The Ledes

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

New York Times: “The Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, who emerged from the backwoods of Louisiana to become a television evangelist with global reach, preaching about an eternal struggle between good and evil and warning of the temptations of the flesh, a theme that played out in his own life in a sex scandal, died on July 1. He was 90.” ~~~

     ~~~ For another sort of obituary, see Akhilleus' commentary near the end of yesterday's thread.

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Marie: Sorry, my countdown clock was unreliable; then it became completely unreliable. I can't keep up with it. Maybe I'll try another one later.

 

Commencement ceremonies are joyous occasions, and Steve Carell made sure that was true this past weekend (mid-June) at Northwestern's commencement:

~~~ Carell's entire commencement speech was hilarious. The audio and video here isn't great, but I laughed till I cried.

CNN did a live telecast Saturday night (June 7) of the Broadway play "Good Night, and Good Luck," written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, about legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow's effort to hold to account Sen. Joe McCarthy, "the junior senator from Wisconsin." Clooney plays Murrow. Here's Murrow himself with his famous take on McCarthy & McCarthyism, brief remarks that especially resonate today: ~~~

     ~~~ This article lists ways you still can watch the play. 

New York Times: “The New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said on Thursday. The multiyear agreement 'will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,' the news organization said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports. This is The Times’s first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology. In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of articles published by The Times to train automated chatbots without any kind of compensation. OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected those accusations.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I have no idea what this means for "the Amazon customer experience." Does it mean that if I don't have a NYT subscription but do have Amazon Prime I can read NYT content? And where, exactly, would I find that content? I don't know. I don't know.

Washington Post reporters asked three AI image generators what a beautiful woman looks like. "The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a 'beautiful woman,' all three tools generated thin women, without exception.... Her body looks like Barbie — slim hips, impossible waist, round breasts.... Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging. More than a third of the images had medium skin tones. But only nine percent had dark skin tones. Asked to show 'normal women,' the tools produced images that remained overwhelmingly thin.... However bias originates, The Post’s analysis found that popular image tools struggle to render realistic images of women outside the Western ideal." ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: The reporters seem to think they are calling out the AI programs for being unrealistic. But there's a lot about the "beautiful women" images they miss. I find these omissions remarkably sexist. For one thing, the reporters seem to think AI is a magical "thing" that self-generates. It isn't. It's programmed. It's programmed by boys, many of them incels who have little or no experience or insights beyond comic books and Internet porn of how to gauge female "beauty." As a result, the AI-generated women look like cartoons; that is, a lot like an air-brushed photo of Kristi Noem: globs of every kind of dark eye makeup, Scandinavian nose, Botox lips, slathered-on skin concealer/toner/etc. makeup, long dark hair and the aforementioned impossible Barbie body shape, including huge, round plastic breasts. 

New York Times: “George Clooney’s Broadway debut, 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' has been one of the sensations of the 2024-25 theater season, breaking box office records and drawing packed houses of audiences eager to see the popular movie star in a timely drama about the importance of an independent press. Now the play will become much more widely available: CNN is planning a live broadcast of the penultimate performance, on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern. The performance will be preceded and followed by coverage of, and discussion about, the show and the state of journalism.”

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. -- Magna Carta ~~~

~~~ New York Times: “Bought for $27.50 after World War II, the faint, water stained manuscript in the library of Harvard Law School had attracted relatively little attention since it arrived there in 1946. That is about to change. Two British academics, one of whom happened on the manuscript by chance, have discovered that it is an original 1300 version — not a copy, as long thought — of Magna Carta, the medieval document that helped establish some of the world’s most cherished liberties. It is one of just seven such documents from that date still in existence.... A 710-year-old version of Magna Carta was sold in 2007 for $21.3 million.... First issued in 1215, it put into writing a set of concessions won by rebellious barons from a recalcitrant King John of England — or Bad King John, as he became known in folklore. He later revoked the charter, but his son, Henry III, issued amended versions, the last one in 1225, and Henry’s son, Edward I, in turn confirmed the 1225 version in 1297 and again in 1300.”

NPR lists all of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners. Poynter lists the prizes awarded in journalism as well as the finalists in these categories.

 

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Email Marie at constantweader@gmail.com

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Jun052011

The Commentariat -- June 6

Paul Krugman explains the difference between demagoguery and telling the truth to people who don't know the difference. ...

... I put up a Krugman page on Off Times Square, but you may comment on Douthat or anything else within reason. (Hmm. Did not mean to suggest here that Douthat was reasonable; he is not.)

CW: More later. Perhaps. I'm now living in a McDonald's somewhere in Pennsylvania. It's freezing and they're playing really loud music. BUT they have a WiFi hotspot AND an outlet to plug in my laptop. They will be throwing me out in a few hours. The lives of the unconnected are pitiful indeed.

Okay, here's more:

Dean Baker: "... Welcome to the Second Great Depression."

Sara Murray of the Wall Street Journal: "At least half the states have begun to rein in safety-net programs that swelled during the downturn, even as high unemployment and slow job growth persist. States offer a range of assistance programs such as tax credits for the working poor, unemployment benefits for the jobless and cash for low-income mothers and children. Governors from both parties have begun to make or propose cuts to these programs as they face another year of yawning budget gaps."

Thom Shanker of the New York Times: "President Obama’s national security team is contemplating troop reductions in Afghanistan that would be steeper than those discussed even a few weeks ago, with some officials arguing that such a change is justified by the rising cost of the war and the death of Osama bin Laden, which they called new 'strategic considerations.' These new considerations, along with a desire to find new ways to press the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to get more of his forces to take the lead, are combining to create a counterweight to an approach favored by the departing secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, and top military commanders in the field."

"Headwinds." Karen Garcia: President Obama has a new word & the court stenographers have got it down pat. She is having trouble distinguishing among Obama, Romney & Huntsman. Same policies: just different pretenses to shore up their bases..

Lisa Mascaro & Noam Levey of the Los Angeles Times suggest Democrats & Republicans will kick the deficit debate down the road & "resolve" the debt ceiling standoff by essentially doing nothing till after the 2012 election. No kidding.

Nathan Schwartz of the New York Times: "Bank stocks took another tumble late last week after Moody’s, the credit rating firm, warned it might downgrade the debt of giants like Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo as the government eases back on support for the sector. Even as the market absorbed that news, reports that Goldman Sachs had been subpoenaed in an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney further unnerved investors, and sent that giant investment’s bank’s shares sinking."

Another Lesson from Alan Greenspan on How to Say, "I Fucked up," without Saying "I Fucked up." Phil Izzo of the Wall Street Journal: "Alan Greenspan, a high-profile proponent of President George W. Bush's tax cuts, now says the U.S.'s debt troubles have become so worrisome that he would support going back to Clinton-era tax rates. 'The fact that I'm in favor of going back to the Clinton tax structure is merely an indicator of how scared I am of this debt problem that has emerged and its order of magnitude,' said the former chairman of the Federal Reserve in an interview Friday on CNBC."

James Surowiecki of the New Yorker: Elizabeth Warren may be both the best loved & most hated person in Washington. "Given the intensely partisan nature of Washington these days, the demonization of Warren and the C.F.P.B. is all too predictable. But it’s profoundly misguided, because Warren is far from the anti-capitalist radical that her critics (and some of her supporters) suppose. Indeed, an empowered C.F.P.B. could actually be a boon to business."

John Burns of the New York Times: "... Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, returning from a brief visit to the rebel headquarters in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, hinted at concern in Western capitals about what might come after the toppling of Colonel Qaddafi. Mr. Hague said he had pressed the rebel leaders to make early progress on a more detailed plan for a post-Qaddafi government that would include sharing power with some of Colonel Qaddafi’s loyalists."

Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker: "President Obama named some of the country’s most knowledgeable climate scientists to his Administration. But any hope that he might take the lead on global warming has faded."

Right Wing World *

Art by Boing Boing via Little Green Footballs.Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs: "Man, you’ve gotta almost admire the sheer blind dedication of Sarah Palin’s wingnut acolytes. Now they’re trying like crazy to edit the Wikipedia page for 'Paul Revere' to make it match Palin’s botched version of history." (Paul Revere artwork by Boing Boing is here.) CW: this is taking Right Wing World to a whole new dimension. ...

... Jeff Spross of Think Progress: in a Fox "News" Sunday appearance, Palin herself insists she got the Revere story right. Of course, she botches it again. With video of our Historian Laureate re-explaining history.

* Sorry, can't help it.

News Ledes

New York Times: "At a news conference in Midtown Monday afternoon, Representative Anthony D. Weiner tearfully confessed to sending a photo of himself in his underwear to a woman via Twitter and then lying about it. Mr. Weiner said the indiscretion was part of a pattern of sending inappropriate and at times explicit photos and messages to women he met over the Internet." CNN's print story is here. ...

     ... Update: the Times has a more expansive story here.

New York Times: "Peter A. Diamond said Monday he was withdrawing his name from consideration for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, issuing a sharply worded broadside that criticized Senate Republicans for blocking his nomination. Mr. Diamond, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Nobel Prize laureate for his work on labor markets, had waited more than a year for a Senate vote, a step that Republicans refused to allow."

AP: "Five American troops serving as advisers to Iraqi security police in eastern Baghdad were killed Monday when rockets slammed into the compound where they lived. The deaths were the largest single-day loss of life for American forces in two years."

Reuters: "Israel accused Syria on Monday of orchestrating lethal confrontations on the once-quiet ceasefire line between the two countries as a distraction from Damascus's bloody crackdown on an 11-week-old revolt."

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, another Republican who will not be POTUS, says he'll run anyway. WashPo story here.

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