Editorial Director for News and Politics Podcasts at CBS. Former host of The Gist, a 3000 episode daily news podcasts. Retweets is an anagram of wet trees.
I'm glad this was reported, I always figured many influencers were happy to be used as stenographers, and the part about disapearing signal messages as a possible violation of law is good to document. But is it a scandal? The Mamdani admin. isn't doing anything outside the bounds of coms strategy, and some of the NYT handwringing about the possible benefits are overwrought. Influencers w/ access "can help increase their own social media following and, by extension, potentially put them in a position to attract paid content sponsorships from commercial brands." (Exactly like every news outlet!)
Inside Mamdani’s Private Army of Public Influencers nytimes.com/2026/09/04/nyreg…
Journalism used to have general restrictions against language that would valorize suicide. No more I guess, if doing so serves to critique a policy you oppose.
You can believe that the ankle monitors are needlessly cruel, or that revoking TPS for Haitians was irresponsible, purposely so. But the not very clever intimation that this kid who made a terrible choice was murdered is bad writing and thinking.
So Ezra did an interview with the @jasminewsun, as did Derek Thompson. Ezra doesn't seem to have written on it or opined much on "Data Centers as Abundance". I don't want him to pop off while uninformed, but there's been enough time to gather info. If Data Centers ARE a legit menace, document that. But if the objections are mostly myth, exaggeration, and folk understanding, then the Abundance Agenda should mean defending them, they're not that different from transmission lines or fracking. The Abundance Agenda is a bit too cowardly, dodging, as it does unpopular (among liberal) causes for my taste. I preferred @MarcDunkelman 's Why Nothing Works. The Minnesota Power Lines popular uprising insideclimatenews.org/news/0… thwarted progress we can now say, decades later. We need to be braver in the moment.
SF passed a law disallowing arrest of prositutes (sex workers) for solicitation. Didn't want to discriminate. So police can send them letters advising them that buying sex is illegal (they've sent 10 since August) ) police can redirecting traffic. Anyway, its not working, residents are moving out, and even the prostitutes (sex workers) acknowledge the failure. -sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti…
I think if you did a search of podcast description language, or other write-ups which are routinely outsourced to AI, you would see a giant uptick "quietly" and "real".