Extra, Extra
No News is Good News: ” This is a return to news video investments from Big Tech. Tech firms have invested billions in live sports rights to bolster their streaming services, but live news has proved a more elusive customer acquisition tool.” Amazon will stream election night coverage hosted by Brian Williams. (This may sound weird coming from me, but I see this is a terrible sign. We need more places to escape the news, not more places to be confronted by it. And we sure as hell don’t need one more place to get election night news.)
+ Hen Attacks Fox House: “Bret Baier started off his Wednesday evening interview with Kamala Harris with a barrage of combative questions about immigration, designed less to elicit substantive answers than to prove what a tough guy the Fox host could be.” Margaret Sullivan: Fox News’s interview of Kamala Harris was grievance theater, not political journalism. Harris basically went into Trump campaign HQ and kicked ass. Though you definitely wouldn’t know that if you opened up 50 tabs like I did this morning and saw the relentless distortions. These really are sad times. You can watch the interview here.
+ Runaway Training: “While the pace at which the overall population has been radicalizing increased in recent years, people with military backgrounds have been radicalizing at a faster rate.” His country trained him to fight. Then he turned against it. More like him are doing the same.
+ Cheating Weighs: “Before 2020, most Americans had no reason to fear this problem. Political parties largely acted in good faith, and most understood that our basic democratic norms were sacrosanct. In a world in which one party is still consumed by election fraud claims from 2020 (as JD Vance’s nonanswer in the debate underscored) and is prepared to claim the same in 2024, we have much to fear.” Neal K. Katyal in the NYT (Gift Article): In Case of an Election Crisis, This Is What You Need to Know.
+ Liam Payne Dies: “Liam Payne, the former member of the boy band One Direction, died of trauma and internal and external bleeding, an autopsy performed in Buenos Aires following his death after he plummeted from a hotel balcony in Argentina’s capital.” Here’s more from BBC.
+ Crime of the Century: “The Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay $880m to 1,353 people who alleged that they were sexually abused as children by Catholic priests, in the largest settlement by a US diocese over decades-old abuse claims.” (This is just one city…)
+ Flu the Nest: “Scientists have concluded that widespread physical distancing and masking practiced during the early days of COVID-19 appear to have pushed B/Yamagata into oblivion. This surprised many who study influenza, as it would be the first documented instance of a virus going extinct due to changes in human behavior.”
+ Boss Mode: “That was literally a song I wrote in two minutes. Didn’t even think about it. Didn’t think it was ever going to be on a record … There’s nothing on that record. Wrote it in two minutes. And if you go to iTunes now, it’s the number-one favorite song out of every song I’ve written. I wrote that in two minutes!” A cool discussion between Zach Bryan and Bruce Springsteen.
