I have nothing more to say.
Week 37, 2020
Zombie news
For nearly as long as there has been newspapers and magazines, there have been people who use publications to launder their own reputations or advance their own agendas. Press barons were a real thing before fake news, and media ownership is still a great way for the powerful to access even more power. PR folks, meanwhile, take great pains to try and place op-eds by, or positive stories about, their clients in the pages of prestigious and not-so-prestigious publications.
But the gutting of news media over the past 20 years, driven by a storm of competition, disintermediation and greed, has led to some slightly different beasts emerging from this hellscape.
One is the fake news outlet: something that looks and behaves like a genuine publication but is really just propaganda dressed in a costume of real publishing.
Now we have the “zombie magazine”—the formerly prestigious publication that uses the reputation it gained in the past to launder bad ideas. Prime candidate? Newsweek, which let its pages be used as the starting pistol for a racist conspiracy theory about Kamala Harris.
As Alex Shephard puts it in The New Republic:
Newsweek’s opinion section… has become a clearinghouse for right-wing nonsense. But it also points to a larger crisis in journalism itself: The rise of the zombie publication, whose former legitimacy is used to launder extreme and conspiratorial ideas.
Even by the volatile standards of journalism in the twenty-first century, Newsweek’s recent problems are extraordinary. There are the usual issues: a sharp decline in print subscribers, Google and Facebook, the difficulty of running a mass-market general interest news magazine in an age of hyperpartisanship. But Newsweek has also been raided by the Manhattan district attorney’s office (a former owner and chief executive pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges in February) and has been accused of deep ties to a shadowy Christian cult, amid many other scandals.
Zombie magazines are different from more traditional places that propagate conspiracies under the guise of legitimate news—say, the Wall Street Journal‘s often rabid op-ed pages or the New York Times‘ recent Tom Cotton debacle— because the value is in the gap between public perception and current reality (that is, the folks who buy into the Harris spew likely recognize Newsweek as a voice with a little bit of historical authority even if the publication is clearly a long, long way from what it once was.) It’s also different because everybody involved seems so totally fucking desperate.
The canonical story on this turmoil at Newsweek is probably Daniel Tovrov’s CJR story on “dropshipping journalism,” which is prominently credited in Shephard’s piece. But I thought it was interesting to see this piece appear in The New Republic, because for a while I was pretty sure that TNR was going to become exactly the same kind of zombie magazine itself.
And perhaps that’s the thing to recognize from this sad tale: we can all end up there if we aren’t careful.
Week 36, 2020
SIX MONTHS OF LOCKDOWN. We passed the milestone without even realizing, it just kind of came and went. (It was the same when we hit 100 days back in week 26.) Of course, “lockdown” is not exactly lockdown. Sometimes when the word crosses my lips, I feel like a character from this McSweeney’s jab: “Another dull quarantine weekend at home, Target, Chipotle, Home Depot, and our niece’s graduation party.” Your lockdown might not look the same as mine. We leave the house once or twice a day, go to the local shops or for a stroll. We get takeout food. Some weekends we have a socially-distanced drink with a couple of friends in our back garden, although I can’t think of the last time we visited other people. We haven’t done outside dining or drinking, which are now allowed in San Francisco, and the only shops I’ve been inside are supermarkets and pet stores. Our risk balance is being spent on childcare, basically: a covid-vetted summer camp here and there. School is back, but only virtually, for now—maybe October, they’re saying. The rest of the time we’re staying home. That’s now been fully half a year. And you only have so many days, right?
Books I read: Just one completed this week. Fever Dream by Samanth Schwelbin (translated from Spanish), which lived up to its name and had me in dread from the very beginning right through to the end.
Stories I worked on: Our magazine ridealong podcast Deep Tech looks at India’s history of using internet shutdown to stifle protest, with Sonia Faleiro. A study suggesting covid-19 tracing apps can have significant impact even if not everybody uses them; Joan Donovan walks through the emergence of right wing “riot porn” online; elsewhere what political databases know about you and, relatedly, what Facebook’s political ad ban gets wrong.
A prayer for life
According to a Tina Brown essay I read recently, Vanity Fair‘s breakthrough editorial moment came when she published Dominick Dunne’s 1984 heartbreaker about the murder of his daughter and the trial of her killer. Since Conde Nast relaunched the magazine in 1983, it had been destroyed in the market, hadn’t found its footing, and had been lined up to get shut down. When Brown took the job at the start of 1984 it was almost a goner.
But you take a great writer, telling a terrible, tragic and personal story that somehow touches everybody, and it can do strange things.
Brown says Dunne’s essay (“Justice”) was a turning point for the magazine in the 80s; the moment its voice began to click. (She also noted that newsworthy covers and glamour helped, too.)
That context brought a different layer to this terrific, desolate piece by Jesmyn Ward on the death of her husband at the beginning of a year of utter turmoil. It’s a dramatically different piece, but she weaves together the terrible, the tragic, the individual and the universal. Ward brings into a single place the very personal grief she endured, the widespread hurt caused by covid-19, and the collective grief that led to the latest eruptions of Black Lives Matter protests.
Two days after our family doctor visit, I walked into my son’s room where my Beloved lay, and he panted: Can’t. Breathe. I brought him to the emergency room, where after an hour in the waiting room, he was sedated and put on a ventilator. His organs failed: first his kidneys, then his liver. He had a massive infection in his lungs, developed sepsis, and in the end, his great strong heart could no longer support a body that had turned on him. He coded eight times. I witnessed the doctors perform CPR and bring him back four. Within 15 hours of walking into the emergency room of that hospital, he was dead. The official reason: acute respiratory distress syndrome. He was 33 years old.
The parallels between the stolen breaths of black murder victims—Eric Garner, George Floyd—and the virus taking away people’s breath have been noticed by other writers, but no one has done it this vividly or devastatingly.
ASAP
Been thinking a lot about the long view recently, both in work and in life. Everything’s awful and urgent and yet the past six months have felt so momentously slow that it’s creating a huge amount of internal dissonance: make-it-happen-now has to sleep in the same bed as when-this-is-all-over. And that’s presuming it will ever be over, of course.
I’m placing high value on every little moment that breaks out of the immediate, every long view and every. That’s not because it distracts me from the everyday sense of turmoil, but in fact because it puts the everyday into a new focus. The long haul is always there. Your task is to stay concentrated on each part of the pathway to get to wherever we’re going.
One of those moments came this week when I read about John Cage’s As Slow As Possible. It’s an organ composition he wrote in 1987, five years before he died. Performances typically last around an hour, but the play comes from extending the limit—hours or more. In fact, there is one particular ongoing performance that is slated to last 639 years and it changed chord this week for the first time since 2013.
The piece started playing on September 5, 2001. That was a week before the twin towers fell, a generation ago—a moment that has shaped life for many of us, one way or another, but is now a piece of history the same way as the Second World War was to my parents. When this particular performance of ASAP ends, it will be the year 2640.
The value of questions that are hard to answer
One of the problems that excites me most in journalism is what you do when you’re presented with a lack of information. It’s been the genesis of some of the most interesting projects I’ve worked on, including Ghost Boat (“how can you find people who disappeared?”) and the MITTR Covid Tracing Tracker (“who is doing what with digital contact tracing?”)
So I was really interested by this Buzzfeed investigation that effectively asked “Where are China’s internment camps?” and answered it with real sharpness, insight and cunning. (The answer, it turns out, is that they’re blanked out on Chinese maps, making them hard to confirm and describe.)
You don’t need to read very far to understand the impact here.
In the most extensive investigation of China’s internment camp system ever done using publicly available satellite images, coupled with dozens of interviews with former detainees, BuzzFeed News identified more than 260 structures built since 2017 and bearing the hallmarks of fortified detention compounds. There is at least one in nearly every county in the far-west region of Xinjiang. During that time, the investigation shows, China has established a sprawling system to detain and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities, in what is already the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.
As they say in the behind the scenes piece, the breakthrough came when they noticed the blank squares and strange behavior in Baidu maps. This wasn’t stone cold evidence of internment camps of course (it isn’t exactly unheard of for maps to obfuscate high security buildings, and China is very controlling of cartography: it’s actually illegal to make maps there without authorization.)
But still… trying to answer a seemingly impossible question brought them some surprising results.
Week 35, 2020
TOUGH WEEK. Almost six months into lockdown, the wildfires encircle San Francisco and fill the skies with smoke. Suddenly even the limited ways we are able to go out into the world have become a bad idea. Some days are better than others, but the mornings are nearly always the worst; the smell of smoke invades everything, a blanket of smog sits in the sky and my chest stretches to grasp at the air. Combine this with the first week back at virtual school for L—a new school, a new class, a new everything really—and there was barely a moment where normality felt possible.
With everything else going on, it’s hard to stay on course sometimes. Anger, hopelessness, anger again. But I’m lucky that the dark clouds of my mood pass quickly. Hopefully you can manage the same.
Books I read: After a bye week, I managed to get through a couple of novels and some essays. Making my way through Maigret continues, Georges Simenon proving an easy and speedy palate cleanser: this week it was The Late Monsieur Gallet (I’m meandering through in some kind of rough chronological order.) I also read The 392 by Ashley Hickson-Lovence, a fast and lively piece of work which I really wanted to like—it’s an ensemble piece about my version of London—but couldn’t. There was talent in there, but I ended up disappointed by the caricatures.
Wrapped up week 35 with a busman’s holiday The Art of Making Magazines, a compilation of talks given by various industry luminaries to students at Columbia. I found half of it inspiring or insightful—Tina Brown’s contribution was honest and clear, Peter Kaplan’s gossipy and energetic, Michael Kelly’s deliciously blunt—but the other half felt unnecessarily romantic or wrapped up in a self aggrandizing myth. It was funny because these pomposities were punctured by flashes of mundanity, that showed either how much the world has changed or how out of date the conveners of the J-school’s program were (one interview with Chris Dixon, the creative director of New York magazine, became almost a parody when the old school editor who was interviewing him started asking about tools in a way that felt remarkably like “Wow, so you use computers now?” “Yes, we use computers.”) Not highly recommended.
Stories I worked on: The dark fascination with QAnon and the people who are sucked into it continues, with Abby Ohlheiser’s look at how the conspiracy theory is targeting and recruiting evangelicals (there’s a direct line from the satanic panic to pizzagate to this current omniconspiracy.) Last week, Patrick Howell O’Neill produced this deep dive on the Israeli spyware giant NSO, which has suddenly started talking a lot about how it’s changing but without much to back it up, and a follow-up interview with the CEO. Also along the way: an attempt to block spyware sales to Hong Kong, and a contact tracing study.
The blindness of media
There are many pieces about the problems of journalism, and of journalists, and Sarah Ditum has certainly written one of them. I hesitated to post it because at some points it felt tritely rosy about life in the trenches of journalism before the internet, and at others it’s stuck in a stage of pseudo-self-awareness as an example of the very thing that it regrets. The seemingly mandatory piece of thinly-veiled commentary on outrage culture didn’t help either. (I looked it up and discovered that she is—perhaps unsurprisingly given what I see back in Britain—a writer with a documented history of unpleasant views on trans rights. Ugh.)
But at certain moments it resonated, probably because I’ve navigated the same period in history, saw the same characters in local newspapers, the same arc of damage swinging down on the national press.
The majority of people who now enter journalism will only have the latter experience [of professional vulnerability], and even if they wind up on staff, this will be what forms them. They are weak actors reliant on weak institutions. This weakness is what you have understand before you can make sense of the strange cowardice that afflicts the media.
I often wonder what I would do if I wasn’t a journalist. Back home the options were the toothbrush factory or the sausage factory. At college I mainly worked crunching data or doing research. My first job out of college was running numbers for a management consultancy. They’re all jobs, all alternative futures (or alternative histories now, I suppose.) Journalism felt like an escape, an opportunity to keep learning new things. Now I don’t know that I could be much else; at least, even in the times when I haven’t always been exactly a journalist I’ve still been relying on those skills and that editorial judgment.
But the solipsism of this story, ultimately, is that it sees journalism as anything other than a reflection of society. It’s not that the collapse of journalism has been a disaster for democracy, it’s that the collapse of everything has been a disaster for democracy.
In 2016, after Trump was elected, I wrote that American media was actually a better representation of the anxious white working class than the miners who got trotted out time and time again as political proxies. But journalists don’t see what they have in common with everybody else—the same fault lines, the same biases, the same endangered existence—they see how they are exceptional. Journalists are unloved and vulnerable? Tell that to somebody who’s worked their whole life on a string of zero hours contracts, paying off university debt, suffering the pangs of austerity or laid off three times before they’re 25.
Everyone lives in this teetering precariat now.
Never not fascinating
Week 33, 2020
Books I read: Unintentionally, both my reads this week were about the ways in which men dominate women, and the ways in which rules can be made to damage people. First up was The Handmaid’s Tale, and it’s probably 20 years since I read it—I was struck by how vibrant and clear it felt, and of course how much more possible everything seems now than when I read it in the glow of turn-of-the-century optimism. Next up was The Vegetarian by Han Kang, which was very different but equally mesmerising. Still processing that one.
Stories I worked on: A mixture of the short (oceans on Ceres! England’s second try at a contact tracing app!) the medium (contact tracing apps in Germany and Ireland) and the long (the lessons TikTok creators are learning! How psychiatry and big data can diagnose mental health based on the words you talk or type!)
Start here 