In the hours following the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, his parents issued a statement that concluded with this plea: “Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.” That could be the rallying cry of the era. As was the case after the killing of Renee Good, the lies about the incident and the victim began immediately, and came from the very top. How do we get the truth out about this American son when an administration, its media and political enablers, and a social media army (fueled by AI-powered distortions and good old-fashioned falsehoods) are so determined to get the truth out of American life? In Minneapolis, protesters are recording masked agents, and agents are recording scenes from their perspective. But as Charlie Warzel explains in The Atlantic, even these realtime recordings can’t deliver agreement about what happened among those who view them through filters poisoned by partisanship and relentless lying. “A dark irony of our current age is that there is more video and photographic evidence than ever before, and yet propagandists can coerce or convince others to not believe what they can see with their own eyes.” It’s easy enough to say, Believe Your Eyes, but it’s something else to convince others to believe theirs. 2Street Level View“For weeks, these agents had been actors in a kind of theater of power, meting out various forms of state force and violence, framed by the smartphone cameras they carried, providing a steady stream of content for the Trump administration’s various social media platforms. What was clear in person, seeing the scene outside of the frame, were the limits of this performance of power. The agents had no capacity to maintain order or much apparent interest in doing so. Their presence was a vector of chaos, and controlling it was not in their job description. All that was holding the crowd back, as far as I could tell, was the knowledge that an officer like these shot a woman a week earlier and that another shot a man up the street an hour ago. I left the scene that night certain it would happen again.” NYT Magazine(Gift Article): Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis. 3Doc’ing Station“Like many people who strap on an Apple Watch every day, I’ve long wondered what a decade of that data might reveal about me. So I joined a brief wait list and gave ChatGPT access to the 29 million steps and 6 million heartbeat measurements stored in my Apple Health app. Then I asked the bot to grade my cardiac health. It gave me an F.” Luckily for Geoffrey A. Fowler, ChatGPT’s analysis of his health data was wrong. But when you read AI analysis, especially when you’re desperate for answers, it often sounds right. WaPo (Gift Article): I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data. Then I called my doctor. 4The Grand Scheme of ThingsIf you’re a busy, tired, stressed parent looking for new ways to get your own parents to help out with the kids, and the usual guilt trips aren’t working, here’s a new angle. Tell them taking care of their grandkids is for their own good! Helping to raise your grandchildren? It’s good for your brain. Researchers “found that seniors who provided child care for their grandchildren − including watching them overnight, caring for sick grandkids, playing with them, helping with homework, making meals and driving them to school and extracurriculars − scored higher on memory and verbal fluency tests than those who were not caregivers.” 5Extra, ExtraThe Last Hostage: “The remains of the last hostage held in Gaza have been identified, the Israeli military said Monday, ending a more than two-year saga for captives’ families in Israel — and paving the way for the second phase of the ceasefire in the war-torn enclave.” 6Bottom of the News“Climber Alex Honnold successfully completed a ‘free solo’ ascent up the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taiwan on Saturday, doing so without a rope or harness in an event that streamed live on Netflix for a worldwide audience.” |
Monday, January 26, 2026
Unfortunate Son
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