“Educated at Harvard, NYU Law School, and NYU Stern School of Business, the crown prince of this tabloid affair emerged onto the Manhattan social scene polished (enough), poised (enough), and ready to spend outlandish amounts of social capital and capital-capital trying to clear his family’s name. To read about Jared in the press—usually just ‘Jared’—was to read about a stunted, striving boy-man hell-bent on alternately earning and redefining the boldfaced surname that Page Six denied him. Online he was often referred to by his initials, as if a joke were being flagged: ‘JK.’ The story of his young career is like a mash-up of genres, a cautionary fairy tale, a tragicomic myth more Greek than Italian: in the process of forming himself around reforming his father’s reputation, he married a woman whose own lying, cheating, stealing father went on to become the forty-fifth president of the United States and whose single term resulted in two impeachments and multiple ongoing criminal and civil investigations—which suggests a variation on another famous line of the Corleones’: Just when you thought you were out, another dad pulls you back in. Breaking History, Kushner’s new memoir, is nothing if not an attempt to exorcise those patrimonies—a nearly five-hundred-page book composed with all the beige rage not of a pezzonovante, a Big Shot, but of a Li’l McKinseyite consultant whose disciplined loyalty to family management would be admirable, or at least capable of eliciting sympathy from me, had he been a private citizen and not a public servant.” (NYRB)
I really love this video that’s kind of gone viral in this apocalyptic world. Persian version of the 19th century Italian protest folk song, Bella Ciao sung by two Iranian women without Hijabs. (Twitter)
(Kara Young, via Wikimedia Commons)
“‘Confidence Man’ chronicles how Trump’s fixation on race, gender and religion dates back decades, shaped by a tumultuous period in New York City’s history. ‘Racial is more severe in New York than it is anywhere else that I can think of,’ Trump said in a post-presidency interview with Haberman, who writes that Trump ‘often seemed frozen in time’ in 1980s New York and viewed tribal conflict as inevitable. During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Trump’s fear of germs and illness led him to announce publicly he would require dates to take an AIDS test, and Haberman writes he called reporters to inquire if people he had met with might be gay – concerned because they had exchanged a handshake. In the late 1990s, after Trump divorced Marla Maples, he had a relationship with a model, Kara Young, who was the daughter of a Black mother and White father. Haberman writes that after meeting Young’s parents, Trump told her she had gotten her beauty from her mother and intelligence ‘from her dad, the white side.’ Trump laughed as he said it, Haberman writes. Young told him it wasn’t something to joke about. Reflecting his view of life as a show he was casting, Trump focused on ‘the look’ – telling others that his wife Melania Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence and his first Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch were all out of ‘central casting,’ Haberman writes. The former President remained focus on how those who represented him looked. He complained about the way former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, his ambassador to the United Nations, looked on television. ‘Can’t we do better lighting or give her better makeup?’ he asked, according to the book. Trump said his acting Homeland Security chief Elaine Duke looked ‘like a housewife,’ Haberman writes. The director of the Secret Service resembled ‘Dumbo.’” (CNN)
“Philippe Vasset, a French journalist, has launched a new weekly publication called Glitz Paris, which calls itself ‘the first investigative publication dedicated to the global luxury sector.’ Vasset told the New York Times that the newsletter will report on stories that “cut through various universes,” such as the connection between luxury watches and arms dealers. Glitz plans to hire 15 reporters and will be funded by subscriptions.’” (CJR/ NYT)
“(Gavin) Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, told MSNBC's Alex Wagner on Wednesday that he no longer speaks with Guilfoyle, who filed for divorce from Newsom in January 2005 and got engaged to Donald Trump Jr. in January 2022. ‘Nope. Not lately,’ Newsom, 54, said in the interview when asked if he and Guilfoyle, 53, still communicate. When Wagner pointed out that Guilfoyle's association with the Trump family ‘must be weird’ for him, Newsom responded, ‘Yeah, of course.’ Newsom added, though, that his relationship with Donald Trump wasn't always the way it is now. ‘I mean, we had an interesting, not as combative relationship, even though we went at it on a lot of issues we also found ways to get along,’ he added.” (People)
“A top manager at a company that reportedly transported Russian military equipment for the war in Ukraine has been found dead. Pavel Pchelnikov, 52, was the director of communications at Digital Logistics, a subsidiary of Russian Railways. His body was found at 6.30 a.m. local time on Wednesday on the balcony of his apartment in central Moscow, local newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets reported. Police are investigating the death with Russian media reporting that the nature of his injuries suggested that he had committed suicide without specifying further. However, the website Top Cargo 200, which uses open source intelligence to track and publicize the deaths of senior Russian officers in their war in Ukraine, said Pchelnikov had been killed by a gunshot.” (Newsweek)
“The heirs of a late sultan have launched legal proceedings to seize as many as a dozen Netherlands businesses of Malaysian state oil company Petronas in a move set to further infuriate Kuala Lumpur after similar actions in Luxembourg in July. Representatives of the heirs of the last sultan of Sulu said on Thursday they had asked The Hague Court of Appeal to recognise the $14.9bn awarded to their clients this year in an arbitration case against Malaysia. The filing of the petition to enforce the award comes barely two months after the claimants’ lawyers said they had seized two Luxembourg-based Petronas subsidiaries in a sudden escalation of a legal dispute that stems from an agreement signed 144 years ago … The latest move is part of efforts launched by the Sulu heirs to win compensation over the Malaysian state of Sabah, which they claim their ancestor leased to British colonialists in 1878 before the discovery of vast natural resources in the area.” (FT)
“A JUDGE HAS rejected Bill Cosby’s bid for a retrial after the disgraced comedian was found guilty in June of sexually assaulting a minor in 1975. Cosby was ordered to pay the victim — Judy Huth, who was 16 at the time of the sexual assault that took place at the Playboy Mansion — $500,000 in damages after a jury found him guilty during a civil trial. Earlier this week, Cosby’s lawyers argued that he should be awarded a new trial after Huth revised the details of her case: Huth originally said the assault happened when in 1974 when she was 15 but changed it to 1975 and 16 years old before the trial; Cosby’s legal team argued that the change in the timeline made it harder for them to defend their client, the Hollywood Reporter wrote. However, on Tuesday, Judge Craig D. Karlan rejected Cosby’s arguments and stood by the jury’s verdict.” (Rolling Stone)
“On Monday, the Times reported that the Biden administration and TikTok had drafted a preliminary agreement to resolve national security concerns posed by the app. The two sides have ‘more or less hammered out the foundations of a deal in which TikTok would make changes to its data security and governance without requiring its owner, ByteDance, to sell it,’ the Times wrote, adding that the Biden government and TikTok's owners were ‘still wrangling over the potential agreement.’ According to the Times, US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco has concerns that the terms of the deal are not tough enough on China, and the Treasury Department is skeptical that the proposed agreement can resolve security issues. The Biden administration's policy towards Beijing, the Times notes, ‘is not substantially different from the posture of the Trump White House, reflecting a suspicion of China.’ Under the proposed agreement, TikTok would store the data it holds about American users on servers located in the US, and likely run by Oracle, a cloud-computing company based in the US, instead of on servers in Singapore. (In the wake of the June BuzzFeed article, TikTok said this had already been put in place.) An external US entity like Oracle would monitor TikTok's recommendation algorithms , to ensure that they aren't suggesting or censoring content in an attempt to influence the American public. (There have been reports in the past that TikTok removed specific kinds of content at the request of the Chinese government, including content related to pro-democracy protests in China.) The agreement would also require TikTok to appoint a board of American security experts to oversee its operations.” (CJR)