Hello, and happy Friday.
It’s been a pretty bleak couple of weeks for American journalism. Since our last correspondence, hundreds of journalists have been made redundant in a series of seemingly back-to-back layoffs. It started last Tuesday when the Los Angeles Times cut 115 people, or roughly 20 percent of its staff, from its newsroom. Other outlets, which sadly included TIME, announced layoffs shortly thereafter.
Then this week, the digital news startup The Messenger announced that it was closing down, taking more than 300 jobs and any modicum of decency with it. Even as I write this, more layoffs are occurring.
While mass media redundancies are unfortunately nothing new, that doesn’t make hearing about them—or, worse yet, having yourself or your colleagues be affected by them—any easier. That these cuts are coming at the start of an unprecedented election year, in which there will be added pressure on news outlets to cover key contests amid rising concerns of AI-powered disinformation and misinformation, is especially concerning.
While I don’t claim to be an expert on exactly why these layoffs are happening now (market forces?? epic mismanagement???), what I do know is that journalism is a vital good—one that, if not properly invested in, cannot be maintained at the standard readers expect or deserve. All of which is to say: if you value it, please consider paying for it!
What I’ve written
On Thursday, the Biden administration unveiled a new executive order targeting rising Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. I wrote about what to make of it:
How the Biden administration chooses to use this new foreign-policy stick, and on whom, will ultimately determine the impact that it has. “These individuals are going to have U.S.-based assets frozen, their financial transactions will not be able to go through U.S. financing institutions. and people will not be able to support them financially either—that’s a big deal,” says Yousef Munayyer, a nonresident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C. and an expert on Israeli and Palestinian affairs. “The extent to which that actually becomes enforceable really depends on how many people you put on this list and who those individuals are.” Keep reading here
Last month, Israeli lawmaker Ofer Cassif caused a political firestorm when he expressed his support for South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of “genocidal acts” against Gaza’s Palestinians. Now, he faces the prospect of being removed from office altogether.
I wrote about the ongoing effort to impeach Cassif and the stifling of anti-war voices in Israel:
While Cassif’s expulsion is far from certain (if the Knesset votes to affirm the decision, as is expected, he will still have the opportunity to appeal the decision to the country’s Supreme Court), his colleagues say that the prospect of his removal marks a dangerous precedent—one in which political dissent, particularly against the ongoing war in Gaza, is no longer tolerated. Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This harrowing Q&A with a pediatrician who spent two weeks inside a Gaza hospital (The New Yorker)
In the first few hours of my work, I treated an approximately one-year-old boy. His right arm and right leg had been blown off by a bomb, and flesh was still hanging off the foot. He had a bloodstained diaper, which remained, but there was no leg below. I treated the baby while he lay on the ground. There were no stretchers available because all the beds had already been taken, considering that many people were also trying to use the hospital as a shelter or safe space for their families. Next to him there was a man who was on his last breaths. He had been actively dying for the last twenty-four hours, and flies were already on him. All the while, a woman was brought in and was declared dead on arrival. This one-year-old had blood pouring into his chest cavity. He needed a chest tube so he wouldn’t asphyxiate on his own blood. But there were neither chest tubes nor blood-pressure cuffs that were available in pediatric sizes. No morphine had been given in the chaos, and it wasn’t even available. This patient in America would’ve immediately gone to the O.R., but instead the orthopedic surgeon bandaged the stumps up and said he couldn’t take him to the operating theatre right now because there were more pressing emergencies. And I tried to imagine what was more pressing than a one-year-old with no hand and no legs who was choking on his own blood. So that, to me, was symbolic of the impossible choices inflicted on the doctors of Gaza, and how truly cataclysmic that situation is.
This long read on the despots of Silicon Valley (The Atlantic)
The new technocrats are ostentatious in their use of language that appeals to Enlightenment values—reason, progress, freedom—but in fact they are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement. Many of them profess unconditional support for free speech, but are vindictive toward those who say things that do not flatter them. They tend to hold eccentric beliefs: that technological progress of any kind is unreservedly and inherently good; that you should always build it, simply because you can; that frictionless information flow is the highest value regardless of the information’s quality; that privacy is an archaic concept; that we should welcome the day when machine intelligence surpasses our own. And above all, that their power should be unconstrained. The systems they’ve built or are building—to rewire communications, remake human social networks, insinuate artificial intelligence into daily life, and more—impose these beliefs on the population, which is neither consulted nor, usually, meaningfully informed. All this, and they still attempt to perpetuate the absurd myth that they are the swashbuckling underdogs.
This piece on the implosion of The Messenger (Slate)
The failure was one of vision, not execution by a talented team of roughly 300 writers and editors. The Messenger’s founders built a website for a world that no longer exists. They played stupid games and won stupid prizes. The site’s biggest achievement in its nascency was being the first to report that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were “quietly hanging out” last fall. That story, like all the Messenger’s other stories, is now impossible to access unless you saved a copy somewhere.
What I’m thinking about
How Brits really think so little of Americans’ tea-making abilities (though I suppose we haven’t really helped ourselves there).
Until next time,
Yasmeen