The Ledes

Monday, June 23, 2025

New York Times: “Frederick W. Smith, [the founder of FedEx,] who bet everything he had on a plan to revolutionize freight transport, courting disaster early on but ultimately winning vindication in the form of power in Washington, billions in personal wealth and changes in how people all over the world send and receive goods, died on Saturday. He was 80. FedEx was conceived in a paper that Mr. Smith wrote as a Yale University undergraduate in 1965. He argued that an increasingly automated economy would depend on fast and dependable door-to-door shipping of small packages containing computer parts. He got a C.” 

The Washington Post has posted U.S. maps to show when & where the heat and humidity will be the worst this week.

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To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

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Note for Readers. It is not possible for commenters to "throw" their highlighted links to another window. But you can do that yourself. Right-click on the link and a drop-down box will give you choices as to where you want to open the link: in a new tab, new window or new private window.

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.

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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Tuesday
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The Commentariat -- October 13

This Could Be Entertaining. Or Not. C-SPAN is carrying the debate between Delaware Senate candidates Chris Coons & Christine O'Donnell this evening. Update: and so they debated. New York Times story here. You can watch the debate here.

We probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. -- Barack Obama

Peter Baker interviews President Obama & his aides for the upcoming Sunday New York Times Magazine. Here's an edited transcript of Baker's interview of the President. Here's a slideshow of A Day in the Life.

And now for a few words from Meg Whitman's hometown newspaper:

Michael Leahy & Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post on how the Obama Administration fucked up off-shore drilling policy: "This article, based on dozens of interviews with people directly involved, reveals that fundamental questions weren't pursued because top administration officials generally accepted the conventional view of the industry's safety record. They were focused on the environmental issues - how drilling and a possible spill would affect sensitive habitats - and not on the engineering risks of exploration." This is a fascinating read which opens a window on the delusional hubris of the ruling class, a story made even more relevant by yesterday's news that the Administration has lifted its moratorium on deepwater drilling.

Michael Powell & Motoko Rich of the New York Times: "This is not what recovery is supposed to look like.... Call it recession or recovery, for tens of millions of Americans, there’s little difference."

Showing Banksters the Love -- Again. Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times: "The swelling outcry over fast-and-loose foreclosures has thrust the Obama administration back into the uncomfortable position of sheltering the banking industry from the demands of an angry public." ...

... Andrew Leonard of Salon: "White House advisor David Axelrod's attempt over the weekend to minimize the foreclosure mess as mere paperwork 'mistakes' was a massive misrepresentation of what's really going on. With Democratic politicians across the country calling for a nationwide foreclosure moratorium, Obama's reluctance to get out in front of the issue, so far, is yet another public relations disaster." ...

... Coming to a Neighborhood Near You. Robert Lewis in the Sacramento Bee: "The same industry whose lax lending standards led to the economic downturn is now being blamed by local officials for letting neighborhoods rot.... Many banks and other lenders are either unable or unwilling to handle the mass of houses left vacant by the foreclosure crisis. Many derelict houses are owned by lenders. Others are sitting in limbo."

The New York Times Editorial Board uses the Wisconsin senatorial race as Exhibit A to make the case that the American electorate has gone stupid. Wisconsin voters are about to reject the principled, independent-minded Russ Feingold for a know-nothing plastics manufacturer spewing "misinformation and simplistic solutions."

Boston Globe Editorial Board: "If there were a Nobel prize for governmental dysfunction, US Senator Richard Shelby would be in contention — but then so would the US Senate as a whole." BTW, Shelby claims he is not the senator who put a hold on a vote to confirm Peter Diamond's nomination to the Fed.

"Law and Order: SCOTUS Unit." Dana Milbank: the Supreme hear a habeas corpus case in which they show a remarkable fascination with CSI-style forensic evidence -- "the word 'blood' was uttered 60 times in the hour." CW: I thought questions like Scalia's, "Why wouldn't he wipe up the blood?" were more of the Agatha Christie genre.

Weird Story of the Day. Ray Rivera of the New York Times: "The mysterious military-grade explosives that were found in an East Village cemetery over the weekend are more than a dozen years old and were most likely stolen from a military base, the police said Tuesday." The cemetery, BTW, is located on East 2nd Street between First & Second Avenues.

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