Don’t summarize: drive points home with highlights. That’s how you should summarize a long report. It’s also why no one is satisfied with Attorney General William Barr’s summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. If you write, you have to write summaries. Think of a summary as a movie trailer: it gives you the general…
Last week, the editors of the Boston Globe requested me to write an op-ed on Facebook and what needs to happen in the wake of its consistently poor behavior. Here’s a link to what they published, which will appear in Sunday’s “Ideas” section. (If you’re not a subscriber, you’ll have to provide your email address…
Thanks to research by Samuel Braslow of Los Angeles Magazine, we now know what kind of California vanity plate requests are rejected for being . . . well, a bit iffy. It’s a great case study in the challenges of content blocking policy; “I know it when I see it” is no way to determine…
Tim Murtaugh, Director of Communications for Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, sent a memo to TV producers regarding who they should put on TV. Imagine what would happen if we took this seriously? The text of Murtaugh’s memo to producers at networks like CNN is below. Memorandum To: Television Producers From: Tim Murtaugh Director of Communications,…
Is Donald Trump’s national emergency actually an emergency? Let’s take an unemotional look at that. Trump has declared a national emergency to get access to funds originally designated for other purposes so he can build his border wall. There are any number of analyses of whether this is legal, and certainly congressional Democrats and others…
President Trump announced the “American AI initiative” with an executive order. Like many such presidential pronouncements (and not just from Trump), it’s somehow both blustery and mushy. Let’s take it apart and see if it makes sense. In what follows, commentary is mine. Passages in bold italic are passive voice, weasel words, or other notably…
Donald Trump’s State of the Union message sounded like a rational if self-serving laundry list of dozens of platitudes and programs — you know, just like every other president’s. Except for one thing: He invented facts that are easily proven false. Why? The rest of this post is based mostly on the fact checks in…
We’ve heard a lot about the border wall in the last week — especially since Donald Trump has shut down the government until he gets funding for it. The messaging around the wall reveals that to Trump and his administration and his followers, it is a philosophical worry-stone, not a physical construct. For Trump to…
Very soon after Donald Trump announced he would withdraw the US troops now in Syria and many of those in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis resigned. Let’s read between the lines in his resignation letter. Resignation letters in the Trump administration tend to be short and uncontroversial. If you’re not leaving because…