#the New York times

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Allison Fisher at MMFA:

During The New York Times’ “Climate Week NYC” discussion with Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts, reporter David Gelles outlined the right-wing initiative’s regressive approach to climate change and the environment. Gelles also noted that Project 2025's call to dismantle climate action comes as the world is already experiencing the consequences of a warming climate, pointing out that a record number of people in the Phoenix, Arizona, area were killed by extreme heat this year alone. Roberts responded by pointing to Heritage Foundation research claiming that there has been a “reduction in climate deaths — climate-related deaths — over the last century by 98%.” Not only is this a red herring argument used by climate deniers to downplay the climate crisis, but that reduction is reportedly due in part to improved forecasting, which is done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency Project 2025 has called to dismantling.

As Reuters has reported, the decrease in deaths since 1920 is largely due to “better forecasting and preparedness,” even while “the number, intensity, and cost of climatic and meteorological hazards have all increased over the last hundred years.”

Notably, Project 2025 calls for dismantling NOAA, which houses the National Hurricane Center, the very agency that has improved the forecasting of deadly weather events and is critical to providing life-saving information. 

With Hurricane Helene in the process of making landfall, Project 2025 architect and Heritage head honcho Kevin Roberts told the Climate Week NYC hosted by The New York Times vomited out climate denialist talking points. Project 2025 has called for the dismantling of NOAA and National Hurricane Center (NHC) and the privatization of the NWS.

[phoenixyfriend]

Also did you know that the reason NYT can sue openAI with the expectation of success is that the AI cites its sources about as well as James Somerton.

It regurgitates long sections of paywalled NYT articles verbatim, and then cites it wrong, if at all. It's not just a matter of stealing traffic and clicks etc, but also illegal redistribution and damaging the NYT's brand regarding journalistic integrity by misquoting or citing incorrectly.

OpenAI cannot claim fair use under these circumstances lmao.

[zegalba]

[cynicalclassicist]

Pretty much. The New York Times is leaning again into that pseudo-intellectual stuff. And the reason a lot of younger people aren't having children is down to money. While you get people like Musk and so on saying how important it is to have more children... well, it's easy for billionaires to say that, even while they make our lives harder. And then they'll come out with their white replacement eugenics bs.

[contemplatingoutlander]

"Here's what a functional democracy does after its president abuses his power and declares martial law: remove him from office."

--Steven Beschloss

"Protesters reacting as the vote to impeach the president was announced on Saturday."

Opposition lawmakers needed eight supporting votes from Mr. Yoon’s party to impeach him. When they called an impeachment vote last weekend, Mr. Yoon’s People Power Party boycotted it, saying that he should be given a chance to resign rather than be impeached. Only three of its 108 lawmakers participated. On Saturday, the party said that it officially opposed impeachment, but its lawmakers were allowed to cast their secret ballots. The result indicated that 12 lawmakers from Mr. Yoon’s party had joined the opposition to impeach him and another 11 abstained or cast invalid votes, sealing his fate. [emphasis added]

Why couldn't the Republicans in the U.S. Senate have voted to convict Trump in 2021 after he incited an insurrection and attempted to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power?

Once again, Republicans make America look bad in the eyes of the world.

_______________ Note. The video caption was added to the video to mimic the video on the front page of the digital New York Times on 12.14.24. The video was originally from Reuters.

[drchucktingle]

yes its true buckaroos BURY YOUR GAYS is featured in NEW YORK TIMES book review sunday print edition today. THIS PROVES LOVE

[i-am-aprl]

[magsinhiding]

This article is wild (gift link). I truly cannot understand charging for a wedding. You’re already expected to give a gift!

[tayswiftdotcom]

Taylor Swift is on the cover of The New York Times Magazine!

[zendeyas]

Zendaya – The New York Times

[mysharona1987]

[baby-girl-aaron-dessner]

[hotdaemondtargaryen]

EWAN MITCHELL PHOTOGRAPHED AND INTERVIEWED FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE.

ABOUT BEING RECOGNIZED

Like most people, Ewan Mitchell is accustomed to anonymity.

So during a recent trip to Manhattan, he was surprised by what a hotel doorman asked when he arrived: “You haven’t packed your eye patch?”

The actor is still getting used to strangers making the connection in public.

“I wouldn’t think people would recognize me, but they do.”

“I think it’s because of my strong chin.”

“When I’m dressed up as Aemond and catch myself in the mirror, he scares even me a little bit.”

When he’s not in character, Mitchell is soft-spoken and occasionally flashes a boyish grin, though he retains much of Aemond’s seriousness and quiet intensity.

He is also very private: He stays off social media and in the past has shied away from sharing much with the public.

“Once you lose the mystery, you can’t really get it back.”

HE KNOWS THAT AEMOND'S KEY ROLE IN S2 MEANS HE MUST ALSO EMBRACE THE SPOTLIGHT

“There is a point where you have to go, now’s the time to pull back the curtain.”

Like Aemond, Mitchell is a second son.

He grew up in Derby, an industrial town in the middle of England, and his parents expected him to follow his older brother’s footsteps and work at Rolls-Royce (the aerospace and industrial technology company, not the carmaker).

HIS INSPIRATIONS AND BECOME AN ACTOR

Inspired by films like “Citizen Kane” and “Taxi Driver,” Mitchell knew early on he wanted to become an actor.

When he was 13, his teacher asked each student in his class what they wanted to do when they grew up.

“Then it came to me, and I said, ‘I’m going to be an actor,’ and everyone laughed at me.”

His family could not afford tuition for drama school, so Mitchell attended a two-year vocational school, where he studied design and technology while working part-time at a restaurant and in customer service at a local soccer club.

Midway through the program, at 17, he was accepted into the Nottingham Television Workshop, a drama group that trains young people in acting.

Through the Workshop, Mitchell landed a leading role in a 2015 short film called “Fire,” about a young man who leaks fire from his hands.

Once the short was released, Mitchell downloaded it onto a dozen CDs, took the train to London and stopped by the offices of every agent he could find, handing them each a copy.

The one person who called back continues to represent Mitchell.

“By hook or by crook, I wanted to make sure that I was going to be in this business.”

ABOUT BEING CASTED AS AEMOND TARGARYEN

Aemond’s growing prominence in the show requires Mitchell to embrace the spotlight as well.

“There is a point where you have to go, now’s the time to pull back the curtain.”

But being cast as Aemond in “House of the Dragon” has been his biggest professional turning point by far.

“Since landing him, I feel like I’m able to now steer the course of my career.”

Mitchell had been rewatching the classic Hollywood adventure film “The Vikings” (1958) and musing about how he wanted to play a morally dark character similar to the one played by Kirk Douglas when he received an email inviting him to submit a taped audition for Aemond.

When he eventually auditioned in person, he left a lasting impression on Ryan Condal, the showrunner for “House of the Dragon.”

“When Ewan came into the room, he just had this presence to him that I can best describe as unsettling,” Condal said.

“It was kind of quietly terrifying the way he performed it, and it was totally different than everybody else. And then he thanked us very politely and left the room.”

Condal recalls asking Kate Rhodes James, the casting director, “Is he always like that?”

She replied, “Oh no, he’s just a very intense northern boy.”

To prepare for his role, Mitchell did not watch “Game of Thrones.” Instead, he read portions of “Fire & Blood,” the book by George R.R.

Martin that inspired the show, and studied the performances of Michael Fassbender in “Prometheus” and Peter O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia,” each playing a figure who wields power for his own ends.

ABOUT MATT SMITH AND DAEMON TARGARYEN

On his first day on set, Mitchell consulted with Condal and decided that he would avoid interacting with Matt Smith, who plays Aemond’s similarly menacing uncle and rival, Daemon, in order to heighten the tension between the two characters.

Mitchell had grown up admiring Smith’s performance in “Doctor Who.”

But on set Mitchell avoided any eye contact with him, keeping his distance until the climactic scene near the end of the first season when Aemond and Daemon finally face off.

“There’s this addictive kind of quality when you’re in the shoes of a character.”

“When you lose yourself for a moment, it’s almost like a dream.”

ABOUT HIS HOME AND HIS DOGS

When he isn’t acting, Mitchell still lives at his family home in Derby and spends time with his dogs, three whippets named Eva, Bella and Bonnie.

“Now that I’m on it.”

“I’ve just got to stay on the dragon.”

[main-character-magazine]

Austin Butler | The New York Times (2022)

[contemplatingoutlander]

The Rage and Glee That Followed a C.E.O.’s Killing Should Ring All Alarms

"The concentration of extreme wealth in the United States has recently surpassed that of the Gilded Age. And the will among politicians to push for broad public solutions appears to have all but vanished. I fear that instead of an era of reform, the response to this act of violence and to the widespread rage it has ushered into view will be limited to another round of retreat by the wealthiest. Corporate executives are already reportedly beefing up their security. I expect more of them to move to gated communities.... Almost certainly, armed security entourages and private jets will become an even more common element of executive compensation packages, further removing routine contact between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us, except when employed to serve them."

--Zeynep, Tufekci, professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University

This is a gift 🎁 link, so you can read the whole insightful article by Zynep Tufekci, a Princeton sociologist. She discusses the "avalanche" of rage against the insurance industry that this shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson evoked on social media:

I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated. The conditions that gave rise to this outpouring of anger are in some ways specific to this moment. Today’s business culture enshrines the maximization of executive wealth and shareholder fortunes, and has succeeded in leveraging personal riches into untold political influence. New communication platforms allow millions of strangers around the world to converse in real time. [emphasis added]

[See more under the cut.]

Tufekci describes how income inequality today has exceeded that of the Gilded Age, during which the wealth of the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, etc. (i.e., the "Robber Barons") was amassed. Referring to the Gilded Age, Tufekci commented:

Less well remembered is the brutality that underlay that wealth — the tens of thousands of workers, by some calculations, who lost their lives to industrial accidents, or the bloody repercussions they met when they tried to organize for better working conditions. Also less well remembered is the intensity of political violence that erupted. The vast inequities of the era fueled political movements that targeted corporate titans, politicians, judges and others for violence. [emphasis added]

Slowly but surely, over time, reform occurred. Tufekci says:

The turbulence and violence of the Gilded Age eventually gave way to comprehensive social reform. The nation built a social safety net, expanded public education and erected regulations and infrastructure that greatly improved the health and well-being of all Americans. [emphasis added]

Tufekci is worried that the U.S., a nation that is "awash in powerful guns," may be entering a new violent era. She fears that the national response to today's income inequality and corporate exploitation will unfortunately not be the kinds of reforms that happened previously--reforms that limited how much corporations (and their wealthy owners/ CEOs) could exploit labor, consumers & the environment.

What Tufekci implies, but doesn't state, is the reason those kinds of reforms won't happen is because nearly half of the country, riled up by right-wing media, elected Trump--a greedy corporate billionaire--to take away their economic pain.

So of course Trump has enlisted two other billionaires, Musk and Ramaswamy to demolish labor protections, business regulations and the social safety net--the very reforms that helped average citizens avoid the worst labor exploitation and economic problems of the Gilded Age.

In doing so, Trump and the billionaire oligarchs working with him are setting the nation up for disaster.

These billionaires who believe that anything that helps corporations (and the wealthy who own or run them) flourish, seem to have completely forgotten that AI is now finally taking off. and in its wake many people (including those in technical fields and management) will be laid off.

But by that time, there will be little or no social safety net for them to fall back on.

Unfortunately, there will be lots of AR-15s laying around.

Wait until the working and middle classes FINALLY realize they've been had by Trump and the billionaire oligarchs.

The violence of the Gilded Age will be nothing in comparison.

[martanis]

MORFYDD CLARK and CHARLIE VICKERS photographed for 📰 The New York Times