Substacks

Requiem for The New York Times – Read by Eunice Wong Chris Hedges

Published

10 months ago

April 17, 2024

Text originally published April 12, 2024

Subscribe now

Requiem for The New York Times – by Mr. Fish

Subscribe now

NEW YORK: I am sitting in the auditorium at The New York Times. It is the first time I have been back in nearly two decades. It will be the last. The newspaper is a pale reflection of what it was when I worked there, beset by numerous journalistic fiascos, rudderless leadership and myopic cheerleading of the military debacles in the Middle East, Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, where one of the Times contributions to the mass slaughter of Palestinians was an editorial refusing to back an unconditional ceasefire. Many seated in the auditorium are culpable.

I am here, however, not for them but for the former executive editor they are honoring, Joe Lelyveld, who died earlier this year. He hired me. His departure from the Times marked the paper’s steep descent. On the front page of the program of the memorial, the year of his death is incorrect — emblematic of the sloppiness of a newspaper that is riddled with typos and errors. Reporters I admire, including Gretchen Morgenson and David Cay Johnston, who are in the auditorium, were pushed out once Lelyveld left, replaced by mediocrities.

Lelyveld’s successor Howell Raines – who had no business running a newspaper – singled out the serial fabulist and plagiarizer, Jayson Blair, for swift advancement and alienated the newsroom through a series of tone deaf editorial decisions. Reporters and editors rose up in revolt. He was forced out along with his equally incompetent managing editor.

Lelyveld came back for a brief interim. But the senior editors who followed were of little improvement. They were full-throated propagandists – Tony Judt called them “Bush’s useful idiots” – for the war in Iraq. They were true believers in the weapons of mass destruction. They suppressed, at the government’s request, an expose by James Risen about warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the National Security Agency until the paper found out it would appear in Risen’s book. They peddled for two years the fiction that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. They ignored the contents from Hunter Biden’s laptop that had evidence of multimillion dollar influence peddling and labeled it “Russian disinformation.” Bill Keller, who served as executive editor after Lelyveld, described Julian Assange, the most courageous journalist and publisher of our generation, as “a narcissistic dick, and nobody’s idea of a journalist.” The editors decided identity, rather than corporate pillage with its mass layoffs of 30 million workers, was the reason for Trump’s rise, leading them to deflect attention from the root cause of our economic, political and cultural morass. Of course, that deflection saved them from confronting corporations, such as Chevron, which are advertisers. They produced a podcast series called Caliphate, based on invented stories of a con artist. They most recently ran a story by three journalists — including one who had never before worked as a reporter and had ties with Israeli intelligence, Anat Schwartz, who was subsequently fired after it was disclosed that she “liked” genocidal posts against Palestinians on Twitter — on what they called “systematic” sexual abuse and rape by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions on Oct. 7. It also turned out to be unsubstantiated. None of this would have happened under Lelyveld.

Reality rarely penetrates the Byzantine and self-referential court of The New York Times, which was on full display at Lelyveld’s memorial. The former editors spoke — Gene Roberts being an exception — with a cloying noblesse oblige, enthralled with their own splendor. Lelyveld became a vehicle to revel in their privilege, an unwitting advertisement for why the institution is so woefully out of touch and why so many reporters and much of the public despise those who run it.

We were regaled with all the perks of elitism: Harvard. Summers in Maine. Vacationing in Italy and France. Snorkeling in a coral reef at a Philippine resort. Living in Hampstead in London. The country house in New Paltz. Taking a barge down the Canal du Midi. Visits to the Prado. Opera at The Met.

Luis Buñuel and Evelyn Waugh skewered these kinds of people. Lelyveld was part of the club, but that was something I would have left for the chatter at the reception, which I skipped. That was not why the handful of reporters in the room were there.

Lelyveld, despite some attempts by the speakers to convince us otherwise, was morose and acerbic. His nickname in the newsroom was “the undertaker.” As he walked past desks, reporters and editors would try to avoid his glance. He was socially awkward, given to long pauses and a disconcerting breathy laugh that no one knew how to read. He could be, like all the popes who run the church of The New York Times, mean and vindictive. I am sure he could also be nice and sensitive, but this was not the aura he projected. In the newsroom he was Ahab, not Starbuck.

Subscribe now

I asked him if I could take a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard after covering the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, wars that capped nearly two decades of reporting on conflicts in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

“No,” he said. “It costs me money and I lose a good reporter.”

I persisted until he finally told the foreign editor, Andrew Rosenthal, “tell Hedges he can take the Nieman and go to hell.”

“Don’t do it,” Andy, whose father was the executive editor before Lelyveld, warned. “They will make you pay when you come back.”

Of course, I took the Nieman.

Halfway through the year Lelyveld called.

“What are you studying?” he asked.

“Classics,” I answered.

“Like Latin?” he asked.

“Exactly,” I said.

There was a pause.

“Well,” he said, “I guess you can cover the Vatican.”

He hung up.

When I returned, he put me in purgatory. I was parked on the metropolitan desk without a beat or assignment. On many days I stayed at home and read Fyodor Dostoevsky. At least I got my paycheck. But he wanted me to know I was nothing.

I met with him in his office after a couple of months. It was like talking to a wall.

“Do you remember how to write a story?” he asked, caustically.

I had not yet, in his eyes, been suitably domesticated.

I walked out of his office.

“That guy is a fucking asshole,” I said to the editors at the desks in front of me.

“If you don’t think that got back to him in 30 seconds you are very naïve,” an editor told me later.

I did not care. I was struggling, often through too much drinking at night to blot out my nightmares, with trauma from many years in war zones, trauma in which neither Lelyveld nor anyone else at the paper took the slightest interest. I had far greater demons to battle than a vindictive newspaper editor. And I did not love The New York Times enough to become its lapdog. If they kept it up, I would leave, which I soon did.

I say all this to make it clear that Lelyveld was not admired by reporters because of his charm or personality. He was admired because he was brilliant, literate, a gifted writer and reporter and set high standards. He was admired because he cared about the craft of reporting. He saved those of us who could write — a surprising number of reporters are not great writers — from the dead hand of copy editors.

He did not look at a leak by an administration official as gospel. He cared about the world of ideas. He made sure the book review section had gravitas, a gravitas that disappeared once he left. He distrusted militarists. (His father had been a conscientious objector in World War II, although later became an outspoken Zionist and apologist for Israel.) This, frankly, was all we wanted as reporters. We did not want him to be our friend. We already had friends. Other reporters.

He came to see me in Bosnia in 1996 shortly after his father died. I was so absorbed in a collection of short stories by V.S. Pritchett that I lost track of the time. I looked up to find him standing over me. He did not seem to mind. He, too, read voraciously. Books were a connection. Once, early in my career, we met in his office. He quoted from memory lines from William Butler Yeats’ poem, “Adam’s Curse”:

…A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.

“You still have to find your voice,” he told me.

We were the sons of clergymen. His father was a rabbi. Mine was a Presbyterian minister. Our fathers had participated in the civil rights and anti-war movements. But that is where our family similarities ended. He had a deeply troubled childhood and distant relationship with his father and mother, who suffered from nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts. There were long periods when he did not see his parents, shuttled off to friends and relatives, where he wondered as a child if he was worthless or even loved, the subject of his memoir “Omaha Blues”.

We rode in my armored jeep to Sarajevo. It was after the war. In the darkness he talked about his father’s funeral, the hypocrisy of pretending that the children from the first marriage got along with the family of the second marriage, as if, he said, “we were all one happy family.” He was bitter and hurt.

He writes in his memoir of a rabbi named Ben, who “had zero interest in possessions,” and was a surrogate father. Ben had, in the 1930s, challenged racial segregation from his synagogue in Montgomery, Alabama. White clergy standing up for Blacks in the south was rare in the 1960s. It was almost unheard of in the 1930s. Ben invited Black ministers to his home. He collected food and clothing for the families of sharecroppers who in July 1931 after the sheriff and his deputies broke up a union meeting had engaged in a shoot-out. The sharecroppers were on the run and being hunted in Tallapoosa County. His sermons, preached at the height of the Depression, called for economic and social justice.

He visited the Black men on death row in the Scottsboro case — all of them unjustly charged with rape — and held rallies to raise money for their defense. The board of his temple passed a formal resolution appointing a committee “to go to Rabbi Goldstein and ask him to desist from going to Birmingham under all circumstances and desist from doing anything further in the Scottsboro case.”

Ben ignored them. He was finally forced out by his congregation because, as a member wrote, he had been “preaching and practicing social equality,” and “consorting with radicals and reds.” Ben later participated in the American League Against War and Fascism and the American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy during the Spanish civil war, groups that included communists. He defended those purged in the anti-communist witch hunts, including the Hollywood Ten, spearheaded by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Ben, who was close to the communist party and was perhaps at one point a member, was blacklisted, including by Lelyveld’s father who was running the Hillel Foundation. Lelyveld, in a few torturous pages, seeks to absolve his father, who consulted the FBI before firing Ben, for this betrayal.

Ben fell victim to what the historian Ellen Schrecker in “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America” calls “the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history.”

“In order to eliminate the alleged threat of domestic Communism, a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and other anticommunist activists hounded an entire generation of radicals and their associates, destroying lives, careers, and all the institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture,” she writes.

This crusade, she goes on, “used all the power of the state to turn dissent into disloyalty and, in the process, drastically narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political debate.”

Lelyveld’s father was not unique in succumbing to pressure, but what I find fascinating, and perhaps revealing, is Lelyveld’s decision to blame Ben for his own persecution.

“Any appeal to Ben Lowell to be prudent would have instantly summoned to his mind the appeals made to Ben Goldstein [he later changed his last name to Lowell] in Montgomery seventeen years earlier when, with his job clearly on the line, he’d never hesitated about speaking at the black church in defiance of his trustees,” Lelyveld writes. “His latent Ezekiel complex again kicked in.”

Lelyveld missed the hero of his own memoir.

Lelyveld left the paper before the attacks of 9/11. I denounced the calls to invade Iraq — I had been the newspaper’s Middle East Bureau Chief — on shows such as Charlie Rose. I was booed off stages, attacked relentlessly on Fox News and right-wing radio and the subject of a Wall Street Journal editorial. The message bank on my office phone was filled with death threats. I was given a written reprimand by the paper to stop speaking out against the war. If I violated the reprimand, I would be fired. Lelyveld, if he was still running the paper, would not have tolerated my breach of etiquette.

Lelyveld might dissect apartheid in South Africa in his book, “Move Your Shadow,” but the cost of dissecting it in Israel would have seen him, like Ben, blacklisted. He did not cross those lines. He played by the rules. He was a company man.

I would never find my voice in the straightjacket of The New York Times. I had no fidelity to the institution. The very narrow parameters it set were not ones I could accept. This, in the end, was the chasm between us.

The theologian Paul Tillich writes that all institutions are inherently demonic, that the moral life usually requires, at some point, that we defy institutions, even at the cost of our careers. Lelyveld, while endowed with integrity and brilliance, was not willing to make this commitment. But he was the best the institution offered us. He cared deeply about what we do and he did his best to protect it.

The newspaper has not recovered since his departure.

Substacks

Kanye Needs a Conservatorship River Page

Published

9 minutes ago

February 11, 2025

admin

Just a week after trotting his clearly uncomfortable wife onto the Grammy’s red carpet in a completely see-through dress, rapper Kanye West went on an unhinged antisemitic online posting spree. How bad? He started by declaring himself a Nazi and posting a series of inflammatory messages about Jews and women (as well as a few hardcore porn videos). A few lowlights: “Hitler was sooooo fresh,” and “JEWS WERE BETTER AS SLAVES YOU HAVE TO PUT YOUR JEWS IN THEIR PLACE AND MAKE THEM INTO YOUR SLAVES.”

It wasn’t the first time this has happened: In 2022, West went on several similar rampages. He vowed to go “death con 3 on Jewish people,” and implied that fellow rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs (currently in jail awaiting trial on racketeering and sex-trafficking charges) is controlled by a Jewish cabal. Lest we forget, he also made a bizarre appearance on InfoWars, where he again proclaimed his admiration for Adolf Hitler and performed a skit with a butterfly net called “Netanyahu” that was so unhinged even host Alex Jones was visibly uncomfortable.

Substacks

Trump maintains funding freeze at NIH, defying court order Judd Legum

Published

3 hours ago

February 11, 2025

admin

Exterior view of the main historic building (Building 1) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The Trump administration is still prohibiting National Institutes of Health (NIH) staff from issuing virtually all grant funding, an NIH official tells Popular Information. The ongoing funding freeze is also reflected in internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information and was reiterated to staff in a meeting on Monday. The funding freeze at NIH violates two federal court injunctions, two legal experts said.

The funding freeze at NIH puts all of the research the agency funds at risk. As the primary funder of biomedical research in the United States, NIH-funded research includes everything from cancer treatments to heart disease prevention to stroke interventions.

On January 27, the Trump administration, through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), issued a memo requiring federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance,” including “grants and loans” beginning at 5 PM on January 28. The purpose of the spending freeze was to ensure compliance with President Trump’s Executive Orders prohibiting funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or “DEI,” and “woke gender ideology.”

The Trump administration quickly faced two federal lawsuits, one filed by the National Council of Nonprofits and another filed by 22 states. On January 28, a judge in the National Council of Nonprofits case issued an administrative stay preventing the funding freeze from going into effect. In an attempt to head off the litigation, the OMB rescinded the memo on January 29. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, however, posted on X that the memo was only rescinded to evade the court’s order and the “federal funding freeze” was not rescinded and would be “rigorously implemented.”

As a result of the post, plaintiffs in both cases pushed for the federal court to issue a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) prohibiting the Trump administration from implementing the funding freeze.

On January 31, the federal judge overseeing the case brought by 22 states issued a TRO. The Trump administration is “restrained and prohibited from reissuing, adopting, implementing, or otherwise giving effect to the OMB Directive under any other name or title or through any other Defendants (or agency supervised, administered, or controlled by any Defendant), such as the continued implementation identified by the White House Press Secretary’s statement of January 29, 2025,” according to the TRO.

On February 3, the federal judge overseeing the case brought by the National Council of Nonprofits also issued a TRO. This TRO states that “Defendants are enjoined from implementing, giving effect to, or reinstating under a different name the directives in OMB Memorandum M-25-13 with respect to the disbursement of Federal funds under all open awards.”

Despite both of these injunctions, NIH staff was prohibited from issuing virtually any grant funding — including funding for multi-year grants that have already been approved and partially disbursed. According to internal NIH email correspondence, the agency leadership said that the freeze was in place to ensure the grants were compliant with Trump’s executive orders. This was the precise rationale stated in the OMB memo.

On February 10, NIH canceled all Federal Advisory Committee meetings where new grants are approved. This notice was posted to the NIH Employee Intranet:

Between February 3, 2024, and February 10, 2024, the NIH issued 513 grant awards totaling $218,273,053. Between February 3 and February 10 this year, the NIH issued just 11 grant awards totaling $4,981,089. In other words, since the courts ordered a full resumption in grant funding, the agency approved a handful of grants accounting for 2.2% of its typical volume. An NIH official says a small number of grants are being approved by NIH leadership, but nearly all grants remain frozen.

David Super, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and an expert on administrative law, told Popular Information that the Trump administration is “in contempt of court” and the continued funding freeze at NIH is “completely unlawful.”

Further, Super said, the law requires “the prompt expenditure of appropriated funds” and “federal officials take oaths to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not the individual who happens to be president at a particular moment, and they must uphold those laws whether or not consistent with the wishes or executive orders issued by the president.” Super noted that the U.S. Code says that the “[t]he Director of NIH shall expand, intensify, and coordinate research and other activities of the National Institutes of Health with respect to autoimmune diseases.” Withholding appropriated grant funding is inconsistent with this legal obligation.

Samuel Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan with a specialty in governance issues, agreed. Bagenstos told Popular Information that both judges were “very clear” about the scope of the TROs and that the NIH is violating both orders.

The federal judge overseeing the case brought by 22 states found that the Trump administration had not fully complied with the January 31 order. The judge issued a new order directing the Trump administration to “immediately end any federal funding pause.” According to an NIH source, no action was taken in response to the new order.

We started a new publication, Musk Watch. NPR covered our launch HERE. It features accountability journalism focused on one of the most powerful humans in history. It is free to sign up, so we hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.

Subscribe to Musk Watch

A $4 billion funding cut

Alongside the funding freeze, the Trump administration announced Friday that it would drastically cut its NIH grants to research institutions in order to save an estimated $4 billion.

When the NIH awards a grant to a university, part of that funding directly funds a research project, and part of it goes to the overhead costs that support the research, such as electricity, building maintenance, and personnel. In the past, the indirect funding tacked on to NIH grants has been around 30% of the grant for direct research funding on average, with some universities getting over 60%.

Now, the NIH says it will slash the rate for indirect funding to a maximum of 15% of the grant for direct research costs — a move that has sparked intense backlash at research institutions across the country.

Researchers and university officials note that overhead costs are essential to performing research. Many institutions rely on government funding for indirect research costs since many private grants cover a much smaller portion of those costs. In its announcement, the NIH pointed to the massive endowments of Harvard and Yale (around $50 billion and $40 billion, respectively), implying that universities could simply draw from their endowments to cover the sudden gap in funding. But most universities have endowments far smaller than those of Harvard and Yale and are restricted in how they can use those funds.

A 2022 report by the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group behind Project 2025, argues that indirect funding linked to NIH grants is used by elite universities to hire DEI employees. The release announcing the indirect funding cap references the Heritage Foundation study, WIRED reports.

The cuts will be a devastating setback for biomedical research in the U.S. Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, posted on X that “a sane government would never do this.”

Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on the Senate appropriations committee, has called the 15% limit “illegal” since a law was passed last year prohibiting the NIH from changing the system it uses to distribute funds for indirect expenses. On Monday, 22 states filed a new lawsuit the Trump administration to block the cuts, saying that “cutting-edge work to cure and treat human disease will grind to a halt.” A few hours after the lawsuit was filed a federal judge issued an injunction blocking the new policy.

Substacks

Trump: Free the Hostages or ‘All Hell Will Break Out.’ Plus… River Page

Published

4 hours ago

February 11, 2025

admin

It’s Tuesday, February 11. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Kanye West and the case for conservatorships, Kat Rosenfield on what comes after cancel culture, and the lessons from a phony frenzy over the government’s Politico subscriptions.

But first: Trump’s ultimatum to Hamas—and British historian Andrew Roberts on the precedents for the president’s Gaza proposal.

How much longer will the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas hold? To listen to Donald Trump, the answer is no later than Saturday—unless all of the remaining hostages are released. Trump issued his ultimatum while taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon.

“If they’re not returned—all of them, not in drips and drabs. . . Saturday at 12 o’clock,” said Trump. “After that, I would say all hell is going to break out.”

Earlier Monday, Hamas announced it was suspending the release of more hostages and accused Israel of breaking the ceasefire deal. Israel’s defense minister called the move an “outright violation of the ceasefire,” and said he had ordered the IDF to “prepare at the highest level of alert for any possible scenario in Gaza.” In other words, the ceasefire was already looking shaky before Trump opened his mouth. Then he upped the ante.

It’s the second time in a week that Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks on the conflict have grabbed headlines. Last Tuesday, it was his plan to take over Gaza and rebuild it. Over the weekend, Trump revisited the controversial idea, saying that Gazans would not have the right to return to the Strip once it has been rebuilt.

The response to this plan hasn’t exactly been positive. Everyone from the MAGA base to Israel’s Arab neighbors have derided it.

British historian and Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts sees it a little differently. Trump, he argues, is suggesting only the historical norm. As he puts it: “Again and again in the past, peoples who unleash unprovoked aggressive wars against their neighbors and are then defeated lose either their government or their sovereignty, or both.”

Read Andrew Roberts: “The Historical Case for Trump’s Gaza Plan.”

Cancel Culture Is Over. What’s Next?

Last week, Marko Elez, a DOGE staffer, resigned after The Wall Street Journal revealed that the 25-year-old had made a series of racist comments under a pseudonym on X, including “Normalize Indian hate,” and “I was racist before it was cool.” He also called on the United States to implement “eugenic immigration policy.”

Then Musk posted a poll on—where else?—X, asking if he should rehire Elez. When the online masses said yes—and J.D. Vance backed Elez’s return—Elon did just that. It’s the latest sign that cancel culture is over. But what is replacing it? That’s the subject of today’s column by Kat Rosenfield, who explains how we have lurched from one extreme to another. That’s fine, writes Kat, “if you want to live in a world where the discourse is permanently dominated by shrieking authoritarians on one side and smirking edgelords on the other.”

But what if you don’t?

Read Kat’s piece, “DOGE and the Backlash to the Backlash.”

Beware the Internet Mob—on USAID and Everything Else

Last week, a scandal broke—“the biggest in media history,” according to popular conservative activist Benny Johnson. DOGE had opened the books on USAID and cut off aid to Politico, the popular D.C. news site. Now that their ill-gotten taxpayer gains were gone, the news site couldn’t meet payroll. Conservative media, Elon Musk, and even Trump jumped on the story, with the president repeating the “biggest scandal” line.

But, as reporter Isaac Saul writes today in The Free Press, it wasn’t a scandal at all. Various government employees had purchased a product called Politico Pro and expensed it to their respective agencies. Someone was wrong on the internet? What’s new? Well, Isaac says the story is a cautionary tale that epitomizes everything that is wrong with our current media environment. Read why here.

Speaking of the media, yesterday, just hours after we asked PBS about an alleged plan to hide its DEI staffers from Trump’s executive order, the network scrapped its DEI division. Read Josh Code’s exclusive report here.

Kanye Needs a Conservatorship

It wasn’t the first time this has happened: In 2022, West went on several similar rampages. He vowed to go “death con [sic] 3 on Jewish people,” and implied that fellow rapper Diddy (currently in jail awaiting trial on racketeering and sex trafficking charges) is controlled by a Jewish cabal. Lest we forget, he also made a bizarre appearance on Infowars where he proclaimed his admiration for Hitler and performed a skit with a butterfly net called “Netanyahu” that was so unhinged even Alex Jones was visibly uncomfortable.

Kanye’s latest tirade ended with the deactivation of his X account—it’s not clear whether he deactivated the account himself or was booted off the platform. But even in his absence, he’s still trolling: During the Super Bowl he ran a bizarre ad, filmed at his dentist’s office, encouraging viewers to visit his website Yeezy.com. Sunday, there were numerous products on the site, including shoes and CDs, but today, there is only one: A $20 swastika T-shirt. Given that—and everything else—it’s hard to have sympathy for Kanye. But we should. Take away the fame and money and what you have is a crazy person lashing out on a bus. America’s rambling bus stop schizos deserve help, and that includes Kanye. It’s time for a conservatorship.

I suspect some people will be angry with me for suggesting this. Most Americans who know the word conservatorship were probably introduced to it via the “Free Britney” campaign. That’s Britney as in Britney Spears, the 2000s pop star behind early aughts classics like “. . . Baby One More Time” and “Toxic.” Her story goes something like this: Britney was a sweet Southern girl who was plunged into the spotlight by her domineering stage parents and broken by paparazzi. In 2007, as her painful divorce played out in the tabloids, Britney lost it and shaved her head before attacking a paparazzo with an umbrella. A year later, she was placed under a court-ordered conservatorship that gave her father and lawyer control over her financial and personal affairs. The arrangement was extreme: Britney would later compare her situation to slavery. She claims she was forced to work, forcibly medicated, and had no control over her personal life, including her finances.

After a drawn-out court battle, she was “freed” in November 2021. But since then her behavior has repeatedly worried her fans. After her short-lived marriage to a significantly younger man, a fitness instructor–slash-actor-slash-model named Sam Asghari, Britney began a turbulent relationship with her ex-con handyman, which ended in a violent altercation that saw police and paramedics involved. Online, Britney has posted numerous bizarre rants—including one where she doesn’t appear to know her own age—and videos where she dances with knives, and she has repeatedly posted nude photos of herself, something that reportedly strained her relationship with her two teenage sons, who live with their father.

Clearly, her mental break in 2007 wasn’t a one-time thing. Combined with her recent activity, it raises the question: Shouldn’t someone watch out for her? And would Kanye benefit from the same oversight?

Sure, conservators’ power should be limited, and there should be greater oversight in place to ensure that people aren’t being exploited. Britney’s story was terrible, but as is often the case with mental health—see mass deinstitutionalization, which has ballooned the prison population—the response has been to decry conservatorship as an institution instead of taking the steps needed to reform it. Because like it or not, some people are too mentally ill to be left in complete control of their own lives.

That would appear to include Kanye. He’s completely wrecked his own public image by becoming the most famous antisemite in America, and his behavior toward his wife Bianca Censori certainly seems abusive: Kanye repeatedly trots her out naked in public in what appears to be some kind of bizarre psychosexual humiliation ritual. This is not a sane person. At a certain point, the mentally ill have already lost their autonomy to whatever disease ails them. Allowing that to continue spinning out, unmitigated, is crueler than placing someone under a conservatorship, particularly if our leaders finally stand up and deliver the reforms the system so desperately needs.

Kanye needs help. He needs supervision. Kanye needs to be protected from Kanye.

New York City mayor Eric Adams at a press conference at City Hall on December 12, 2024, in New York. (Michael M. Santiago via Getty Images)

A group of investors led by Elon Musk submitted an unsolicited offer of $97.4 billion to buy OpenAI, Sam Altman’s AI venture that produced ChatGPT. The move complicated both Altman’s plans to turn OpenAI into a for-profit company (it was first founded as a charity) and his ongoing legal battles with Musk. In a statement reminiscent of his takeover of Twitter, Musk said, “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was. We will make sure that happens.” Altman responded on X, saying “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

Trump signed an order imposing 25 percent tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports on Monday. The move came just one week after the president promised to suspend tariffs on Mexico and Canada—yet Canada is the largest supplier of steel and a major supplier of aluminum to the U.S., and will face the brunt of Trump’s order. Trump has also started to threaten additional countries with reciprocal tariffs, saying, “Very simply, if they charge us, we charge them.” The man just loves tariffs. No wonder, as this Wall Street Journal headline reports, “For CEOs and Bankers, the Trump Euphoria Is Fading Fast.”
A federal judge blocked Trump’s attempts to reduce health research grant funding Monday. It is the latest fight in the battle brewing between the administration and the courts. J.D. Vance retorted that “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” and Musk retweeted a post on X that stated “Either the Supreme Court comes in and reigns [sic] these judges in or we don’t actually have real elections.” Separation of powers, kiddos.
Yesterday, the Justice Department told federal prosecutors to drop corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams, who was accused of accepting illegal gifts from Turkish nationals and at least one Turkish government official. The gifts allegedly bought the Turks fast-track approval for a new consulate in Manhattan, despite safety concerns, as well as Adams’ silence on the Armenian genocide. The charges seem to have been dropped after Adams’ monthslong charm offensive with Trump. Whether or not the mayor broke the law, he sure knows how to network!
Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, took an HIV test at 10 Downing Street in order to encourage others to do the same. Starmer said he was “surprised” to discover that he is “the first prime minister to have done this.” HIV is mostly transmitted through unsafe sex, with gay and bisexual men at greatest risk, or by sharing needles while injecting drugs. Presumably Starmer, who has been married to the same woman since 2007, has had next to no exposure to the disease, but who knows? Maybe the secret lives of stodgy British politicians are more exciting than we think.

Indian police shut down Grammy Award–winning singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran’s street performance in Bengaluru on Sunday. “Even global stars must follow local rules—no permit, no performance!” said a local MP who was concerned about traffic congestion. Finally, someone has put a stop to him. We’ve dealt with the hokey nonsense long enough!
Can someone please explain why they still call it The City of Brotherly Love? After the Philadelphia Eagles crushed the Kansas City Chiefs 40–22 in Sunday’s Super Bowl, Philly fans made like BLM protesters in 2020. Nearly 50 revelers were arrested, four sanitation trucks were vandalized (sanitation trucks?), and a bonfire was lit at a downtown intersection. “The Super Bowl victory celebrations will continue on Friday, when the city hosts the parade,” said ABC News. A word to our Philly readers: Youse guys stay safe out der, go birds.

Subscribe now