Madeleine

NYT Protects Its Pundit Who Dismissed Trans Rights as ‘Boutique Issue’ It seems likely that the omission of Frank Bruni's name—a familiar one, of course, to regular readers of the New York Times op-ed page—was a deliberate choice.

Not disagreeing with the broader point but the pundit class was framing trans rights that way years before Elon bought X. NYT types are always happy to throw someone more vulnerable under a bus on pretext that attaining more power demands doing so. 2016: fair.org/home/nyt-pro...

The point of using AI for something like that seems not to be obtaining information — it’s not reliable — but adding a wee frisson of customer service to online search. Not the info itself but a vaguely flattering, conversational / solicitous veneer basic search engines lacked.

I’ve read about that but it seems to me there’s inherent sycophancy in all the models. People who are asking consumer AI for basic info easily found elsewhere like tide times, e.g., get an answer that sounds confident but may be off by hours —https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crklrnv5yn4o

People come up with the weirdest excuses for not being interested enough in their own choice of leisure reading to pay even a bit of attention to it. This one belongs in a hall of fame someplace.

Haven't seen the movie and am in no hurry to, but the Grauniad publishing 2-3 think-pieces daily about how intolerable it is that a posh woman made an insufficiently serious film is a weird sop to a dozen or so comments-section dudes who’ve been moaning about Fleabag for years.

Their politics and transparent self-interest aren’t exactly off the record. People who can’t or won’t see that crowd for what it is unless and until it openly admits its own hypocrisy would simply find another, equally inane noise to make to pass time besides ”where are they now hmm.”

If conservatives are upset with coverage, one must re-configure the paper so they never for a second feel like they are condescended to. If libs are upset with coverage, they’re stupid and can’t read.

Top NYT Editor: ‘We Are Pro-Capitalism, the Times Is in Favor of Capitalism’ New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet—likely the most influential gatekeeper in all of media—told Times staffers in a closed-door meeting last December that the paper of record was “pro-ca...

It’s gross but not shocking. NYT editors have been quite open about their disdain for the left and unwillingness to include left-leaning perspectives in the paper. fair.org/home/top-nyt...

NY Times Crossword Play the most prestigious crossword in the country.

She can do the NYT crossword on the Seattle Times site daily for free. www.seattletimes.com/games-nytime...

The New York Times’ first article about Hitler’s rise is absolutely stunning Vox is a general interest news site for the 21st century. Its mission: to help everyone understand our complicated world, so that we can all help shape it. In text, video and audio, our reporters expl...

More broadly speaking they’ve been at it much longer than that –
www.vox.com/2015/2/11/80...

Screenshot from Google News showing that both the Independent and Martha Stewart site preceded the Guardian article, with the Independent having a very similar headline (“Cabbage Core – the trend that’s here to stay”)

It is very poor, but I suppose they had to add something to the Independent’s headline while borrowing it.

…and note that there’s not a single sentence in there about what, if anything, the NYT would be changing about its processes to stop similar patterns from happening again. Zero accountability, as if years of terrible, racist, fact-free nonsense landed on the front page as blamelessly as rain.

Opinion | Slandering the Unborn (Published 2018) How bad science and a moral panic, fueled in part by the news media, demonized mothers and defamed a generation.

It’s been this my entire life. One wee example, read this recap of its endlessly lurid 80s-90s “crack babies” coverage acknowledging that much of the reporting and analysis were “far too alarmist and totally unsubstantiated” and “clearly drawn from myth” www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

NY Times Crossword Play the most prestigious crossword in the country.

The Seattle Times publishes the NYT crossword daily –
www.seattletimes.com/games-nytime...

screenshot showing the Guardian headline on this topic alongside very similar others that preceded it (The Independent the day before, “Cabbage Core - the trend that’s here to stay” and Martha Stewart site 6 days ago, “This Humble Vegetable is Suddenly Everywhere…”)

It’d be more interesting to read why the Guardian is thoroughly shameless about copying this type of not-news filler from other publications. I’ve been reading more than 20 years and the lack of ambition only becomes more and more pronounced.

screenshot of the opinion piece linked above: “Student loan repayments of up to 9% means some of these so-called Plan 2 graduates face effective marginal tax rates of 49% or more, in England and Wales, where even the super-rich pay only 45%. It's a generational injustice that rankles: why are young people being squeezed proportionately harder in some cases than their bosses? Isn't it tough enough already to save up for a first flat, or start a family, without hanging yet more millstones round their necks?”

This isn’t about the US, and there is much more to income and power inequality in the US than crazily expensive higher education.

It’s bigger than that — the thousands of Meta and Google employees who build and operate their tech and respond to these DHS requests, etc., aren’t themselves Epstein class. They're happy enough to do the work for ordinary economy or business class wages.

photo of a sign held aloft at a demonstration: “Fuck the Guardian, you transphobic frauds.”

Not good that the Guardian now often strips bylines from links like these and leaves them off of its own topic pages. Some of us want to avoid transphobic writers like Lucy Mangan.

Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology Even city council members don’t know about the program.

Not just in the future - Thiel has been selling his creepy tech to gov’t for years. New Orleans PD in 2018 for example.
www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17...

It’s beyond “if” for some of them. Google for instance did turn over this Philadelphia retiree’s info to DHS. archive.ph/kmWHG (Link is to Feb. 3, 2026 WaPo article, “Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon”

He simply doesn’t have to, no? By all appearances his investors aren‘t bothered by him being obviously high, any more than they are by his white nationalist politics or any other aspect of his personality or character.

Facebook slammed by UN for its role in Myanmar genocide In the wake of the midterm elections on Tuesday, tempers seem to be running hot at the White House: Attorney-General Jeff Sessions, who drew the president’s ire by recusing himself from the Russia inv...

This is a company that didn't pause when it was found to be facilitating genocide either. There is no floor / basement / sub-basement to Meta’s amorality. There isn’t anything its workers won’t do to make the world worse so long as it generates profit. www.cjr.org/the_media_to...

Greg Gianforte sentenced to community service for assaulting Guardian reporter Montana Republican fined $385 and spared jail after pleading guilty to assaulting Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs on the eve of Gianforte’s election

Reminiscent of the governor of Montana‘s 2017 assault on a reporter. Really grim that this stuff plays well with voters in parts of the US. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017...

Screenshot of BBC live blog of Pam Bondi Senate Judiciary Committee testimony highlighting that “She deflected questions about Trump's connection to Epstein and asked why Democrats had not raised concern about the late convicted paedophile financier before she took office”

It’s bonkers but not a new type of bonkers. Inane attempts at deflection were also the theme of her Oct. 2025 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony too for example.

Facebook Gave Ad Agencies an Inflated Video Viewing Metric for 2 Years On the cusp of Advertising Week, Facebook has some egg on its face when it comes to perhaps the industry's most promising space—digital video.

www.adweek.com/digital/face...

Two (and more) things can be true at the same time though — it can replace white collar and other jobs *and* the hype can be largely misplaced, unearned, and ill-considered. Did media learn nothing from Facebook’s great pivot to video, which killed lots of jobs despite being bumbling froth?

Who is the Guardian for these days? Difficult to share editors’ apparent convictions that “No one in particular“ is what great publications with sustainable readership support have in common.

cover of “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber” by Mike Isaac

Screenshot of Wired magazine book review of Super Pumped: “By the end of Super Pumped, we are back in the land of techspeak. The book’s final chapters vacillate between buying (or at least repeating) the line that Uber’s investors had a crisis of conscience and suggesting that they acted largely to protect their investment when they staged a coup to wrest control of the company back from Kalanick. In fact, Isaac acknowledges, at least some of the bad press around Uber was due to a strategic campaign to manipulate tech journalists. ‘[T]here were a select few who wanted it to look as messy as it all really was,’ he writes about sources who leaked him down-to-the-minute details about Kalanick’s resignation. ‘And they used me, an unwitting participant, to make that happen.’”

Surely a coincidence that that reporter went on to write a bro-y book about Uber in which he seems to have acknowledged being a useful idiot for its investors as well.

Facebook Reports New Issues With Ad-Counting Tools (Published 2016)

It‘s also been harmful to journalism over and over again — during the “pivot to video” for example the NYT’s sole source on the problem of wildly inflated viewing numbers was a Facebook press release. www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/t...

Social media is a problem, Keir, but so is life for too many in Britain. I’d deal with that first | Marina Hyde Elon Musk may be a useful villain, but that should not distract politicians from the basic facts about inequality and poverty, says Guardian columnist Marina Hyde

She writes commentary, not reports breaking news. To be clear I’m not saying she’s good at it. I stopped reading in 2024 when she attributed racist far-right street violence in the UK that summer to economic inequality. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...