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      Jack Schlossberg Is Named a Political Correspondent for Vogue

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      Mr. Schlossberg, 31, the only grandson of President John F. Kennedy, has courted attention with outlandish TikTok videos, many of them political.There is no shortage of pundits in the media class eager to help Americans understand the current political moment. Not many of them had over 100,000 followers on TikTok before starting their gig.Jack Schlossberg did.In his playful way, Mr. Schlossberg, 31, has captured the attention of his social-media-native audience. Whether that is because of his remarkable resemblance to his uncle, John F. Kennedy Jr., or because of his ability to distill complex Supreme Court rulings into bite-size videos, it’s hard to say.As one of the most prominent members of the Kennedy family, America’s most enduring political dynasty, Mr. Schlossberg has always borne some expectation of being involved in public life.“I am inspired by my family’s legacy of public service,” Mr. Schlossberg, who is the only grandson of President John F. Kennedy, recently told Vogue. “I take that very seriously, and I want to contribute in my own way. I have big dreams, but I also know that I’m trying to make a positive impact today.”This week, the magazine announced that Mr. Schlossberg would be a Vogue.com political correspondent. Through a publicist, Mr. Schlossberg declined to be interviewed for this article, as he was “currently focused on producing his content for Vogue,” suggesting that, despite describing himself as a “silly goose,” he is taking the role seriously.Chloe Malle, the editor of Vogue.com, said she saw his appointment as an opportunity to influence the magazine’s readers to vote.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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      in Elections

      U.S. and Allies Target Russian Bots Working to Spread Propaganda

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      Intelligence officials from three countries flagged a Russian influence campaign that used artificial intelligence to create nearly 1,000 fake accounts on the social media platform X.The Justice Department said on Tuesday that it had moved to disrupt a covert Russian influence operation that used artificial intelligence to spread propaganda in the United States, Europe and Israel with the goal of undermining support for Ukraine and stoking internal political divisions.Working with the governments of Canada and the Netherlands, as well as officials at Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, the department said it seized two internet domains in the United States and took down 968 inauthentic accounts that the Russian government created after its attack on Ukraine began in 2022.In affidavits released with the announcement, officials with the Justice Department, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon’s Cyber National Mission Force linked the effort to Russia’s Federal Security Service and RT, the state television network that has channels in English and several other languages.The disclosure of such a large, global network of bots confirmed widespread warnings that the popularization of rapidly developing A.I. tools would make it easier to produce and spread dubious content. With A.I., information campaigns can be created in a matter of minutes — the kind of work that in the months before the 2016 presidential election, for example, required an army of office workers.The Russian network used an A.I.-enhanced software package to create scores of fictitious user profiles on X. It did so by registering the users with email accounts on two internet domains, mlrtr.com and otanmail.com. (OTAN, perhaps coincidentally, is the French acronym for the NATO alliance). The software could then generate posts for the accounts — and even repost, like and comment on the posts of other bots in the network.Both domains were based in the United States but controlled by Russian administrators, who used the accounts to promote propaganda produced by the RT television network. In a statement, the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, called it “a generative AI-enhanced social media bot farm.”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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      in Elections

      Autistic Employees Find New Ways to Navigate the Workplace

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      As diagnoses of autism rise, Microsoft and other large companies are working to better support autistic workers so they can thrive without “masking.”When Chelsia Potts took her 10-year-old daughter to a psychologist to be tested for autism spectrum disorder, she decided almost as an afterthought to be tested herself. The result came as a surprise. Like her daughter, Ms. Potts was diagnosed with autism.Ms. Potts, 35, thought she might have had anxiety or some other issue. A first-generation college student, she had earned a doctor of education degree and risen through academia to become a high-level administrator at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. But after her visit to the psychologist, she had to figure out how her diagnosis would affect her work life.“Initially, I was confused, and I did keep it to myself,” Ms. Potts said. “I had a picture of what someone with autism looked like, and that did not look like me.”She considered the ways she had compensated in the past in an effort to hide her disability and come across as a model employee — a coping mechanism known as “masking.”For years, she had angled to meet with co-workers one on one, because she felt ill at ease in group settings. She reminded herself to smile and appear enthusiastic, knowing that some people found her speaking voice overly serious. She also tried to avoid bright lights and noise in the workplace.After wrestling with her diagnosis for six months, Ms. Potts met with a university official. That conversation “was one of the most difficult experiences of my life,” she said.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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      in US Politics

      #KHive: Kamala Harris memes abound after Joe Biden’s debate disaster

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      In the aftermath of Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, left-leaning Americans can’t stop talking about the vice-president online. Memes about Kamala Harris are spreading with a speed and enthusiasm previously unseen on X and Instagram.Supercuts of her set to RuPaul’s Call Me Mother. Threads of her “funniest Veep moments”. Collages of jokes about her over a green album cover a la Charli xcx’s Brat. Numerous riffs on a comment she made about a coconut tree. Previous progressive snark about Harris has cast her either as an incompetent sidekick a la HBO’s Veep or as an anti-progressive cop, a reference to her years as California’s top law enforcement official. But as rumors circle about discussions of Biden dropping out of the presidential race, social media commentary on the nation’s second-in-command has grown more positive – even if ironically so.The Veep clips describing Harris now show Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) becoming president despite her years of ineptitude. The cop jokes come with side-by-sides of the vice-president and Donald Trump’s mugshot. Witness the rise of the “KHive”, a term coined by MSNBC’s Joy Reid for fans of the vice-president in the style of Beyonce’s Beyhive. And as the memes take a turn, so too have the polls. Recent numbers indicate Harris is having a “surprise resurgence”, polling more positively against Trump than Biden and all other rumored Democratic candidates, including Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg.The bleak wake of the debate is not the first time the vice-president has inspired jokes on social media, though it is the loudest. A video of Harris informing Joe Biden the two had won the 2020 election – most of all her “we did it, Joe” remark – has been a popular meme since the start of the administration.Conservatives have also made jokes at the vice-president’s expense for years now. In a January 2022 interview about the administration’s Covid policies, she gave the tautological answer: “It’s time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.” Fox News said she had been “crushed for non-answer”. The Daily Wire said she “incoherently babbles”. Ben Shapiro said on TikTok: “Every day, there is a new all-time Kamala Harris clip.”The recent meme cycle, whether joking or authentic, celebrates these kinds of verbal gymnastics, which are characteristic of Harris’s speeches – sometimes profound, sometimes nonsensical. Her most popular quip involves her mother and a coconut tree. In May 2023, she said, “My mother used to – she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” The story was part of a speech on educational economic opportunity for Latino Americans; you can read the full transcript on the White House’s website.A simple coconut emoji has become shorthand for the vice president. Mashups of her coconut tree anecdote have become punchlines in videos, images, and text on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok, racking up tens of thousands of likes and retweets. Several of her other trademark remarks have enjoyed a similar resurgence.The Biden-Harris campaign seems to have taken notice and intends to ride the virtual wave of support, even if it did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The president and vice-president posted a job ad on 3 July in search of a social media strategist for Harris specifically. The aide will write posts for Harris every day in an effort to “expand the vice-president’s voice online”, per Politico.The explosion of Harris content mirrors how Donald Trump’s speeches and tweets spread as memes. His bizarre, idiosyncratic way of talking and tweeting makes for funny reference points on both right and left, insertable into unrelated jokes for the pastiche effect of the best absurd online humor. Outlandish rhetoric that stands out for its flourishes – whether putatively weighty like Harris or unapologetically pugnacious like Trump – makes for good punchlines.Another of Harris’ aphorisms appears with almost comic frequency and has made its way into the online frenzy over her: “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” A supercut of her making the remark in dozens of different public appearances, nearly four minutes of the same phrase repeated over and over again, has been retweeted nearly 9,000 times.A video of her dancing alongside a drum line has also resurfaced, remixed to showcase her ascendancy as Biden’s star fades. As one tweet of the video reads: “Kamala seeing the CNN polls this morning.” Her distinctive laugh, which makes an appearance in the coconut tree tale before her demeanor and tone turn inexplicably somber, has long inspired posts remarking on her willingness to display emotion in public. Biden, by contrast, spoke in a feeble monotone during the debate. Against Trump’s gesticulation and rancor, Biden appeared gray and weak. Observers online wonder: could Kamala stand up to Trump, as she once did to Biden himself?Why the enthusiasm for Harris now? Perhaps despair over the other two options. One tweet crystalizes the reason for the quick shift in the vibes online: “Who cares if she’s weird? At least she’s not a felon or 80.”And is the turn to Harris genuine or just a nihilistic joke in the face of an uninspiring election? The same tweet winks with absurd maximalism of internet speech: “We need a Gemini Rising woman President from California who is on pills+wine, is campy, and didn’t get married until she was middle aged because she was too busy being a 365 party girlboss.”Parts of the tweet are true – Harris’ ascendant astrological sign is indeed Gemini – but “365 party girlboss” is a reference to Charli xcx’s album Brat, another meme of the moment. There’s also no evidence she’s on pills.With the Democratic machine in disarray as rumors of Biden’s resignation swirl, it’s not clear what comes next for the vice-president – or the US. As one tweet blending multiple Harris quips stated, in an attitude of throwing exasperated hands to the sky: “God grant me the serenity to be unburdened by what has been, the courage to see what can be, and the wisdom to live in the context.” More

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      in Elections

      Why More French Youth Are Voting for the Far Right

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      Most young people in France usually don’t vote or they back the left. That is still true, but support has surged for the far right, whose openly racist past can feel to them like ancient history.In the 1980s, a French punk rock band coined a rallying cry against the country’s far right that retained its punch over decades. The chant, still shouted at protests by the left, is “La jeunesse emmerde le Front National,” which cannot be translated well without curse words, but essentially tells the far right to get lost.That crude battle cry is emblematic of what had been conventional wisdom not only in France, but also elsewhere — that young people often tilt left in their politics. Now, that notion has been challenged as increasing numbers of young people have joined swaths of the French electorate to support the National Rally, a party once deemed too extreme to govern.The results from Sunday’s parliamentary vote, the first of a two-part election, showed young people across the political spectrum coming out to cast ballots in much greater numbers than in previous years. A majority of them voted for the left. But one of the biggest jumps was in the estimated numbers of 18-to-24-year-olds who cast ballots for the National Rally, in an election that many say could reshape France.A quarter of the age group voted for the party, according to a recent poll by the Ifop polling institute, up from 12 percent just two years ago.There is no one reason for such a significant shift. The National Rally has tried to sanitize its image, kicking out overtly antisemitic people, for instance, who shared the deep-seated prejudice of the movement’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. And the party’s anti-immigrant platform resonates for some who see what they consider uncontrolled migration as a problem.Young people at an anti-far-right gathering in Paris after the results of the first round of the parliamentary elections. 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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      Supreme Court Declines to Rule on Tech Platforms’ Free Speech Rights

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      The justices returned both cases, which concerned state laws that supporters said were aimed at “Silicon Valley censorship,” to lower courts. Critics had said the laws violated the sites’ First Amendment rights.The Supreme Court on Monday avoided a definitive resolution of challenges to laws in Florida and Texas that curb the power of social media companies to moderate content, leaving in limbo an effort by Republicans who have promoted such legislation to remedy what they say is a bias against conservatives.Instead, the justices unanimously agreed to return the cases to lower courts for analysis. In the majority opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that neither lower appeals court had properly analyzed the First Amendment challenges to the Florida and Texas laws.The laws were prompted in part by the decisions of some platforms to bar President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Supporters of the laws said they were an attempt to combat what they called Silicon Valley censorship. The laws, they added, fostered free speech, giving the public access to all points of view.Opponents said the laws trampled on the platforms’ own First Amendment rights and would turn them into cesspools of filth, hate and lies.The two laws differ in their details. Florida’s prevents the platforms from permanently barring candidates for political office in the state, while Texas’ prohibits the platforms from removing any content based on a user’s viewpoint.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