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Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

INAUGURATION 2029

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.

 

Contact Marie

Email Marie at constantweader@gmail.com

Saturday
May242014

The Commentariat -- May 25, 2014

Internal links removed.

Tim Noah of NBC News: "... there's no reason to believe veterans' wait times to see a VA doctor exceed, on average and to any significant degree, non-veterans' wait times to see a private-sector doctor. Inadequate access to health care is a VA problem. But it's a national problem, too."

Two Salon columnist, Andrew O'Hehir here & Elias Isquith here, take Glenn Greenwald's side against Michael Kinsley & George Packer who critique Greenwald's book (and personality).

Has Cake, Eats It, Too. AP: "Robert Gates, the new president of the Boy Scouts of America, said Friday that he would have moved last year to allow openly gay adults in the organization but said he opposes any further attempts to address the policy now.... 'I would have supported having gay Scoutmasters, but at the same time, I fully accept the decision that was democratically arrived at by 1,500 volunteers from across the entire country.'"

Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times: "Pope Francis called 'urgently' on Saturday for a 'peaceful solution' to the Syrian crisis and a 'just solution' to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as he started a three-day sojourn through the Holy Land at a time of regional turmoil and tension."

Eric Lach of TPM: "The creationist Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky. plans to unveil a new attraction this weekend: a world-class Allosaurus skeleton. But unlike other museums, where dinosaur skeletons are used to 'indoctrinate our kids with belief in evolution,' according to the institution, the Creation Museum's skeleton will serve as 'a testament to the truths found in God's Word.'" Via Steve Benen.

News Ledes

New York Times: "Pope Francis inserted himself directly into the collapsed Middle East peace process on Sunday, issuing an invitation to host the Israeli and Palestinian presidents for a prayer summit at his apartment in the Vatican, in an overture that has again underscored the broad ambitions of his papacy."

New York Times: "With their country caught in a fierce tug-of-war between Russia and the West over a new security order, Ukrainians elected Petro O. Poroshenko as president on Sunday, turning to a pro-European billionaire to lead them out of six months of wrenching turmoil, including a continuing separatist insurrection in the east."

Los Angeles Times: "Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department officials Sunday identified the first three victims of the Isla Vista rampage, each found fatally stabbed Friday night inside an apartment not far from the UC Santa Barbara campus. Now, all the attacker's victims have been identified, and they were all UCSB students." The Times currently has several related stories on its front page.

AFP: "Afghan President Hamid Karzai was offered a meeting with President Barack Obama at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul but declined, a US official said Sunday."

Reader Comments (6)

Hesitate to say something nice about him here, but for a change Douthat has some sensible things to say, this time about the Tea Party, its appeal, origins, effects and possible legacy...that is, until he runs into the impossible job of making three of the possible 2016 Presidential candidates sound credible...but I don't fault him for that failure. Even Superman couldn't do it.

legacy.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-tea-party-legacy.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0

May 25, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterKen Winkes

Robert Gates. Boy Scout. It figures.

May 25, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJames Singer

@Re: Creationists. Their logic, or lack thereof, escapes me. Arguing with them is pointless, because they always refer back to Genesis and shoehorn whatever cockamamie theory they're peddling into it.

What scares me is the number of people who swallow their BS. S

May 25, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterBarbarossa

I submitted the following to the Times in response to "The Power of Political Ignorance." It might be a bit shrill, but I think it is on point:

Our media strain to reach sunny conclusions from gloomy evidence. See Ross Douthat's phoned-in endorsement of the Know-Nothing Party in today's edition.

It pleases many to think that the critical votes that gives one candidate a win are those of the vaunted "moderates" who think more deeply about the issues than do partisan riff-raff like ourselves.

However, there is no middle ground between war and peace. There is no middle ground between climate disaster and acting with celerity to address climate issues. There is no middle ground between those who would treat the historically ostracized as the humans they are and those who would maintain the xenophobic, homophobic, aggressively racist points of view from which lynching disrespectful black people was regrettable but necessary and driving gay kids to suicide or even killing them was merely doing God's work.

After all, if you hate certain people and believe in a deity, you must customize your deity to mirror your hatred or yourself suffer the guilt and shame that accompany such hateful emotions.

So, in the midst of our own Cultural Revolution, in which erudition and science have not been in such disrepute since Pol Pot decided to kill all the educated people in Cambodia, our press has performed acrobatically trying to pass off zealots like Ted Cruz (and his charming father) as if they were give-and-take participants in the national dialogue.

When the low-information voter splits his vote, the press can take a bow.

May 25, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJack Mahoney

Excellent, Jack. Well said.

May 25, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJames Singer

Jack: Well said! Thanks for sharing it.

And if the Right's attack on "erudition and science" mounted with nary a demurrer from the national press, did not have a clear endgame in sight, witness the new Thai military government's arrest/detention of professors and intellectuals for a glimpse of our own future, if the Cruzers and his cadre of know-nothing haters continue to have their way.

Extracts from my own comment to the Times in which I might have been a bit shrill, too.

"....The Tea Party amalgam is an expression of discontent from those who don't like the way the country is going, their growing sense that events are out of their control. To that degree, the Tea Partyers are correct. They are. But the changes they do not like have little to do with our own government. They arise from international demographic and economic forces over which individual nation-states hold little sway. International corporations and the financial sector are both more powerful than any one individual government, even our own. They are free to benefit from the world's resource scarcity, using the geographic fiction of national barriers as a means to profit without paying taxes. Because they are not tied to any one nation, they have no compunction about dislocating workers and inequitably distributing resources and the wealth derived from them, thereby tearing hundreds of communities' social fabric to shreds.

Unfortunately the TP's reaction to all this is grounded in a misunderstanding of history and a constricted vision of our future.

(I would add here that constricted view would simply eliminate anything they do not like or understand, and that's a bundle.)

The government they have been schooled to hate may be ineffective, but it is not the problem."

May 25, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterKen Winkes
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