EJ Dionne/The Washington Post:
Will American politics stay stuck? Biden has a plan for that.
Some Republicans saw George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 with 50.7 percent of the popular vote as the beginning of a realignment toward the GOP, while Democrats had comparable hopes for their party after Barack Obama’s 2008 victory with 52.9 percent of the vote. Neither wish was fulfilled.
No wonder the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch and Lynn Vavreck refer to our politics as “calcified” in their important (and aptly titled) recent book on the 2020 election, “The Bitter End.”
Jill Lawrence/The Bulwark:
What the ‘Weaponization’ Committee Is Really After
‘It’s a drug they’re going to put out on the street for conservative media and conservative voters.’
[...]
But beyond the political risk for Biden and his legacy, there is a larger danger for the country—specifically the Judiciary Committee’s new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. Jordan has long complained about the supposed persecution of conservatives by the FBI and other agencies. Now he’s claimed broad powers to do something about it—including mucking around in open investigations.
Is the government really picking on conservatives? Or, hear me out, did a defeated, twice-impeached president and some of his conservative allies maybe do something unconstitutional or illegal in trying to overturn the 2020 election by lying, scheming and attacking the Capitol? Or moving hundreds of top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago and then (unlike Biden) stonewalling for months to forestall handing them over? Maybe these things deserve federal attention. Right?
Jonathan Weiler/”Jonathan’s Quality Kvetching Newsletter” on Substack:
The preposterous premise of the Twitter Files
This shouldn't need explaining. But, here we are.
The Twitter Files narrative reinforces and amplifies rightwing grievances that, in recent years, have focused on the supposed liberal bias of Tech companies like Twitter and Facebook, leading to content moderation policies that crush free speech by unfairly restricting dissemination of conservative viewpoints. This itself is, of course, derivative of much longer standing conservative complaints about liberal media bias. This nonstop drone of complaint about the stifling of conservative voices has long served a clear purpose, which the Republican National Chairman, Rich Bond, spelled out plainly three decades ago: to “work the refs.” The refs are the media, specifically political journalists, and the goal, Bond explained is that "[t]here is some strategy to it [bashing the ‘liberal’ media]. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one."
Ben Smith/Semafor:
The Billionaire Era in News is Fizzling
“I’m guessing that it’s proven difficult for them all because it is the sort of business that needs and deserves full attention,” said Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, a tycoon who has given much of his wealth to journalistic causes, including nonprofit local news organizations and reporters’ security. Newmark said he had never seriously considered taking over a media company himself. “People in business who don’t know anything about media might perceive it as easy — in that case they just haven’t done their homework.”
The challenge is in part that during the period when the billionaires emerged as white knights, alternate models seemed hopeless, with print in ruins and the promise of social media collapsing. (I was the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News at the time, and we too dreamed of a billionaire savior.)
But since then, distinct models have emerged. Local nonprofits have begun to serve some of the functions of accountability and state government news from Sacramento to Mississippi, seeking billionaires’ — and the other 99.99%’s — money, but little else. The emergence of digital subscriptions gave organizations from the Times to tiny Substacks a stable source of revenue, provided they could connect intensely with an audience. Washington proved a fruitful starting point for a new generation of companies including Politico, Axios, and Punchbowl News. (Semafor is riding some of the same currents.)
Baratunde Thurston/Puck:
Harry & Meghan in History
Despite my best efforts to not care about the British royal family, I’ve found myself entranced by the Sussexes’ journey of racial awakening, moved by their historical traumas, and transformed by their exile.
Let me start at the beginning for me. In the late summer of 1997, I was in mourning, and I was in debt. I was heading into my junior year at Harvard. The mourning began earlier that summer when I learned that two of my classmates—young, brilliant Black men—were killed in the same car accident. The loss of any young life is a tragedy. The loss of these young lives was devastating for me, the class of 1999, and particularly our small Black community. The debt began two years earlier when my mother and I both took out loans to pay for this higher educational experience. (In truth, the debt began centuries earlier, with the theft of land and people that, down the line, required loans taken out by both parent and child to further that child’s education, but that’s an essay for another time).
Picture a young Baratunde—part nerd with his Palm Pilot, part cool kid with his cornrows, part janitor with his mop bucket (paying down that debt required many odd jobs including literally cleaning and prepping campus housing as part of the “Dorm Crew” work-study program). I’m walking through the courtyard of Mather House, a rare Brutalist dorm sitting along the Charles River amongst more traditional Gothic Revival architecture striving to stir some Oxbridge flavor. It was here that one of my closest friends, a Trinidadian woman, broke the news that Princess Diana had died.
Noam Cohen/The Atlantic:
The Culture Wars Look Different on Wikipedia
The site is tackling more controversial edits, the results of which can reverberate across the internet.
Wikipedia’s billions of facts, rendered as dry prose in millions of articles, help us understand the world. They are largely the brain behind Siri and Alexa. They have been integrated as official fact-checks on conspiracy-theory YouTube videos. They helped train ChatGPT. So, unsurprisingly, when you search Google for “Gregory Hemingway,” it follows Wikipedia’s lead: You are told about Gloria instead.
In Wikipedia’s early days, the question of what to call Gloria Hemingway would have been treated as a quick mission to locate a fact in established publications such as The New York Times. Joseph Reagle, a Wikipedia expert at Northeastern University, told me the site has an inherent “conservatism,” faithfully reporting whatever secondary sources say about a subject. And at the time of Hemingway’s death, in 2001, no major publication, including the Times, called her Gloria.
But in recent years, something has begun to change. Wikipedia’s editors are no longer simply citing dated sources; instead, they are hashing out how someone would want to be understood. But even though these deliberations touch on some of the most controversial issues around—and reach conclusions that reverberate far beyond Wikipedia’s pages—they are shockingly civil and thoughtful for the internet today.
Katie J.M. Baker/The New York Times:
When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don’t Know
Educators are facing wrenching new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students socially transition at school.
Jessica Bradshaw found out that her 15-year-old identified as transgender at school after she glimpsed a homework assignment with an unfamiliar name scrawled at the top.
When she asked about the name, the teenager acknowledged that, at his request, teachers and administrators at his high school in Southern California had for six months been letting him use the boy’s bathroom and calling him by male pronouns.
Mrs. Bradshaw was confused: Didn’t the school need her permission, or at least need to tell her?
It did not, a counselor later explained, because the student did not want his parents to know. District and state policies instructed the school to respect his wishes.
“There was never any word from anyone to let us know that on paper, and in the classroom, our daughter was our son,” Mrs. Bradshaw said.
Addison Del Mastro/The Bulwark:
What the Weird Clash Over Gas Stoves Tells Us About Conservatives and Risk
Culture wars, conspiracism, and consumer welfare.
All that said, it’s worth looking a little closer at the rhetoric of the reaction to the gas stove story, because of what it reveals about conservative controversialism today.
As a housing advocate, some of the rhetoric sounds familiar to me. There’s an inchoate but widely held view out there that all of this—electrifying appliances and cars, building transit and dense housing, reforming zoning, and so on—is part of a scheme to take away the things that make America great. It is not uncommon to be talking with a conservative about housing and have him suggest that I want to—or want him to—“live in a pod and eat bugs.”
Yes, it doesn’t help that California will ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035 (or maybe they won’t; it’s more than a decade away, and a lot can happen in a decade) and at least once urged residents not to charge their electric cars. It does sometimes seem that regulators and bureaucrats take actions to push conspiracy theorists’ buttons. Certainly, if you do happen to believe that the purpose of ending single-family zoning and banning gasoline cars is to restrict Americans’ independence and freedom of movement, then California’s approach feels like it confirms your suspicions.
But the merits of zoning reform, or the risks of gas cooking, are largely technical questions. Yes, they are also questions of values, but judgments about those values must be informed by actual facts.
The problem with the culture war dynamic isn’t that it separates people into pro and con camps; it’s that it snatches these issues out of the realm of debate and into a realm of feeling and partisan signaling.