Why do Americans believe in the idea of Trump as the World’s Greatest Businessman, the playboy with the Midas touch? Because that’s the story that a New York-based media — not talk radio but Time and Vanity Fair, not alt-right bloggers but prime-time TV — spent years and decades selling them.
.. Writing for The Intercept earlier this year, Jim Lewis pointed out that “… it wasn’t some Klan newsletter that first brought Trump to our attention: It was Time and Esquire and Spy. The Westboro Baptist Church didn’t give him his own TV show: NBC did. And his boasts and lies weren’t posted on Breitbart, they were published by Random House. He was created by people who learned from Andy Warhol, not Jerry Falwell, who knew him from galas at the Met, not fund-raisers at Karl Rove’s house, and his original audience was presented to him by Condé Nast, not Guns & Ammo.”
.. But Trump was a pal, a get, and ratings gold. Trump was just playing a part. Trump was part of their scene.
.. So he kept getting (and still gets) the celebrity treatment — friendly interviews with favorable ground rules and softball questions — rather than the mix of ostracism and horror that a cultural outsider would have reaped.
.. They all have a style that reflects New York’s distinctive culture (worldly, striving, ever-so-slightly-impolite), and its distinctive right-of-center constituencies (Manhattan hedge funders, Staten Island cops). Which means that their conservatism differs, in large ways and small, from the conservatism of Utah or Texas or Wisconsin.
.. If Michele Bachmann were running on Trump’s exact platform, Hannity wouldn’t be running nightly infomercials for her candidacy. If Rick Santorum were promising to make America great again, The Post and The New York Observer wouldn’t be endorsing him. If Mike Huckabee were leading in the delegate count, The Journal’s editorial writers would have long ago gotten over their doubts about Ted Cruz.
But for Trump, these gatekeepers are willing to overlook, to forgive, or at least to tolerate. Because he’s a New Yorker, just like them.
.. I’ve written before that the Trump campaign is a kind of comic-opera version of a demagogue’s rise, a first-as-farce warning about how our political system could succumb to authoritarianism.
How E-Mail Killer Slack Will Change the Future of Work
At the New York Times, engineers have built a bot that predicts for its editors what stories will perform best with readers on social media.
Why Do Taxonomists Write the Meanest Obituaries?
The open nature of the science of classification virtually guarantees fights.
Ever since Darwin gave us a framework for understanding common descent, the search has been on for a natural classification, an arrangement of nested groups, or taxa, that accurately reflects evolutionary relationships. In this scheme, a classification functions as an explicit evolutionary hypothesis—to say that five species form a genus is also to say that those five species share a unique common ancestor. Ditto for families and orders, right up through classes and kingdoms.
.. splitters, who advocate for more and smaller groups, and lumpers, who like their groups big and inclusive.
.. Keeping track of all these names and their shifting histories requires specialists to maintain a near-encyclopedic familiarity with the literature of their group.
.. the Codes generally remain silent on the question of quality: Any taxonomic proposal, no matter how outlandish, ill-informed, or incompetent, counts so long as it was published according to the barest of requirements set out in the Codes themselves.
.. if you can print it and you can distribute it, then you can describe pretty much whatever you want.
.. it also creates a massive loophole for unscrupulous, incompetent, or fringe characters to wreak havoc. That’s because the Principle of Priority binds all taxonomists into a complicated network of interdependence; just because a species description is wrong, poorly conceived, or otherwise inadequate, doesn’t mean that it isn’t a recognized part of taxonomic history. Whereas in physics, say, “unified theories” scrawled on napkins and mailed in unmarked envelopes end up in trashcans, biologists, regardless of their own opinions, are bound to reckon with the legacy of anyone publishing a new name. Taxonomists are more than welcome to deal with (or “revise”) these incorrect names in print, but they can’t really ignore them.
.. As E.D. Merrill, the Harvard botanist who set out to index and correct much of this work in the 1930s and ’40s, put it, “we would have been infinitely better off today had Rafinesque never written or published anything appertaining to the subject.”
.. Makhan’s descriptions are notoriously short on detail. In place of clear scientific diagrams, he illustrates much of his work with blurry, out-of-focus photographs. Most frustrating to fellow entomologists, many of Makhan’s “new” species are instantly recognizable, at least to them, as already described insects. Despite numerous articles and blog posts on the so-called “Makhan problem,” new publications continue to appear, most in a small Australian journal without a traditional peer-review process. (As recently as last year, Makhan described a new species of waterbeetle, Desmopachria barackobamai—named, of course, for the 44th president of the United States.)
.. That’s because the growth of so-called “vanity journals”—publications that look to all appearances like mainstream scientific outlets, but lack rigorous peer-review—has produced new avenues for what some have taken to calling “taxonomic vandalism.” As traditional boundaries between experts and amateurs dissolve in the face of digital publishing, more opportunities than ever exist for novel voices in science, journalism, and politics. Unfortunately, these opportunities come at a cost, as a growing tide of information challenges the discriminatory abilities of scientists and lay readers alike.
.. While discussions underway now could revise the Codes to include stricter controls on which publications count for classificatory changes, many taxonomists are wary of doing anything that might deter amateur contributions. With so many species left to discover, and with existential threats to biodiversity looming, they realize the field needs as much help as it can get.
What Should We Do About Big Data Leaks?
What is transparency in the age of massive database drops? The data is available, but locked in MP3s and PDFs and other documents; it’s not searchable in the way a web page is searchable, not easy to comment on or share.
.. This, said the consortia of journalists that notably did not include The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc., is the big one.
.. Organs of journalism are among the only remaining cultural institutions that can fund investigations of this size and tease the data apart, identifying linkages and thus constructing informational webs that can, with great effort, be turned into narratives, yielding something like what we call “a story” or “the truth.”
.. If this is the age of the citizen journalist, or at least the citizen opinion columnist, it’s also the age of the data journalist, with the news media acting as product managers of data leaks, making the information usable, browsable, attractive.
.. There’s a glut of data, but most of it comes to us in ugly formats. What would happen if the things released in the interest of transparency were released in actual transparent formats? By which I mean, not as a pile of unstructured documents, not even as pure data, but, well, as software? Put cost aside and imagine for a minute that the FCIC report was not delivered as web pages, PDFs, finding aids, and the like, but as a database filled with searchable, formatted text, including documents attributed to the individuals within, audio files transcribed, and so forth.
.. I look at that FCIC data and see at least 300 hours of audio. That’s $18,000 worth of transcription. Those documents could be similarly turned into searchable text, as could any of the PDFs. We can do the same for emails. These tools exist and are open. If there are any faxes they can be OCRed.