Archives for August 2020

In the last four years, there have been more than 1,200 unique titles about Mr. Trump, compared to around 500 books about former President Barack Obama and his administration during Mr. Obama’s first term, according to an analysis by NPD BookScan. There have been so many high-profile books about the Trump era that there’s even a forthcoming book about all the Trump books: “What Were We Thinking,” by the Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada, who surveys some 150 titles that try to explain how Trump won and has governed, and what his presidency tells us about the country that elected him.

Also driving the unusually high volume and sales of Trump books is the churn of turnover in the West Wing, accelerating the normal timeline for insider accounts, which usually arrive after a president has left office. Mr. Trump has expressed his outrage over some of the books, responding with irate tweets and legal complaints that drive even more news coverage and further sales boosts.

Some in the industry credit the soaring sales of political books with lifting the industry overall in recent months, in spite of the pandemic and economic crisis. Print unit sales are up more than five percent this year so far compared to the same period in 2019, according to NPD BookScan.

With just two months before Election Day, a bumper crop of Trump books is landing. Next month, Skyhorse, an independent publisher, is rushing out “Disloyal,” a memoir from Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and fixer, who made explosive claims about Mr. Trump’s behavior in a foreword he released on his website. Skyhorse is anticipating a hit, with a first printing of 600,000.

Other significant Trump books coming next month include Mr. Woodward’s “Rage,” an investigative work that details Mr. Trump’s dealings with North Korea and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic; a book by Andrew Weissmann, the lead prosecutor in the special counsel’s office; a book about the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russia’s election interference by Peter Strzok, a former F.B.I. deputy assistant director of counterintelligence, and “Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President,” by Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for The New York Times. A memoir from Rick Gates, a high-level aide on the 2016 campaign and a witness in the Russia investigation, is slated for October publication.

There is also “Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady,” by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former friend and adviser to the first lady. She has said that she was forced out of the administration and “thrown under the bus” following reports about excessive spending on the inauguration, which she was closely involved in.

“There’s always some publisher or some agent saying the interest in Trump is exhausted, this book did really well, but no one wants to read anymore about this,” said Matt Latimer, a founder of Javelin, a Washington-based literary agency. “And then another book comes out that everyone wants to read. And it never ends.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/books/trump-books.html

The directive, which came from Fred Silverman, then the head of daytime programming at CBS, also asked that a pop song be embedded in each episode, as was done on “The Archie Show.” The idea was for the new series to be soothing and nonviolent, an answer to the moral panic about violence in the media in the wake of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, said Kevin Sandler, an associate professor of film and media studies at Arizona State University.

The pop song part didn’t work out. But Mr. Ruby and Mr. Spears hit all the other marks by writing an adorable half-hour comedy-mystery with a lovable and hapless Great Dane — a character modeled, they often said, on the character Bob Hope played alongside Bing Crosby in the “Road” movies. After 15 or so drafts, they realized that the dog, Scooby-Doo, was the star. (The artist was Iwao Takamoto, another Hanna-Barbera veteran, who died in 2007.)

A half-century later, episodes of “Scooby-Doo” are still being broadcast, and it is considered the most spun-off series in the history of television, having spawned other series as well as feature films, video games, comic books and other merchandise, said Mr. Sandler, who is working on a book about the show. In 2004, the show beat “The Simpsons” to set a Guinness record for “most prolific cartoon,” at 350 episodes.

It has inspired fans in every decade, who cleaved to characters like the beatnik slacker Shaggy (based on Maynard G. Krebs from “Dobie Gillis”) and the bespectacled brainiac, Velma, who would become a lesbian heroine.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/arts/television/joe-ruby-dead.html

The company is also building more support for outside subscriptions into the product, including an account-linking feature that allows subscribers to stay logged in to their news accounts while reading articles on Facebook.

As global regulators devise different strategies to rein in technology giants, companies are facing the complicated decision of modifying their products for different markets. European competition authorities have demanded changes — and Google has complied — for how Google directs users of its Android smartphone software to its own services. Google has also agreed to concessions in its search engine in Russia at the behest of regulators.

By taking aim at Google, whose dominant search engine is the gateway for information and news, and Facebook, the largest social network with billions of users, Australia’s regulator seeks to address what it calls “power imbalances” between news publishers struggling with the collapse of traditional media and conglomerates with thriving online ad businesses.

In a call with investment analysts in August, Robert Thomson, chief executive of the media giant News Corp, said the legislation in Australia was an “inflection point” for the internet.

“I can assure you that not only regulators but media companies around the world and the digital platforms are watching Australia closely,” he said.

Facebook said that the country’s regulators did not understand the relationship between news and social media, and that publishers benefited more from Facebook than the other way around.

“We want to pay for journalism — we believe in journalism and have demonstrated that,” said Campbell Brown, vice president of global news partnerships at Facebook, in an interview. “Our plan was to make real investments in news in Australia. But this is not a workable outcome.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/technology/facebook-block-news-stories-australia.html

Already, the Trump administration has placed sanctions on dozens of Chinese companies in recent weeks over alleged security threats and human rights violations, and it has threatened to take more measures to block Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and Baidu from doing business in the United States. Under Mr. Trump, the sale of Grindr, the gay dating app, to Beijing Kunlun Tech Co., a Chinese company, was unwound.

Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser known for his harsh criticism of China, said in an interview on Monday that it was “critical” that Americans not use apps that are made in China because Beijing could use them to surveil, track and potentially even extort Americans.

“That’s really the policy position underlying why we have gone after TikTok and WeChat and there will be others because China, communist China, the Chinese Communist Party, is basically going out around the world trying to acquire technology and influence,” he said. Of Mr. Trump, he added, “This country and this president, the strongest president on China in history, is not going to put up with that.”

Mr. Navarro said he was not part of the negotiations over TikTok’s sale, a deal that was being reviewed by the Treasury Department. The White House referred a request for comment to the Treasury Department, which did not respond.

According to an analysis by the U.S.-China Business Council, China’s new export controls affect two technologies that are critical for TikTok — the data analytics used to create personalized information feeds, and technology that governs user interactions with artificial intelligence, including voice recognition and other voice technologies.

To transfer these technologies to partners out of China, exporters now need to obtain several approvals from their provincial commerce department, a process that can take up to 45 working days. ByteDance has said that it will comply with the new regulations.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/technology/tiktok-export-us-china.html

In a taped speech for the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night, accepting the best direction prize for her gender-switch video “The Man” from her 2019 album, “Lover,” Taylor Swift took a moment to recognize her fans’ support of her latest LP.

“Everything that you guys have done with ‘Folklore’ this summer,” Swift said, stationed in a strangely featureless room, “I am just so blown away and taken aback by your generosity to me.”

What her fans have done is send “Folklore” to the top of the Billboard album chart for five consecutive weeks — the only album to have notched that accomplishment since Drake’s “Scorpion” two years ago. It’s also Swift’s first time spending so many weeks at No. 1 in a row since “Fearless,” her breakthrough second album, which came out in late 2008 and, for a stretch into 2009, had seven straight No. 1s. (In total, “Fearless” spent 11 weeks at the top.)

“Folklore,” which was released last month with less than a day’s notice, had the equivalent of 98,000 sales in the United States in its fifth week out, including 60 million streams and 52,000 copies sold as a full album. To help move hundreds of thousands of copies of “Folklore” as a complete package, Swift has offered fans dozens of merchandise bundles through her website, and lately sent autographed CDs to indie record stores around the country.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/arts/music/taylor-swift-folklore-billboard.html

But as the American examination of racism has intensified, one of Mr. Sullivan’s convictions has grown further out of step and more unsettling even to those inclined to disagree agreeably with him.

When The Times published an article as part of its “1619” package last year about how old racist beliefs about Black people’s pain tolerance linger in modern medicine, Mr. Sullivan sent the author, Linda Villarosa, an arch note through her website. She’d written in passing of the stereotype “that Black people had large sex organs,” and he asked whether there was data on sex organs that “show that it is a myth.” She forwarded the email to the project’s leader, Nikole Hannah-Jones, asking if the note might have been a prank. In fact, Mr. Sullivan was up late, and tipsy, in London when he sent it, he told me, and meant it as a kind of “gay joke.”

Ms. Villarosa told me she found it a “bizarre” and “unkind” to send a jokey email asking to prove a negative in response to an article about a “corrosive myth that got people killed.”

Then Ms. Hannah-Jones hit him with it on Twitter in the course of a dispute on the 1619 Project.

The flap reminded his colleagues and critics of Mr. Sullivan’s original sin, his decision to put on the cover of the Oct. 31, 1994, New Republic a package titled “Race and I.Q.” The package led with an excerpt from the book “The Bell Curve” by the political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard Herrnstein. They claimed that I.Q. test results are in large part hereditary and reveal differences among races; it produced piles of scientific debunkings. Many — including contributors whom Mr. Sullivan invited to object — saw the piece as a thinly veiled successor to the junk science used to justify American and European racism for decades. Politically, it offered elites an explanation for racial inequality that wasn’t the legacy of slavery, or class, or racism, or even culture, and thus absolved them of the responsibility to fix it. The authors “found a way for racists to rationalize their racism without losing sleep over it,” the political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote in a response in The New Republic.

When George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in May, Mr. Sullivan said, his editors asked him to “be careful,” suspecting that his views on race in America would not be palatable to their audience in that moment, two senior New York employees told me. He decided instead to take the week off from column writing.

In the previous year, Mr. Sullivan had focused his ire on the politics of race and identity, seemingly relishing the chance to challenge what he saw as an increasingly “woke” mainstream media. But “The Bell Curve” excerpt — which Mr. Sullivan always says that he published but did not embrace — lingered over those pieces and framed criticism of him. One fellow writer, Sarah Jones, called him the “office bigot” on Twitter. The new editor of New York, David Haskell, didn’t push him out because of any new controversy or organized staff revolt, the two New York employees said. Instead, the shift in culture had effectively made his publishing of “The Bell Curve” excerpt — and the fact that he never disavowed it — a firing offense, and Mr. Haskell showed Mr. Sullivan the door before the magazine experienced a blowup over race of the sort that have erupted at other publications.

So what does Mr. Sullivan believe about race? On his back porch looking over the bay, Mr. Sullivan said he was frustrated by the most extreme claims that biology has no connection to our lives. He believes, for instance, that Freudian theories that early childhood may push people toward homosexuality could have some merit, combined with genetics.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/business/media/im-still-reading-andrew-sullivan-but-i-cant-defend-him.html