He Was The Times’s Moscow Chief. My Grandmother Was His Censor.
When I was a kid in Moscow, my grandmother told me that New York was the greatest city in the world, The New York Times was the greatest newspaper in the world, and Harrison Salisbury was its greatest journalist. She had made these determinations decades before she ever saw New York City or held a copy of The Times in her hands. As for Salisbury, she never met him. For several years, though, she read almost every article he wrote. She was also his government censor, the person whose job, at the Chief Directorate of Literature and Publishing, was to keep much of his work from ever being published.
M. Gessen, writing at the NY Times, remembers his grandmother, her career as a censor and Salisbury’s career as a foreign correspondent in Moscow.
Salisbury covered the USSR for the Times during World War II, left, and fought to never go back. But he returned in 1949.
He seemed to grasp the biggest story almost immediately. The Soviet government was waging a campaign to identify and imprison “rootless cosmopolitans” — a code word for “Jews.”
He wrote a story about the campaign, which Gessen’s grandmother censored.
My grandmother remembered this article as revelatory. But it contained nothing she didn’t already know. For more than a year, she and her circle of friends – young Jewish intellectuals in Moscow – had been living with a growing sense of fear. Many of them had had their university studies interrupted by the war and were just now, in their late 20s, graduating to find out that Jews had become all but unemployable. They read all the reports of high-profile Jewish writers, actors and critics being denounced, demoted and jailed, and they were sure this was just the beginning. Salisbury’s article reflected these facts and fears back to my grandmother.
The internet isn’t made of meat anymore — Bots have passed humans as the internet’s main source of traffic. Telcos need autonomous, AI-defended, sovereign networks to keep up. My latest on Fierce Network.
“White supremacy welcomed his rage, and that made it irresistible.” In prison, white supremacist literature is required reading:
To survive the box, you learn to fish. People on the outside call it solitary confinement, but it isn’t really, not even at a place like Upstate Correctional Facility, the supermax prison in Malone, New York, ten minutes from the Canadian border. It’s true at Upstate you’re locked down twenty-four hours a day. It’s true you spend twenty-three of those hours in a small concrete and steel cage, and that the twenty-fourth hour is spent in another concrete and steel cage that’s connected to, but even smaller than, the first. It’s true that for the whole time you’re at Upstate, you might not touch another human being, and it’s true you won’t see another person except through a tight mesh of steel wire and reinforced glass. And it’s true you might be locked down for years.
But man is a social animal, and even in a place like Upstate, people will find a way to communicate.
— Joseph Margulies, lithub.com/in-prison…
AI is a power tool, and like any power tool it’s dangerous if you’re careless with it. You can be the guy who warned everyone that a table saw can cut your fingers off and still lose a finger one day.…
— Don’t Write With AI, Say People Who Write With AI [Will Oremus / The Atlantic]
Gerbil — Journalist Allen Salkin’s multipart investigative podcast about that rumor about Richard Gere.
“A deep dive into Hollywood’s most infamous rumor — and what it reveals about celebrity, gossip, power, the internet and our own brains.”
I’m not sure about this podcast but I enjoyed the first episode and Salkin’s interview on Dan Savage’s podcast so I’ll stick with it for at least one more episode and see where it goes.
A Reckoning in Springfield [Stephanie McCrummen / The Atlantic]
Trucker Jack Buhring wrestles with trauma after he accidentally struck and killed 20-year-old Haitian legal immigrant Pierre Damas Bel on the highway outside Springfield, Ohio.
Bel, who had never violated any law and who had a solid job, was among the Haitians in Springfield ordered to check in to ICE field offices and wear ankle monitors.
Following the accident Bel’s father put out a statement saying “after my son was outfitted with this ankle monitor, he felt like he was treated like an animal.”
In 2024, the despicable J.D. Vance spoke the hateful lie that Haitians in Springfield were eating cats and dogs. When Vance was called out on the lie, he admitted it and said he was right to do it.
The People of Utah vs. Kevin O’Leary [Josh Dzieza / The Verge] Mr. Wonderful wanted to build the world’s largest data center. The neighbors had other ideas.