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One of the things that’s misunderstood about independence is that it doesn’t require you not to have a theory of the case, right? My great-grandfather had a line that he often quoted: “I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”

it? If you are a Democrat and you believe that Donald Trump represents a threat to democracy, is it then anti-democracy for an organization like yours, David, to produce reporting that raises questions about the actions, conduct, or fitness of President Biden?

Members of the Hasidic community criticized our reporting, and very loudly. They sent a letter to the Pulitzer committee raising all sorts of concerns. But it is also true that we heard from countless members of the community saying, “We needed this.” The implicit request of the critics is to suppress such reporting: “It may be true, but, because it can be misused, we don’t want it out there.” But, if we had suppressed the reporting, more kids would be deprived of education. That is the posture of independence.

The posture of independence is not about being a blank slate. It’s not about having no life experience, no personal perspectives. That is an impossible ask. That’s a parody of the long debate over objectivity. The idea of objectivity, as it was originally formulated, wasn’t about the person’s innate characteristics. It was about the process that helped address the inherent biases that all of us carry in our lives. So the question isn’t “Do you have any view?” The question is “Are you animated by an open mind, a skeptical mind, and a commitment to following the facts wherever they lead?”

The key isn’t being a blank slate. It’s not that you don’t have a theory going into any story. It’s a willingness to put the facts above any individual agenda. Think about this moment and how polarized this country is. How many institutions in American life do you believe are truly putting the facts above any agenda?

Let’s be absolutely clear: the former President of the United States, the current leader of one of America’s two political parties, has now spent the better part of seven years telling the public not just to distrust us but that we are the enemies of the American people, that our work is fake, manufactured. The term “enemies of the people” has roots in Stalin’s Soviet Union and in Hitler’s Germany.

Another dynamic inside our industry is that journalism, to some extent, has become an echo chamber. What do I mean by that? It’s been a while since I looked at your bio, but, if you are like many journalists of your generation and in my generation, you probably started at a local paper. That was the traditional path. And what was the day like for a journalist at that point? If you were a cub reporter, you were probably writing—As you were at the Providence Journal.You were probably writing one story a day to three stories a week somewhere. What were your days like? Every day, you were out in the communities you were covering. You were being confronted with the full diversity of this country and of the human experience. On the same day, you would talk to rich and poor, you’d talk to a mother who just had lost a son to murder, and a mother whose son was just arrested for murder, right?

Are you saying that’s changed? That reporters are just sitting in rooms in front of a screen? I don’t think that’s the case.Of course it’s the case! It’s the least talked-about and most insidious result of the collapse of the business model that historically supported quality journalism. The work of reporting is expensive. As traditional media faded, and particularly local media faded, and as digital media filled that vacuum, we saw a full inversion of how reporters’ days were spent. The new model is you have to write three to five stories a day. And, if you have to write three to five stories a day, there is no time to get out into the world. You’re spending your time writing, you’re typing, typing, which means that you are drawing on your own experience and the experience of the people immediately around you. So, literally, many journalists in this country have gone from spending their days out in the field, surrounded by life, to spending their days in an office with people who are in the same profession, working for the same institution, living in the same city, graduating from the same type of university.

The concern is that there’s also a widening gulf in the realm of information. Just as there’s an income-inequality problem in this country that gets worse and worse, there’s an informational divide. I’m not saying that A. G. Sulzberger can be responsible for it and make it all better with a stroke, but there is that problem.I disagree with the hypothesis. I think there is an information problem, but I think it’s about the collapse of local news. I think that that is an American tragedy, a dangerous and insidious force in American life.

broader thought about Opinion: I would just say, look, three years after that episode, do you feel that, on the Times Opinion pages, are you regularly seeing pieces from every side of the political spectrum on the abortion debate? On business and economic questions? Social and political questions? I think you do. I’d argue that, under Katie [Kingsbury, who replaced Bennet], you’re seeing more of them than ever. I think you see that she’s just hired another conservative columnist, our first evangelical columnist, also a military veteran.

Would you hire a Trumpist on the Op-Ed page?This is a question I’ve been getting now for six years, and it’s a really tricky one. It’s trickier than it sounds, and I bet you have a suspicion on why. It is harder than you’d think to find the Trumpist who hasn’t, at some point, said, “The 2020 election was rigged, and Donald Trump won the election.”I get it. But a huge number, tens of millions of people, either tolerate that point of view or believe it.Yeah. But independence is not about “both sides.”So you would not have a Trumpist who said that at some point writing on your Op-Ed page?We would not have anyone who—But you’d have guest columnists like Tom Cotton—We certainly would not have a columnist who has a track record of saying things that are demonstrably untrue.

In this hyper-politicized, hyper-polarized moment, is society benefitting from every single player getting louder and louder about declaring their personal allegiances and loyalties and preferences? Or do you think there’s space for some actors who are really committed just to serving the public with the full story, let the facts fall where they may?

The priority, though, as you will have assumed, is not the movie’s people but its stunning formal ravishment, filled with gleaming ’50s modernisms set against luridly painted desert mesas and blazing teal skies, every shot an irradiated postcard from a sun-scorched pastel past, or an imaginary travel ad painted by the late Bruce McCall. Anderson structures his action around this design, horizontally, with whole scenes, and much of the comedy, captured in wide-screen swivels and stretch pans that often loop a complete 360 degrees. Some shots suggest a Lego formality, others recall late ’60s Godard. As an eye assault, it’s a thing of wonder.

I once had a student who, being on the autism spectrum, opined that Anderson’s films, with their regularized lack of modulation and love of symmetry and distance, and studied emotional coolness, are at least works that reflect the spectrum’s worldview.

There are plenty of engineers who worked hard and deserve credit, but there are also thousands of people labelling elbows in photos and judging the emotion of internet comments.

So how "expressive" is her wedding website company? How custom are her services? What would a couple ask her to produce or put on their website? What variety of services would Smith be offering? What other website designers could couples use? We don't have any answers to those questions, except the ones Smith and her lawyers invented to make their case as strong as possible.

Luke Wroblewski posted an interesting side-by-side comparison of the Today view, Control Center, and standard sharing sheets in iOS 7 and the iOS 10 public beta. Much less transparency, more solid shapes in place of outlines, and more use of color.

Inside an online platform everything, even reality, is just content and content just begets more content. And in a world run by big platforms, a person’s post becomes discourse, discourse creates memes, memes inspire a fandom, and fandoms become social movements. And over the last decade, as platforms flattened everything into content, most news publishers, hiding behind antiquated ideas about objectivity and made desperate from vanishing ad revenue, allowed themselves to be flattened, as well. And now, even though they don’t think of themselves as a competing news fandoms, they absolutely are.

I don’t think the way people react to news stories in 2023 is all that different from how it’s ever been. Here are two great threads comparing funny mean-spirited reactions to the Titanic sinking to the similar memes everyone made this month about the imploded submarine billionaires. But now, if you don’t like what’s in the newspaper you can just write your own thing and get more readers than it did.

Can’t possibly comprehend that extreme levels of wealth created an environment of arrogance that led to a submarine vaporizing a bunch of guys in the middle of the ocean? Just tweet that that’s not actually what happened. The fact the Russian coup didn’t even last a full day and no one got arrested sounds suspicious to you? Easy. Just make up something else.

Eventually every platform wanted the same kind of content, but to fit specific algorithms and specific demographics, which no one would bother to do, so the same videos just got posted everywhere until none of the networks felt distinct from each other and every site just pivoted away from the whole idea.

While the companies are each in wildly different spaces, throughout the interviews there was a clear common thread across the three: they each went after problems their co-founders saw first hand. They made something that people want. Something that they themselves wanted, or that the people immediately around them wanted.

In energy transmission, for instance, superconductors could revolutionize power grids by allowing for lossless transmission of electricity, potentially reducing energy waste and lowering costs. In healthcare, devices such as MRI scanners could become more compact and efficient, potentially reducing costs and making these devices more accessible worldwide.

The discovery of a room-temperature superconductor does not immediately guarantee its applicability. Other factors, such as the material's ability to carry high current, its mechanical strength, stability in the presence of strong magnetic fields, and cost-effectiveness in large-scale production, would all be critical determinants of its practical uses.

Trump is probably allowed to tell his followers he believes the election was stolen. But that wouldn’t excuse using his speech to instruct election officials to find a way to get the outcome he wants — one that is different from the certified outcome reached by counting the actual ballots cast. At that point, his speech veers into criminality. This is true in the same way you can probably confide with a friend that you are hoping a personal enemy of yours will disappear, but you veer into criminality when you call a hitman and vaguely imply that you wish that person would disappear. Speech can be criminal.

“Wednesday night, we witnessed over two hours of fear-mongering and gaslighting, of cynicism and whataboutism, of canned talking points and memorized one-liners,” Hasan said. Despite the “pious-sounding, high-minded” tone struck by many candidates, their responses lacked substance and underscored their lack of seriousness in the race. “Forget a vision for America. These people have no vision for the Republican Party — a party that lost the House in 2018, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020 and only narrowly regained the House in 2022,” he added. “It was another reminder that the Republican Party of the United States is not a normal center-right or conservative party… These are political pygmies, trailing a disgraced front-runner who is facing 91 criminal counts in four different jurisdictions.”

When I am in good hands I open myself to a state of curiosity and appreciation. I allow myself to suspend preconceived notions. I give you freedom to take me where you want to go. I immerse myself in your worldview and pause judgement.

That trust doesn’t come easily. As an audience member it’s about feeling cared for from the moment I interact with your work. It’s about feeling a well-defined point of view permeate what you make. If my mind was changed, I must have been in good hands.

I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail. I can feel it almost instantly. In any medium. Music, film, fashion, architecture, writing, software. At a Japanese restaurant it’s what omakase aims to be. I leave it up to you, chef.

There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. SpaceX is currently the sole means by which NASA transports crew from U.S. soil into space, a situation that will persist for at least another year. The government’s plan to move the auto industry toward electric cars requires increasing access to charging stations along America’s highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise, Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its proprietary charging stations that the Biden Administration relaxed an early push for a universal charging standard disliked by Musk. His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, so long as Tesla makes them compatible with the other charging standard.

In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice

Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official

Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, with whom Musk has both worked and sparred, told me, “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.

later. “He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa,” Justine wrote. “The will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home.”

There are competitors in the field, including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, but none yet rival SpaceX. The new space race has the potential to shape the global balance of power. Satellites enable the navigation of drones and missiles and generate imagery used for intelligence, and they are mostly under the control of private companies.

A number of officials suggested to me that, despite the tensions related to the company, it has made government bureaucracies nimbler. “When SpaceX and NASA work together, we work closer to optimal speed,” Kenneth Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, told me. Still, some figures in the aerospace world, even ones who think that Musk’s rockets are basically safe, fear that concentrating so much power in private companies, with so few restraints, invites tragedy.

Tesla for a time included in its vehicles the ability to replace the humming noises that electric cars must emit—since their engines make little sound—with goat bleats, farting, or a sound of the owner’s choice. “We’re, like, ‘No, that’s not compliant with the regulations, don’t be stupid,’ ” Cliff told me. Tesla argued with regulators for more than a year, according to an N.H.T.S.A. safety report

Musk’s personal wealth dwarfs the entire budget of OSHA, which is tasked with monitoring the conditions in his workplaces. “You add on the fact that he considers himself to be a master of the universe and these rules just don’t apply to people like him,” Jordan Barab, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor at OSHA, told me. “There’s a lot of underreporting in industry in general. And Elon Musk kind of seems to raise that to an art form.”

Some people who know Musk well still struggle to make sense of his political shift. “There was nothing political about him ever,” a close associate told me. “I’ve been around him for a long time, and had lots of deep conversations with the man, at all hours of the day—never heard a fucking word about this.”

the cuts that Musk had instituted quickly took a toll on the company. Employees had been informed of their termination via brusque, impersonal e-mails—Musk is now being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars by employees who say that they are owed additional severance pay—and the remaining staffers were abruptly ordered to return to work in person. Twitter’s business model was also in question, since Musk had alienated advertisers and invited a flood of fake accounts by reinventing the platform’s verification process

Musk’s trolling has increasingly taken on the vernacular of hard-right social media, in which grooming, pedophilia, and human trafficking are associated with liberalism

It is difficult to say whether Musk’s interest in A.I. is driven by scientific wonder and altruism or by a desire to dominate a new and potentially powerful industry.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.

At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game.

Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances.

To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others.

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.

When I first started meeting founders, I wanted to help with anything and everything. Unfortunately, that's neither realistic or possible. For example, I have many responsibilities at my day job that must come first. Over time, I have honed in my pitch to be explicit about how I can and can't help. See the notes above about ways to be helpful, and find your own unique combination of value to bring to the table.

My contract typically looks like this: We agree to meet ~X hours per quarter/half/year Multiply by Y contracting rate Y ⨉ X = some dollar amount Z Divide Z by the startup's latest price per share to arrive at a number of advisor shares to grant

Be founder-friendly! It's a big deal and a lot of paperwork to get a smaller check or advisor on the cap table (unless they already have a lot of operational infrastructure in place) – this usually means being relaxed about the commitment paperwork or helping out pro-bono for the first few hours while they work through the logistics.

Finding founders you work well with can be a numbers game; you won't be sure what you like doing until you've met a handful of founders, done several advisory meetings, and poked at different types of problems. It's okay to dip your toe and warm up to the process before committing a lot of time and energy to this. I started slow, and have been steadily sharpening my own intuition about what kinds of products and founders get me excited, and where I can add unique value

Riverdale has gone in so many directions since it started. What did you think it was going to be?Petsch: A way to get me out of my restaurant hosting job. Charles Melton: I was a dog walker and working a Chinese takeout when I did my chemistry read with KJ and Cole for season two.In season one, Reggie was played by Ross Butler, who left to continue his role on Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why. Lili Reinhart: I had just signed a lease by myself in L.A., and I was terrified because I couldn’t afford it. This was my second time moving there to try and make it work, and I had no money and no job. I remember after my final audition, I was on the phone with my mom and told her it was the first time ever in an audition process that I felt like I truly was okay and at peace with whatever the outcome was: “I gave them my version of what this character is, take it or leave it.” That night, I found out I got it.

Casey Cott: I don’t think people understand how Riverdale works. Very quickly, before you start shooting an episode — we’re talking two days — you get the script. And sometimes you don’t even have a script. You just get an email that says, “You have a recording session.” And if you’re really lucky, you get a text from Roberto that says, “Hey, we should sing this song.” Mendes: If there’s one thing that show taught us, it’s how to wing it.

Reinhart: I think it’s important to acknowledge that our show is made fun of a lot. People see clips taken out of contextBy 2019, “Riverdale Cringe” videos had become a genre online, be they TikTok reactions to particularly funny lines of dialogue or YouTube compilations of strange moments from the show. and are like, What? I thought this was about teenagers. And we thought so as well—in season one. But it’s really not been easy to feel that you’re the butt of a joke. We all want to be actors; we’re passionate about what we do. So when the absurdity of our show became a talking point, it was difficult. It is What the fuck? That’s the whole point. When we’re doing our table reads and something ridiculous happens, Roberto is laughing because he understands the absurdity and the campiness.

If you want to watch a teen show where there’s just a bunch of kids in a high school dealing with relationship drama, there’s a lot out there. Sprouse: Go watch Euphoria. Mendes:  But Roberto didn’t want to do that. I think he wanted something that was more outlandish. Sprouse: That’s the natural life cycle of a cult program. North America is the only part of the world that raises vocal opposition to the absurdity of the show. England, which has a more dry, sort of crass, sarcastic sense of humor, loves it and gets it. We find a huge audience in France that has a fascination with classic Americana. Mendes: And don’t forget Brazil! All the show’s fan accounts. We’ve done so much that anytime we get a new script or go into a new project, it’s like, I’ve done a version of this on Riverdale.

Petsch: Does anyone remember when I had my whole-ass own church in season five? I think my favorite line is “I am Cheryl Blossom, queen of the bees!” And by “favorite,” I mean that’s the only time I ever texted Roberto and said, “Please, please, please, don’t make me say this.” I had to shake honeycombs at my mother to banish her.

Mendes: I had this long line, and I remember I was like, “I fucking hate this!” I couldn’t get it, and it was so complicated, but now it’s my little party trick. Sprouse: Say it, Cami. Petsch: Say it, girl. Mendes: “Word of my exploits serving Nick his comeuppance has seeped into the demimonde of mobsters and molls my father used to associate with.” [Everyone cheers and applauds.]