and clicks. Kittens are cute. Listicles are good for laughs. On the other hand, dick pics get stale quickly unless there’s a story behind them. Brett Favre is the exception that proves the rule.Smith recounts discussions with Steve Bannon, the dark lord of Trumpworld. He describes a Trump Tower meeting, amid the 2016 campaign. Bannon, then Trump’s campaign chairman, “exuded confidence, but it didn’t feel like a winning campaign”, Smith observes. “He didn’t seem to have much to do.”But there was more to the confab than atmospherics. There was insight.“Breitbart hadn’t just chosen Trump, Bannon told me, based on the candidate’s political views.” Rather, “Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement he’d driven, and attached themselves to it.”Charisma counts. Said differently, Hillary Clinton was only a candidate. Unlike Trump, she did not spearhead a movement, evoke broad loyalty or elicit passion. Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born socialist, stood in marked contrast. And he didn’t give speeches at Goldman Sachs or summer on Martha’s Vineyard.Sanders connected with the white working class and Latinos. A creature of the beer track, he came within two-tenths of a point of beating Clinton in Iowa then clobbered her in New Hampshire. The Democratic primary extended into July. The performance of the senator from Vermont presaged Clinton’s election day woes.“BuzzFeed, in Bannon’s view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement,” Smith writes. “Why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie, he asked me.”Smith’s answer satisfied no one, not even himself: “I told Bannon that we came from different traditions.”Greed, sex and ambition also marble Smith’s tale. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange and a $10m investor in Semafor, faces a dozen federal criminal counts. The company plans to repurchase his shares. Tainted money is a flashpoint for aggrieved creditors.The pursuit of coolness, cash and desirability seldom respects boundaries. Like moths, journalists gravitate to flames only to be burned. In one chapter, Smith recalls the plight of BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson.Johnson came from the Blaze, the hard-right brainchild of Glenn Beck, purveyor, Smith says, of “deranged conspiracies about Barack Obama before [Fox] pushed him out in 2011”. As for Johnson, he generated clickable copy. “He had a gift for traffic,” Smith writes. Johnson also had a plagiarism problem. In hindsight, he flashed warning signs. Apparently, Smith elected to ignore them.“I wasn’t really worried about whether Benny would fit in,” he admits. “I should have been.”Johnson was not another David Brooks or George Will. He was not “a bridge between BuzzFeed’s reflexive progressivism and the other half of the country”. Rather, Johnson crystallized something new, “a conservative movement more concerned about aesthetics than policy, motivated by nostalgia and culture more than by the overt subject matter of politics”.These days, owning the libs takes precedence over policy debate. Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Mien matters more than ever.Smith writes: “I sometimes wonder now if Benny was headed toward the kind of rightwing populism that Donald Trump came to embody.”Perhaps. Then again, “bullshit” and looks have always populated politics and the ranks of politicians. Smith’s words, again. After BuzzFeed, Johnson bounced to the National Review then on to the Daily Caller. He is now at Newsmax and Turning Point USA, the $39m non-profit led by Charlie Kirk.Elsewhere, Smith recalls an offer made by Disney in 2013, to purchase BuzzFeed for $450m with the “potential of earning $200m more”. Smith’s colleagues rejected the deal. The Disney chief, Bob Iger, exploded: “Fuck him, he loses, the company will never be worth what it would have been worth with us.”He was prescient.“By 2022, the internet had splintered,” Smith notes.America now faces a rerun of the last presidential election, Biden v Trump again.In his conclusion, Smith writes: “Those of us who work in media, politics and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are resistant to the forces we helped unleash.”Rome wasn’t built in a day. Nor was the web. Sometimes, creative destruction is just destruction, slapped with a gauzy label.
      Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is published in the US by Penguin Random House More