The Weekly Newsletter
Welcome to the Weekly Newsletter. The ongoing plan–subject to change–is to apply the Morning Newsletter’s sensibility–snark, healthy skepticism, intellectual consistency–to a more comprehensive analysis of the previous week’s major news events. Basically, same voice but more thoughtful. We’re still waiting to see how it goes.
What happened this week?
On Friday, President Biden kicked off his re-election campaign with a speech at a community college in eastern Pennsylvania. The choice of locations, just a few miles from Valley Forge, was no accident. Biden framed the upcoming presidential contest as a battle between Trump’s relentless anti-democratic ambitions versus the defenders of the nation’s democratic principles, not unlike the battle between the forces of King George III and George Washington’s Continental Army 246 years ago.
Biden was lauded by the mainstream press and the political class for the forcefulness of his rhetoric and, indeed, it was one of Biden’s best speeches as president. But the question of how effective it was at persuading voters is unanswerable. Biden has lost the confidence of many young voters over his support for Israel and some of those same voters appear to underestimate the threat Trump poses–a consequence of the normalization of Trump’s behavior and rhetoric over the last decade. When faced with a binary choice between Biden and Trump, will those voters “come home”? It’s impossible to say right now.
The question of what impact the speech and similar subsequent speeches will have on swing and independent voters is equally unknown. The country seems to have soured on Biden and there’s probably not much he can do to reverse that trend. But he has one advantage no other unpopular incumbent has ever had; he’s running against Donald Trump. As attention shifts to Trump, with his conspiracy theories, breathtaking ignorance, misanthropy, grievance and sundry other failings, it should redound to Biden’s favor.
One thing is certain, however it ultimately plays out, at least politically, 2024 is going to be truly awful.
Embattled Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned on Monday after it surfaced that she had copied and pasted parts of her doctoral thesis from previously published work. Evidence of Gay’s plagiarism was uncovered by publications and individuals associated with the right, a fact supporters of Gay seized on since they couldn’t actually defend what she’d done. Rather than defend it, they decided to attack the motives of those who uncovered what she’d done. and when that didn’t work spent the remainder of the week minimizing her crimes. On Thursday, it came to light that the wife of a major Harvard donor who had been instrumental in forcing Gay’s resignation had also plagiarized her dissertation. The woman in question, Neri Oxman, wife of billionaire Bill Ackman and a former MIT professor, had apparently “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation.” according to Business Insider. And while that’s not great, Oxman hasn’t been employed as a professor since 2021 and she definitely wasn’t president of the most respected university in the world. But had she been, she too should have been fired. In the end, as is so often the case, everyone looked bad but the only real victim was trust in our institutions.
Speaking of American institutions with reputation problems, Boeing had an even worse week than Claudine Gay, the Ackmans, Harvard and liberal and conservative activists combined, when part of the fuselage from an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 kinda blew right off at 16,000 feet. Amazingly, no one was killed but that appears to have been mostly dumb luck since the seat next to the errant fuselage component was empty at the time it decided to no longer be part of the plane. The FAA immediately grounded all 737 Max 9s, pending inspections (some of which have already been completed and those planes have been cleared to fly). The incident is the latest hit for the once highly regarded aerospace company. As you may recall, about five years ago, a pair of 737 Max 8s crashed nose-first into the ground just after takeoff as a result of software problems with the upgraded aircraft. And just recently, Boeing asked airlines flying its Max 9s to inspect the jets for any loose bolts in the rudder system after an airline found the problem in two of its planes
In this week’s schadenfreude department, it was reported last week that Fidelity Investments believes the value of its shares in Elon Musk’s X have lost 71.5% of their value. Musk has continued to blame everyone–advertisers, Jews, internet research non-profits, the woke hive mind, etc–for Twitter's woes, and each time he’s managed to somehow miss the responsible party. But I’m not telling him
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HEY!!
i'm missing your reasoned take on current events, missing your sardonic observations, missing your blatant snark, and missing you.
hoping you've found something a lot more fun to do than commenting on the dilemmas and predicaments in the headlines.
give us a holla here if you're so inclined.
be well! <3
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