Weekend Reading
Long reads for a late winter weekend
“The New York Times is facing questions about a sweeping investigative story it published on the Israel-Hamas war back in December. The high-profile piece — which carried the headline 'Screams Without Words': How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7’ — sowed together a number of atrocities Hamas committed against women during its heinous terror attack to conclude that they were ‘not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.’
There is significant evidence to indicate that Hamas carried out sexual violence against women during the surprise assault that killed at least 1,200 Israelis, as CNN and other outlets have repeatedly reported. But key elements of The Times' reporting in telling that larger story have since fallen under the microscope. The Intercept, which has adversarially insinuated news organizations are reporting on the war with a pro-Israel bias, on Wednesday night published an approximately 7,000-word article scrutinizing how The Times' piece was reported, questioning elements of the story, which was authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, along with freelancers Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella. The Times earlier this week publicly condemned Schwartz' decision to ‘like’ various pro-Israel posts about the war on social media, including a post on X that endorsed turning the Gaza Strip into a ‘slaughterhouse.’ The Times said that doing so amounted to ‘unacceptable violations’ of its company policy and that it was ‘currently reviewing the matter.’” (Oliver Darcy/Reliable Sources)
“But ‘the consensus is that monetary policy transmission is not as strong in its influence on prices’ in Africa as it is in other emerging economies, said David Omojomolo, of Capital Economics, reflecting a view shared by other analysts. One major reason, he said, is that the financial sector is usually not the predominant pillar of the overall economy. In developed markets, high levels of private sector debt from mortgages or other loans mean interest rate tweaks are felt immediately. ‘So high rates hurt us, and stop us borrowing, and low rates make us over-excited, like children on Christmas Day, because debt becomes nearly cost-free,’ said Charlie Robertson, head of macro strategy at FIM Partners. Interest rates do not exert a similar effect on people in sub-Saharan Africa with ‘virtually no private sector debt’ nor mortgages, he said. Like Kenya, Nigeria’s current inflation is significantly driven by food prices. The contribution of food to overall inflation is 52% in Nigeria, which is in stark contrast to the U.S. and Japan where its contribution ranges from 7% to 19% respectively. Food price increases in Nigeria are tied to a number of factors, particularly insecurity in the country’s food producing regions, road transportation costs tied to higher fuel prices, and a scarcity of dollars for imports. Prices will remain high overall as long as those issues remain unresolved, analysts say.” (Alexander Onukwue/semafor)
“Last March, shortly before Donald Trump was criminally charged for his hush money deal with Stormy Daniels, we learned that Melania Trump was still angry with her husband over the alleged affair and didn’t care if he ended up going to prison for it. So it’s pretty unsurprising to learn that when the allegations first came out that he’d paid a porn star six figures to keep quiet about cheating on his spouse, Melania was extra pissed about it and feeling pretty ungenerous toward the then president. In American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, From Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden, New York Times reporter Katie Rogers reports that after the allegations went public in 2018, Melania refused to join Trump on a trip abroad and headed to Mar-a-Lago without him. ‘[FLOTUS press secretary Stephanie] Grisham, who traveled with her on that jaunt, said that the first lady had wanted to communicate her anger to the president,’ Rogers writes, according to People. Melania, Grisham told Rogers, ‘was pissed at Trump and wanted him to be a little humiliated that she took off.’ Four years later, Melania appeared to ‘communicate’ a similar message when she didn’t show up for Trump’s speech at Mar-a-Lago (a.k.a. her home), following his arraignment by the Manhattan district attorney on 34 felony charges stemming from the hush money deal. (He pleaded not guilty and has denied the affair.) At the time, reporter Linda Marx revealed that the former first lady did not ‘sympathize with Donald’s plight.’ A source familiar with the matter said, ‘Despite what happens to Donald, she will be fine.’ The hush money trial—Trump’s first but not last criminal one—is scheduled to kick off on March 25.” (Beth Levin/VF)
“A metal detectorist has discovered a 4,000-year-old copper dagger, likely from an elite warrior, in a forest near the village of Korzenica in southeast Poland. ‘The Korzenica dagger is so far the oldest metal dagger discovered [in] south-eastern Poland,’ said Marcin Burghardt, an archaeologist at the Orsetti Tenement House Museum in Poland who analyzed the dagger. ‘The only similar dagger in Poland was uncovered in the [1960s] so the new find comes as a great surprise,’ Burghardt told Live Science. A team went to examine the spot where the metal detectorist discovered the dagger but found no other artifacts. ‘When we examined the spot, we found neither additional finds nor traces of archaeological features,’ Burghardt said. Because of the lack of additional artifacts, ‘we cannot link the dagger to a specific archaeological culture,’ Burghardt added. Archaeologists were able to date the dagger by comparing it to similar daggers found in Central Europe and the Ukrainian forest steppe that have been securely dated. Based on the comparisons, ‘it seems safe to say that the Korzenica dagger was used somewhere in the [second] half of the 3rd millennium BC,’ Burghardt wrote.” (Owen Jarus/LiveScience)
“Just weeks after the company he founded entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy last May, Shane Smith jetted to the French Riviera. But this wasn’t a vacation for the 54-year-old flamboyant former Vice CEO to drown his sorrows. Smith landed in Cannes on a mission to save the media company that he had started as a scrappy punk music magazine in Montreal three decades ago from the financial scrap heap. Smith, the brash face of Vice, had been quietly operating behind the scenes since stepping aside as CEO in 2018. In his new capacity as executive chairman, he worked the phones and hustled for deals as only he knew how. Now, accompanied by his chief of staff, Alon Soran, he was at Cannes Lions, the annual advertising confab that attracts the monied set looking to do business, desperate to ensure the company he had built didn’t disappear into liquidation and irrelevancy.” (Lachlan Cartright/THR)
“Europe is leading a worldwide scramble to hunt down hundreds of thousands of artillery shells for Ukraine, as the world’s only superpower and Russia’s once arch-rival – America – is taking an unfamiliar back seat. Germany, Denmark, the Czech Republic and even geographically-outside-of-Europe Canada are at the forefront of a global shopping effort aimed at breaking a bottleneck for deliveries of NATO-standard 155mm howitzer shells and other mainstream munitions to the Ukrainian military. The price tag will be high. President Volodymyr Zelensky in a Sunday television interview pointed out, ruefully, that international market artillery shell prices have increased fivefold since the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, creating almost bottomless demand for a Ukrainian army needing to defend itself and civilians, and major European states emptying their own ammunition reserves to dangerously low levels.” (Stefan Korshak/Kyiv Post)
“After a few days of back-and-forth, (Johnny) Depp reluctantly agrees to the meeting. It goes so well that, within months, the 60-year-old actor, known for palling around with the likes of Keith Richards and the late Hunter S. Thompson, will stand face-to-face with MBS, the 38-year-old de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. Theirs will be a bromance like no other. With his willingness to spend billions of dollars in a relentless drive to transform his country into a cultural and economic superpower, MBS is shaking up the world order. To decipher his increasingly consequential moods, methods, and moves, global leaders rely on thousands of diplomats, linguists, and spies. They should probably just call Depp. Over the past year, Depp has spent more than seven weeks in Saudi Arabia, staying in royal palaces and camps, traversing the country by yacht and helicopter, and even flying to London and back on MBS’s personal 747 for a quick trip to attend the Jeff Beck Memorial Concert at the Royal Albert Hall. In that time, Depp and MBS have become real friends. ‘They made a genuine connection,’ says a friend of Depp’s. ‘It’s a shock to many of the people who know [Depp], but it’s what happened.’ Insiders say Depp is now weighing a seven-figure annual contract to promote Saudi Arabia’s cultural renaissance. Both men knew how it felt to suddenly go from golden boy to outcast. Depp’s stock had taken a hit after his ex-wife Amber Heard accused him of abuse. In two high-profile court cases, Depp contested those claims, which he has always denied. As Depp and Heard wrangled in court in the second case, a cascade of unflattering personal details hit the press and social media. The ugly spectacle, and the troll war it sparked, damaged Depp’s reputation in some circles.” (Bradley Hope/VF)
“Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been harsh in his assessment of the right-wing media’s kid-gloves treatment of former president Donald Trump. ‘He had the conservative media that basically rallied to him and made it where a lot of voters thought his nomination was inevitable,’ DeSantis griped during a private call with supporters last week. His self-serving comments are half right. Conservative media outlets have been increasingly soft on Trump. And it’s about to get worse. For a while, major parts of conservative media seemed ready to move on from Trump, especially in places owned by Rupert Murdoch. ‘DeFUTURE’ was the front-page message from the New York Post the day after the 2022 elections, which went disastrously for Trump-backed Republicans; the next day, the paper mocked Trump as ‘Trumpty Dumpty.’ When the 2024 campaign began, many on Fox News fawned over DeSantis, while showing more willingness to criticize Trump than they had in years. But over the past year, as it became clearer and clearer that Trump was likely to be the Republican nominee, outlets began to fall in line.” (Cameron Joseph/CJR)
“Kamala Harris arrived at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month with no good news to share with her European counterparts. The sixty-billion-dollar security package for Ukraine that President Joe Biden had promised was stalled in the House of Representatives, where the Republican Speaker, Mike Johnson, had sent the chamber into a two-week recess without scheduling a floor vote. And then came the news that Alexei Navalny, the charismatic Russian opposition leader, had died in prison. While awaiting official confirmation, Harris said, at the top of her remarks, ‘Whatever story they tell, let us be clear: Russia is responsible.’ As she laid out the stakes of Ukraine’s fight against Russia, she laid into Republicans who ‘embrace dictators’ and ignore the United States’ commitments to its allies. ‘Let me be clear,’ she said, tapping her fingers on the lectern. ‘That world view is dangerous, destabilizing, and, indeed, shortsighted. That view would weaken America and would undermine global stability and undermine global prosperity. President Biden and I, therefore, reject that view.’ She went on to make a campaign-style list of the Administration’s accomplishments and ambitions.” (Peter Slevin/TNY)
“On Wednesday, Mitch McConnell announced he would be stepping down from Republican Senate leadership this fall, marking an end to his controversial, party-defining tenure. While the Kentucky senator plans to serve out his term through 2026, the jockeying for his role as leader has already begun. Several GOP senators have been floated as potential successors — including three named John. Here’s what to know about the top candidates to succeed McConnell.” (Nia Prater/NY)
“As generative AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini become more advanced, they are increasingly being put to work. Startups and tech companies are building AI agents and ecosystems on top of the systems that can complete boring chores for you: think automatically making calendar bookings and potentially buying products. But as the tools are given more freedom, it also increases the potential ways they can be attacked. Now, in a demonstration of the risks of connected, autonomous AI ecosystems, a group of researchers have created one of what they claim are the first generative AI worms—which can spread from one system to another, potentially stealing data or deploying malware in the process. ‘It basically means that now you have the ability to conduct or to perform a new kind of cyberattack that hasn't been seen before,’ says Ben Nassi, a Cornell Tech researcher behind the research. Nassi, along with fellow researchers Stav Cohen and Ron Bitton, created the worm, dubbed Morris II, as a nod to the original Morris computer worm that caused chaos across the internet in 1988. In a research paper and website shared exclusively with WIRED, the researchers show how the AI worm can attack a generative AI email assistant to steal data from emails and send spam messages—breaking some security protections in ChatGPT and Gemini in the process. The research, which was undertaken in test environments and not against a publicly available email assistant, comes as large language models (LLMs) are increasingly becoming multimodal, being able to generate images and video as well as text. While generative AI worms haven’t been spotted in the wild yet, multiple researchers say they are a security risk that startups, developers, and tech companies should be concerned about.: (Matt Burgess/WIRED)
“As a kid growing up on the Upper East Side and Southampton, I was surrounded by Capote’s infamous ‘Swans.’ Watching Feud has brought back some fun, feisty, and of course fabulously fashionable memories of swoony socialite swans Slim Keith, Lee Radziwill, C.Z. Guest, and Babe Paley (who was married to my uncle Stanley Mortimer before Bill Paley). Nancy ‘Slim’ Keith (born Mary Raye Gross in Salinas, California – her mother Raye Nell Boyer Gross later changed her name to Nancy) was a frequent dinner party guest at our apartment on 79th Street and house in Southampton. I always dug her round tinted sunglasses (worn at night) and brassy voice. I remember when Keith swooped into our front hallway, cigarette in hand, and announced that she had her purse snatched on Park Avenue. ‘I spotted this tall, handsome man staring at me down the block,’ she announced proudly. ‘I thought he was trying to pick me up but before I knew it, he had grabbed my bag and ran down the street.’” (Peter Davis/Avenue)
“Since the war in Gaza broke out, China’s role in the region has raised many questions. Only a year ago, China impressed the world when it successfully brokered the Saudi-Iran peace deal. That success inflated hopes that China, lacking the historical entanglements of other great powers, could somehow magically chart a new and effective course to de-escalation and conflict resolution in the Middle East. China has not delivered that success. China does have a vision and desire for an alternative security architecture in the Middle East and has elaborated on its plan since 2018. Instead of replacing the United States as a security guarantor, which China doesn’t want to do and doesn’t have the resources or ability to do, China’s vision for the future stability of Middle East is aimed at creating a new system that would displace U.S. dominance without replacing. The effectiveness of such a framework is questionable, but that is not China’s prime concern. China wants to demolish the U.S.-led security architecture, but not necessarily to build a new structure with Beijing on top. For the last few decades, China has enjoyed the security provided and maintained by the United States in the Middle East. Chinese analysts dispute that China has been freeriding, not only because they see economic engagement as an avenue for stabilization, but also because they see U.S. policy as a source of instability. But with 53 percent of its crude oil imports coming from the region, China has an intrinsic interest in maintaining the regional peace and stability so oil production and transportation will not be disrupted. There is a clear Chinese recognition that China does not have the resources to get into the weeds of the conflicts, their origins, and their potential solutions. Nor does China want to. China has long positioned itself as a customer and a client of Middle Eastern oil, a role that is believed to give China much power but without the burden for China to provide peace. But China does have alternative visions for the regional security architecture. In 2018, President Xi Jinping made a formal proposal to ‘forge a new Middle East security architecture that is common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable.’ In an ideal world, the security arrangement China says it wants in the region would be based on the accommodation of security concerns of all countries, consisting of political and security dialogues, led and managed by regional countries and abiding by U.N. charters.” (Yun Sun/FP)