Losing My Perspicacity January 17, 2025

Democracy died in darkness; Mark Zuckerberg has a super duper new friend; Bill Belichick still hasn’t signed his UNC contract; A SpaceX starship experienced “rapid unscheduled disassembly; and The High Note, courtesy of the Detroit Lions.

Author

Julie DiCaro
January 17, 2025

Sponsored by

Good morning and Happy Free Friday! Thanks for being here.

Yesterday, the world lost both Bob Uecker and David Lynch. While I loved the original Twin Peaks and think it was way ahead of its time, I was never into Lynch’s movies the way some of my friends are, though I recognize that this is a failing on my part rather than Lynch’s. I hate it when art just doesn’t resonate with me, despite knowing it should. Kyle McLaughlin, in particular, shared a lovely tribute to Lynch.

Bob Uecker, on the other hand, was omnipresent during my childhood, between beer ads and his appearances on various talk shows and, of course, his hilarious role in Major League as play-by-play guy Harry Doyle, which wasn’t that much of a departure from how he called Brewers games in real life.

More than just about anyone else I can think of, Bob Uecker was baseball. He took the game about as seriously as he took himself; he was ridiculously quick on his feet when it came to comedy, and he understood that fans want to feel like they’re watching the game with a buddy. Uecker was everyone’s buddy. I especially love this interview he did with Johnny Carson. Come for the Bob Gibson story, stay for the knuckleball joke.

MLB also did a great tribute video.

RIP Bob. Summers will never be the same without you.

Today, Democracy died in darkness; Mark Zuckerberg has a super duper new friend; Bill Belichick still hasn’t signed his UNC contract; A SpaceX starship experienced “rapid unscheduled disassembly; and The High Note, courtesy of the Detroit Lions.

Losing My Perspicacity is an independent newsletter that relies on subscriptions to stay alive. If you’d like t LMP in your inbox five days a week, please consider becoming a premium subscriber. Either way, I’d really appreciate it if you’d click on the ad below, as it helps me pay Beehiv’s monthly fee.

Your NFL Tickets Are Gold—Turn Them into Cash with Lysted

You’re an NFL season ticket holder—you know the value of a great game. But when you can’t make it, why let those seats go empty? Lysted lets you turn those unused tickets into cash effortlessly. Just list once, and let them take care of the rest, selling your tickets across all major platforms like StubHub, Ticketmaster, and SeatGeek. It’s fast, easy, and gets you paid without lifting a finger.

Here we go.

It took Jeff Bezos 11 years to kill the Washington Post, born in 1877

When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post back in 2013, I remember wanting to celebrate. Bezos, at the time, seemed like a forward-thinking guy with deep pockets who would take a hands-off approach to media ownership, which was exactly what the paper needed. Hire the best people possible, give them the resources they need, and let them run with it.

While many people began to have misgivings about Bezos and Amazon in the years prior, 2024 is when the tech billionaire took off the mask, revealing himself to be just another narcissistic billionaire who cared only about protecting his wealth, the repercussions to the rest of the world be damned.

In November of 2023, Bezos named Will Lewis the CEO and Publisher of WaPo. That hiring sparked an outcry from subscribers and staffers alike, as Lewis came from a British tabloid past (having worked for both Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black) and had been implicated in an infamous UK hacking scandal. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote of Lewis, “Blazoned across the top of every edition of the Washington Post is the statement, ‘Democracy dies in darkness. But what if the publisher himself is a master of the dark arts?” Lewis dug himself a further hole by trying to suppress coverage of the allegations against him, both at the Post and at NPR.

Then came the 2024 election and Bezos’ inexplicable decision to kill the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for President, costing the paper 300,000 subscribers. Bezos claimed that decision was made ensure the paper didn’t appear biased. That did not stop WaPo, however, from endorsing nearly all Trump’s nominees for cabinet positions.

That brings us to today, when Bezos and Lewis debuted the new mission statement for the Post. Gone is the iconic “Democracy Dies in Darkness” line adopted in 2017 and seemed perfect for the age of Trump. Instead, WaPo’s new mission statement is “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”

The slide deck that (the Post’s Suzi) Watford presented describes artificial intelligence as a key enabler of The Post’s success, the people said. It describes The Post as “an A.I.-fueled platform for news” that delivers “vital news, ideas and insights for all Americans where, how and when they want it.” It also lays out three pillars of The Post’s overall plan: “great journalism,” “happy customers” and “make money.” The Post lost roughly $77 million in 2023.

Let’s take these in turn.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the Washington Post, as we think of it, is dead and gone. In recent days, the paper has been hemorrhaging talent, with several star reporters leaving for friendlier pastures. The paper that took on the Pentagon and brought down a President has embraced a president-elect who was adjudicated liable for sexual abuse and tried to stage a coup to seize power. “Riveting Storytelling for All of America” couldn’t be a bigger dog whistle to the right, giving credence to the trope that the only people who read the Post are leftist intellectuals on the coasts. Pour one out for Katherine Graham and legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee.

Secondly, the Post has essentially told its core readership to get lost and seems to think that embracing AI will close the gap left by all those canceled subscriptions. Having come from an outlet that also tried to use AI to score free content without pesky human journalists getting in the way, I can promise you it won’t work. First, AI isn’t nearly advanced enough to do what media management seems to think it will do, which is to replace human reporters. AI writes stories from information already on the internet, which means no original reporting. Secondly, AI makes a ton of mistakes. By the time a human editor has gone through the story to find all the problems and edit the robotic writing, you might as well have had a human do it in the first place.

This is from a few days ago. If AI can’t even write an accurate summary, do you really want it writing your news?

This is my periodic rant that Apple Intelligence is so bad that today it got every fact wrong its AI a summary of @washingtonpost.com news alerts. It's wildly irresponsible that Apple doesn't turn off summaries for news apps until it gets a bit better at this AI thing.

— Geoffrey A. Fowler (@geoffreyfowler.bsky.social)2025-01-15T18:15:41.907Z

Not a single one of those things happened.

And it’s far from the only example of AI being terrible at what people think it can do. So many people making decisions at media companies are in love with the idea of having bots write stories instead of human beings. Fortunately for writers, the technology is not there — and neither is the demand from readers — but outlets keep pushing ahead anyway because they all want to be seen as innovators. It’s going to end badly.

I hope readers are as insulted by Bezos’ dim view of them as they should be. I encourage you not to click on or read anything the Post publishes — you can always find it elsewhere. WaPo was once perhaps America’s most important newspaper, the one with the reputation for dogged reporting and a relentless pursuit of the truth no matter the circumstances. There have to be consequences for destroying that. The only means regular Americans have of showing their displeasure is to ignore this new, diabolical version of a once great newspaper.

Mark Zuckerberg has a super duper new friend

Wait until you find out who it is!

Back then, (Stephen) Miller was a mere Senate staffer railing about the evils of immigration. Now he was holding forth on U.S. policy with the billionaire chief executive of Meta, a man he had vilified for years as a globalist bent on destroying the nation.

The scale had flipped.

Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s terms. He made clear that Mr. Trump would crack down on immigration and go to war against the diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., culture that had been embraced by Meta and much of corporate America in recent years.

Mr. Zuckerberg was amenable. He signaled to Mr. Miller and his colleagues, including other senior Trump advisers, that he would do nothing to obstruct the Trump agenda, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would instead focus solely on building tech products.

Suddenly, so many things make sense, like Meta guidelines allowing users to harass and insult the trans community, immigrants, and women. And remember former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg? The woman who told working women everywhere to “lean in” to their careers, without mentioning that she was worth $500 million and had access to nannies, private jets, a small army of household servants, and all manner of things most working moms only dream of? Sandberg also didn’t mention that women give their sexist bosses a scapegoat when they want to embrace a fascist regime.

Mr. Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for an inclusivity initiative at Facebook that encouraged employees’ self-expression in the workplace, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting. He said new guidelines and a series of layoffs amounted to a reset and that more changes were coming.

Earlier this month, Mr. Zuckerberg’s political lieutenants previewed the changes to Mr. Miller in a private briefing. And on Jan. 10, Mr. Zuckerberg made them official: Meta would abolish its D.E.I. policy.

We’ve really fallen into a weird place when people are apologizing for inclusivity and self-expression among their employees. All of this is just days after Zuckerberg gave a completely unhinged interview to Joe Rogan, in which he decried corporate America’s gender neutrality and complained that there isn’t enough “masculine energy” in most companies. Everything he does these days is rife with “I really, really, really want the tough guys who smoke in the bathroom and shove me into a gym locker every day to like me” energy.

I think The Guardian had the best headline all week.

The perfect headline doesnt exi— www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

— Laura Bassett (@lebassett.bsky.social)2025-01-16T19:18:51.346Z

Rebecca Shaw writes:

Whether I am engaging with the news, or with Musk tweeting constantly like a man with no job or friends, or with Zuckerberg sending out weird videos and appearing on Rogan, I am in pain. Not just because I don’t like what they are doing but because they are so incredibly, painfully cringe.

I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.

****

Zuckerberg is a different kind of cringe – but cringe all the same. His cringe moments drip through more sparingly but, when they do, my body tries to turn inside out at my bellybutton. His physical makeover for Maga reasons, performing music because no one will stop him, trying to look cool on a surfboard – all these are extremely difficult to watch. He has been trying to suck up to Trump, going on Joe Rogan’s show to say society has been “neutered” and companies need “more masculine energy”

His wife has to be embarrassed, right? I’d be so embarrassed.

These are the men controlling how tens of millions of people get their news and information, and it means absolutely nothing to them. No matter how many billions you make, you can’t outrun being a dork in high school. That stays with you.

I can’t condone any of this, so I’ll be leaving Facebook and Instagram soon (waiting for Bluesky’s photo platform to launch and to make sure my friends in LA are all okay). I hate the idea of losing touch with so many friends, but I can’t be a part of Zuckerberg’s pivot to hate and bigotry. I’ll be over on Bluesky going forward.

Thank you for pushing the self-destruct button

As long as we’re taking tech oligarchs down a few pegs, I’ll point out that a SpaceX “starship” (lame) experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” yesterday. That’s scientist talk for “it blew up.”

“Starship experienced rapid unscheduled disassembly”

— David Leavitt (@davidleavitt.bsky.social)2025-01-16T23:56:30.356Z

It’s not a “starship” if it doesn’t even make it out of our atmosphere, Elon. Shoutout to all the planes over the Caribbean that were in danger of SpaceX debris falling on their heads.

Here’s a visualization of all the flights that had to redirect due to the falling debris. There’s also a video on Twitter of the debris falling through the sky, taken by an airplane pilot from their airplane cockpit. It was close to civilians in transit.

— (@tayturs.bsky.social)2025-01-17T01:41:20.380Z

I’m calling “Rapid Unexpected Disassembly” for Fantasy Football next season.

Bill Belichick still hasn’t signed his UNC contract

During my time practicing law, I dealt with a lot of contracts. Plea agreements, divorce settlements, parenting agreements — they’re all just different kinds of contracts. So I know how long they take to finalize and how much work goes into them. Often, the parties have an agreement in principle that ends the controversy, but the actual contract isn’t signed for months.

All of that said, I find this weird.

I guess I buy that explanation, but it still seems hinky to me, mostly because of the insane buyout structure of Belichick’s contract.

If he leaves UNC before June 1, 2025, Belichick owes the school $10 million. But if he leaves after that day, his buyout drops to only $1 million. That means any team can buy him out for $1 million months before his Tarheels take their first snap. Hell, Belichick can probably buy himself out at that price.

Given that I’m a person who believes that this entire UNC thing is Belichick’s way of giving a giant middle finger to the NFL, and given all the coaching vacancies right now…well. I’ll believe Belichick is actually going to be a college coach when I see it. And even if I do see it, I’d put money on it not lasting long.

The High Note

Each day, I endeavor to leave you, if not with a song in your heart, with a smile on your face. Here’s today’s attempt. The Detroit Lions have called “dibs” on a 31-lb 6-month old baby. It’s never too early to start thinking about the future of the O-Line.

Here’s the original video.

@madisonpeltzer

He’s in the 99th percentile for everything 🫠 we love a chunky baby!!!! #firsttimemom #fatbaby #barbie #momsoftiktok #mom #momlife #viral #fypシ゚viral

The “average” size of a 6-month-old is 17 lbs. But “average” doesn’t get you to the playoffs!! Amirite Dan Campbell?

Survive and advance today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

See you on Monday.

Reply

or to participate.