What Happened Today: May 2, 2023
Pencils down in Hollywood; Biden sends soldiers to the border; college grads lack soft skills
The Big Story
Always game for a high-profile sequel, the writers of Hollywood went on strike on Tuesday, the first since 2007, in a dispute over salaries and scope of work while the industry recalibrates its business model in the era of platform streaming. The Hollywood studios are under intensifying pressure to squeeze profits from their platforms after plowing billions of dollars into new content to lure more subscribers. But while the belt tightening on production costs has helped pacify the anxious shareholders of the Hollywood conglomerates, the Writers Guild of America says its members are being forced into a gig economy of poorly compensated content creation.
The 2007 strike went on for 100 days and cost the California economy $2.2 billion, a work stoppage that became instantly visible to viewers as new episodes of popular television series and late-night talk shows were replaced with reruns. Today’s strike will potentially be less noticeable to viewers, at least at first, as platformers can tap into their libraries to rearrange the front page of their content portals, which have replaced linear television for millions of Americans. To what extent that distinction undermines the leverage of the WGA remains to be seen as union leaders seek to shore up the lost revenue stream of residuals from reruns that’s no longer going to writers, as well as increase payment and improve contract terms for the so-called mini rooms—which have writers creating multiple episodes for less money compared to the pilot episodes executives once ordered to evaluate if a new show would be green-lit.
According to the guild, its offer would cost the studios $489 million a year, with the current counteroffer from the studios falling far short at just $89 million. If the strike lasts a few days, studios could become incentivized to let the work stoppage stretch to at least eight weeks, the time period that will begin to trigger force majeure clauses that would unwind their contractual obligations to pay not just writers but also actors and directors on projects halted during the strike. At the Met Gala on Monday night, actress Amanda Seyfried gave her assessment of the dispute: “Everything changed with streaming and everybody needs to be compensated for their work. It’s fucking easy.”
Read More: https://apnews.com/article/writers-strike-hollywood-wga-926179281803e10b1d501dcab93e305d
In The Back Pages: The Vanishing
The Rest
→ Concerned that the upcoming sunset of Title 42 will lead to a massive surge of perhaps twice the usual volume of migrants attempting to cross the U.S. southern border, the Biden administration will deploy 1,500 troops for at least three months to support Border Patrol agents, according to U.S. officials speaking on background to the media on Tuesday. While troops have been sent to the border to aid in migrant processing as far back as the Bush administration, the current deployment of active-duty rather than National Guard soldiers is a notable wrinkle as President Joe Biden and his nascent re-election campaign contend with the tricky optics of a heavy military presence and a new set of restrictive immigration policies that will make it difficult for Biden to separate his approach from that of his predecessor and the current GOP front-runner, Donald Trump.
→ This might be your last chance to discover the meaning of life at 2 a.m. at a Vice party. The famed and at times infamous media property is reportedly on its way to declaring bankruptcy, capping off what would be one of the more spectacular media downfalls for an organization that was valued as high as $5.7 billion during a 2017 funding spree. Though Vice could ostensibly continue to maintain its myriad websites and video operations while the bankruptcy process seeks to find a high bidder, it’s likely it will fall under the control of its largest debt holder, Fortress Investment Group. In that case, Vice may be stripped for parts as its new owners try to recoup money on revenue-generating properties like its female-focused Refinery29 and its in-house ad agency, Virtue. Always a volatile market, digital media has been particularly inhospitable to news outlets as of late. Just last month BuzzFeed News announced it was shutting down and laying off 180 employees.
→ Last week we noted that the leader of BYD, China’s top electric car maker, said that it was “basically impossible” for the company to figure out how to create a safe, reliable self-driving vehicle. It now appears that California-based AI car start-up Pony.ai is poised to do just that, having picked up a new permit to run completely autonomous taxis on its ride-hailing app in Guangzhou, China. As pointed out by Scroll reader Michael Greenberg in the comments, Pony.ai has already racked up something close to 200,000 robotaxi orders across its platform since it began testing driverless rides in China in 2021.
→ Thread of the Day
A sultan rooster, a Barnevelder, and a splash Cochin bantam walk into a bar. Or onto a red carpet. That’s not a joke, but rather a thread from Tove Danovich who dutifully paired Monday night’s Met Gala red-carpet guests and their elaborate outfits to the respective types of fowl they resembled. Though Anna Wintour may not approve, she no doubt took home the prize as the evening’s strongest contender for a lemon millefleur sablepoot.
See it here: https://twitter.com/TKDano/status/1653166144214417408
→ Some of the biggest accounting firms in the world are rolling out extra soft-skill training for their youngest recruits since their pandemic-disrupted college educations left them struggling to communicate and work as well in teams as previous cohorts. Isolated from their peers and professors while spending two to three years learning remotely or in isolated clusters, the newest entry-level staffers are notably lagging behind their predecessors in how well they interact in meetings, make presentations, or talk to clients about delicate subjects. “There is a greater need for employers to provide training on basic professional and working skills that wasn’t necessary in prior years,” Jackie Henry, who leads recruitment for Deloitte’s U.K. division, told Bloomberg. Deloitte, PwC, and other professional services firms are trying to help their new hires close the skills gap before clients start to notice the dip in performance.
→ Just as Hollywood writers try to negotiate new contracts that forbid the use of AI to write source material for new content, one of the pioneer researchers who helped create the first prototype for AI systems, Geoffrey Hinton, is waging a war about the societal risks of advanced AI technologies.
Once called the Godfather of AI, Hinton, who co-founded an AI company that he and two students sold to Google for $44 million, is concerned that the new generation of AI chatbots like ChatGPT are beginning to surpass human intelligence by some metrics, a development that could help with some banal office work while leading to AI programs that eventually craft their own code to administer autonomous weapons.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton told The New York Times.
“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
→ While they’re not piloting drones just yet, chatbots are already having a major impact across publishing, with a new report from The NewsGuild that finds at least 49 online news websites publishing everything from politics to celebrity gossip to business coverage that’s made in part or in whole with AI technologies. Many of these web properties are recently launched, and the so-called content farms, which make money-selling ads alongside a high volume of cheaply made articles, are cranking out some stories that are entirely fabricated. That could soon become an issue for legitimate news outlets as they compete for eyeballs on the social media platforms where all of this content mixes together. In the end, the biggest loser might just be the consumer, who has to wade through an information ecosystem polluted by millions of half-baked bits of clickbait written by bots.
Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer behind a slew of hits, including “Early Morning Rain,” died on Monday. He was 84. Frequently covered by Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, Lightfoot saw the success he reached in his native Canada break over the border in 1970 when “If You Could Read My Mind” surged to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like,” Bob Dylan once said. “Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.” Lightfoot would continue to find success with other hits like “Sundown,” which he performs in the video here, and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which is based on the story of a disastrous sinking of a ship on Lake Superior.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Been Around the World by Nomi Kaltmann
Australian Daniel Herszberg visited every country on earth by age 30—and documented Jewish life, past and present, along the way
The Banality of Evil on TV by Jonah Raskin
From Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann’ to Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic,’ will we ever stop being entertained by fascism?
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
This article first appeared in Tablet in Feburary, 2023.
The Vanishing
The erasure of Jews from American life
By Jacob Savage
Suddenly, everywhere you look, the Jews are disappearing.
You feel it like a slow moving pressure system, an anxiety of exclusion and downward mobility. Maybe you first noticed it at your workplace. Or maybe it hit when you or your children applied to college or graduate school. It could have been something as simple as opening up the Netflix splash page. It’s gauche to count but you can’t help yourself: In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City—anywhere American Jews once made their mark—our influence is in steep decline.
For many Jews, the first instinct is to look inward: We blame intermarriage, assimilation, the loss of the immigrant work ethic. This is, of course, a cope. Because the most significant cause of the decline isn’t Jews themselves, but that American liberalism, our civic religion, has turned on us. Where Jewish success was once upheld as a sign of America’s strength and progress over its prejudices, Jewish “overrepresentation” is again something to be solved, not celebrated.
A tenure-track humanities professor at a prestigious public university tells of the finalists for her department’s next graduate school cohort. Of the 20 or so candidates, four to five are Jews. One is a working-class yeshivish applicant with an incredible backstory and even better recommendations. He is passed over for not being “diverse” enough. Of course our professor doesn’t complain— her own tenure is at risk. In the end, not a single Jew is offered admission.
Another Jewish professor applies to work in the UC system. In his mandatory diversity statement, which he describes as “the most shameful piece of writing I’ve ever done,” his sole aim is to convey the impression that he hopes to be the last Jewish man they ever hire. He still doesn’t get the job.
And why would he? Using YouGov data, Eric Kaufmann finds that just 4% of elite American academics under 30 are Jewish (compared to 21% of boomers). The steep decline of Jewish editors at the Harvard Law Review (down roughly 50% in less than 10 years) could be the subject of its own law review article.
The same pattern holds across America’s elite institutions: a slow-moving downward trend from the 1990s to the mid-2010s—likely due to all sorts of normal sociological factors—and then a purge so sweeping and dramatic you almost wonder who sent out the secret memo.
Museum boards now diversify by getting Jews to resign. A well-respected Jewish curator at the Guggenheim is purged after she puts on a Basquiat show. At the Art Institute of Chicago, even the nice Jewish lady volunteers are terminated for having the wrong ethnic background. There’s an entire cottage industry of summer programs and fellowships and postdocs that are now off-limits to Jews.
In 2014 there were 16-20 Jewish artists featured at the Whitney Biennial. After a very public campaign against a Jewish board member with ties to the Israeli defense establishment, the curators got the message. The 2022 biennial featured just 1-2 Jews.
Comb through the dozens of Jewish names for the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship (I count 30-40). You’ll have a much harder time finding them 10 years later (14-16).
From 2010 through 2019 there were at least three Jews in every MacArthur Fellowship class, sometimes as many as five or six. The Forward would write effusive columns celebrating the year’s Jewish geniuses. Since 2020, just 0-1 Jews a year have been awarded grants. The Forwardhasn’t bothered to take note.
Today American Jews watch with Solomonic bemusement as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is argued before the Supreme Court. On some level we sympathize with the Asian American plaintiffs, who are suing Harvard for using admissions criteria that discriminate against them on the basis of their race. Maybe they really are the new Jews, facing the same barriers—insidious racism, personality scores, rural geographic preferences—that we once did.
On the other hand, fancying ourselves to be high caste members of a beneficent elite, we pretend not to notice that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is a cudgel used to exclude certain groups of Americans, including Asians and Jews. Desperate to maintain their waning status within the liberal coalition, Jewish communal organizations ignore these contradictions. Once a protector of specifically Jewish interests but now secure in its new role as handmaiden to power, the Anti-Defamation League filed an amicus brief—in support of Harvard.
In the 1940s, the ADL took a different tack. For decades unofficial quotas at most Ivy League universities limited Jews to around 10% of the student body, despite evermore qualified Jewish applicants. Jewish organizations made it their mission to break this invisible barrier and by the end of the 1950s the quotas were a dead letter. The long summer of American Jewish success had begun.
But the seasons always change. A FIRE/Yougov survey found that self-identified Jews now number just 7% of Ivy League students, compared to 10% during the height of the antisemitic quotas.
In his gripping podcast Gatecrashers, about the history of Jews in the Ivy League, Mark Oppenheimer describes the troubled state of Jewish campus life. Harvard has gone from being 25% Jewish in the 1990s and 2000s to under 10% today. “In theory it could be the case that Jews are the same percentage of whites at Harvard as they always were,” he explains. “But Harvard has not shrunk the number of athletes it admits […] and they’ve kept their geographical diversity. So if you’re a Jewish kid who’s not an athlete and not a legacy and not from Wyoming … then there’s not much room left for you.”
According to the Hillel College Guide, Penn’s Jewish population declined from 26% in 2015 to 17% in 2021; NYU’s dropped from 24% to 13%. Princeton, Columbia, and Cornell have seen smaller but significant declines (Brown and Dartmouth, with different institutional priorities, are by all accounts happy exceptions).
Data from the Yale Chaplain’s Office—which appears to be the only Ivy League university that still tracks religious affiliation—shows a similar trend: The Jewish population went from 19.9% in the 2000s to 16.4% in the 2010s. A couple of years ago, the school’s chaplain told Meir Chaim Posner, the Chabad rabbi at Yale, that around 11% of Yale undergraduates were Jewish. “It’s dropped slightly since then,” Rabbi Posner told me in November.
“The university has decided that DEI is the overarching principle of admissions,” one Hillel director told me. “There’s a general consensus that it’s more difficult for Jewish students to get into top tier schools.” Nor is this difficulty confined to secular Jews—the modern Orthodox population has also crashed. A college counselor at a top Jewish day school reports that as universities have revamped enrollment and gone test-optional, the number of Orthodox students has decreased. “Every year has been harder,” he said. “Our ability to thoughtfully predict the likelihood of admission has gone way down.”
An uneasy omertà settles in. The Ivies skip college nights at Jewish day schools they visited for decades. At Penn there used to be two daily minyans—now there’s one. There are hushed whispers that if current trends hold, some of these colleges might no longer be able to support an Orthodox community at all.
The 1999 Hillel College Guide now reads like a map to a lost civilization. Harvard and Yale have 1,500 Jewish undergrads apiece. There are 5,000 Jewish students and grad students at Columbia, 6,000 at Penn, 14,000 at NYU. It’s hard to imagine that as recently as 2008, articles were being written about the “race” to attract Jewish students.
What was normal less than two decades ago sounds like a siren call from a distant golden age. To even suggest that a 15%-20% Jewish undergraduate student body might be acceptable in a country in which Jews make up 2.4% of the total population is anathema in today’s liberal society.
In New York—the seat of American Jewish political power—there are almost no Jews left in power. A decade ago the city had five Jewish congressmen, a Jewish mayor, two Jewish borough presidents, and 14 Jewish City Council members. Today just two congressmen and a single borough president remain. Only six Jews now sit on the 51-person City Council. Shelly Silver, the corrupt Orthodox former State Assembly leader, was replaced by Yuh-Line Niou, a pro-BDS “progressive” whose oligarch father was featured in the Panama Papers. Not even the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is recognizably Jewish anymore.
“What you have is a lack of identity of Jews as Jews,” the Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf told The Washington Post. “And they don’t have the power to ensure that there’s more than one Jewish congressman. It’s astounding.”
Younger Jews are being excluded from the liberal organizations their parents and grandparents helped create. Identitarian meltdowns roil the progressive world. The Women’s March, the ACLU, and the SPLC all get rid of Jewish leadership. There will be no more “Mighty Iras” in our lifetime. Not even the Jewish president of the Audubon Society is safe.
There are still powerful Jews in Washington—neo-Nazis on Twitter like to post photos of Biden’s cabinet—but the influence is waning. Is it a coincidence that in the U.S. Senate (a handsy group of old men if ever there was one) the only senator forced to resign during the #MeToo panic happened to be Jewish? Or that activists pushed for Dianne Feinstein’s resignation for the explicit reason that she be replaced by someone who isn’t Jewish?
Of the 114 federal judges appointed by Joe Biden (as of this writing), just 8-9 appear to be Jewish—in a field that’s historically been at least 20% Jewish. Liberals worship Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a magical Jewish Teletubby, but they wouldn’t dare nominate another “white woman” to the highest court anytime soon. We are back to the single Jewish seat on the court.
Apparently Jews have so much power and influence that the highest-ranking Jewish senator in history finds it too politically difficult to hire a 22-year-old version of himself. There were at least 15 Jews on Chuck Schumer’s staff of 64 in 2014. After facing pressure for not being diverse enough, and despite an enlarged staff of 89, he can no longer make a minyan.
In Los Angeles—America’s second most Jewish city—there are now just two Jewish City Council members, down from six in 2000. In last year’s infamous dustup, Nury Martinez, the sharp-tongued council president, had despicable things to say about Black people, Oaxacans, even Armenians—but Jews were barely a footnote. “Judíos cut their deal with South LA,” she said. “They are gonna screw everybody else.”
Read the rest here.
The vast majority of Jews in America have historically identified as Democrats, or Liberal. That was their first mistake. The Democrat party hates Israel, and is today become flagrantly anti-semitic. They are done exploiting the “usefulness” of the moneyed and successful Jewish donor population, and have moved on to the much greater moneyed and far more powerful tech and corporate class to fund their schemes, now unashamedly revealing their ever-true loathing of Jews that they always had. Their “usefulness” is no longer required. The question I’ve always asked is how Jewish Americans were ever so blind to this in the first place?
This is what woke anti Semitism looks like