Today in the Culture

Rocked by charges of sexual harassment and racial discrimination, Fox News has instituted mandatory sensitivity training for its employees.

The Problem with the Media Environment

Just noting this headline:

Stephen Colbert has never been angrier — and his show's never been better

His ratings are way up since Trump was inaugurated.

Just as Obama was a huge gift to right-wing journalists, Trump is making millions for left-wing journalists.

Anger sells. And that just feels very dangerous to me.

Donald Trump is Famous

If what Donald Trump really craves is attention, he is getting it:

Coverage of Mr. Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever. . . . The new president doesn’t simply dominate national and political news. During my week of attempted Trump abstinence, I noticed something deeper: He has taken up semipermanent residence on every outlet of any kind, political or not. He is no longer just the message. In many cases, he has become the medium, the ether through which all other stories flow. . . .

All presidents are omnipresent. But it is likely that no living person in history has ever been as famous as Mr. Trump is right now. It’s possible that not even the most famous or infamous people of the recent or distant past — say, Barack Obama, Osama bin Laden, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali or Adolf Hitler — dominated media as thoroughly at their peak as Mr. Trump does now.

I’m hedging because there isn’t data to directly verify this declaration. (Of course, there are no media analytics to measure how many outlets were covering Hitler the day he invaded Poland.) But there is some pretty good circumstantial evidence.

The firm mediaQuant measures how much attention celebrities get in the news and on social media and then attaches a dollar figure to it, based on how much you would have to pay to get that much advertising.

In January, Mr. Trump broke mediaQuant’s records. In a single month, he received $817 million in coverage, higher than any single person has ever received in the four years that mediaQuant has been analyzing the media, according to Paul Senatori, the company’s chief analytics officer. For much of the past four years, Mr. Obama’s monthly earned media value hovered around $200 million to $500 million. The highest that Hillary Clinton got during the presidential campaign was $430 million, in July.

It’s not just that Mr. Trump’s coverage beats anyone else’s. He is now beating pretty much everyone else put together. Mr. Senatori recently added up the coverage value of 1,000 of the world’s best known figures, excluding Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump. The list includes Mrs. Clinton, who in January got $200 million in coverage, Tom Brady ($38 million), Kim Kardashian ($36 million), and Vladimir V. Putin ($30 million), all the way down to the 1,000th most-mentioned celebrity in mediaQuant’s database, the actress Madeleine Stowe ($1,001).

The coverage those 1,000 people garnered last month totaled $721 million. In other words, Mr. Trump gets about $100 million more in coverage than the next 1,000 famous people put together.

Sigh.

Washington Post's Photos of the Year

A few from the Washington Post's set of the year's best news photos, 87 in all. Some amazing  images of war, refugees, protests, terrorist attacks, etc., but I'm not in the mood for those. Above, the Solar Impuse 2 over the Egyptian pyramids by Jean Revillard.

Wildfire in California by Jonathan Alcorn.

Thufa hill in Reykjavik, Iceland by Frank Augstein

Fireworks go awry at the Tazaungdaing Lighting Festival at Taunggyi in Burma by Ye Aung Thu.

Boys playing ball near burning oil wells outside Mosul, Iraq by Goran Tomasevic.

SpaceX launch, Cape Canaveral by Tim Shortt.

Fake News and the Truth Problem

"Fake News" entered the discourse as a term for propagandistic internet stories that had been entirely made up, a way to single out the worst offenders in a time of media misbehavior. But right-wing voices like Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart have taken it over as a way to refer to the mainstream media, denouncing every anti-Trump story as "Fake News."

Rush Limbaugh has diagnosed a more fundamental problem. “The fake news is the everyday news” in the mainstream media, he said on his radio show recently. “They just make it up.”

Some supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump have also taken up the call. As reporters were walking out of a Trump rally this month in Orlando, Fla., a man heckled them with shouts of “Fake news!”

Until now, that term had been widely understood to refer to fabricated news accounts that are meant to spread virally online. But conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself, incredulous about suggestions that that fake stories may have helped swing the election, have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.

This problem is not going away, partly because the mainstream press has not exactly covered itself with glory lately. Consider the campus rape stories from Virginia and Duke that made headlines before turning out to be fabricated. If those weren't fake news, why not? Or all the stories on pre-election polls. If a thousand headlines proclaiming Hillary the likely winner turned out to be wrong, were they fake news? Why not? Because they relied on the calculations of professional pollsters, who as card-carrying members of the establishment have the credentials to be taken seriously, whereas ordinary Trump supporters who just felt in their bones that he was going to win do not? What about all the news stories about the findings of so-called "dietary science"? What about all the famous experiments in psychology that have failed replication? And what about all the news stories that treat one failed replication as proof that the original finding was wrong, without making any attempt to compare the details of the two experiments?

I think the scientific community is making a terrible mistake by proclaiming the certainty of climate projections that are nothing but educated guesses. As I have said many times, I worry about the effects of filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and wish we would stop this mad experiment, but I think models of the climate future are no more reliable than election polls. I really wish people would be more careful with their claims, because not even pushing for action to protect the planet is more important than defending the whole notion of truth.

My readers know that I try to be careful in figuring out what is true and what is not. I regularly preface claims about cancer treatments and archaeogenetics with "wonderful if it turns out to be true." I cannot think of anything to do in the face of truth's erosion except to double down: to work even harder to sort the probable from the possible from the false, the slanted from the exaggerated from the lie.  It simply won't do to put stories from the NY Times in one category and tweets from Trump in another, because sometimes the Times is wrong and sometimes Trump is right. The lazy news habit of just citing what spokesmen from both sides say has to be abandoned, because recent experience shows that spokesmen lie, and it is absolutely the business of journalists to figure out who is lying and call them on it.

In a world of ever more brazen lying, it falls to those who care about the truth to defend it as an absolute value, more important than partisan politics. As the elite consensus collapses, it falls on believers in reason to put it back in the center of our discourse.

Real and Unreal

When I saw this photograph on the front page of the Times yesterday, I assumed it was from a TV show. I was startled to discover that this is an actual photograph of the assassin who killed Russia's ambassador to Turkey, right after the deed, with the dying man on the floor behind him. He is shouting "Don't forget Aleppo! Don't forget Syria!" to the cameras that had been recording the ambassador's speech.

The assassin, Mevlut Mert Altintas, was part of the security detail for the event. It's a disturbing sign of how the Syrian war and the Erdogan regime's response to it may lead to even more conflict and chaos in Turkey. Nobody yet knows if the assassin was part of any organized group, or, if so, which one, since there are several different groups in Syria and Turkey that would be happy to assassinate Russians.

But it also disturbs me that my first reaction on seeing this photograph was to think of television. I suppose that is partly because this was taken through a TV camera that was recording the ambassador's speech; part must also be the way the handsome assassin is dressed, just like a TV assassin would be. The gesture also seems more stage than reality.

I worry a little about my mind when it has been filled with so many images of staged violence that real violence looks staged to me.

Facebook and Fake News

Joshua Benton:

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the list of actors has to start with Facebook. And for all its wonders — reaching nearly 2 billion people each month, driving more traffic and attention to news than anything else on earth — it’s also become a single point of failure for civic information. Our democracy has a lot of problems, but there are few things that could impact it for the better more than Facebook starting to care — really care — about the truthfulness of the news that its users share and take in.

As BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman has documented repeatedly — and as anyone who has spent much time on their relatives’ profile pages can probably attest — Facebook has become a sewer of misinformation. Some of it is driven by ideology, but a lot is driven purely by the economic incentive structure Facebook has created: The fake stuff, when it connects with a Facebook user’s preconceived notions or sense of identity, spreads like wildfire. (And it’s a lot cheaper to make than real news.)

One example: I’m from a small town in south Louisiana. The day before the election, I looked at the Facebook page of the current mayor. Among the items he posted there in the final 48 hours of the campaign: Hillary Clinton Calling for Civil War If Trump Is Elected. Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President. Barack Obama Admits He Was Born in Kenya. FBI Agent Who Was Suspected Of Leaking Hillary’s Corruption Is Dead.

These are not legit anti-Hillary stories. (There were plenty of those, to be sure, both on his page and in this election cycle.) These are imaginary, made up, frauds. And yet Facebook has built a platform for the active dispersal of these lies — in part because these lies travel really, really well. (The pope’s “endorsement” has over 868,000 Facebook shares. The Snopes piece noting the story is fake has but 33,000.)

Benton wants Facebook to hire editors who would, among other things, flag fake stories as fake:

Another idea would be to hire a team of journalists and charge them with separating at least the worst of the fake news from the stream. Not the polemics (from either side) that sometimes twist facts like balloon animals — I’m talking about the outright fakery. Stories known to be false could be downweighted in Facebook’s algorithm, and users trying to share them could get a notice telling them that the story is fake. Sites that publish too much fraudulent material could be downweighted further or kicked out entirely.

Would this or other ideas raise freedom of speech or other thorny issues? Sure. This would be easy to screw up — which is I’m sure why Facebook threw up its hands at the pushback to a human-edited Trending section and why it positions itself a neutral connector of its users to content it thinks they will find pleasing. I don’t know what the right solution would be — but I know that getting Mark Zuckerberg to care about the problem is absolutely key to the health of our information ecosystem.

I think something like this has to be done, because I don't think we can survive as a nation if we all come to believe malicious lies about each other.

Populist Economics and American Politics

Trump, this week:

There is nothing the political establishment will not do, no lie that they won’t tell to hold their prestige and power at your expense. And that's what has been happening. The Washington establishment, and the financial and media corporations that fund it, exist for only one reason, to protect and enrich itself. The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. . . .

It is a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put the money in the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities. Just look at what the corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit, Flint, Michigan and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and all cross our country. Take a look at what is going on. They've stripped away the towns bare and raided the wealth for themselves and taken our jobs away, out of our country, never to return unless I'm elected president.

Which raises the question: is this true?

Trump is not a serious man, but this is a serious argument, embraced by Bernie Sanders and plenty of others on the left. Are working people struggling because a global elite is taking their money? And if so, what could we do about it?

I think it's worth going back to the 1970s to ask how we got to the situation we are in now, with the owners of capital grabbing a record share of global wealth and workers getting an ever smaller piece. Because things were not going great then. The "stagflation" economy helped bring first Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan into the presidency as reforming outsiders; the phrase "Rust Best" was coined to describe the situation in manufacturing towns from Baltimore to Milwaukee. Japanese companies were in the process of destroying American television and stereo manufacturers with better, cheaper products and had begun their assault on our automobile companies, ship builders and more. The sense of decline was everywhere; the papers were full of articles asking why American innovation was dead, why American companies could no longer compete. So when Reagan called for a different economic approach – lower taxes on the rich and their investments, less regulation, etc. – millions listened. And when Reagan broke the air traffic controllers' union and did all he could to ruin unions in general, millions cheered.

To kill inflation Paul Volcker's Federal Reserve drove interest rates up to 19%, which did tame inflation but helped create a severe recession in 1981-1982. Those were my university years, so I was in college at another time when young people were convinced that the best days of capitalism were behind them, that they would never have good jobs, etc. Reagan and Thatcher were hated on the left with a vitriol I have never seen since. But then the recession ended, as recessions do, the stock market boomed and it turned out that the American economy wasn't finished after all. On the whole, 1983 to 1999 was an optimistic time in America. People seemed to feel that it was better than the 70s, anyway. There was opposition to trade deals like NAFTA, but on the whole most people seemed to think that neoliberalism was working. Americans certainly voted for it with their wallets, making the Honda Accord the top selling car in America and Sony the top TV brand. The late 1990s saw the American economy at a dizzying peak. I remember years when to hire a backhoe in Washington you had to reserve three months in advance; one operator I worked with told me he hadn't had a dry day off in five years.

Since the tech stock bubble burst, and the War on Terror started, things have not been so great in America. And looking back, we have figured out that in certain fundamental ways the 1979-1999 period was not as great as we thought. The wages of working people stagnated or even went down, and all the increase in the median family income came from more women and teenagers working. Billionaires were getting staggeringly rich, inequality rising. In the 1990s trade pacts seemed to be working the way economists said they would, with some people losing jobs but more benefiting from lower prices and the general boom. But since then the number of workers in manufacturing has collapsed, and the towns dependent on factory work have hollowed out; part of the reason is certainly trade with China.

So some people on both the left and the right are pining for the good old days, when a man could earn enough at a factory job to put his whole family in the middle class. The argument made by both Trump and Sanders is that we could do it, if we just broke the power of the international elite. I don't buy it. I remember the 70s, and everything I have read supports my basic intuition that we can't go back to the 1960s economy because it was already failing before Reagan and Thatcher came on the scene. Everything that has happened since then has made manufacturing less important, and manufacturing jobs less plentiful. I wrote here a few months ago about the "Pokemon Go Economy"; compared to, say, bowling, Pokemon Go requires much less labor and no physical stuff beyond your smart phone and a bank of servers. Acquiring more stuff is just a less important part of our economy, which means that even without neoliberalism and Chinese trade manufacturing would be a shrinking piece of the economic pie. Add in constantly improving technology – one steel worker today can make 20 times as much steel as in 1950 – and manufacturing employment was simply bound to decline. Plus I think it is worth remembering that even if global trade has hurt American workers it has been a gigantic boon for the developing world, helping to lift two billion people out of poverty in 25 years.

I could easily come up with a list of things we could do to tilt the playing field back toward ordinary people, starting with repealing the 2005 bankruptcy law – there's a case of bankers and lawmakers conspiring together against the rest of us – and getting rid of expensive toll lanes for Lexus drivers. I would like to see higher taxes on the rich and more spending on infrastructure. But none of that will fundamentally change the world economy. None of that will bring back coal country or small manufacturing towns. I don't have any idea what would, and I don't think Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders does, either.

There is also the strange notion that all of the diverse voices in the American media, which compete constantly against each other, are in a conspiracy together. If what you think is that most reporters and news executives are drawn from the same class, and that they therefore generally share the attitudes of that class, sure. I fought that consensus as hard as I could over Bush's invasion of Iraq, and was profoundly frustrated that most of the press supported that crazy scheme. Anyone interested in socialism, anarchism, libertarianism, or any other out-of-the-mainstream movement has to constantly battle to be taken seriously. The American consensus has its virtues, but imagination is not one of them. Yet to extend that analysis into saying that the media and the government lie to you outright every day – to believe, for example, that the real unemployment rate is 42% – is just plain crazy. If the media were all in alliance against Trump, why would they have given him so much attention? Why would they cover his rallies at all? If what the Elite wants is to hog all the money for themselves, why have they allowed so much reporting on inequality and so many Op-eds against themselves?

There are conspiracies in the world, but the world is not itself a conspiracy. Sometimes you have to dig a little to find truths that nobody is much interested in telling, and you always have to take statements from politicians and pundits with a grain of salt. But the media is the best way to understand the world, if you know how to use it. And the best way to make the world better is to work within the system as it is, rather than fantasizing about a revolution that will sweep it away.

Celebrity Statisticians

People pay up to $100 for tickets to watch four or five statistics journalists from 538.com tape their weekly election podcast, which the Columbia Journalism Review calls "an almost unimaginably nerdy event."

Liberals, Conservatives, and the News

Interesting article in Upshot about how liberals and conservatives consume the news. The main discovery is that despite everything you read about how the media have changed and echo chambers and so on, most Americans still get their news from the same mainstream sources. Also, the number of conservatives who rely on conservative sources is greater than the number of liberals who rely on liberal sources.

But of course such a study assumes there is a good way of determining which news sources are liberal or conservative. Zooming in on the habits of people who consume their news online gives the graph above. If you're like me, you are perhaps wondering why the New York Times shows up far to the left of MSN. If you read the fine print, you discover that web sites assigned places on the political spectrum using data from Facebook, by counting up the self-declared political affiliations of people who follow that news source. Thus, the Times shows up as far left because most of the people who follow the Times on Facebook describe themselves as liberals.

Is that a reasonable way to assess the content of a publication as big and fact-filled as the Times? The Times is certainly liberal, but it is also a great newspaper, in terms of spending money to cover issues that matter, and giving them space in its pages. It also covers things like theater and dance better than any other paper I know of, and it has some great science writers. Conservatives who won't read it because of the liberal slant are missing out. And, you know, the Times is not that far left; they despised Bernie, and real socialists hate the Times as much as Breitbart readers do. The Times is the neoliberal newspaper, not the leftist one.

The named publication that takes up the farthest left slot is Talking Points Memo (TPM), which is also strange. TPM is certainly on the left, but it is not the place you go to get your daily dose of outrage at crazy conservatives. It is aimed at Democratic activists and professionals, the sort of people who want to follow the ins and outs of competitive House races in Florida. So, yes, there are "Trump is Crazy" stories to enliven things, but the meat of the publication is stuff political insiders need to know, like which Super-pacs have decided to take out ad buys on behalf of whom, and whose campaign might be derailed by a scandal.

So I don't like this attempt at a political news spectrum at all. It shows something about who reads each publication, but not what is in it.

A Note to Young Journalists

If you think something is unprecedented, it’s probably not.

– Corey Robin

The Weird World of Fox News

The accusations of sexual harassment swirling around Fox News are at the same time unsurprising and, to me at least, puzzling. They are unsurprising on a surface level, given the contempt for feminism and political correctness that pours from the mouths of so many Fox personalities, and the weird way prominent Fox women all seem to look like characters in a repeating sexual fantasy. I was particularly struck by the way Ailes designed the news sets to show off his anchors' legs; he once told a woman who wore a pants suit on the set "I didn't spent all that money on glass tables for you to wear pants."

But on the other hand Fox News has made quite a few women rich and famous and given them platforms that make them players in American politics.

What is one to make of a world where intelligent, capable women who happen to be leggy blondes with a certain hardness to their looks are made into media stars, provided they can put up with their boss and colleagues propositioning them and talking about how hot they look all the time?

I have to say that I find this utterly bizarre.

For one thing these allegations confirm what I always suspected, that the women of Fox News really are a sexual fantasy. Ailes picked them personally for just that reason. The fantasy is widely enough shared that if you do an image search for Fox News female anchors, as I just did, you end up in a strange world of very soft core pornography displaying the hottest on-air personalities in what pass for suggestive poses.

Come to think of it I have an acquaintance who has a fetish for sexy weather girls.

Anyway.

I wonder, is there also an element of political fantasy, the old "feminists are ugly and all the really hot women want to be treated like women" thing? Are the hot blondes as much a part of the Fox News message as constantly calling Obama "divisive" and the lies about "apology tours"?

I have always found Fox News weird. An old-style news operation like the CBS and NBC I grew up with sold an aloof, god's eye view of a chaotic world, with the best sort of people telling us how we ought to feel about it all. Fox News seems to sell sham outrage. What should conservatives be angry about today? How can we twist a story about the normal sort of bureaucratic bungling (e.g., Benghazi) into a spasm of partisan outrage? I suppose I understand why people enjoy that, but don't they see how they are being manipulated? Sometimes the manipulation is so stupidly transparent that I would feel insulted. I know people who follow both the conservative and liberal/mainstream versions of the news, so they have multiple perspectives, but that doesn't seem to apply to the average Fox listener. What does that average listener want? To be manipulated into outrage? Why?

Now I can add another layer to my puzzlement: what is life like for these women?

For the past few days I have been talking about this to whoever will listen, and two people have given me pretty much the same explanation: any woman who would work for Fox News obviously has no principles and would do anything for money and power, sex included. I don't see it that way. Obviously, yes, anyone who wants to be a news anchor has a hungry ambition. But that's not the same as trading sex for promotion, and anyway that is not what most of the recent news has been about. The allegations are mostly tales of clumsy come-ons and excessive hugging, which make Ailes look as much pathetic as predatory.

As far as I understand these things, women respond very differently to being treated as sexual objects in their professional lives. Some laugh it off or even use it to advantage, and some of the women promoted by Ailes seem to be fine with the arrangement. The Times found one female Fox News employee who said

many of the women she worked with “loved Roger Ailes” and were “very grateful to him.”

And then there are those who don't like it but treat it as just another obstacle to overcome on their climb to the top:

Several former Fox News employees said that people were afraid to speak up but that many women viewed the behavior there as par for the course in the broadcasting industry, where appearance is so highly valued.

“There is a culture where, not that you accept it, you just deal with it,” one former employee said.

And then there are those who really hate it and won't stand for it, and those who are wrecked by it.

But what really goes on at Fox News? The Times found lots of complaints about harassment but hardly any actual sex – to be precise just one blowjob, said to be performed by a junior staffer. Is that right? Can there really be such a sexually charged workplace as Fox News seems to be, full of rich, powerful men and rich, sexy women, in which there is no sex, consensual or otherwise? Is everyone covering up the affairs they know to be happening around them, because they see that as unrelated to these investigations? Have we been given a sanitized version designed to protect the women who did sleep their way to the top, or had affairs that might make it look like that's what they did? Or are there really no affairs? If so, what would that mean? Would it be just another sign that climbing to the top of the contemporary meritocracy requires a near abandonment of romance and the erotic? That even a mogul like Roger Ailes gets nothing but long hugs and bare legs under glass tables?

It is important to note that the real anger, and the lawsuits, come from women who say they were fired for refusing to go along, or for speaking out against the system. The average Fox spokesman would call that sour grapes. What this says to me is that women in the categories I just mentioned – who don't mind harassment or accept it as a fact of life to be gotten around – can put up with a lot as long as they have the right to say no. The limit for them comes when somebody tries to take that right away. When they feel like their careers have been sabotaged because they refused to do things they consider beneath them, they call their lawyers.

But I mainly wanted to says how weird I find everything about this story.

Ezra Klein on Hillary Clinton

Lots of stuff at Vox today on Hillary, including an interview with her and an essay by Ezra Klein that I recommend. It begins from the question of why Hillary gets praise for her work while in office but panned for her campaigning. He calls this "the Gap." Most successful politicians – Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders – see their poll numbers rise when they campaign. But not Hillary:

Hillary Clinton is just the opposite. There is something about her persona that seems uniquely vulnerable to campaigning; something is getting lost in the Gap. So as I interviewed Clinton's staffers, colleagues, friends, and foes, I began every discussion with some form of the same question: What is true about the Hillary Clinton you’ve worked with that doesn’t come through on the campaign trail?

The answers startled me in their consistency. Every single person brought up, in some way or another, the exact same quality they feel leads Clinton to excel in governance and struggle in campaigns. On the one hand, that makes my job as a reporter easy. There actually is an answer to the question. On the other hand, it makes my job as a writer harder: It isn’t a very satisfying answer to the question, at least not when you first hear it.

Hillary Clinton, they said over and over again, listens.

Hillary listens to what her allies and staffers say to her, and she remembers it, and she also reads their memos and remembers what they said, and likes to surprise them by mentioning something they wrote in an old white paper that they thought nobody in power had ever read. It's the most flattering possible thing for a political staffer and explains why so many Hillary people have been very loyal to her.

As Klein says, there is something very gendered about this. Stereotypically, what most politicians do – make speeches,  hold debates – is male behavior, whereas women always say that the thing they value most is listening. Here is linguist Deborah Tannen:

Women, she’s found, emphasize the “rapport dimension” of communication — did a particular conversation bring us closer together or further apart? Men, by contrast, emphasize the “status dimension” — did a conversation raise my status compared to yours?

Klein takes a look at the Democratic primaries through this lens:

Talking is a way of changing your status: If you make a great point, or set the terms of the discussion, you win the conversation. Listening, on the other hand, is a way of establishing rapport, of bringing people closer together; showing you’ve heard what’s been said so far may not win you the conversation, but it does win you allies. And winning allies is how Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination.

Given where both candidates began, there is no doubt that Bernie Sanders proved the more effective talker. His speeches attracted larger audiences, his debate performances led to big gains in the polls, his sound bites went more viral on Facebook.

Yet Clinton proved the more effective listener — and, particularly, the more effective coalition builder. On the eve of the California primary, 208 members of Congress had endorsed Clinton, and only eight had endorsed Sanders. “This was a lot of relationships,” says Verveer. “She’s been in public life for 30 years. Over those 30 years, she has met a lot of those people, stayed in touch with them, treated them decently, campaigned for them. You can’t do this overnight.”

One way of reading the Democratic primary is that it pitted an unusually pure male leadership style against an unusually pure female leadership style. Sanders is a great talker and a poor relationship builder. Clinton is a great relationship builder and a poor talker. In this case — the first time at the presidential level — the female leadership style won.

Thoughts? Klein has a lot about how this has worked and not worked in Clinton's career.

The other thing that really comes out in Klein's piece is how much Hillary hates the media. Klein asks, why are our politics so toxic, and Hillary essentially says, "the lying, scandal-mongering media." Klein's response is, well, some of that is true, but Hillary's refusal to hold press conferences and so on still hurts her and she really needs to stop fearing the media and starting using it.

I thought this was the most interesting thing I've read about Hillary all year.

Scott Alexander Blogs His Way to Fame

Scott Alexander seems to be on the verge of achieving one of my fantasies, of becoming a famous essayist just by posting interesting stuff on his own blog. No help from editors or journalistic insiders, no self-promotional stunts, no celebrity gossip, just writing about serious topics in a way people want to read. This is extraordinarily difficult. There was a first wave of bloggers who got famous largely by being first – Andrew Sullivan, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, etc. – but even some of those had previous and/or parallel careers in journalism. I can't think of anyone who has achieved fame as a sociopolitical blogger – on his or her own blog, I mean, not as part of Slate or the Corner – in the seven years I have been doing it.

Timing, as they say, is everything. I love blogging and reading blogs, which just fit perfectly into my intellectual world, but it seems that I actually came to it rather late, as its glory days were already fading. Now you read all the time that blogging is dead or pointless, and most of humanity seems to have moved on to Facebook or Twitter or something.

But that hasn't stopped Scott Alexander. He emerged from a small internet world of "rationalists" and people who play games like "Dungeons and Discourse" (which mashes up D&D with philosophy and puns), and back in 2011 his posts got only ten or so comments. Now his posts get 1,000 comments and he is regularly cited at Vox and occasionally at the NY Times. He has done all his writing in his spare time, while he has attended medical school and gone through his internship and residence in psychiatry. So I guess it can be done.

I have been thinking lately about why Alexander has been successful at this and I have not. Setting aside questions of talent – in particular, he is a lot wittier than I am – I come up with several reasons. For one thing, he writes passionately about controversial topics. I tend to see both sides of everything too well to believe very passionately in one side or the other, and whenever I write a post with much vehemence I feel embarrassed about it later. As Alexander explained in a great essay, it is controversy that draws attention; this was by way of explaining why things like the Michael Brown case from Ferguson or the Duke lacrosse rape case get really famous, rather than clear-cut examples of police misconduct or campus rape. What elevates something into the public eye is argument, so it is murky cases where partisans can passionately argue both sides that get the attention. ("The less useful, and more controversial, a post here is, the more likely it is to get me lots of page views.") Alexander is plugged into a more youthful internet world than mine, where people passionately debate whether Bernie Sanders is liberal and revolutionary enough to be worth supporting and fling cruel insults at each other like "Nice Guy" and "White Bro". So he takes sides in arguments that lots of people on the internet care about, especially all the war of the sexes stuff that swirls around feminism, "Nice Guys" (aka "Fedoras"), whether nerds are sexist or women are too snotty to date nerds, polyamory, and whether there is such a thing as "rape culture."

For another, Alexander has been very revealing about his own personal life. This I refuse to do, partly from disinclination but mainly because as a husband and father most of the important stuff about my personal life involves other people. Two of my friends, after reading private emails from me about my children, have told me that I should be a parenthood blogger because what I write about my kids is so interesting. No thanks – my children deserve better than to have me broadcast their struggles and foibles across the internet. Ditto my marriage; whatever right I have to reveal my own darkest moments does not extend to my wife. Because of the semi-public nature of my career, which involves lots of work for the National Park Service, there are things I think about archaeology and history that could get me in serious trouble. A little thing I posted about Memorial Day in one small town, which I thought was cute, got me blacklisted by the local historical and archaeological community, and they have since refused to meet with me. So one of the main tricks of the essayist, self-revelation, is largely closed to me.

In a way that is related to both of the above, Alexander has made himself a spokesman for a particular sort of people, nerdy guys who are good at abstract thought and wordplay but can't get a date. I am not at all sure for whom I would be a spokesman, and anyway have never tried.

Plus, he just writes an incredible amount.

Over the past few months I have read through everything Alexander has written at his current blog, Slate Star Codex, and I worked my way back to 2011 in his previous blog, Squid314. I found this fascinating. I don't agree with everything, but then who could write two or three times a week for five years, often about controversial subjects, and always be right? There are some things Alexander says that I think are just wrong (see the nonsense about monarchy in Meditations on Moloch) and others that I think are products of being young in a way that looks silly from past 40. Alexander suffered from being mocked in high school and had little romantic life until he was well out of college, and that certainly sucks to live through, but on the other hand by the time he is 45 he will be a well-paid, respected psychiatrist who probably has a monthly column in some prestigious magazine, having vaulted about twenty rings up the ladder past the jock who was his nemesis at 16, and this makes things look a little different.

(Why is high school so awful? How could we do it differently?)

Anyway, here is a list of some of Alexander's most interesting posts.

Politics and general stuff:

I Can Tolerate Everything Except the Out Group (his most famous post, the one that has been repeatedly cited at the NY Times; my response is here.)

The Control Group is Out of Control (What's wrong with modern science; this has recently been cited in scientific journals)

Meditations on Moloch (Are we trapped in an evil system over which nobody has any real control?)

Rape Culture

Superweapons (and here)

Against Dystopian Fiction

Race and the Criminal Justice System

Social Psychology is a Flamethrower (If we took the findings of social psychology seriously, what would we do?)

Social Justice and Words (certain words – racism, privilege, etc. – are not tools of communication but weapons, and we should treat them accordingly)

Why I Defend Scoundrels

About medicine and being a doctor:

Medicine as not seen on tv

The effectiveness of SSRIs

Poverty and Psychiatry (some patients are really suffering from being broke)

How Bad Are Things? (from the psych hospital, they look pretty bad)

Headlines and Readers

The Times has been running an  experiment in which they post the same article with two different headlines and randomly give one or the other to each visitor to its web site:

And so, for a short while on March 15, one reader might have seen this:

$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Trump

While another saw this:

Measuring Trump’s Media Dominance

Any guesses on which won the test, and by how much?

The top one got nearly three times as many readers, which underlines the crucial role of headlines in the digital age.

A story might be 1,000 words long, but tweaking the tiny handful of words that promoted this one on our home page gave us 297 percent more readers.

In other cases, headline tests have increased readership by an order of magnitude.

When this:

Soul-Searching in Baltimore, a Year After Freddie Gray’s Death

was paired against this:

Baltimore After Freddie Gray: The ‘Mind-Set Has Changed’

The test showed a 1,677 percent increase in readership for the second one. . . .

Can you tell which of the headlines below resulted in a tenfold increase in readers?

Is Everything Wrestling?

It’s Not Just Wrestling That’s Fake. It’s the World.

It was the conversational two-sentence version, with “fake.”

The article is here, but you may find it paywalled.

It has occurred to me that I might be able to get more readers by tweaking the titles of my posts, but between laziness and a snobbish disdain for clickbaiting I haven't bothered.

The Worst Possible Headline

Are Kim Kardashian and Kanye West a Match Written in the Stars? See What their Astrological Charts Say

The mind boggles. No link because I refuse to participate in this degradation.

Why Men are Quoted More Often

Because we're arrogant:

Research shows that men tend to be more confident in their opinions and less worried about being publicly wrong. That can make them more willing to make bold predictions and sweeping arguments. That's not necessarily the way to ensure accuracy — it's called "overconfidence bias" for a reason — but it does make for entertaining quotes and lively panels. Women, by contrast, tend to be less overconfident in their expertise and thus less willing to make sharp and sweeping arguments in public.

That's not to say that women are making the wrong choice by being careful about their public statements. It's likely, after all, that women need to work harder and be more careful about errors in order to be taken as seriously as their male peers because of biases like the citation gap described above. Being extra careful makes women less likely to be caught saying something incorrect in public, so it might, on balance, be worth it. But it also means they're less likely to give pithy quotes than men who don't have to be so careful.

That's a dynamic I've encountered in my own reporting again and again: Women I interview are much more cautious about hewing closely to their own research and area of expertise, and much more likely to insist on speaking off the record when making a controversial or critical argument. My male sources, on the other hand, are much more willing to freely hold forth on whatever I ask about, confident that whatever opinions they might have are useful enough to share with my readers.

The result is often that female experts give me little information beyond what I already know from reading their published work — and that the men's quotes are the ones that survive final edits.

This comes from journalist Amanda Taub, who says she has been making a conscious effort for years to interview and quote more women, but that this has had little impact on her published work.

I would say that Hillary Clinton is a good case of what Taub is saying: nobody in politics knows more than she does, but she very often cannot find a clear and pithy way to express her knowledge. She never gives an answer without at least one qualifier and sometimes there are more qualifiers than all the other words put together. Many people find the result weaselly and off-putting; why can't she just give a straight answer? But maybe the whole fascination with "straight answers" to what are often very complex questions is a masculine bad habit we would be better off without.

Kasich Gets the Kiss of Death from the Times

I see that the New York Times has continued their peculiar habit of endorsing a candidate in the Republican primaries. Poor John Kasich; if the Times supports him, is there any chance Republican voters will? Who do you suppose was the last Republican who wanted to be endorsed by the Times; Gerald Ford? I don't think Trump has bothered to mock Kasich very much, but if Kasich does as well in New Hampshire as some polls suggest, Trump now his line of attack ready. The candidate from the liberal media establishment!

Today's Bizarre Question

Why can’t we stop talking about New York in the late 1970s?

Personally, I'm not having any trouble with this one.

What Happened in Waco?

Unless you live nearby or know lots of bikers, you have probably lost track of the crazy story from Waco. Last spring shooting broke out in the parking lot of a steak house, and nine people were killed. Since then: silence. And not because news organizations have lost interest:

Four months after a shootout left 9 bikers dead at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas, prompting the arrest of 177 people, many of them presumably innocent, authorities are still denying the public access to key pieces of evidence, including video. The legal fate of arrestees still hangs in the balance. And it still isn’t known how many of the dead bikers were killed by bullets that police officers fired.

But police bullets did hit some of the bikers, the Associated Press reports after reviewing 8,800 pages of evidence apparently leaked to the news organization. “The gunfire included rounds fired by police that hit bikers, though it isn't clear whether those rifle shots caused any of the fatalities,” Emily Schmall reports. “Investigators have offered scant details about what sparked the fight or how the gunfire played out, and no one has been charged.” 18 bikers were wounded but survived the melee.

Lawyers in the case have seen “dashboard video of people fleeing the scene while shots ring out, audio of police threatening to shoot people if they rise from the ground and photos of bodies lying in pools of blood in the restaurant parking lot,” AP adds. But neither police nor defense attorneys are talking about the evidence due to a broad gag order that a coalition of media organizations is challenging as unconstitutional. It was imposed by a judge who is a former law partner of the local district attorney.

This is crazy. The longer this goes on, the worse it looks for the Waco police. What are they hiding? Was it an officer who fired first, touching off the slaughter? Was the whole business about a fight between rival gangs a sham? I don't know, but right now it looks like nobody else knows, either, except perhaps for people in the DA's office who aren't saying for reasons that look increasingly bad.