The agenda setting New York Times is a “paper of record,” with a journalism staff of 3000, about 7 percent of all journalists working in the US. The paper has also been a reliable source of pro-Israel messaging for years, especially after October 7, so when a well-respected human rights journalist wrote such an op-ed in its pages it was a public relations disaster for Israel and its propaganda machine went into high gear to counter the bad press. Zionists and genocide supporters protested in front of the Times building. Netanyahu was so outraged that he threatened to bring a defamation lawsuit against the paper. The Israel Foreign Ministry called the piece “blood liable” and accused Nicholas Kristof of writing “an endless stream of baseless lies and propaganda” that turned the “victims into the accused.” More

Corruption has never been far from the center of American politics. Some of the most notorious scandals stretch from the cronyism of Warren G. Harding to the abuses of power exposed during the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon. Yet many historians argue that what distinguishes What distinguishes Donald Trump from earlier corrupt presidencies is that corruption no longer operates behind closed doors, shielded by the liberal rituals of institutional legitimacy and the euphemisms of political decorum. Under Trump, corruption is performed openly as spectacle, celebrated as a sign of strength, wealth, vengeance, and personal loyalty. More

Earlier this month, researchers at the University of California San Diego published a study offering “the first empirical evidence that a modern artificial intelligence system can pass the Turing test.” Famously named for Alan Turing, the English mathematician and World War II codebreaker, the test is designed to determine whether a computer can exhibit human intelligence such as to make it indistinguishable from a human. What is interesting, perhaps, is how few waves this apparent breakthrough has made within the broader public discourse. More