Strikes get the goods // What's Good: Nov. 10, 2023
Fran Drescher, historians, and Jezebel.
Hello, good afternoon, happy Friday. Taylor Swift is back on tour and I am so excited about watching her perform on low-quality TikTok streams again; it is a true delight.
A 4-hour “humanitarian pause” is not a ceasefire, by the way.
Brand safety for whom
This strikes me as horseshit:
In his email to staff about the decision to shut down Jezebel and lay off its staff G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller said that “our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s.”
Lauren Tousignant, Jezebel’s interim editor in chief, told 404 Media that Jezebel was told “brand safety,” the fact that advertisers don’t want to be next to the type of content Jezebel was publishing, was “one of the biggest factors” that led G/O to stop publishing the site and lay off its staff. Tousignant said that a couple of weeks ago, the ads sales team asked if it could remove Jezebel’s tagline—“Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth”—from the site.
Not horseshit as to whether it’s true - I’m sure it is - but horseshit that advertisers and “brand safety” are what allow a website to exist or not in our modern economy. Seems bad. Categorically bad!
Victory lap
We all cried,” says Fran Drescher, recalling the moment that SAG-AFTRA reached a tentative agreement to end the actors strike on Wednesday night. “It was such a relief and a release. I felt like one of those tennis stars, like Djokovic when he won the US Open and fell to his knees and wept on the court.”
For the last 30 years, Drescher was best known for her role as sweetly brash working woman Fran Fine in the classic 1990s sitcom The Nanny. That changed on July 13, when Drescher, in her role as SAG-AFTRA president, announced that the actors would be going on strike. In her familiar, adenoidal Queens accent, she hurled scathing invective at the entertainment studios and streamers represented by the AMPTP—“a greedy entity” that she deemed to be “on the wrong side of history.”
It’s a well-deserved and well-earned victory.
Halo effect
Haha oops it turns out the scammers did some scams:
It’s been a no good, very bad year for Effective Altruism, or “EA” for short, the cultural movement that aims to use “evidence and reason” to figure out the best ways to do the “most good.”
One year ago, the EA community was flying high. Its poster boy, a philosopher named William MacAskill, had just published his book “What We Owe the Future,” which makes the case that we should be far more concerned about humanity’s long-term future — thousands, millions, even billions of years from now — than we ordinarily are. Effective Altruists call this “longtermism,” an idea built around a vision of the future in which we reengineer humanity, colonize space, plunder the vast resources of the cosmos, and ultimately maximize the total amount of “value” in the universe by creating huge numbers of “digital people” living “happy” lives in giant computer simulations.
If this sounds bizarre and potentially dangerous, that’s because it is. Yet MacAskill’s book, longtermism and the EA movement that he co-founded received mostly favorable coverage from leading news outlets like The New Yorker, The Guardian, and Time magazine. MacAskill himself was a guest on “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah, who was impressed with MacAskill’s claim that he gives away more than 50% of his income to EA-approved charities.
Doomed to repeat
Listen to the historians, please, they are begging you:
Historian Patricia McMahon studies nuclear policy, a famously difficult subject to research as so much of the material is classified.
So when a legal issue involving Canadian conscription practices during the First World War piqued the York University professor’s interest, she figured it would be a nice change of pace from her usual work.
“I thought, ‘This will be easy. Who is going to withhold records that are 100 years old?’”
Gaza is no longer Gaza
If you read one piece this week, make it this one:
Atef Abu Saif is the author of six novels and since 2019 has been minister of culture for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
Abu Saif was visiting family in Gaza, where he grew up, when bombs began to fall Oct. 7 — in retaliation for Hamas’s surprise attack earlier that day that killed 1,400 Israelis. He began sending voice notes to friends abroad, describing the fraying texture of everyday life, creating a diary of life under siege.
The following excerpts, which have been edited for length, clarity and style, track roughly three weeks, from Oct. 7 to 26, a time when about 7,000 Gazans were killed.
You deserve some good animal content
https://twitter.com/GatorsDaily/status/1722681688470290438
https://twitter.com/RedPandaEveryHr/status/1723036863328330175
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1723031646121730241
https://twitter.com/petscures/status/1723025874826445145
https://twitter.com/raccoonhourly/status/1723030285598494939
https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1723027593866129740
https://twitter.com/GoldretrieverUS/status/1722995962644160954
https://twitter.com/weirdlilguys/status/1722976855433625738
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1722975307391484421
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
ICBC ransomware attack triggers global regulator, trader scrutiny. How a 'Refund Fraud' Gang Stole $700,000 From Amazon. LinkedIn Really Is the Best Social Network. Tabletop, card game retailers join the game industry’s burgeoning union push. How the GOP muzzled the quiet coalition that fought foreign propaganda. At SpaceX, worker injuries soar in Elon Musk’s rush to Mars. The Warnings About Trump in 2024 Are Getting Louder.