One afternoon last fall, I sat in the Free Speech Movement Café, on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, drinking a fair-trade, shade-grown coffee. Students at nearby tables chatted in Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and English; next to me, a student alternated between reading a battered copy of “The Myth of Sisyphus,” by Camus, and checking Facebook on her phone. “This café,” a placard read, “is an educational reminder for the community that the campus freedoms we take for granted did not always exist, and, in the democratic tradition, had to be fought for.” In the fall of 1964, left-wing students at U.C. Berkeley demanded the right to hand out antiwar literature on Sproul Plaza, the red brick agora at the center of the campus. The administration refused, citing rules against the use of school property for external organizing. The students’ struggle, which became known as the Free Speech Movement, consumed the university’s attention for much of the academic year, and made minor national celebrities of the movement’s undergraduate leaders—especially Mario Savio, who was rakish enough to be a countercultural icon and articulate enough to be interviewed on television. Joan Baez went to Berkeley to show support for the students, singing “We Shall Overcome” from the steps of Sproul Hall. In the end, the students won, and some of them went on to join the next generation of professors and university administrators. “Freedom of speech,” Mario Savio once said, “is the thing that marks us as just below the angels.”

Fifty-three years later, the mood on campus was distinctly less celestial. Like the agitation throughout the country, the agitation at Berkeley had many long-roiling causes, but its proximate cause was easy to identify: a right-wing professional irritant named Milo Yiannopoulos. A former Breitbart editor and a self-proclaimed “Internet supervillain,” he was known less for his arguments than for his combative one-liners and protean, peroxide-blond hair. Another word for “Internet supervillain” is “troll,” and, whenever too many news cycles passed without any mention of him, Yiannopoulos showed up somewhere unexpected, such as the White House press briefing room or a left-leaning college campus, hoping to provoke a reaction.

In the process, he convinced his supporters that he should be a poster child for campus free speech, a principle that is universally lauded in theory but vexingly thorny in practice. In the 2017-18 academic year, Politico reported, an unusually large number of universities struggled “to balance their commitment to free speech—which has been challenged by alt-right supporters of President Donald Trump—with campus safety.” One expert on campus life called this “the No. 1 topic of the year.” Many college administrators were forced to devote their scarce time and money to securing on-campus venues for pugnacious right-wing speakers such as Ann Coulter and David Horowitz; arch-conservative policy entrepreneurs such as Heather Mac Donald and Charles Murray; and avowed racists such as Richard Spencer. These are names that a lot of Americans would prefer to forget. All of these figures hold views that are divisive, or worse. Yet this is precisely what makes them useful test cases. The Supreme Court’s most important First Amendment opinions often concern the lowliest forms of human expression: a burning cross, a homophobic slur, a “bong hits 4 jesus” banner.

Yiannopoulos, who claims to disdain identity politics but rarely forgoes an opportunity to call attention to his sexual orientation, spent much of 2016 and the early part of 2017 on what he called the Dangerous Faggot Tour, visiting dozens of colleges across the country. Each stop was part Trump rally, part standup show, part PowerPoint deck, and part bigoted rant. At U.C. Santa Barbara, a group of young men wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats carried Yiannopoulos into the venue on a litter; he then delivered, in a genteel Oxbridge accent, a lecture called “Feminism Is Cancer.” At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he projected a photo of a transgender student, subjecting her to public mockery. “It’s just a man in a dress, isn’t it?” he said.

The last stop on his tour, on February 1, 2017, was U.C. Berkeley, the nation’s preëminent public university, in one of its most proudly left-leaning cities. A week before Yiannopoulos’s arrival, the U.C. system had reaffirmed its promise to protect undocumented students from arrest and deportation. In response, Yiannopoulos called for Berkeley’s administrators to be criminally prosecuted. There were rumors that he planned to name undocumented students from the stage, alerting Immigration and Customs Enforcement to their presence. There was little that administrators could do. At a public institution, cancelling a speech because of what the speaker might say is called prior restraint, and the courts have generally deemed it unconstitutional.

On the afternoon of the event, fifteen hundred protesters amassed on Sproul Plaza. Some called themselves Antifa, for “anti-Fascist,” a loose collective of far-left vigilantes who draw inspiration from the European anarchist tradition. A few protesters, wearing black clothing and bandannas or masks over their faces, hurled metal police barricades through a plate-glass window of Berkeley’s student center; someone set fire to a lighting rig, and flames leaped several stories into the air. A Berkeley student, wearing a red hat that said “Make Bitcoin Great Again,” was interviewed by a local news crew as the mayhem escalated behind her. “I’m looking to just make a statement by being here, and I think the protesters are doing the same,” she said. “And props to them, for the ones who are doing it nonviolently.” Moments later, a masked protester ran up and pepper-sprayed her in the face.

Police evacuated Yiannopoulos from campus before he could speak. The next morning, the riot was the lead story on “Fox & Friends.” The show’s most prominent fan, Donald Trump, who had been President for less than two weeks, tweeted, “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - no federal funds?” The whole spectacle was such a boon to Yiannopoulos’s brand that some left-wing conspiracy theorists wondered whether he had hired the masked protesters himself.

Spring came, and then summer. The annual Berkeley Kite Festival took place at the marina. Biologists from Berkeley published a paper in Science explaining how chickens grow feathers. Yiannopoulos wrote a book that included some of the zingers he’d trotted out at his college talks, and it reached No. 2 on the Times nonfiction best-seller list.

Carol Christ, a scholar of Victorian literature and a former president of Smith College, took office as Berkeley’s new chancellor. She had been a Berkeley professor for many years, beginning in 1970—close enough to the Free Speech Movement to be touched by its spirit. A few days into the fall semester, she announced that a student group had invited Yiannopoulos back to Berkeley, and that she intended to let him speak. Citing the Bill of Rights and John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty,” she declared that her first academic year as chancellor would be “a free speech year.” “We would be providing students with a less valuable education,” Christ wrote, “if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous.” The homage was surely unintentional, but “Dangerous” happened to be the title of Yiannopoulos’s book.

Whether a sophist like Milo Yiannopoulos may speak at a public university like Berkeley is less a question of what the law is than of what the law should be. The Supreme Court has been consistent, during the past half century or so, in its broad interpretation of the First Amendment. “Speech can’t be prevented simply because it’s offensive, even if it’s very deeply offensive,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law and the co-author of a book called “Free Speech on Campus,” told me one morning in his office. He grimaced sympathetically as he talked, like a doctor delivering bad news. “I would argue that it’s generally a good idea to protect speech we don’t like, even when we’re not legally obligated to do so, but in this case we are.”

Voltaire, anti-Semite and sage of the Enlightenment, is credited with the aphorism “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Chemerinsky, arguably the foremost First Amendment scholar in the country, believes, in the Voltairean tradition, that free speech is the bedrock of a free society. I asked him about the Antifa activists who had vowed to shut down Yiannopoulos’s events by any means necessary. “Violence is never protected by the Constitution,” he said. “And preventing the speech of others, even by using one’s own speech, is called the heckler’s veto, and it is not protected, either.”

On talk radio and social media, many free-speech advocates lack Chemerinsky’s judiciousness. Some answer every challenge with a recitation of the First Amendment, as if its forty-five words were a magic spell that could settle any debate. Free-speech skeptics on the left can be equally predisposed to bad-faith arguments—misreading or ignoring the Constitution, dismissing the concept of free speech as inherently racist, or simply bypassing discourse and setting public property on fire.

There are better arguments. “No one is disputing how the courts have ruled on this,” john a. powell, a Berkeley law professor with joint appointments in the departments of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies, told me. “What I’m saying is that courts are often wrong.” Powell is tall, with a relaxed sartorial style, and his manner of speaking is soft and serenely confident. Before he became an academic, he was the national legal director of the A.C.L.U. “I represented the Ku Klux Klan when I was in that job,” he said. “My family was not pleased with me, but I said, ‘Look, they have First Amendment rights, too.’ So it’s not that I don’t understand or care deeply about free speech. But what would it look like if we cared just as deeply about equality? What if we weighed the two as conflicting values, instead of this false formalism where the right to speech is recognized but the harm caused by that speech is not?”

Yiannopoulos and many of his defenders like to call themselves free-speech absolutists, but this is hyperbole. No one actually believes that all forms of expression are protected by the First Amendment. False advertising, child pornography, blackmail—all are speech, all are illegal. You’re not allowed to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, make a “true threat,” or incite imminent violence. These are all exceptions to the First Amendment that the Supreme Court has made—made up, really—over time. The boundaries can and do shift. In 1940, a New Hampshire man was jailed for calling a city marshal “a damned Fascist.” The Supreme Court upheld the conviction, ruling that the words were not protected by the First Amendment, because they were “fighting words,” which “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”

Are some of Yiannopoulos’s antics—say, his attempts to intimidate undocumented and transgender students—closer to fighting words than to intellectual discourse? Maybe. But the fighting-words doctrine has fallen out of favor with the courts. In 2006, the Westboro Baptist Church picketed a soldier’s funeral, carrying signs that read “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “You’re going to Hell.” Even factoring in almost seven decades of epithet inflation, this would seem more injurious than “damned Fascist.” And yet the Supreme Court ruled that the signs were protected by the First Amendment.

In the nineteen-seventies, when women entered the workplace in large numbers, some male bosses made salacious comments, or hung pornographic images on the walls. “These days, we’d say, ‘That’s a hostile workplace, that’s sexual harassment,’ ” powell said. “But those weren’t recognized legal concepts yet. So the courts’ response was ‘Sorry, nothing we can do. Pornographic posters are speech. If women don’t like it, they can put up their own posters.’ ” He drew an analogy to today’s trolls and white supremacists. “The knee-jerk response is ‘Nothing we can do, it’s speech.’ ‘Well, hold on, what about the harm they’re causing?’ ‘What harm? It’s just words.’ That might sound intuitive to us now. But, if you know the history, you can imagine how our intuitions might look foolish, even immoral, a generation later.”

In the media, and on his Facebook and Instagram feeds, Yiannopoulos tirelessly promoted his return to Berkeley. Instead of a mere lecture, he envisioned “a huge, multi-day event” called Milo’s Free Speech Week. A video had recently come to light in which he’d made some deeply ill-advised comments about pederasty. Afterward, he’d been widely condemned on both the left and the right. He seemed to hope that his Berkeley appearance would restore him to mainstream relevance, and perhaps marketability.

He posted a schedule, at FreeSpeechWeek.com, that culminated in the presentation of the first annual Mario Savio Award for Free Speech. (Savio died in 1996; his son Daniel told the Guardian that Yiannopoulos’s appropriation of his father’s legacy was “some kind of sick joke.”) When Yiannopoulos spoke privately to his influential friends on the far right, he often said, “This will be our Woodstock.” He released a list of more than twenty speakers, which included many of the usual free-speech warriors and also some surprising names, such as the secretive military-security magnate Erik Prince. In addition to Yiannopoulos, the four headliners would be Ann Coulter; Pamela Geller, a virulently Islamophobic blogger from Long Island; Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist and vigilante journalist; and Steve Bannon, newly fired from his job as Trump’s chief strategist. To build anticipation, Yiannopoulos’s team made promotional videos about each headliner, in the style of an action-movie trailer. “Bannon Infiltrates Berkeley,” less than thirty seconds long, has been viewed more than thirty thousand times.

Mindful of the potential for violence, some students requested a robust police presence; others suggested that more police on campus would make them feel less safe, not more; still others demanded that the university cancel Free Speech Week. More than a hundred and fifty Berkeley faculty members and graduate students signed an open letter calling for a campus-wide boycott. Christ told me that she never considered cancelling the event. “The reputational cost would simply be too high,” she said. Reputational cost is impossible to quantify, but the literal cost to U.C. Berkeley, in security fees alone, was likely to exceed a million dollars. The university had a budget deficit of more than a hundred million dollars, with less funding coming from the state in recent years. “Would I rather devote our precious resources to more class sections, overdue building repairs, or many other things we badly need?” Christ continued. “Absolutely. But we have to make this work.” Others on campus speculated that Yiannopoulos’s real goal was to force a government-subsidized institution to expend as many resources as possible. On FreeSpeechWeek.com, there were T-shirts for sale reading “Defund Berkeley.”

Traditionally, outside speakers don’t have unilateral power to schedule their own events on college campuses—like vampires, they have to be invited in—and Yiannopoulos was the guest of a conservative student organization called the Berkeley Patriot. “We don’t want to seem like we support someone like Milo, because we don’t,” Pranav Jandhyala, one of the Patriot students, told the DailyCal, the campus newspaper. “We’re simply inviting him because free speech is protected.” As the ostensible organizers of the event, the students had to sign contracts and waivers, assuming significant legal risk. At the time, the Berkeley Patriot had existed for only a few months. It had between five and twenty active members, depending on the definition of “active.” For a while, the administration and the Patriot students worked well together. “We’re treating them the way we’d treat any other students who are taking on something difficult and need our support,” Dan Mogulof, the assistant vice-chancellor for public affairs, told me. “We want to be sure that they don’t feel unsafe or marginalized.”

Then things began to fall apart. The university set several deadlines, and, amid negotiations over contracts, the Patriot students missed them all. It also became clear that Yiannopoulos’s lineup was not a list of confirmed speakers but a wish list. “Contrary to news reports, I have not been contacted about participating in Free Speech Week,” Heather Mac Donald tweeted. Erik Prince told The Atlantic that his presence on the list was “a typo.” Bannon said nothing publicly, but several people told me that he was scheduled to be in China that week. “I would never under any circumstances appear at an event that included Milo Yiannopoulos,” Charles Murray told The Chronicle of Higher Education. Asked why, Murray responded, “Because he is a despicable asshole.”

Carol Christ told me, “The metaphor I’ve been thinking about a lot is that of an object and its shadow. At first, I was imagining a conventional lecture: the lecture is the object; the digital recording is its shadow.” We were sitting in her office, which she hadn’t had time to finish unpacking. Several copies of the Norton Critical Edition of “The Mill on the Floss,” which she had edited, remained in a cardboard box on the floor. “By contrast,” she continued, “when I consider Milo’s—I’ll use the word ‘event,’ although I’m not sure that that’s exactly the right word—it’s becoming clearer that he’s actually trying to plant a narrative, a trail of impressions and images, that lives primarily in the digital world, and that we, this physical campus, are merely the shadow.”

Yiannopoulos is not the only orator who has figured out that a speaking gig at a public university, especially in the face of fierce ideological opposition, is an easy way to attract an audience. “My college tour began after the victory by Donald Trump,” Richard Spencer, a proponent of “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” said in a recent YouTube video. “I loved it. I thought it was a great success, and so did most everyone else.” Such speakers often portray themselves as soldiers for free speech, but more often they use the First Amendment as a convenient shield.

One fall afternoon at Berkeley, outside the Free Speech Movement Café, several undergraduates gathered in a semicircle around an oversized poster, Sharpies in hand, doing what their liberal-arts curriculum had trained them to do: dissecting a text. “This is so full of fallacies, I just assumed it was by a student,” one of them said. In fact, it was a transcription of a lecture that the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro had delivered on campus the previous week. A former Breitbart editor, he now runs a site called the Daily Wire and hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the most popular right-wing podcast in the country. A first-year student with pink highlights in her hair pointed to one sentence: “The Constitution was not written by a bunch of people who speak Korean.” It was one step in Shapiro’s argument that there was no systemic racism in the United States. “As an Asian-American, I feel personally attacked,” she said, adding, “I’m, like, half joking.” Another sentence on the poster read, “Income inequality is not the big problem; nobody rich is making you poor.” Above the latter clause, a student had written, in blue, “False premise, no one suggests that.” Another student wrote, in red, “Read Marx plz.”

Shapiro tries to appeal to both the pro-Trump and the anti-Trump factions of the Republican base, spitting out indignant syllogisms in a rapid nasal delivery that sounds like a podcast played at double speed. He had reserved a lecture hall on Sproul Plaza, and a thousand protesters showed up outside the venue. Compared with Yiannopoulos’s appearance, there were far more police, and they were far more aggressive. They arrested nine protesters and confiscated a few sticks and other potential weapons. There was no violence—at least, not of the physical variety. “Speech is violent, we will not be silent!” a group of students, standing outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union, chanted. Later, I asked Viana Roland, a political-science student who had joined the chant, what she’d meant. Roland is from Santa Maria, a farm town several hours south of Berkeley. “Folks in my family pick strawberries, and some of them are undocumented,” she said. “Shapiro says that systemic racism is a myth. That is an apologetics for white supremacy, an ideology with a long legacy of violence.” Because she was an Afro-Latina, she said, “that violence might be an abstraction to some people, but it’s not abstract to me.”

I asked john powell what he thought about the rhetorical tactic of conflating speech with bodily harm. “Consider the classic liberal justification for free speech,” he said. “ ‘Your right to throw punches ends at the tip of my nose.’ This is taken to mean that speech can never cause any kind of injury. But we have learned a lot about the brain that John Stuart Mill didn’t know. So these students are asking, ‘Given what we now know about stereotype threat and trauma and P.T.S.D., where is the tip of our nose, exactly?’ ”

Adam Jadhav, a Ph.D. student in Berkeley’s geography department, has little patience for the classic liberal approach. While lecturing in a course called Global Environmental Politics, he projected a slide arguing that Yiannopoulos’s event was “not about robust exchange of ideas” but “about a shadowy political element weaponizing a narrow interpretation of the First Amendment.” A conservative student took a photo, in which Jadhav is clearly identifiable; someone sent it to Yiannopoulos, who shared it on Instagram.

“Idiots in the comments were calling me a fat slob because I didn’t tuck in my shirt,” Jadhav told me at a taquería a couple of blocks from campus. “I was, like, dude, come on, it’s a kurta.” Jadhav has thick-framed glasses, a small hoop earring, and a tattoo of a parrot on his forearm. The parrot, in a speech bubble, quotes Marx: “The point, however, is to change it!” “It” refers to the world. Marx was expressing his exasperation with armchair philosophers who are all talk and no action.

“I consider myself an activist, not just an academic,” Jadhav continued, ordering a beer. “I align myself with Antifa, although that term is sometimes misunderstood. I’m not Black Bloc”—the masked, black-clad contingent that uses violence. “Most of us, percentage-wise, are not Black Bloc. I do, however, think it’s important to stand up against hypernationalism and Fascism in all its forms. That might entail breaking unjust laws, but that’s how progress has always been made.”

After Jadhav’s picture circulated online, Christ wrote him a warm e-mail expressing her sympathy. He thanked her, but urged her to “control the narrative” when it came to Yiannopoulos. “What I meant was: Let’s not get played,” Jadhav said. “He’s coming here to make people afraid, and to milk us for attention.” There were real victims of government overreach—dozens of protesters rounded up in mass arrests at Trump’s Inauguration; Desiree Fairooz, an activist who was arrested for laughing during the confirmation hearing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions—but Yiannopoulos, who has never been jailed or injured at his speeches, wasn’t one of them.

Recently, on Fox News, Ben Shapiro said, “Everything has been deemed hate speech on campus. . . . There is a big part of the left—and it’s growing—that says that it is incumbent to protect the campus from ideas that are dissenting.” This premise has become commonplace, even among liberals, but the evidence is mixed. One study, from 2015, did find that forty per cent of millennials, a greater proportion than in any other age group, would want the government to be able to censor speech that is “offensive to minority groups.” But another study, conducted the following year, found that only twenty-two per cent of college students wanted universities to ban offensive speech—a lower proportion than in the rest of the American adult population. In March, a political scientist named Jeffrey Sachs analyzed the most recent data, broken down by age. In conclusion, he tweeted, “There is no campus free speech crisis, the kids are all right, those that say otherwise have lost all perspective, and the real crisis may be elsewhere.”

It was a bright Friday morning, and Dan Mogulof, the Berkeley public-affairs administrator, was speed-walking to California Hall, a Beaux-Arts building where the chancellor and other top administrators have their offices. In theory, Free Speech Week was to begin in forty-eight hours. But, Mogulof had told me, “No speakers have been confirmed, no venues have been confirmed, no one on Milo’s team will answer simple questions.” Margo Bennett, the chief of campus police, said that “pretty much everything we know about Milo’s plans, at this point, we’re getting from his Instagram.”

At the entrance to California Hall, Mogulof took a call on his cell phone. His eyebrows shot up, and he pumped his fist like a golfer sinking a long putt. Then he hung up and paced the corridors, popping in through various doors and interrupting meetings. “Sorry, friends, but it’s rare that I get to bring good news,” he said to a roomful of deans and assistant chancellors. “I’m just now—as in, right now—learning that a Berkeley Patriot student is telling local media that the event is off.”

College administrators across the country were watching Free Speech Week closely. Richard Spencer was scheduled to speak soon at the University of Florida, and Charles Murray had been invited to the University of Colorado in Boulder. Officials from both schools were embedded with Berkeley’s administrators, Mogulof said, “to observe—see what works, see what doesn’t—and apply those lessons when it’s their turn in the hot seat.”

Mogulof hurried to Sproul Plaza, where he had called a press conference for print and TV reporters, both local and national. “I just texted someone from the Patriot,” one reporter said to another. “I asked if Free Speech Week was cancelled, and the response was ‘LOL, unclear.’ So that’s my headline, I guess: ‘LOL, Unclear.’ ”

As Mogulof spoke to the reporters, an undergraduate sociology student walked by, holding an iced coffee and a Rice Krispies Treats wrapper. She shouted a question at Mogulof: “Students have a right to go to their classes and feel safe in their classrooms, and you’re ready to compromise that for, like, the First Amendment that you’re trying to uplift?”

“Your concerns are right on the money,” Mogulof said. The student was not satisfied. She continued to ask questions, using her phone to film the interaction. As she talked, a few of the TV cameras swung toward her. “Please do not take video of me!” she said, holding up her phone like a talisman.

“Um, it’s a press conference,” one of the camera operators said.

A newspaper reporter said, “How’s that for free speech?”

That night, I called Yiannopoulos and asked him where he was. “I’ve landed in San Francisco, but my specific location is top secret, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m not even telling dear friends, much less the press. For security reasons. I’m sure you understand.”

It took me twenty minutes to discover his secret location, and another forty-five minutes to get there by bart. It was a chain hotel situated between a strip mall and an eight-lane highway, in the commuter suburb of Walnut Creek. I found Yiannopoulos and his entourage in a “Grill & Lounge” area decorated in at least five clashing shades of taupe. Yiannopoulos greeted me with a kiss on the cheek, as though he had no memory of our earlier conversation. “Normally, we stay at places that are far, far posher than this,” he said. “If you follow my Instagram, you know that already. But I’m afraid this trip had to be thrown together at the last minute. For security reasons, you understand.”

Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon were no-shows. Joining Yiannopoulos were a few of his employees and the two remaining headliners, Pamela Geller and Mike Cernovich. “I’ll do anything for Milo,” Geller said, sipping a cocktail. “He and I are the same piece of kishke, as my grandmother used to say.” Her persona is reminiscent of late-career Joan Rivers, but with more splenetic bigotry and fewer punch lines. “If Milo doesn’t have freedom of speech, nobody does,” she went on. “Besides, his company’s publishing my next book, so it’s good cross-promotion.”

“Milo, what’s the deal tomorrow, man?” Cernovich said. “Are we speaking on campus? Off campus? What the fuck is going on?”

“O.K., so this hasn’t been announced yet, but we’re giving a big press conference on Treasure Island,” Yiannopoulos said. “I’m going to make my entrance by speedboat, with a camera trailing me on a drone, and we’re going to be live-streaming it all on Facebook.”

“I don’t do boats,” Geller said. “I projectile-vomit. But I love it for you, Milo, it’s a fabulous idea. I predict two hundred and fifty thousand viewers watching that live stream, at least.”

“I’ll be wearing this gorgeous Balmain overcoat—I’ll show you—with this huge fur collar,” Yiannopoulos said.

Geller and Cernovich changed the subject to Internet censorship. “They kicked me off Google AdSense,” Geller said. “I was making six figures a year from that. You can’t even share my links on Pinterest now! I’m ‘inappropriate content.’ ”

Yiannopoulos looked bored. “You guys are so selfish,” he said. “We used to be talking about me.” He turned to his stylist, a glassy-eyed, wisp-thin man, and whispered, “Go get the coat.”

They continued hashing out plans. “So we’ll walk in with you, through the streets of downtown Berkeley,” Cernovich said. “If there’s a screaming Antifa crowd, and if I maybe have to street-fight my way in and break a few noses in self-defense, that’s all good optics for me.”

“Maybe we should line up on the Sproul steps,” Yiannopoulos said, “surrounded by Berkeley students wearing ‘Defund Berkeley’ T-shirts.”

“Why don’t we march in with our arms linked together, like the Martin Luther King people, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’?” Cernovich said.

“We’ll do our thing, and then at some point the protests will turn violent,” Yiannopoulos said. “That will become the focus, and then we can just get ourselves out of there.” He reclined in his chair and smiled. “It’s all coming together,” he said.

The stylist came back with the coat, and Yiannopoulos squealed. “Pamela, is this coat to die for or what?” he said.

“Oh, my God, Milo, I’m dying,” Geller said. “It’s sick.”

He put the coat on and turned around, again and again, examining his reflection in the darkened glass of a window.

“It’s fabulous,” Geller said. “It’s sick. I hate you.”

There was no speedboat, no drone footage, no press conference on Treasure Island. Yiannopoulos, live-streaming on Facebook from his hotel room, delivered what he called a press conference, although the only questions came from online commenters. He invited Christ “to participate in a debate with me.” Later, when I asked her whether she would consider accepting his offer, she laughed.

The next day, police escorted Yiannopoulos, Geller, and Cernovich onto Sproul Plaza through a back entrance. The plaza was ringed by police in riot gear; helicopters thumped overhead; snipers were visible on the rooftops. A crowd of supporters and protesters gathered outside the barricades, waiting to be let in. Yiannopoulos was not allowed onto the Sproul Hall steps. Instead, he stood on a concrete landing nearby, facing about thirty people. “I am here, in the name of Mario Savio, to make you stop!” one protester shouted.

Yiannopoulos addressed his audience. “I invite you to join me for a moment, on your knees, to pray,” he said. “Pray for each other, for the fortitude and strength to carry on, to fight for free speech in the face of overwhelming odds.” He knelt and clasped his hands. Few joined him. Geller tried to lead the crowd in a rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” but, beyond those three words, nobody could remember the rest of the song. After about fifteen minutes, Yiannopoulos took a couple of selfies and left. No arrests were made, and no violence was reported. “I don’t even know if this is gonna make it to air tonight,” a local TV reporter said.

As his caravan left town, Yiannopoulos live-streamed from the back seat of an S.U.V. “We don’t care if the police are throttling access to make sure there’s only thirty people there,” Yiannopoulos said. “None of that stuff is gonna deter us, because we don’t crave acceptance and publicity the way liberals do. We just want to be left alone.” I watched the stream with Mogulof, who was eating a York Peppermint Patty. “So I guess that was the most expensive photo op in Berkeley’s history, huh?” he said.

The day after his fifteen-minute Free Speech Week, Yiannopoulos left for Hawaii, and Berkeley tried, warily, to return to normal. In a classroom at the law school, john powell was teaching a seminar on civil rights. One student asked whether something like the intentional infliction of emotional distress, a concept from tort law, might be extended to free-speech cases. “It’s an interesting question,” powell said. “Why do we think, for example, that burning a cross is injurious? It’s just a symbol. And yet even Clarence Thomas, who is rarely sympathetic to such arguments, recognizes that the symbol itself is emotionally injurious.”

They discussed Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case upholding a Louisiana law that segregated railcars by race. “The petitioner argued that segregation ‘stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,’ ” powell said. “But the Court rejected that and said, in effect, ‘If you feel stigmatized, it’s just in your mind.’ ” That changed in 1954, when the Court issued its unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. “They finally found that segregation was, in fact, inherently harmful,” powell said. “And what was the harm? The Court was very explicit: it’s psychological harm.” He paused, arching an eyebrow slightly. “This means that there is precedent for weighing psychological injury as a real concern.”

Later that fall, Judith Butler, the cultural theorist and Berkeley professor, spoke at a forum sponsored by the Berkeley Academic Senate. “If free speech does take precedence over every other constitutional principle and every other community principle, then perhaps we should no longer claim to be weighing or balancing competing principles or values,” Butler said. “We should perhaps frankly admit that we have agreed in advance to have our community sundered, racial and sexual minorities demeaned, the dignity of trans people denied, that we are, in effect, willing to be wrecked by this principle of free speech.”

Butler’s partner, the political philosopher and Berkeley professor Wendy Brown, was teaching a course called Introduction to Political Theory. “It was an amazing experience to be discussing Mill while all this stuff was blowing up around us,” she said. “It’s one thing for a student to feel that, through the free exchange of ideas, ‘the truth will out.’ It’s another thing to defend that position while Milo is staging his political theatre outside your window.”

Shortly before winter break, Carol Christ recorded a YouTube video. “In many ways, it was a classic Berkeley semester,” she said, “as we dealt with complex, controversial issues that played out across the campus and the country.” A Berkeley student recorded a parody, holding a mug of tea and wearing a Carol Christ costume consisting of a gray wig and a sweater cape. In a chipper voice, she spoke of “a classic Berkeley semester” in which “Nazis frolicked across the campus”—a result, the Christ impersonator said, “of my neoliberal, Fascist-aligned white feminism.” She topped off her tea with a generous pour of whiskey.

Some speakers began to lose their taste for on-campus provocation. In March, Richard Spencer appeared at Michigan State University. Two dozen protesters and counterprotesters were arrested outside the venue—the Pavilion for Agriculture and Livestock Education—and Spencer ended up speaking to a near-empty hall. Afterward, he posted a video. “I really hate to say this, and I definitely hesitate to say this,” he said, “but Antifa is winning.”

The last time I checked, the only content on FreeSpeechWeek.com was a photo of Yiannopoulos and the words “milo will return to berkeley in spring 2018.” I texted Yiannopoulos, who had recently been shilling dietary supplements from the InfoWars studio, in Texas, to ask whether this was true. “Yes I am going back to Berkeley,” he responded. “Working it out with the students now.” No one at U.C. Berkeley had heard about any such plans.

Still, conservative speech at Berkeley continued in Yiannopoulos’s absence. In April, Charlie Kirk, the executive director of the national conservative student group Turning Point U.S.A. and a friend of Donald Trump, Jr., announced that he would give a talk at Berkeley. He tweeted:

My message will be quite clear:

Open borders are inhumane

We must build a militarized wall

There are only 2 genders

Berkeley should be defunded.

Speaking alongside Kirk was Turning Point’s communications director, Candace Owens, a vitriolic young conservative with a knack for creating viral moments. Before she went by her own name, Owens was a YouTuber who called herself Red Pill Black, a reference to the fact that she was an African-American who had “escaped the Democrat plantation.” Near the beginning of the talk, two hecklers stood up, and one of them shouted, “These aren’t ideas, this is Fascism.” They were ejected, and the audience cheered. “Antifa, if you really take a look at their platform . . . they seem to be the ones that are the white supremacists,” Owens said. “They feel like their ideas are so supreme to everybody else’s that they have the right to boycott, to be violent.”

Four days after the panel, Kanye West tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks,” followed by several tweets in which he expressed his “love” for Donald Trump. Despite widespread bewilderment and outrage, West refused to back down, insisting that his views were not about politics per se but about the higher principle of untrammelled expression. “Love who you want to love,” West tweeted. “That’s free thought.”

In late May, Congress held a hearing on “Challenges to the Freedom of Speech on College Campuses.” One of the witnesses was Bret Weinstein, a biologist who, until recently, taught at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington. Last year, after he wrote a controversial e-mail, students protested and demanded that he be fired. Amid growing unrest on campus, a group of students posted a photo of themselves wielding baseball bats. Weinstein sued the college, alleging that it had failed to protect him from “threats of physical violence,” and left his teaching job. The college admitted no wrongdoing, but settled for half a million dollars. At the congressional hearing, Weinstein was introduced with the title Professor-in-Exile. “The First Amendment is simply not sufficient to protect the free exchange of ideas,” he said.

Near the end of the school year, I met Erwin Chemerinsky, the law-school dean, at a coffee shop in downtown Berkeley. “There is no guarantee that the marketplace of ideas will lead to truth, and that’s obviously a big problem,” he said. He is a Voltairean, not a Panglossian. Nonetheless, he continued, “My distrust of government is so great that I can’t think of a way to address that problem without making it worse.” Later, I talked to john powell. “There are any number of areas—gay rights, animal rights, housing—where legal reformers have set out to change the law,” he said. “If our speech laws looked more like Canada’s, would that be the end of democracy as we know it?”

Classes were over. The year of free speech, for all practical purposes, had come to a close. Outside California Hall, next to the Free Speech Bikeway, a grounds crew was spreading cedar mulch on the flower beds. The plate-glass window on Sproul Plaza had been replaced; nearby, seniors were putting on their caps and gowns and posing for photos. A shin-high self-driving robot scooted across the plaza with a sticker on its flank (“How’s my programming?”).

In 2014, at a teach-in commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Wendy Brown spoke against trigger warnings and in favor of exposing students to new ideas. “When we demand, from the right or the left, that universities be cleansed of what’s disturbing,” she said, “we are complicit with the neoliberal destruction of the university.” Back then, Milo Yiannopoulos was still an obscure opinion journalist, and Donald Trump was still a reality-show magnate. “I haven’t radically shifted my position, but it’s fair to say that I’ve shifted my emphasis,” Brown told me. “I’ve become newly attuned to how free speech can be used as cover for larger political projects that have little to do with airing ideas.”

Carol Christ told me that the events of the past academic year hadn’t changed her faith in the First Amendment, but that they had made her wonder how an eighteenth-century text should be interpreted in the twenty-first century. “Speech is fundamentally different in the digital context,” she said. “I don’t think the law, or the country, has even started to catch up with that yet.” The University of California had done everything within its legal power to let Yiannopoulos speak without allowing him to hijack Berkeley’s campus. It was a qualified success that came at a steep price, in marred campus morale and in dollars—nearly three million, all told. “These aren’t easy problems,” Brown told me. “But I don’t think it’s beyond us to say, on the one hand, that everyone has a right to express their views, and, on the other hand, that a political provocateur may not use a university campus as his personal playground, especially if it bankrupts the university. At some point, when some enormous amount of money has been spent, it has to be possible to say, O.K. Enough.” ♦

Learn more at The New Yorker

IT WAS EARLY JUNE WHEN THE LEGENDARY CONGRESSMAN John Lewis cancelled his scheduled commencement address at the University of California, San Diego. Lewis had backed out in a show of solidarity with a union strike involving UC workers just two weeks before graduation. Gary Robbins, a science and technology reporter at the San Diego Union Tribune was juggling three stories that afternoon, but found time to cover the news anyways. Robbins is not a higher-education reporter, but his work places him on UCSD and other research university campuses in the area frequently. Without a dedicated higher-education reporter at the daily paper, the 40-year veteran has become the paper’s de facto correspondent, filing higher-education stories when he can find the time.

Robbins says he might have missed the Lewis story were it not for a tip he got from a student reporter.

All over the country, daily newspapers and metro sections have thinned as revenue streams have dried up. For the education beat, this has left journalists responsible for covering impossibly large areas—and more reliant on college newspapers. The burden is especially potent in California, home to a three-tiered public university system that represents a massive chunk of the state budget and includes California State University–the largest in the US—as well as the 10-campus University of California system and a host of public community colleges.

Gabriel Schneider, a recent graduate of UCSD and founder of the independent student news outlet, The Triton, broke the news and then gave Robbins a heads up, who later wrote a story of his own including comment from a Triton staff member. For Robbins, higher education is a kind of “subbeat,” one that he has to cherry-pick ideas from.

“I’m not on campus everyday to find stories,” he notes. But Schneider and other student reporters like him are, and their coverage is increasingly vital.

“They’re essential. They don’t have formal training, but they keep banging on doors and asking the right people the right things, so sometimes when stories surface it comes up first from student reporting,” says Robbins.

Robbins maintains contact with editors at the Triton and at The Guardian, another independent UCSD student newspaper, and he’s in touch with student reporters at nearby San Diego State University. Those relationships help him keep tabs on developing stories on campus in a way that might otherwise be impossible.

And when newsworthy things happen on campus that have implications beyond the college gates, student journalists offer local reporters a starting point–and sometimes a directory–for potential sources.

Last year, The Triton covered protests from some student groups after the Dalai Lama was invited to speak on campus. Schneider says soon after, reporters from The New York Times were on campus to cover the controversy–and they linked back to their story. In January, as the national conversation around immigration and the future of young undocumented immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program raged, a UCSD student with DACA made a wrong turn and accidentally crossed the Mexican border. He was detained while trying to re-enter. Schneider covered the news for the Triton before the local daily picked up the story. (He was eventually released.) Earlier this year the Triton ran a story about a university professor who publicly denigrated a student who transferred from a community college that was later covered by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In California, the presence of higher-education reporters varies widely. Outlets like CalMatters, KQED, inewsource, and Voice of San Diego have education reporters covering the state with a focus on both K-12 and higher education matters. Often this work is investigative and infrequent. Outlets like EdSource cover education exclusively. (Two higher-education reporters are stationed in Los Angeles.)

Teresa Watanabe, the Los Angeles Times’s higher-education reporter covers the University of California system extensively (another reporter previously focused on the California State system, but the position is currently vacant). She says she makes a point of keeping track of what student journalists are covering, and has picked up stories from them in the past, including this story about a UC Berkeley student who ran for a student senate seat as a squirrel–and won. It was first covered by The Daily Californian, the campus’s student newspaper.

Megan Burks, the sole education reporter at KPBS in San Diego, covers a whopping 42 K-12 districts, about eight community colleges, and four major universities. She hasn’t collaborated with student journalists, but says they’re often “a step or several” ahead of her when she starts digging into a higher-education story. And student reporters have appeared on the station’s midday show to talk about stories that they weren’t able to assign a staffer to, says Burks.

“I’m the only education reporter at my station. I’m taking more of a global view as opposed to tracking the progress of student fee increases or a referendum,” she says. She uses student newspapers most often, she says, when “I start digging and looking for a way to localize [a story] or I’ve heard rumblings and start googling to see where the sources would be, usually the first hits [are] student newspapers.”

In the Bay Area, local reporters at places like the East Bay Expressand the San Francisco Chronicle work to dig into higher-education news–and major stories such as the free speech debate routinely attract national interest. But Suhauna Hussian, a former editor at UC Berkeley’s The Daily Californian, worries that smaller—but equally important—stories are slipping through the cracks.

“There is no shortage of stories that need telling, even at a place like UC Berkeley that receives so much scrutiny from national media,” says Hussain. She offered instances of sexual misconduct in university Greek life as an example.

“The Daily Californian broke a story about the UC Berkeley chapter of Sigma Chi: Leadership knew about repeated allegations of drugging and sexual assault and didn’t take action until the newspaper made inquiries about the allegations,” says Hussain in an email.

But Hussain says the capacity of a student newsroom to build institutional knowledge and cultivate sources is hard given the turnover baked into their four-year college experience. Local reporters are better positioned to do long-term reporting.

Local media also benefits from student reporters in their internship programs as they look for ways to supplement higher-ed coverage. At KPCC, education editor Maura Walz constantly grapples with how best to focus her reporters’ energies across such a large swath of the state; there is one higher-ed reporter focused primarily on undercovered community colleges and first-generation students. Walz follows several student newspapers on Twitter, and says having student interns around the office helps keep them tuned into what’s happening on campus.

“We have had student reporters on our air before…A lot of times, the student press has been helpful in breaking news situations,” says Walz, offering reports of an active shooter on UCLA’s campus as an example where the student press helped them stay on top of a fast moving story.

“Having the reporters featured on our talk shows is a really good middle ground where [we’re] crediting reporting to them and they are getting the experience of being on air,” says Walz.

This kind of symbiotic relationship is promising. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently expanded a training program for college journalists intended to equip them with stronger reporting skills in areas like the Freedom of Information Act and Title IX.

Walz, the editor at KPCC, worries that limited resources create a situation in which professional journalists bogged down by large coverage areas and a nuanced beat potentially miss opportunities to do meaningful accountability reporting in the public interest.

“I get worried we are not thinking about how much public money is being spent by the University of California system and [whether it] is being spent efficiently or well,” says Walz. “Are we not being good at holding these institutions accountable because we are focused on other things?”

Student reporters also say the presence of professional reporters on their campuses legitimizes their efforts to do solid reporting on the stories that are within their capability, in the face of university administrators who are sometimes reluctant to take them seriously.

“Nationally, there is a crisis with reporters being called ‘fake news’ and being told we don’t want you here, and I see that replicated on campus,” says Schneider. “A huge [issue] is that we don’t have a lawyer. We file public records requests and when they deny them and say they’re out of scope, we can’t sue. When we want to fight for something, we just can’t.”

Schneider believes the guaranteed turnover of university newspaper staffs, and their status as students, encourages university administrators to treat their requests less seriously.

In one meeting with the UCSD chancellor’s administration, Schneider adds, an official asked plainly: Why do we need to support student newspapers?

As the professional reporting corps steels itself against similar antagonisms, one reason to support student papers is the amount that they contribute to important, local reporting.

Learn more at Columbia Journalism Review

ON THE DAY I INTERVIEWED Norman Pearlstine at the Los Angeles Times, tourists kept wandering into the cool, marbled lobby to inquire about taking the building tour. The security guard politely told them—on four separate occasions in a span of 30 minutes—that there are no more guided walks through the imposing Art Deco building that has served as the newspaper’s home since 1935. The last tour was given on June 15. The tourists wandered around the lobby’s massive globe to peer at busts of the paper’s founding family, the Chandlers, and snap photos before moving on.

Upstairs there are empty cardboard boxes stacked in the newsroom, as reporters, editors, and staff prepare to leave this building and, they hope, a tumultuous 19-year period wherein owners in Chicago dramatically cut the paper’s staff and ambitions. The paper’s new local owner, billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, pledges to breathe new life into the paper and plans to relocate the LA Times next month to a new headquarters 20 miles southwest, in El Segundo, an airport-adjacent beach city. On June 18, the paper’s sale to Soon-Shiong became final—a shift so recent that former Editor in Chief Jim Kirk, who served under tronc (or Tribune, in redux), could still be spotted strolling the halls when I visited to interview Pearlstine on Monday.

Pearlstine, the LA Times’s new executive editor, sat down with CJR on his fourth official day on the job to discuss his vision for the newspaper. At the moment, Pearlstine—who has held leadership positions at the Wall Street Journal and Time Inc., among other outlets—says he is laying plans for a fresh generation of leadership at the Times, determining shifts in coverage, and developing a working relationship with the paper’s new union.

Throughout the interview Pearlstine spoke with the guarded curiosity of a reporter who has just begun digging into what promises to be a really good story. He won’t overpromise, but doesn’t believe he’ll under-deliver—the goods are there. Pearlstine is in an exploratory phase and faces formidable challenges such as restaffing a Washington bureau that many veteran journalists fledunder threat of closure from previous owners, in a time when covering the president presents unprecedented challenges. “Those are serious losses and I wish that we hadn’t lost them, but I’ve been really encouraged by the people who’ve reached out to me just in the last week since the announcement. And if we can deliver on some of those, we’ll be fine,” Pearlstine says.

In Los Angeles, Pearlstine sees fresh opportunity to beef up investigative coverage—not only in coverage of business and the entertainment industry—but in unlikely fodder like food and arts, and sports, especially as the city prepares to host the Olympics, the World Cup, and serve as home to a bevy of pro and college sports teams. The freshly unionized newsroom was openly gleeful to seeformer owners tronc go, but Pearlstine doesn’t disparage past leadership. Necessary changes will take some time, he says, before promising to move as fast as possible. Our conversation is edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with an elephant in the room. You retired last year from Time, Inc after serving as chief content officer. [New York Times Executive Editor] Dean Baquet is 61. [Washington Post Executive Editor] Marty Baron is 63. What went into the decision of coming out of retirement at age 75 to run a sort-of-struggling newspaper?

I was given an opportunity to do it and I consider myself fortunate to have that opportunity. I spent a lot of my life doing things that, it turns out, are somewhat relevant to being here. What began as a consulting relationship with Dr. Soon-Shiong, to think about a model for editorial—well, the more we got into it the more we thought that there was benefit in trying to figure out the place first before we figured out the next generation of leadership. When he asked me if I’d be willing to do it, I was delighted to have the opportunity.

Dr. Soon-Shiong is openly ambitious. He wants to compete with The Washington Post and The New York Times. What do you believe you can accomplish within your first year in this role? What are your goals?

I might put some conditions on that question of competing. There are certain stories that we definitely need to be competitive on. The goal is for us to be perceived as a world-class journalistic enterprise, doing what makes the most sense for our current audience and the audience we aspire to serve. In some cases, that will make us directly competitive with other big national and international publications, and in other places I think we want to call our shots to really set an agenda in the places where we’re particularly well-equipped to do it.

You need some sense of how quickly you can move, but I have not wanted to be tied into a specific date in terms of accomplishments. At this point, I’m still trying to figure out what are the assets currently in place and how are they being deployed. It’s a very talented staff. Frankly, more talented than I had thought from the outside looking in, solely because—I mean most of the headlines about the Los Angeles Times in recent years have been about turmoil, about cost cutting, about attrition and departures. In fact, it has an amazing alumni society. But the big surprise to me is just how much talent there is in the building.

The first [priority] is to assess the talent that is here and make sure that we’re fully utilizing and taking advantage of some really smart people who may not have felt that they were either being listened to or that they had opportunity to take on more authority or responsibility. A second is to try to figure out what we need to do to fill in the holes to buttress that, given the ambitions that Dr. Soon-Shiong has talked about. And then, certainly over a period of time, we have to begin thinking about a next generation of leadership. As much as I would love to be the person responsible for a 10-year turnaround at the Los Angeles Times, I don’t think it’s probably good for the organization and probably not good for me either to think in those terms.

It’s no surprise that—really going back to last August when so many people at the top of the masthead were let go—a lot of people put their resumes out on the street and some of them have resulted in offers, some people have left. Some people, I think, were on the verge of leaving and they are at least willing to give us a chance to prove that we’re not just all talk. They’ve had a lot of talk over the years so it’s understandable if people were skeptical but in that first year certainly there’s some very important vacancies that we need to fill. Beyond that, I think there’s some very important coverage areas that we have to address.

Part of it is: What do we do just to get the current operation running better? And then: What are the new things that you want to do where we have a lot of catch up?

Media faces a challenge in covering the president now, and you had the winning quote on Reliable Sources recently when you said “Trump’s cocaine is media.” I’d love you to expand on that a little bit more.

Well, he’s a very interesting and complicated guy, I’ve known him a long time. He’s very much an instinctual creature. When I said that I think media is his cocaine, I just mean that he loves press attention. He may love railing against the press; he’s railed against the press a lot, long before this. I can’t tell you how many letters I’ve gotten with that gold leaf on it and that big signature.

He’ll get mad and he’ll ban CNN from something or The New York Times, but he’s given Maggie Haberman some good interviews for all the complaints about the New York Times. Were I more delicate, I guess I would have said it’s a symbiotic relationship or something like that. But, yeah, it is his cocaine.

He may love railing against the press; he’s railed against the press a lot, long before this. I can’t tell you how many letters I’ve gotten with that gold leaf on it and that big signature.

If you go back and read The Art of the Deal, right after the preface, that first chapter he talks about truthful hyperbole, and about the fact that he thinks it’s really important to say whatever comes into his head that he thinks advantages him. I think engagement is really essential and you have to you have to keep trying to cover him and his administration as best you can, on your terms when you can. Sometimes you’ll have to do it on his terms. We don’t have the luxury of saying we’re going to skip this story.

To the degree you can, especially with a limited staff, you want to dig into the issues of substance where there are very real changes taking place that show the power of the chief executive and where it can be implemented. As important as those stories are, understanding the 32 lawsuits that the state of California has brought against the EPA is pretty important for our audience as well. We need to make sure that we’re understanding some of those very real changes that are taking place.

The culture war that is being waged right now seems to be waged against California in many ways.

Well, and New York as well.

Yes, and New York, the so-called coastal elite—

Some states ran very heavily against him—

Sure, but there’s a taco truck on my corner here in LA. I think there’s a particularly hard slant against any place that has a lot of immigrants, and we are a majority-minority city. What will the Times do to cover communities that might feel antagonized or threatened right now?

Well, those are communities we need to cover in any case. Given the immigrant population of this state, we need to be all over stories involving immigration. And we need to understand, if you will, the ways in which these immigrant populations do and don’t want coverage of the countries where many people were born or where their parents were born. So, the Mexican elections are a very big story here in [their] own right. Mexico versus Korea in a World Cup game at 8am may be peculiar to us in terms of its importance, but I think given the nature of this population—and I would include in that the fact that there’s still a significant number of voters who would consider themselves part of the Trump base in one way or another—that it’s dangerous to generalize about the state.

Fair enough. I’d like to look inward at the Times newsroom for a second. I think a question that your staffers would want me to ask is: After years of cuts and layoffs, can you offer any assurance that layoffs are on hold, at least for the time being?

There may be individual cases where you’re taking a look and saying, “Well do we need as much emphasis here and can we emphasize more there?” Those kinds of things go on in the everyday running of any newsroom. I have not heard of any desire for any cuts or further layoffs. I don’t want to ever say “never” on something like this because I don’t know. I mean, I’ve only been in the office really four days so it’s a little hard to give you definitive answers on these things. We are doing a careful analysis of what everybody on staff is doing and whether this is the best use of our resources.

I have not been involved in and I haven’t really had a chance to figure out the implications of a large part of the workforce now being represented by a union. We have to understand just what does it mean, before you have a contract, in terms of what you can and can’t do. That’s not to suggest any flags there, it’s just that I don’t know.

When you were at the Wall Street Journal, the Journal was a union shop, right?

It was, but its name—it was called the Independent Association of Publishers’ Employees—may give you some notion of how strong the union was. I was the union representative in Detroit when I was at an early stage in my career. I remember writing the union bylaws at one point but that was a long time ago. I’ve been in management too many decades to assert any claims there, but yes, there was a union, and they subsequently became part of CWA, I think, as the guild is now.

And then Time, Inc. had a union as well. So you’re used to negotiating and collective bargaining, as management.

Yes, absolutely.

I ask because the union really seemed to turn off tronc.

I don’t want to get into a discussion of the specifics just because I haven’t been involved, but the union vote was an expression of very deep concerns on the part of a lot of people who work here. And whether there was a union or not, you have to take those concerns seriously. I’ve met—not in a formal session, but informally—with a number of people who have been identified with the union movement, and I think that there is a lot of sincerity in their concerns and we should be prepared to take them seriously.

I don’t consider the existence of a union itself as any bar to having good relations with the people who work here.

The union vote was an expression of very deep concerns on the part of a lot of people who work here. And whether there was a union or not, you have to take those concerns seriously.

It seems to be a very optimistic time for the paper. How do you plan to keep that good will going and turn the page?

I can’t stress enough the value of having the opportunity to listen to people and to try to get some bottom-up thinking in terms of what we’re doing. It is terrific to have an owner for whom a diverse workforce and a diverse workplace is important. It’s fabulous to have an owner who despite his own personal success still views himself as kind of an underdog who is willing to confront the establishment, whether it’s in medicine or in anyplace else. And who’s a great listener. I’ve learned a lot from him in the period I’ve spent with him. So I think it’s especially important, given the tumult of the last few years, that we will listen carefully and then try to respond to the best ideas that we hear.

I think there’s also a need to recognize that a lot of the difficulties here are difficulties that our entire industry has gone through and that I think Pat is right to want to run it as a business. But we then have to acknowledge that it’s a tough business. We’re not the only ones who’ve gone through huge staff reductions. They might have been handled better, but the disruption in our industry is something you know you [at CJR] have devoted whole issues to. And we’re as much a part of that as anybody else. But sometimes you just need a little time to figure things out.

Journalists are an impatient bunch.

Hey! But also, the extraordinary thing has been how many people have stuck it out, have hung in with no real rational expectation something like this would happen. And I’m grateful they have.

I mean, I tried to talk [award-winning columnist] Steve Lopez out of coming here, and gave him all the good reasons why he shouldn’t be here, and I’m so glad he is. I had hired him to Time out of the [Philadelphia] Inquirer. He was working for me when my old friend John Carroll stole him from me. And I was trying to tell Steve why he shouldn’t come to LA and why it was a terrible place for him to try to write his column. Now I’m glad he’s here.

International news is one of Dr. Soon-Shiong’s interests. The Times currently has bureaus in Johannesburg, Mexico City, Mumbai and Beijing. This morning’s World section had reports from Beirut, Jerusalem and Istanbul, but everyone is listed as a “special correspondent.” So you’re getting original reporting freelance, much of it very excellent. But is there anything that you want to do to try and focus international coverage more, or to staff some of these people?

I think there are certain places where we might want to put more emphasis, and I haven’t worked that out completely. But given our prominence as part of the Pacific Rim, with as big a Korean American population as we have and with all the stories emanating now, you know, should you have somebody in Seoul? You know,Barbara Demick is as smart about Korea as anybody but she’s in New York right now. You can look at the whole Asian region and, with very large populations here from the Philippines, from Vietnam, from South Asia, you could imagine having someone there.

The Russia story is an important one, and right now we don’t have anyone in London or on the continent. And if we don’t replace the person who just left Johannesburg for Beijing, then no one in Africa. If you have to set priorities, it’s hard to say where you go. But I think that Asia and Latin America remain critically important.

We have some national beats that we ought to be looking hard at, as well. Given how important the immigration story is, we’ve got a reporter in Houston but no one between Houston and Los Angeles. Do you need Phoenix? We aspire to cover California and the West Coast. We have no one in Seattle right now, and we’re not as strong in Northern California as you’d expect. I say this without having any real sense of how quickly and how broadly we’re going to be hiring, because I think until we figure out what we’ve got, that’s tough to say. For instance the San Diego Union-Tribune has a very strong reporter based in Tijuana. Can we make more use of her work when we’re talking about immigration? That’s a very real question to ask. And are there other examples like that?

The gender story became very big in the past year, not only through the lens of entertainment coverage with Harvey Weinstein, but also in terms of coverage decisions. The New York Times hired a gender editor for the first time last year. And The Washington Post has relaunched the Lily, US women’s first newspaper. Do you think that there is an opportunity there for doing more coverage for and of women?

Well, certainly the story is extraordinary. And so then the question is how do you best cover it. I think it can lead a way to coverage that you otherwise might not get, and it probably adds to a voice in the newsroom that pushes back against intrinsic bias on the part of many of us. That sort of keeps you straight. But I guess I’d want to be satisfied that that’s the only way we can get the coverage.

And compared to what? I’ve been asking people to give me their list of if they had their druthers, you know, what they would add and [laughs] it’s a pretty formidable list. I don’t want to in any way suggest that this is unimportant, it’s just really a question of what’s the best way for this organization.

Fair enough. Here’s another question. You guys have this big move to the west side. In LA, the west side tends to be whiter, wealthier—

Correct.

And certainly a good part of your readership. But I think the East Side and other neighborhoods have long complained that they don’t get very good coverage, that they deserve more, particularly and more broadly Latino and black communities. How do you maintain a presence?

Well, first of all, we are keeping a presence downtown. We will have an office with several dozen seats in it, and I would expect we’d probably have a pretty senior editor here responsible for it. Secondly, without taking away from the importance of physical location of where your desk is, it’s more important to talk about where your reporters are. We have a few people who are doing some extraordinary work, [such as] Esmeralda Bermudez’s piece last week about bringing up a trilingual child.

That was fantastic.

It was really quite a terrific piece that just said a whole lot about the world that she lives in. You know, Hector Becerra, who is the city editor, his father came here in the trunk of a car. He grew up in Boyle Heights and he is a mentor to a number of young reporters on the Metro desk, for whom this is a really important story. And I think that the difficulty with Los Angeles is just that it’s just such a complicated [place]. I mean, it’s a complicated government structure with a city government and a county government and so the city police get a tremendous amount of coverage, and the sheriffs office much less. Yet when you look at where police brutality cases have been over the last couple decades, you know, it would argue that the sheriff’s office probably ought to get more coverage than the LAPD.

It’s not just East LA that complains. When Marty Baron ran the Orange County edition of the Los Angeles Times, that had 200 reporters. I don’t know what we have now; it’s probably about five or something. There were zone editions that I remember from the Valley, from the west side, from Torrance, Carson, Long Beach. There was a San Diego edition that was never a great commercial success but that was part of the ambition of the place. I think that how you cover these local communities, especially in an age where increasingly the product is going to be a digital one, is interesting. How do you keep your brand on mobile? How do you create an app that that makes you feel like you’re part of this community if you’re living in Echo Park or in Highland Park or something? These are issues that go beyond where the newsroom is.

I do know that there’s some tremendous upside in better local coverage if we figure out how to do it. I mean, you look at Hearst’s record over the last seven years of increased profits and revenues from their newspapers and you know that there are things you can do locally that haven’t been done.

Disney coverage has been a subject of controversy, with former editor Lewis D’Vorkin somewhat infamously coming to blows with the newsroom on it.

I wasn’t here at the time, and I’ve never had a conversation with anyone at Disney about anything, so I don’t want to prejudge anything. I think on the basis of what I read, it looked like very solid coverage to me. Now, did we do everything we could have done to try to get their cooperation on a piece like that? I have no idea. Maybe this is just what happens when you write a tough piece. I haven’t dug into it—I haven’t taken 60 seconds to go backward just because there’s so much stuff ahead that I’m looking at. But I would hope that you could do tough aggressive skeptical coverage of your largest institutions with a level of mutual respect—where even if they hate a piece, you continue to be talking to each other. And if that doesn’t work, you have to at least ask the question whether it’s them or it’s you.

Any last things to add about your ambitions for this paper?

At the risk of being too aggressive in my flattery of the owner, what excited me and made me want to come on board was an understanding of the depth of his commitment to wanting to make this just a great paper and to invest resources in ways that make that possible.

Whenever somebody comes to a field like media from another place, you always want to make sure they fully understand what they’ve gotten involved in. His ability to both operate at 50,000 feet and then, somewhat annoyingly, to be very granular in his sort of deconstruction of everything from staffing to beats and so forth has just been remarkable.

Learn more at Columbia Journalism Review

Alight breeze was rustling along Connecticut Avenue when I arrived at an unmemorable bar in Washington, D.C., and plopped down across from a former federal intelligence official. It had been an exhausting day. For decades, I’ve covered the goings-on and machinations within Silicon Valley, but these days the biggest technology story is occurring at the heart of the nation’s capital. I’d already met with current and former intelligence and security officials in federal buildings along the lush Capitol grounds, researchers from think tanks in bespoke coffee shops near Dupont Circle, and, now, in a dark bar not too far from the National Mall. Each spoke articulately and cogently about the threats posed to the 2018 midterms by Russia. I’ve been reporting cyber-security and hacking for well over a decade, and even unearthed some truly scary stuff—like the chilling manifest destiny of fake news—in the process. But what I learned that day, and particularly in that bar, scared the shit out of me.

On the televisions hanging above the bar played a commercial for Uber—an apology from the company’s new C.E.O. for the actions of its previous C.E.O. As the news came back on, we made swamp small talk. Would the Democrats retake the house? Would Donald Trump win re-election in 2020? Or would his chaotic presidency all come crashing down far, far sooner? The former official simply shook his head side to side. “Russia is going to do everything it can to ensure that doesn’t happen,” he said. “They’ll hack the voting booths, if they haven’t already; they’ll quadruple their efforts on social media; they’ll do things we”—he pointed to me, then himself —“haven’t even thought of yet.” When I asked what we can do to stop them, he said, as if imitating the voice-over for a horror-movie trailer, “These are all things that have been in the works since the day Trump won two years ago.”

So what exactly is Russia planning for the upcoming election? The correct question, a half dozen security experts and former and current government officials have told me, is what are they not planning? These people all said that 2018 will likely be a testing ground for 2020. Many of the tactics that Russia experiments with could (and likely will) be enacted on a much larger scale two years from now. Some of these strategies and maneuvers appear grounded in reality, while others seem speculative, but all have the same sinister goal of breaking the system—by cleaving our polity, distracting us with feuds large and small—by sowing discord through technology platforms and services. “Having the U.S. at war with itself is giving Russia credit internationally,” explained Andrew Weiss, the vice president for research on Russia for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noting that we as a country are more divided on almost every issue than at any other time in history. “[Russia is] not the creator of this problem, but they have exploited it. Just creating mistrust, and throwing a question mark over the legitimacy of our government, is a pretty big prize for Russia.”

In the coming months, these experts told me, Russian operatives will likely start creating fake Facebook groups (if they haven’t already)—some that slam to the left, others that lean as far right as humanly possible—that will argue with one another, and help us do the same; there will be accounts on social media that use Cambridge Analytica-style targeting to serve up ads, and a barrage of cleverly designed and perfectly disguised bots on Twitter. All stuff we’ve seen already, but with much more advanced algorithms and snakier and more aggressive tactics. (This time, for example, fake video and audio will start circulating through the social stratosphere, all with the intended purpose of trying to make real news seem fake, and fake news seem real.) As we’ve seen with the various e-mails posted on WikiLeaks—ranging from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the D.C.C.C. to the countless hacking attempts around the world that preceded the French national election—any modern candidate should expect that their e-mails, text messages, and personal social-media data are hacked and published. At least any candidate that Russia wants to harm.

Robby Mook, Clinton’s former campaign manager, told me in an interview on my podcast last week that even the slightest action by Russia can have outsized consequences. Recalling the repercussions of the John Podesta e-mail saga, Mook warned that simply hacking someone’s e-mails, text messages, or other private content—even if they are not salacious—can spread like a plague on social media; before long, the truth and fake content blurs together, and you have a coagulated version of fake truth. Social media allows Russia and other adversarial governments the ability to take something so small, and make it tantamount to any scandal on Earth. “Little, tiny embers become infernos in a way that no technology has ever enabled in history,” a tech entrepreneur lamented recently.

And then there will be new tactics. More than one expert told me that Russia will try to go after actual voting booths in smaller, more contentious districts across the country. The world we live in so intertwined with technology that you could imagine Russian hackers disrupting how we even get to the polls on Election Day. Ride-sharing services could be hacked. We’ve already seen instances of hackers faking transit problems on mapping apps, like Waze, to send people in the wrong direction, or away from a certain street. Perhaps most terrifying of all, one former official told me, are the possibilities arising from Russia’s alleged 2015 cyber-attack on Kiev’s power grid, which plunged the city into darkness. The moment I heard this, I ordered another drink.

On some level, the dystopian horror that technology poses to our democracy is effectively limitless. At the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas last year, white-hat hackers (the good kind) demonstrated that it takes about 90 minutes to hack into a voting booth. Some voting booths still operate using an old version of Windows XP, and people can easily get in using Wi-Fi systems. Over the years, there have been countless instances of hackers easily penetrating voting booths. Earlier this year, election officials admitted that Russians actually did infiltrate some of the U.S. election systems in 2016. Jeanette Manfra, the head of cyber-security at the Department of Homeland Security, told NBC News, “We saw a targeting of 21 states, and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated.” Another official admitted that, “2016 was a wake-up call, and now it’s incumbent upon states and the feds to do something about it before our democracy is attacked again.” Of course, the one person who possesses the most power to prevent this from recurring—our president—may be the one who stands to benefit the most in the first place.

With their man already in the Oval Office, Mook suggested that Russia’s goal in 2018 will similarly be to “sow discord.” It’s an elegant way of saying that they just want to start trouble and see what happens. And there are no consequences for them doing it. (If anything, Vladimir Putin is praised more by Trump.) Since Trump’s election, Mook explained, there have been several congressional hearings that have detailed how Russian operatives have fanned both sides of the flames during almost every major event in the last few years: Charlottesville, the Las Vegas shooting, Parkland, even infiltrating Bernie Sanderssupporters’ Facebook groups. Just this past week, as America boiledover the White House’s abominable policy to separate children and parents at the border, the Russians were hard at work stoking the flames with a flamethrower. Weiss echoed this, noting that the discord existed in America before the Russians stepped in—they just helped exacerbate it with tech. “There’s the old saying by Napoleon [along the lines of], ‘When your enemy is making a big mistake, don’t interrupt them,’” Weiss said. “This has been the most successful covert operation in reported history.”

In some ways, there are almost too many holes to plug to stop the Russians from causing massive harm in the coming elections. Mook suggested that concerns about voting-booth safety were just one tiny part of the problem. “Our election system goes far beyond machines. We have voter-registration databases,” he said. “We have e-poll books—the actual devices used to look you up when you come in to vote. We have the results reporting system. We have the Web sites that host those results.” Imagine, for a brief, terrifying moment, that the Web sites and reporting systems (the methodologies that are the backbone of how news organizations report election results in real time) are hacked, and Trump is briefly marked as the winner before the election is accurately called for his opponent? Trump and his surrogates would seize on such a moment like piranhas to blood. “I think [Russia] will do anything they can to help Donald Trump win re-election,” Mook concluded, “but there greater interest is to sow doubt in the election process in general—and doubt in democracy.” (As Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan note, Moscow’s continued covert efforts to interfere in our elections should be the most urgent issue before Trump when he meets with Vladimir Putin next month—a confrontation that is hard to imagine for a president who has deliberately ignored the issue when he wasn’t outright encouraging it.)

Russia and Putin want to drive a wedge deeper and deeper into the United States, pitting Americans against Americans, breaking the system from within, and helping us destroy ourselves. As one researcher said to me recently, if there’s one thing that Russia and the Democrats agree on, it’s that Trump is an idiot, and he’s so self-obsessed that he’ll always put himself before American democracy, and, in turn, weaken it. Trump is also playing to the same drum as the Russians, only louder. Over the past two years, Trump has been trying to make the public believe that everything about our democracy is corrupt—but not for the reasons you might think. First, it was Washington in general. (“Drain the swamp!”) Then, when the polls predicted his loss, it was the entire electoral system, which was “rigged.” (After he won the electoral vote, but lost the popular vote, there were magically between 3 million and 5 million people who, he lied, voted illegally.) Now, in anticipation of the Mueller Report, Trump has gone after the F.B.I. with the goal of discrediting them when the report finally does come out. Trump’s attacks on these institutions, and his unrelenting blitz on the media, are an attempt to make Americans distrust what journalists and cable outlets say, especially when it’s the truth. What more could the Russians ask for?

Last year, shortly after Trump started to settle into his new job, mysterious things began to happen to some of Putin’s critics. The Russian ambassador to Sudan suddenly had a heart attack in his swimming pool; another Russian politician, who had fled the country after publicly denouncing the country’s actions in Ukraine, was gunned down in front of a hotel; soon, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, India, and Greece died of a heart attack, too. And then there were the string of officials, and Putin critics, who mysteriously “fell” from their balcony or roof. One politician was killed in a Dupont Circle hotel room, not far from the bar where I met the former federal official who warned of what was to come.

Over the years, approximately a half dozen Russian journalists have been murdered and abducted while doing their jobs. Each time “accidents” happen, Russia denies any involvement, calling allegations that these were Putin-backed “absurd.” And so while none of this is new, I had to ask Weiss—who formally covered Russia for the Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, advising both presidents about Russia—if we should worry that Putin could cross a line from digital to physical. Weiss didn’t say yes, but he also didn’t say no. “I don’t know what is possible,” he told me. “I think what we’ve seen so far is that all powers of imagination are possible when it comes to dealing with Russia. The Russians play hard. They play this game really ruthlessly.”

The day after my terrifying discussions in that dark bar, I had time to kill before heading to a meeting at the United States Senate building, so I decided to walk to try to clear my head. No matter how many times you do it, it’s an incredibly sobering experience to go past those massive buildings that house our government. The Library of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Department of Justice all stand momentous and stoic. They present themselves as edifices capable of withstanding anything—anything at all. Yet I found myself sitting across from the most impressive building of them all, the United States Capitol, and wondering if these institutions can withstand Trump, and, in turn, Russia. The answer, it seems, is right there in front of us. Russia and Trump want us to hate each other. They want us fighting on Twitter. Spewing vitriol. Telling our neighbors to go fuck themselves. Fighting on Facebook. If that continues to happen, they win, and we all—all!—lose. The only way to beat Russia is the only way that America can survive itself.

Learn more at Vanity Fair

It began with the smallest possible quantity of optimism, which turns out to be $1,500.

Charlotte and Dave Willner had seen the pictures of migrant children crying at the border. One in particular reminded them of their own 2-year-old daughter.

The San Francisco area couple had heard — as much of the United States had by now — that President Trump’s administration has begun jailing migrant parents caught crossing the border and sending their children to shelters. The president’s chief of staff has called the new “zero-tolerance” policy a deterrent against illegal immigration.

But the Willners had also learned that a lump of cash might thwart the government’s plans.

Just like arrested Americans, detained migrant parents can often post bond and simply walk out of jail.

They can then, presumably, collect their children from government custody and live in the United States until their court hearings, which are often months away.

Or they could, if they had the money. Bonds for detained migrants typically range from hundreds to many thousands of dollars — amounts that might as well be in the billions for families that arrive here with next to nothing, and have whatever they brought with them confiscated by Border Patrol.

So the Willners created a Facebook fundraiser over the weekend to raise $1,500 — enough to free a single migrant parent with a relatively low bond.

“It was the closest thing we could do to hugging that kid,” Dave Willner told the Mercury News.

Five days later, the Willners have raised more than $12 million and climbing — overflowing all previous optimism.

“We can confirm this is one of the largest fundraisers we’ve ever seen on Facebook,” Roya Winner, a spokeswoman for the social media giant, told The Washington Post, back when the amount was less than $4 million.

Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is among the nearly 200,000 people who had contributed by Wednesday morning.

Private donors have matched more than $250,00o of the total, but the Willners said the average donation is just $40.

The money has come from Americans disaffected with their government, immigrants who remember their own journeys, and sympathizers from Canada to Switzerland and beyond.

“That clear moral commonality is what will sustain us,” Charlotte Willner wrote on Facebook on the first night of the campaign. “It transcends almost everything. It is an enduring sense of what America ought to be about.”

Or as Joanna Leah Kaylor of Mammoth Lakes, Calif., put it when she threw in her contribution: “Children are children and need our help.”

In more ways than one, the surge has overwhelmed the Texas nonprofit that will receive the money, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES).

With donations pouring in at $4,000 a minute at one point, the nonprofit has already taken in twice as much cash as it raised in all of 2016, according to its public financial records.

It plans to use the money not only to bond parents out of immigration jails but also to provide lawyers to the parents and children as they fight in court to stay together and stay in the United States.

“We’ve been occasionally crying around the office all day when we check the fundraising totals,” RAICES wrote on Facebook. “This is such a profound rejection of the cruel policies of this administration. Take heart.”

It’s also a profound change of fortune for a nonprofit that just weeks earlier was at a bleak point in its three-decade history.

RAICES provides free or low-cost lawyers to immigrants and refugees in Texas, where nearly 1,500 detained children are being held in a converted Walmart while their parents are imprisoned elsewhere.

Three weeks ago, as news of the child detentions was beginning to reach public consciousness, RAICES announced that “the Trump administration is ending funding for representing thousands of released unaccompanied children.”

While the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement did not immediately reply to a request for comment from The Washington Post, employees at nonprofits besides RAICES confirmed that the agency ended a grant program last month that paid for some detained migrant children to have lawyers while in government custody.

“We were going to be able to finish out our cases but not accept new cases,” said Jenny Hixon, RAICES’s development director. She said the lost money was estimated to blow a $300,000 hole in the nonprofit’s budget next year, which would mean fewer lawyers for the families.

“For our attorneys, the worst thing in the world is not being able to take a case,” Hixon said.

But that was before the viral fundraiser.

“This is our entire annual budget in several days,” Hixon said. “And it’s not just the funding. We’re getting literally thousands of people contacting us, wanting to volunteer. Many are like, ‘I’ll come to Texas.’”

Though RAICES served 7,000 family members in detention last year, Hixon said, the nonprofit’s administrative staff is threadbare. “We really only have attorneys, and then me,” she said.

She is now racing to contact other nonprofits so she can put the money to use when the fundraiser ends and Facebook releases the full amount in mid-July.

“We’re ramping up our representation of the parents,” Hixon said. “We’re hiring more legal point-people who try to get the families back in communication with each other. We’re launching a nationwide network of people to provide support to people after they are released from detention, because as you can see, this is traumatizing.”

The plan is to locate every separated migrant family in the United States, get them lawyers and, when possible, get them out of federal detention — parents and children alike.

RAICES is even setting up a network of therapists and psychologists, expecting — as pediatricians do — that many children will emerge from their detention with PTSD, toxic stress and other aftereffects of the separation.

It will be a long road, but now there’s enough money to hope for an end.

Learn more at Washington Post

A Facebook fundraiser is set to raise $5 million in under five days in response to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration and the separation of thousands of children from their families at the border.

Charlotte and Dave Willner started their fundraising campaign after seeing the viral image of a two-year-old girl crying as her mother, an asylum seeker from Honduras, was being searched and detained at the US-Mexico border. The initial goal of $1,500 was meant to help cover bond fees for the one person, but it rapidly grew in scale.

“We are collectively revulsed at what’s happening to immigrant families on our southern border. In times when we often think that the news can’t possibly get worse, it does,” Charlotte Willner wrote on the fundraiser’s description.

The fundraiser went viral, just like the photo that inspired it, with $4,000 being donated every minute as of Tuesday morning. With the outpouring of support, the couple decided to change the fundraiser’s focus and donate the money to the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a Texas nonprofit that provides affordable legal services to refugees and immigrants.

In April, the Trump administration directed the US Attorney’s offices to criminally prosecute all adult migrants who attempt to cross the southwest border illegally. Any children accompanying them are then forcibly separated from their parent. This new policy sends these adult migrants to federal jail, instead of immigration detention, where children cannot be held. Over 2,000 migrant children have been separated from their families since the policy was put in place.

Learn more at Verge

The 2018 Select LA Investment Summit, organized by the World Trade Center-Los Angeles, brought executives from more than 25 countries together to discuss the potential of the region for innovation and economic development. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder of NantWorks and the new owner of the Los Angeles Times, addressed the summit and noted that Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to combine its current public and private leadership of 21st Century mobility, technology, clean energy, bioscience, climate action, and goods movement to create the next global industrial revolution. TPR is pleased to present an excerpt of Dr. Soon-Shiong's remarks.

Stephen Cheung: Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is a physician, surgeon, scientist, inventor, technologist, and philanthropist who has devoted his career to translating science into medical innovations with local impact. He currently serves as chairman and CEO of NantWorks, a company devoted to the transformation of healthcare and utilizing artificial intelligence to win the war against cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

In 2016, Dr. Soon-Shiong announced the formation of Cancer Breakthroughs 2020, a comprehensive collaboration of researchers, insurers, academic institutions, and pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the potential of combination immunotherapy in the treatment of cancer. He also serves in various academic capacities at UCLA, Imperial College of London, UCLA Wireless Health Institute, and California NanoSystems Institute.

Many of you know that Los Angeles has one of the most diverse populations in the world. We have more than 140 nationalities represented right here in the Los Angeles region, and we speak more than 224 different languages. And many affiliations claim Dr. Soon-Shiong to be one of their own.

Dr. Soon-Shiong was born in South Africa, and our South African friends are proud to have one of their own so well received in LA. As a first-generation Asian-American myself, my friends are delighted to see a fellow Asian-American as a key transformative figure for the region. Since he obtained his Master’s degree from the University of British Columbia, our Canadian friends are claiming Dr. Soon-Shiong; and since he’s a member of the Board of Councilors at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering, our friends at USC claim him as a Trojan. Not to be outdone, it’s fair to call Dr. Soon-Shiong a Bruin. But most importantly—especially considering his role as the new owner of the L.A. Times—I think we can all agree that Dr. Soon-Shiong is an Angeleno through and through.

Patrick Soon-Shiong: I’m truly excited to be able to present today what we’ve been quietly doing since 2008. I’m honored today to tell you what nanotech has been about for the last decade. From now to 2028 Olympics, we will implement this vision.

I came to this city in 1980—38 years ago—and I think my work is a testament to the fact that as long as you dream, collaborate, and implement the greatest talent—and there’s great talent in this city, in universities, sports, medicine, healthcare, and technology—it is truly limitless what you can do.

In 2008 and 2010, when I sold both of my biotech companies, we decided that we would harness this talent and devote these energies into what I call the fourth industrial revolution. What I mean by that is that there is truly a way to converge biology, medicine, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, physics, and technology. In fact, we are actually already in this fourth industrial revolution; we just don’t know it. And if we in this most amazing city can exploit that, we will lead California and the nation—and frankly, I think we will provide open exploration to the globe.

You probably know us [NantHealth and other Nant companies] as a company focusing on cancer. However, in the context of researching cancer, we discovered that the artificial intelligence infrastructure that we’ve been developing could also address the next catastrophe that is going to hit us: climate change.

We saw a very real opportunity to harness the power of the sun, air, and water to completely change how we derive, store, and use energy. So, on our campuses in Culver City, El Segundo, and Phoenix, we quietly began taking advantage of that power.

Our work on renewable low-cost energy, called a zinc-air battery, now has provided power to four million people around the world for the last five years. Using the ability of a hydrogen fuel cell that harnesses the power of the sun and water to create hydrogen, this reduces the carbon footprint. The ability to create a water production [with zero processes] allows us to grow food in a different way. We have the ability to forever change how motors behave, by removing the gas and creating new electric high-torque motors.

And finally: Where I come from—being Chinese and living under the rule of South African apartheid—I understand that without freedom of speech and speaking truth to power, nothing else actually matters. We needed to establish a forum, not only to empower the underserved and the underdogs, but also for those of us working in the fourth industrial revolution to share amongst ourselves and with the rest of the nation and the world.

This has been our mission; now I’m going to share with you exactly how we’ve gone about that.

The Nant Key Initiatives can be broken into three buckets. As part of our work on catastrophic life-threatening diseases, I’m going to Chicago to announce the first true cancer vaccine. We can quite literally decode the genome in your body, put it into an adenovirus, and inject it subcutaneously—like a flu shot—and drive out cancer. We have built something called a natural killer cell that we can drill down in unlimited supply and grow and engineer it to drive out your cancer without high-risk chemotherapy.

We also have a renewable energy program with multiple programs in motion: the zinc-air battery and the hydrogen fuel cell with high-torque motors, which give us the ability to change transportation.

Finally, one of the most important opportunities is in artificial intelligence and machine learning. I think, from an anthropological perspective, humanity is at an inflection point—with the social network, and the idea of what is news—what is real news, what is fake news—how do we manipulate human beings—and the use of artificial intelligence. There is a true dark side to technology. The idea we are going to take artificial intelligence that we have on machines that do machine learnings and create connectivity and create a social network of safe, true information, and also to engage the millennials with sports and e-sports and engagement vehicles.

These are the three vehicles we are executing.

With regard to the cancer program, this is the natural killer cell we’ve engineered. It’s a breast cancer cell and it has gone after this breast cancer cell and literally will devour the cell through a blood transfusion. We’ve now built an unlimited supply of these natural killer cells that we can take from your tumor and an old tissue and derive through artificial intelligence the sequence, and drive the sequence either into an adenovirus or the natural killer cell, and that will drive the vaccine.

What you and I have in our bodies today I call our first responders. You all have a natural killer cell in your body. I don’t want to alarm you, but each of one of you, as you’re developing stem cells, in order to survive, your body needs to build these stem cells. There’s a mathematical error that happens in every stem cell—billions of them—and the reason people do not have cancer is this first responder in your body called the natural killer cell that is killing it, until the tumor decides how to put that natural killer cell to sleep. We’ve now figured out a way to grow this unlimited supply of this natural killer cell and then take that and engineer that and then add that to this adenovirus of this gene and this now becomes the future of cancer care. Imagine going to Wal-Mart and getting a flu shot—for cancer. That is actually not unrealistic. And with that system of this cartoon? Your DNA signature is your drug. The drug is then placed into a system of vectors to treat cancer.

Let me turn to energy storage and the opportunity to create this zinc-air battery. This is the holy grail. You and I live on zinc; that is how we make insulin. You and I live on zinc-air; that is how air goes through the lungs. Imagine then taking this biological system into an anode and a cathode, and merely using oxygen to store energy. While people have been focusing on the generation energy with lithium-ion—and we all know the dangers and the cost of lithium—if you could break $100 per kilowatt hours for a battery, you’d change the world. I predict that within 12 months, we will break $100 per kilowatt hour. And if that is the case, then what happens is that zinc-air batteries will be the support services and replace generators, lead-acid. And I’ll give you a little secret: The L.A. Times buildings will be running on zinc-air batteries.

What’s happened is we’ve now deployed these grid applications, and remarkably now, 100 rural villages have installed these off-the-grid renewable power solutions in all of Indonesia. Here’s an island completely running with no grid—no other power—on these zinc-air batteries. They’re intelligent batteries; we can tell by the minute which battery and which cell is activated or deactivated. 120,000 cells have been produced to date with 3,000 systems installed globally. What’s exciting to me is that 4 million people are now covered with 3,000 metric tons of CO2 reduction.

What’s next is another very exciting technology. Through machine vision, we’ve developed a technique that we call edge detection, where we can recognize through a computer the edges of mobile systems like solar panels. Imagine taking these solar panels and through the power of the sun to focus their source of power to a single beam and generating heat to the point of the power of the sun and truly creating reverse combustion, meaning taking H20 and breaking it down into hydrogen and oxygen and then from the hydrogen generating hydrogen fuel. I don’t think people recognize that today, the way petroleum is generated or natural gas is taken is making burnt CO2 thrown into the air so that you can get hydrogen from the heat to purify your petroleum. This would be another breakthrough and the opportunity to create more hydrogen fuel cells. Water reduction as some of you know is now possible and changing farming. The opportunity then to change the world, both on diseases and climate and energy.

Finally, the opportunity now is to take this asset—the L.A. Times, the San Diego Tribune, and the California News Group—and integrate it with next-generation technology, like Zoom video conferencing. Imagine that you could download an app similar to the L.A. Times app, and press a button to see an on-call doctor at any time. Imagine that you had the ability to interact with anybody anywhere, or have access to livestreaming of any event. That’s what we’re going to try and release for you. I think this is an opportunity to truly change how we present media, and that studio where I was this morning with some of the moguls of entertainment in the industry to take this 360-degree green stage and create an entertainment through LA.

Don’t get mad at me, but there was not enough space on the two LA soccer teams. Soon, I will be the majority owner of D.C. United. The reason this is exciting is that we can interconnect D.C. and Los Angeles. Between D.C. and Los Angeles, we can truly become the voice of the nation to the world.

With that, I want to thank you for allowing me to review what we’ve been doing. I truly believe we are in the fourth industrial revolution and this is the greatest city in the world and in the United States and I’m proud to be an Angeleno.

Learn more at The Planning Report

The Los Angeles Times has a new owner, a new editor and, after years of upheaval, a new path forward.

On the day that Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong completed his $500-million purchase of the 136-year-old newspaper, the L.A. biotech billionaire announced he was naming veteran journalist Norman Pearlstine as its executive editor.

Pearlstine has spent 50 years in journalism helping shape some of the nation’s most prominent publications — including Time Inc. magazines, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News and Forbes. It was the first major move by Soon-Shiong, who also bought the San Diego Union-Tribune, Spanish-language Hoy and several community papers from Chicago newspaper company Tronc.

During the last two months, Pearlstine, 75, has served as an advisor to Soon-Shiong, charged with creating a transition plan for The Times. He will now execute that plan.

“Not only does he have amazing experience with the full knowledge of how a newsroom runs — but he’s amazingly modern and forward-looking,” Soon-Shiong said. “There’s no agenda, other than to make this the best journalistic institution. We’re lucky to be able to capture him.”

Pearlstine becomes The Times’ fourth top editor in less than a year and its 18th since the paper began publishing in 1881. He succeeds Jim Kirk, a Chicago newsman whose nearly 10-month tenure came during a period of corporate dysfunction that culminated with the sale of The Times. Rather than accept a smaller role, Kirk decided to leave the paper.

Soon-Shiong and Pearlstine were greeted Monday by a jubilant crowd of employees who squeezed into the center of the newsroom for an hourlong town hall meeting. There, the new leadership fielded questions and shared their vision for The Times.

“Let’s put Tronc in the trunk and we’re done,” Soon-Shiong said to cheers and applause.

“I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to work at the L.A. Times,” Pearlstine said, recalling how he had applied for a job decades earlier. “Thank you, Pat…. Better late than never.”

The change comes at a challenging time for print publications.

“We need to figure out the new business model,” Soon-Shiong said. “The interest of the reader is more important than the interest of the advertiser. That may be heresy because advertising still is the source of our revenue but it is a complex new dance in this new business model.”

Soon-Shiong, acknowledging his competitive nature, said he is determined to get The Times into the national conversation, which will require beefing up the newsroom.

Pearlstine told the staff that “it’s really on me” to come up with a staffing and hiring plan to present to Soon-Shiong. But he also has cautioned against trying to emulate other publications, saying: “It would be a huge mistake to try to be a clone of any East Coast paper.”

Pearlstine’s appointment came as a surprise to some, particularly because many figured he had retired after he left Time Inc. last year.

“I’m astonished — but not surprised,” said Walter Isaacson, a former Time magazine editor who now teaches at Tulane University. “This guy has a passion for journalism and an instinct for what’s interesting — and a true boyishness for making people realize that journalism is a noble profession.”

Marcus Brauchli, a former Washington Post editor who now runs investment firm North Base Media, agreed.

“The new owner could not have chosen a more stabilizing presence,” he said, noting that Pearlstine also will serve The Times well because he has spent the last few years getting immersed in the latest trends shaping digital media.

That’s how Pearlstine and Soon-Shiong met. In 2013, Pearlstine, then chief content officer of Time Inc., was intrigued by Soon-Shiong’s efforts to develop artificial intelligence that would make newspaper reading a more interactive experience. He flew to California to check out the work but it wasn’t ready to be deployed commercially.

After Soon-Shiong announced his purchase of The Times in February, Pearlstine quickly reached out and soon flew to Los Angeles for a meeting. He joined as a consultant in April, with marching orders to identify and recruit top editors.

Soon-Shiong has aimed high. He offered two L.A. Times alums — Marty Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, and Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times — the top job “knowing that it was a long shot.”

He even invited Baquet to his Brentwood home, which has a private basketball court. “I let him shoot a few shots to see if I could convince him,” Soon-Shiong said. “I said we’ll play HORSE and if I win, you’re gonna have to stay.”

Other top prospects were hesitant to join The Times with its revolving door of managers. “To anyone from the outside looking in, there has just been a lot of turmoil,” Pearlstine said, noting that part of his challenge is to prove “that the turmoil is behind us.”

Pearlstine advised Soon-Shiong against rushing one of his most important decisions.

“We thought that there was risk in trying to fill that job before we had a clear understanding of the staff … and a clear understanding of what the mission was,” Pearlstine said.

They discussed an interim role but quickly dismissed that idea.

“We’ve had enough interims,” Soon-Shiong said. “He’ll be here as long as he wants.”

Still, at 75, Pearlstine acknowledges that he might be in the job only a year or two.

“I’m realistic that one of the most important things I can do is to find my successor,” he said. “I think we will have a better idea of what the next generation of leadership is after we have done some more work and, frankly, after we have done some more listening.”

Soon-Shiong also announced that Chris Argentieri, currently the general manager of The Times, will become chief operating officer of California Times, the new corporate moniker for the group of publications that Soon-Shiong acquired. Jeffrey Light will remain publisher and editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Although Monday was his first day on the job, Pearlstine in 2005 played a role in an effort to disentangle The Times from Tribune Co. He arranged a meeting between the late John Carroll, then the paper’s top editor, and Los Angeles power broker Eli Broad to see whether Broad would be interested in buying the paper. The billionaire philanthropist later joined investor Ron Burkle in a bid that was rejected.

The following year, Carroll gave a speech at an industry conference in which he provided a blueprint to save The Times. The key ingredients were local and private stewards.

“One of the great things that comes with Patrick’s ownership, with local ownership and a willingness to invest, is that it brings a period of stability,” Pearlstine said in an interview. “I’m lucky as hell to have this opportunity, and I feel confident that this is somewhere I think I can be helpful.… This remains an extraordinary place.”

One immediate task will be calming staff members, who since April have been worried about the looming move out of their historic Art Deco building in downtown Los Angeles, where the newspaper has been based since 1935.

The new headquarters in El Segundo will worsen the commutes for many, a hardship Soon-Shiong acknowledged. But he said The Times needs a modern home. He is developing a campus on 10 acres near Los Angeles International Airport, which will include an event center with an auditorium, a studio for podcasts and videos, and a museum on the history of The Times. He would like to host events, such as the paper’s annual Food Bowl and Festival of Books, there.

Pearlstine is energized by his new task. He has lost 50 pounds in the last year and has taken up boxing. He plans to find an apartment in the greater Los Angeles area, perhaps close to El Segundo.

He said his wife, Jane Boon, an industrial engineer, will divide her time between Los Angeles, New York and Vancouver, Canada. She is a native of Canada.

Pearlstine, who grew up in a small town outside Philadelphia, has been a fixture in New York media circles, where he is known for his intelligence, sharp wit and longevity in a business that tends to wear people out.

“He’s an absolutely first-rate journalist,” Brauchli said.

His long career has not been without controversy. In 2005, while serving as editor in chief of Time Inc., he was harshly criticized for turning over subpoenaed notes of reporter Matthew Cooper to a federal grand jury hearing evidence into the identification of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. Pearlstine defended the action, saying that Time Inc. had spent millions of dollars fighting the special counsel in the matter and “lost every round.” The Supreme Court had refused to hear the case. Pearlstine later said that it was his most difficult decision in his career as an editor.

He started in journalism in 1967 as a copy boy at the New York Times, a few months after earning his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He moved to the Wall Street Journal in 1968, where he worked for the next decade, including a stint in Los Angeles and in Asia, where he launched the paper’s Asia edition. He became executive editor of Forbes magazine in 1978, a job he held for two years. But, in 1980, he returned to the Journal and served as managing editor from 1983 to 1991 and then as executive editor for a year.

After leaving the Journal in 1992, he worked to launch the magazine SmartMoney for Dow Jones & Co. and Hearst Corp. He became editor in chief at Time Inc. in 1995, overseeing such publications as Time, People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, InStyle and Entertainment Weekly. That job brought him frequently to L.A. When he left in 2005, Time Inc. boasted more than 150 magazine titles.

He then spent five years as chief content officer for Bloomberg and served as chairman of Bloomberg Businessweek after the company acquired that magazine. He returned to Time Inc. in 2013 as chief content officer and was promoted to vice chairman in 2016. He retired last year as the company, reeling from a loss of subscribers and advertisers, prepared for a sale.

At The Times, Pearlstine will be looking to rebuild the newsroom and restore the organization’s reputation. He replaces Kirk, who came onboard last August, when Tronc sacked four top editors. Kirk led the newsroom until November, when Lewis D’Vorkin was brought in from Forbes.

D’Vorkin’s three-month tenure was disastrous, marked by clashes with staff and a vote by the newsroom to unionize, the first time in the paper’s 136 years. Tronc bounced D’Vorkin and, in late January, Kirk became editor in chief. About 10 days later, Tronc announced its deal to sell the California News Group to Soon-Shiong.

Tronc will soon return to its former name of Tribune Publishing, two people close to the company said Monday.

Pearlstine said he invited Kirk to stay in another capacity, but Kirk declined.

"It's unfortunate but I understand that new ownership wants to go in a different direction,” Kirk said. “I’ve had a terrific but short run…. We've done some great work, I'm happy about that.”

The newsroom took on a party atmosphere throughout Monday. Midafternoon, more than 100 journalists toasted the newspaper's new era in front of a banner with three crossed-out Tronc logos.

Amid the festive sounds of champagne bottles being uncorked, Pulitzer Prize winner and longtime Metro reporter Bettina Boxall described the paper's nearly two-decade-long Chicago ownership as the “20-year war.”

“Here’s to the toughest newsroom in the whole business. Here’s to the Los Angeles Times,” Boxall said as the newsroom erupted in cheers.

Learn more at L.A. Times

Kevin Kosar, a propaganda expert, gives his analysis of the video President Trump had made for his summit with Kim Jong Un.

Watch Here

Reporters crowded into a Singapore auditorium Tuesday, expecting President Trump to walk out and announce the results of his historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Suddenly, two huge screens on either side of the empty podium came to life. Soaring music boomed over the speakers, and the reporters were bombarded with a montage portraying North Korea as some sort of paradise.

Golden sunrises, gleaming skylines and high-speed trains. Children skipping through Kim Il Sung square in Pyongyang. North Korean flags fluttering between images of Egyptian pyramids, the Taj Mahal and the Lincoln Memorial.

In a split-screen shot, Kim Jong Un waved to an adoring crowd while President Trump stood beside him with his thumb in the air. The pair appeared over and over again, like running mates in a campaign video.

The film went on like this for more than four minutes, with brief interludes of missiles, soldiers and warships interrupting the pageantry. Some journalists, unable to understand the Korean-language narration, assumed they were watching one of Pyongyang’s infamous propaganda films. “What country are we in?” asked a reporter from the filing center.

But then the video looped, playing this time in English. And then Trump walked onto the stage and confirmed what some had already realized.

The film was not North Korean propaganda. It had been made in America, by or on the orders of his White House, for the benefit of Kim.

“I hope you liked it,” Trump told the reporters. “I thought it was good. I thought it was interesting enough to show. ... And I think he loved it.”

The crowd sounded skeptical. Some wondered if Trump had not, in fact, just provided U.S.-sanctioned propaganda to one of the country’s oldest adversaries.

But as the president explained it, the video was more like an elevator pitch. It was the type of glitzy production that Trump might have once used to persuade investors to finance his hotels, and now hoped could persuade one of the most repressive regimes in the world to disarm its nuclear weapons and end nearly 70 years of international isolation and militant hostility to the United States.

On Tuesday evening, Trump tweeted a link to the video, for all to see.

The nearly five-minute movie even has its own Hollywood-style vanity logo: “A Destiny Pictures Production,” though a film company by the same name in Los Angeles denied any involvement in making it, and the White House has not yet responded to questions about it.

“Of those alive today, only a small number will leave a lasting impact,” the narrator said near the beginning, as alternating shots of Trump, Kim and North Korean pageantry flashed on the screen. “And only a very few will make decisions or take actions to renew their homeland, or change the course of history.”

The message was clear: Kim had a decision to make. Then the film progressed from grim black-and-white shots of the United States’s 1950s-era war with North Korea into a montage of rose-colored parades and gold-tinted clouds.

“The past doesn’t have to be the future,” the narrator said. “What if a people that share a common and rich heritage can find a common future?”

The same technique repeated even more dramatically a minute later in the film, when the footage seemed to melt into a horror montage of war planes and missiles bearing down on North Korean cities — much like the apocalyptic propaganda videos Pyongyang had produced just a few months ago, when Kim and Trump sounded as if they were on the brink of nuclear war.

But in Trump’s film, the destruction rewound itself. The missiles flew back into to their launchers, and a science fiction-like version of North Korea took its place — one of crane-dotted skylines, crowded highways, computerized factories and drones, all presided over by a waving, grinning Kim, accompanied always by Trump. “Two men; two leaders; one destiny.”

“You can have medical breakthroughs, an abundance of resources, innovative technology and new discoveries,” the narrator said, the footage more and more resembling a Hollywood movie trailer as it built to its finale:

“Featuring President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un in a meeting to remake history,” the narrator concluded, as Korean words flashed on a black background: “It is going to become a reality?”

The reporters had many questions.

“Do you now see Kim Jong Un as an equal?” asked a Time magazine correspondent.

“In what way?” Trump asked.

“You just showed a video that showed you and Kim Jong Un on equal footing, and discussing the future of the country.”

The president may have misunderstood the question, as he referred in his answer to his closed-door talks and a few carefully negotiated photo ops with Kim — not the U.S.-made video that presented the totalitarian autocrat as a hero.

“If I have to say I’m sitting on a stage with Chairman Kim and that gets us to save 30 million lives — it could be more than that — I’m willing to sit on a stage, I’m willing to travel to Singapore, very proudly,” Trump said.

“Are you concerned the video you just showed could be used by Kim as propaganda, to show him as ... ”

Trump cut the question off. “No, I’m not concerned at all. We can use that video for other countries.”

The president was more talkative when discussing how Kim had reacted to the video, which Trump had presumably played for him during a brief, private meeting hours earlier.

“We didn’t have a big screen like you have the luxury of having,” Trump said. “We didn’t need it, because we had it on cassette, uh, an iPad.

“And they played it. About eight of their representatives were watching it, and I thought they were fascinated by it. I thought it was well done. I showed it to you because that’s the future. I mean, that could very well be the future. And the other alternative is just not a very good alternative. It’s just not good.”

International reviews of the video were decidedly mixed.

“Schlocky” — Vanity Fair.

“Odd.” — The Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

“One observer dismissed it as ‘a word salad topped with gratuitous appeasement of a monstrous regime,’ " the South China Morning Post reported.

The Daily Mail noted that as the narrator described North Korea’s glorious future of technology and international investment, the video showed stock footage of the Miami Beach shoreline, not far from a Trump-owned hotel. The Spectator called the whole sequence “real estate politik” — which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“The text reads like some godawful martial-arts movie trailer crossed with a corporate advertisement for an ambitious construction project,” Freddy Gray wrote for the British newspaper. “But clearly, in some peculiar way, it works.”

The president acknowledged that some of the film’s imagery may seem far-fetched. North Korea is mired in poverty, internationally isolated, and has been mismanaged for decades by a family of dictators — Kim, his father and grandfather.

“That was done at the highest level of future development,” Trump told the reporters in Singapore, as if he had just offered Kim a multitiered vacation package. “I told him, you may not want this. You may want to do a much smaller version. ... You may not want that, with the trains and everything.”

He waved his hands. “You know, with super everything, to the top. It’s going to be up to them."

And then, in his usual style, Trump was thinking out loud about the “great condos” that might one day be built on the “great beaches” of North Korea.

“I explained it,” he said. “You could have the best hotels in the world. Think of it from the real estate perspective.”

As the screens above Trump emphasized, he certainly had.

Learn more at Washington Post

After the February high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., digital media company Attn: teamed with ABC News and Freeform to air an hourlong documentary that followed the teen survivors as "they turned their unimaginable grief and fear into action during the weeks after the attack."

"For Our Lives: Parkland" included coverage of national walkouts and protests as well as explainers that broke down complex topics such as gun laws and semiautomatic weapons into bite-sized segments.

The special, which aired last month, represented a big step for the L.A.-based start-up known for popular online videos that usually explore social and political themes in under three minutes.

Following the motto of "content everywhere," Attn: is turning its social media model into serialized content and hourlong TV specials with major networks. Its short videos draw 500 million views a month across various platforms, making it attractive to networks and studios eager to reach younger viewers who are bypassing cable TV and increasingly turning to their phones for entertainment and news.

"Our biggest competitive advantage is we have a built-in audience," said Matthew Segal, co-founder of Attn:. "We can prove the efficacy of our formats first, and then, when we're talking to a network, we're able to show that it already works."

To handle the growing volume of TV work, Attn: recently moved out of its cramped offices on Melrose to a 15,500-square-foot spread on Hollywood's Seward Street. The company, which has 130 employees, plans to hire 100 more workers in the next year.

Attn: — the unusual name is a play on the abbreviated form of "attention" — was founded by Matthew Segal and Jarrett Moreno in 2014. The pair previously ran OurTime.org, a nonprofit organization focused on registering young Americans to vote.

"When we asked people the biggest reason they didn't vote, they always said they didn't understand why they should," Segal, 32, said. "We decided we could have a bigger impact through media and storytelling."

Though they eschew political alignment, progressive ideals are in their DNA. One of Attn:'s videos, "Dads and moms should share parenting roles," questions gender responsibilities in under two minutes. "Toilet paper isn't our only option" makes a case for conservation in 74 seconds. Combined, those videos boast more than 100 million views on Facebook.

The messages are wrapped in accessible packages of animation, entertainment and celebrity appearances. One video features Snoop Dogg rolling a blunt as he says, "If you want your marijuana to be legal, then you got to vote in this election."

Attn: aims to catch people in their transitional moments — on a bus or waiting in line for coffee — and also when they sit to watch television.

The company raised around $24 million through two rounds of fundraising, with principal investors including Evolution Media Capital, Marc Rowan, Paul Wachter and Main Street Advisors.

The new Hollywood headquarters has all the makings of a "cool" company. In one hallway, a wooden bookshelf rotates to reveal a secret speakeasy lounge. An orange slide offers an alternative to the stairs.

The extra space is needed to handle upcoming TV projects.

The company is developing an animated series with Ellen DeGeneres that explores cultural issues of the day. The series will be featured on DeGeneres' talk show in addition to Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Also in the works is a scripted series with YouTuber and comedian Lilly Singh that uses sketch comedy to examine topical themes.

And Paramount Television is working with Attn: to turn its popular "America Versus" web series, which compares political, social and cultural differences between the U.S. and other countries, into a TV show.

The 60 or so videos in the series — ranging from Sweden's trash system to comparisons of public restrooms in the U.S. and Japan — have drawn around 800 million views over the last 18 months and caught the eye of Paramount Television President Amy Powell.

"I loved the idea of the global conversation being truly global and looking at how we as Americans compare and contrast to the rest of the world," Powell said. "This show attacks that head on."

Powell was drawn to the show's authentic storytellers and its built-in audience, a demographic that she says is largely underserved.

"As we look at the show's specific reach, it's young and social by nature," Powell said. "They don't want to be spoken down to. They want to be served information that's real and authentic, and Attn: has proven they're capable of doing that."

The average American adult reportedly spends 10 hours a day looking at a screen, which means the market is ever-expanding — as is the competition. Websites like NowThis and Upworthy have developed strong social media followings. Bigger name bands such as BuzzFeed and Vice have similarly developed production deals and, in the case of the latter, a cable channel.

Executives declined to disclose their finances but said Attn: is close to being profitable and that revenue has grown 200% annually since 2016. About 40% of its revenue comes from branded content, 30% from licensing its original content and 30% from consulting services.

"We'd like for original content to take up a bigger percentage, but we don't want it to overpower the others," said Moreno, 31. "We have a diversified business model and plan to stay well-rounded."

He and Segal acknowledge the challenge of translating short videos into longer programming. However, they're quick to argue that making a 90-second video can sometimes be just as daunting as a 20-minute piece.

"Starting with short form made us better storytellers because it made us selective about what entertains people," Segal said. "Now, we have to figure out what pulls them in and holds their attention for longer periods of time."

Learn more at L.A. Times

The California Senate voted on Wednesday to approve a bill that would reinstate the net neutrality regulations repealed by the Federal Communications Commission in December.

The bill, S.B. 822, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), was introduced in March and passed through three committees, all along party-lines. The bill was approved 23–12 and will now head to the state Assembly.

“Under President Obama, our country was moving in the right direction on guaranteeing an open internet, but the Trump-led FCC pulled the rug out from under the American people by repealing net neutrality protections,” Wiener said in a statement last month after the bill passed its final committee vote.

After the FCC moved to eliminate net neutrality rules, states began implementing their own measures. In January, over 20 attorneys general sued the commission before the order was even published. Some governors attempted to use executive orders, while others worked with legislators. California’s bill to restore protections in the state is one of the toughest responses to the FCC’s rollback.

The bill would reinstate rules similar to those in the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order. It forbids ISPs from throttling or blocking online content and requires them to treat all internet traffic equally.

But the bill also takes the original rules further by specifically banning providers from participating in some types of “zero-rating” programs, in which certain favored content doesn’t contribute to monthly data caps.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a statement on Tuesday that called the bill “a gold standard for states looking to protect net neutrality.”

Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who spearheaded the Obama-era regulations, supports the bill. In March, he wrote a letter to the California Senate Energy, Utilities, and Communications Committee with two other former chairmen approving of the measure.

“These protections are essential to our economy and democracy. SB 822 steps in to protect Californians and their economy by comprehensively restoring the protections put in place in the 2015 net neutrality order,” the chairmen said.

If the bill goes on to pass in the Assembly, providers will no longer be able to obtain government contracts in the state of California without obeying the regulations.

“A GOLD STANDARD”

After receiving final approval last month from the Office of Management and Budget, the federal net neutrality rules are set to end on June 11th, leaving states to legislate their own protections. California would be the third state to pass a net neutrality law, following Washington and Oregon.

“In California, we can lead the effort to clean up this mess and implement comprehensive, thorough internet protections that put California internet users and consumers first,” Wiener said.

Learn more at The Verge

When local newspapers shut their doors, communities lose out. People and their stories can’t find coverage. Politicos take liberties when it’s nobody’s job to hold them accountable. What the public doesn’t know winds up hurting them. The city feels poorer, politically and culturally.

According to a new working paper, local news deserts lose out financially, too. Cities where newspapers closed up shop saw increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals, say researchers who tracked the decline of local news outlets between 1996 and 2015.

Disruptions in local news coverage are soon followed by higher long-term borrowing costs for cities. Costs for bonds can rise as much as 11 basis points after the closure of a local newspaper—a finding that can’t be attributed to other underlying economic conditions, the authors say. Those civic watchdogs make a difference to the bottom line.

Paul Gao, an associate professor of finance at the University of Notre Dame and one of the paper’s authors, was inspired to look into the issue after an episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” about the news industry. “He was focused on two things: consolidation of national news media and closure of local news media. John Oliver’s show really gave us the prompt for the phenomenon, and we started thinking about it from an economist’s point of view.”

The survey covers some 1,596 English-language newspapers serving 1,266 counties in the U.S. over the study period. This paper excludes counties without any daily local newspaper (1,863 in all). Across the relevant counties, the study finds 296 newspaper “exits”—which refers to a local paper closing down or being absorbed by another outlet, or publishing fewer than four days a week, or merging to form a new newspaper. Depressingly, the paper finds that news shrinkage is a nationwide phenomenon.

Discounting the media-rich counties, which could absorb the hit of a lost daily—as well as the places that added a newspaper (they exist!)—a total of 204 counties saw a decrease in local coverage to two or fewer daily newspapers. By examining local municipal bond data for these counties, the researchers were able to suss out a relationship between local newspaper closures and public finance outcomes. In the three years following a newspaper closure, the costs for municipal bonds and revenue bonds increased for these cities. That’s likely the result of losing the investigative services those ink-stained wretches once provided.

“You can actually see the financial consequences that have to be borne by local citizens as a result of newspaper closures.”

“There are already papers that show that there are political consequences, or political outcomes, when local newspapers close,” says co-author Chang Lee, assistant professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But that’s not really a direct impact on local residents. We wanted to show that, if you look at the municipal bond market, you can actually see the financial consequences that have to be borne by local citizens as a result of newspaper closures.”

Think of a municipal bond’s offering yield as the interest rate that municipalities pay for borrowing money in the bond market, Gao says. High offering yields mean that a city or county has to promise to pay more in coupons (semiannual payments to bondholders) or more principal for whatever the city is borrowing. Secondary yields, on the other hand, are the interest rates for bonds as they trade in the market: more of a proxy or indicated rate of a city’s financial wellbeing.

Without investigative daily reporters around to call bullshit on city hall, three years after a newspaper closes, that city or county’s municipal bond offering yields increased on average by 5.5 basis points, while bond yields in the secondary market increased by 6.4 basis points—statistically significant effects.

Rate hikes are even more pronounced for revenue bonds, and they run higher all around in states with low internet usage and poor governance. Here’s a tidy explanation from the paper for the relationship between hard-nosed local reporters and revenue bonds:

Revenue bonds are commonly issued to finance local projects such as schools and hospitals, and are backed by the revenues generated by those projects. General obligation bonds, on the other hand, are typically used to finance public works projects such as roadways and parks, and are backed by local taxes and fees. Revenue bonds should be subject to greater scrutiny because of the free cash flows that those projects generate, and these bonds are rarely regulated by the state government. A local newspaper provides an ideal monitoring agent for these revenue-generating projects, as mismanaged projects can be exposed by investigative reporters employed by the local newspaper. When a newspaper closes, this monitoring mechanism also ceases to exist, leading to a greater risk that the cash flows generated by these projects will be mismanaged.

The Rocky Mountain News, for example, won four Pulitzer Prizes in the 2000s before it closed at the end of that decade. The paper was known for its investigative reporting, especially with regard to local government deals surrounding the Denver International Airport. Three years after that paper shuttered, the median yield spread for new local municipal bonds increased by 5.3 basis points. In the meantime, the Denver Post has been subject to devastating budget cuts.

One key task for the researchers was to establish that higher bond costs were the result of a decline in local investigative reporting—and not, say, crumbling economic conditions. They addressed this concern in a number of ways. First, to keep things local, they excluded state bonds from their analysis. Second, in order to compare apples with apples, they looked at the difference in borrowing costs between a county that lost its fishwrap with a similarly sized and scaled neighboring county—a control—that didn’t.

“There could be an underlying economic state that drives both variables, the newspaper closure and borrowing costs,” says Dermot Murphy, the paper’s third author, also at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “That’s where we have to get a little bit more sophisticated with our tests, to establish the causal connection from newspaper closures to borrowing costs.”

Gao, Lee, and Murphy also looked at Craigslist as an indicator. A harbinger of doom for newsprint media, Craigslist’s arrival in a city could spell disaster for smaller regional newspapers, as residents moved from selling their junk or searching for roommates in paid classifieds to online (and other advertisers left with them). For counties within 30 miles of a city where Craigslist opened up shop, the probability of newspaper closure increased by 9.6 percent. Similarly, outside the central Craigslist hubs (think Boston or San Francisco), municipal bond costs rose, too.

The team presented its findings at the Society for Financial Studies Cavalcade at Yale University earlier in May, and it’s the subject of a discussion at the Brookings Institution in July. (The paper has yet to be published.) It joins a growing body of research examining the wide-ranging impacts of local-news desertification, from heightened susceptibility to post-truth politics to alarming gaps in our national surveillance of infectious diseases.

>For fans of local newspapers, the outlook isn’t rosy. As important as local investigative reporting may be to local capital markets, the researchers don’t expect local newspapers to rebound on their own—even though it might cost taxpayers a lot more in the long run to lose a local daily than it would to subscribe to one.

“Our analysis suggests that newspaper companies, or the information they provide, is a public good and it’s worth providing,” Lee says. “But if we don’t finance it, no one will produce it.”

Learn more at City Lab

The Russian company charged with orchestrating a wide-ranging effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election overwhelmingly focused its barrage of social media advertising on what is arguably America’s rawest political division: race.

The roughly 3,500 Facebook ads were created by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, which is at the center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s February indictment of 13 Russians and three companies seeking to influence the election.

While some ads focused on topics as banal as business promotion or Pokémon, the company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community.

The company continued to hammer racial themes even after the election.

USA TODAY NETWORK reporters reviewed each of the 3,517 ads, which were released to the public this week for the first time by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The analysis included not just the content of the ads, but also information that revealed the specific audience targeted, when the ad was posted, roughly how many views it received and how much the ad cost to post.

Among the findings:

Of the roughly 3,500 ads published this week, more than half — about 1,950 — made express references to race. Those accounted for 25 million ad impressions — a measure of how many times the spot was pulled from a server for transmission to a device.

At least 25% of the ads centered on issues involving crime and policing, often with a racial connotation. Separate ads, launched simultaneously, would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups.

Divisive racial ad buys averaged about 44 per month from 2015 through the summer of 2016 before seeing a significant increase in the run-up to Election Day. Between September and November 2016, the number of race-related spots rose to 400. An additional 900 were posted after the November election through May 2017.

Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton. A few dozen referenced questions about the U.S. election process and voting integrity, while a handful mentioned other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush.

Young Mie Kim, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who published some of the first scientific analysis of social media influence campaigns during the election, said the ads show that the Russians are attempting to destabilize Western Democracy by targeting extreme identity groups.

“Effective polarization can happen when you’re promoting the idea that, ‘I like my group, but I don’t like the other group’ and pushing distance between the two extreme sides,” Kim said. “And we know the Russians targeted extremes and then came back with different negative messages that might not be aimed at converting voters, but suppressing turnout and undermining the democratic process.”

The most prominent ad — with 1.3 million impressions and 73,000 clicks — illustrates how the influence campaign was executed.

A Facebook page called “Back the Badge” landed on Oct. 19, 2016, following a summer that saw more than 100 Black Lives Matter protests, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests in August and protests over the police shootings of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa and Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte.

The information analyzed by the USA TODAY NETWORK shows the Internet Research Agency paid 110,058 rubles, or $1,785, for the Facebook spot. It targeted 20- to 65-year-olds interested in law enforcement who had already liked pages such as “The Thin Blue,” “Police Wives Unite” and the “Officer Down Memorial Page.”

The very next day, the influence operation paid for an ad depicting two black brothers handcuffed in Colorado for “driving while black.” That ad targeted people interested in Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X and black history. Within minutes, the Russian company targeted the same group with an ad that said “police brutality has been the most recurring issue over the last several years.”

USC professor Nick Cull, author of The Cold War and the United States Information Agency, says the ad campaign is reminiscent of tactics employed during the Soviet era. His book explored how the KGB tried to disrupt the Los Angeles Olympics by faking propaganda from the KKK threatening black athletes.

"Soviet news media always played up U.S. racism, exaggerating the levels of hatred even beyond the horrific levels of the reality in the 1950s," Cull wrote in an email. "It was one reason Eisenhower decided to move on civil rights."

Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the minority leader of the House Intelligence Committee, said he made the ads available to the public so that academics could study both the intention and breadth of the targeting.

“These ads broadly sought to pit one American against another by exploiting faults in our society or race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other deeply cynical thoughts,” Schiff said in an interview with USA TODAY NETWORK. “Americans should take away that the Russians perceive these divisions as vulnerabilities and to a degree can be exploited by a sophisticated campaign.”

A federal grand jury in February indicted 13 individuals accused of working for the Internet Research Agency to produce the ads. The charges related to meddling in the 2016 election, the only election interference case Mueller's office has filed so far.

The indictment included emails from the Russian company's employees that left no doubt that their objectives were “to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” This effort “included supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaging Hillary Clinton,” the indictment states.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, declined comment on the ads this week. An attorney for two of the companies indicted by Mueller did not respond to a request for comment. One of the companies, Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, entered a not-guilty plea on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia.

The USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found that Russians effort first used a raft of viral memes referencing banal American pop culture, like Spongebob Squarepants and Pokémon, apparently to build support behind legitimate-looking connections before deploying the racially tinged spots.

Hundreds of ads mixed race and policing, with many mimicking Black Lives Matter activists that melded real news events with accusations of abuse by white officers.

That type of subversion only hurts legitimate efforts to calm tensions over policing and hate crimes, said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP. Johnson said the Russian ads likely helped to fuel “hateful, xenophobic rhetoric” throughout the 2016 presidential campaign.

“When you’re stoking fear to get a negative action directed at a targeted population based on race, and when a foreign nation uses that fear to subvert and undermine democracy, that’s become a serious problem,” Johnson said. “It’s a warning for technology companies and corporations that private citizens have entrusted with their privacy to receive factual information.”

It’s hard to measure precise impact of the campaign targeting police and their families, but it certainly didn’t help, said Jim Pasco, senior adviser to the president of the National Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union.

"There is absolutely no doubt that these ad placements further inflamed tensions in already volatile and already sensitive situations at critical times," Pasco said.

The tech tools have changed, but the themes of disruption have not, said Bret Schafer of the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks activity of Russia-linked social media bots and trolls.

Social media is an effective way to target wedge issues because of the ability to micro-target ads, sending messages to confederate flag supporters at the same time as Black Lives Matter sympathizers to stoke divisions, he said.

“They are stirring up the racial pot, while then trying to connect with minority groups and saying, 'Look at how racist the content is online.' They don’t really have to do that because the content online is racist without the Russians, to be very clear,” Schafer said.

He added that it's hard to measure how effective the campaigns were in general. Some of the ads "completely bombed," based on interactions. But stoking racial fears and tensions was often effective.

"Some of the most racist ads put out got the highest levels of engagement,” Schafer said. “It seems that when their messaging went to the extreme on some of these issues, it actually landed the hardest punch.

“If they hit 10% of the time, it's still effective for them,” Schafer said.

Learn more at USA Today

In a dank corner of the internet, it is possible to find actresses from Game of Thrones or Harry Potter engaged in all manner of sex acts. Or at least to the world the carnal figures look like those actresses, and the faces in the videos are indeed their own. Everything south of the neck, however, belongs to different women. An artificial intelligence has almost seamlessly stitched the familiar visages into pornographic scenes, one face swapped for another. The genre is one of the cruelest, most invasive forms of identity theft invented in the internet era. At the core of the cruelty is the acuity of the technology: A casual observer can’t easily detect the hoax.

This development, which has been the subject of much hand-wringing in the tech press, is the work of a programmer who goes by the nom de hack “deepfakes.” And it is merely a beta version of a much more ambitious project. One of deepfakes’s compatriots told Vice’s Motherboard site in January that he intends to democratize this work. He wants to refine the process, further automating it, which would allow anyone to transpose the disembodied head of a crush or an ex or a co-worker into an extant pornographic clip with just a few simple steps. No technical knowledge would be required. And because academic and commercial labs are developing even more-sophisticated tools for non-pornographic purposes—algorithms that map facial expressions and mimic voices with precision—the sordid fakes will soon acquire even greater verisimilitude.

The internet has always contained the seeds of postmodern hell. Mass manipulation, from clickbait to Russian bots to the addictive trickery that governs Facebook’s News Feed, is the currency of the medium. It has always been a place where identity is terrifyingly slippery, where anonymity breeds coarseness and confusion, where crooks can filch the very contours of selfhood. In this respect, the rise of deepfakes is the culmination of the internet’s history to date—and probably only a low-grade version of what’s to come.

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote that reality is one of the few words that means nothing without quotation marks. He was sardonically making a basic point about relative perceptions: When you and I look at the same object, how do you really know that we see the same thing? Still, institutions (media, government, academia) have helped people coalesce around a consensus—rooted in a faith in reason and empiricism—about how to describe the world, albeit a fragile consensus that has been unraveling in recent years. Social media have helped bring on a new era, enabling individuated encounters with the news that confirm biases and sieve out contravening facts. The current president has further hastened the arrival of a world beyond truth, providing the imprimatur of the highest office to falsehood and conspiracy.

But soon this may seem an age of innocence. We’ll shortly live in a world where our eyes routinely deceive us. Put differently, we’re not so far from the collapse of reality.

We cling to reality today, crave it even. We still very much live in Abraham Zapruder’s world. That is, we venerate the sort of raw footage exemplified by the 8 mm home movie of John F. Kennedy’s assassination that the Dallas clothier captured by happenstance. Unedited video has acquired an outsize authority in our culture. That’s because the public has developed a blinding, irrational cynicism toward reporting and other material that the media have handled and processed—an overreaction to a century of advertising, propaganda, and hyperbolic TV news. The essayist David Shields calls our voraciousness for the unvarnished “reality hunger.”

Scandalous behavior stirs mass outrage most reliably when it is “caught on tape.” Such video has played a decisive role in shaping the past two U.S. presidential elections. In 2012, a bartender at a Florida fund-raiser for Mitt Romney surreptitiously hit record on his camera while the candidate denounced “47 percent” of Americans—Obama supporters all—as enfeebled dependents of the federal government. A strong case can be made that this furtively captured clip doomed his chance of becoming president. The remarks almost certainly would not have registered with such force if they’d merely been scribbled down and written up by a reporter. The video—with its indirect camera angle and clink of ambient cutlery and waiters passing by with folded napkins—was far more potent. All of its trappings testified to its unassailable origins.

Donald Trump, improbably, recovered from the Access Hollywood tape, in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women, but that tape aroused the public’s passions and conscience like nothing else in the 2016 presidential race. Video has likewise provided the proximate trigger for many other recent social conflagrations. It took extended surveillance footage of the NFL running back Ray Rice dragging his unconscious wife from a hotel elevator to elicit a meaningful response to domestic violence from the league, despite a long history of abuse by players. Then there was the 2016 killing of Philando Castile by a Minnesota police officer, streamed to Facebook by his girlfriend. All the reports in the world, no matter the overwhelming statistics and shattering anecdotes, had failed to provoke outrage over police brutality. But the terrifying broadcast of his animalistic demise in his Oldsmobile rumbled the public and led politicians, and even a few hard-line conservative commentators, to finally acknowledge the sort of abuse they had long neglected.

That all takes us to the nub of the problem. It’s natural to trust one’s own senses, to believe what one sees—a hardwired tendency that the coming age of manipulated video will exploit. Consider recent flash points in what the University of Michigan’s Aviv Ovadya calls the “infopocalypse”—and imagine just how much worse they would have been with manipulated video. Take Pizzagate, and then add concocted footage of John Podesta leering at a child, or worse. Falsehoods will suddenly acquire a whole new, explosive emotional intensity.

But the problem isn’t just the proliferation of falsehoods. Fabricated videos will create new and understandable suspicions about everything we watch. Politicians and publicists will exploit those doubts. When captured in a moment of wrongdoing, a culprit will simply declare the visual evidence a malicious concoction. The president, reportedly, has already pioneered this tactic: Even though he initially conceded the authenticity of the Access Hollywood video, he now privately casts doubt on whether the voice on the tape is his own.

In other words, manipulated video will ultimately destroy faith in our strongest remaining tether to the idea of common reality. As Ian Goodfellow, a scientist at Google, told MIT Technology Review, “It’s been a little bit of a fluke, historically, that we’re able to rely on videos as evidence that something really happened.”

The collapse of reality isn’t an unintended consequence of artificial intelligence. It’s long been an objective—or at least a dalliance—of some of technology’s most storied architects. In many ways, Silicon Valley’s narrative begins in the early 1960s with the International Foundation for Advanced Study, not far from the legendary engineering labs clumped around Stanford. The foundation specialized in experiments with LSD. Some of the techies working in the neighborhood couldn’t resist taking a mind-bending trip themselves, undoubtedly in the name of science. These developers wanted to create machines that could transform consciousness in much the same way that drugs did. Computers would also rip a hole in reality, leading humanity away from the quotidian, gray-flannel banality of Leave It to Beaver America and toward a far groovier, more holistic state of mind. Steve Jobs described LSD as “one of the two or three most important” experiences of his life.

Fake-but-realistic video clips are not the end point of the flight from reality that technologists would have us take. The apotheosis of this vision is virtual reality. VR’s fundamental purpose is to create a comprehensive illusion of being in another place. With its goggles and gloves, it sets out to trick our senses and subvert our perceptions. Video games began the process of transporting players into an alternate world, injecting them into another narrative. But while games can be quite addictive, they aren’t yet fully immersive. VR has the potential to more completely transport—we will see what our avatars see and feel what they feel. Several decades ago, after giving the nascent technology a try, the psychedelic pamphleteer Timothy Leary reportedly called it “the new LSD.”

Life could be more interesting in virtual realities as the technology emerges from its infancy; the possibilities for creation might be extended and enhanced in wondrous ways. But if the hype around VR eventually pans out, then, like the personal computer or social media, it will grow into a massive industry, intent on addicting consumers for the sake of its own profit, and possibly dominated by just one or two exceptionally powerful companies. (Facebook’s investments in VR, with its purchase of the start-up Oculus, is hardly reassuring.)

The ability to manipulate consumers will grow because VR definitionally creates confusion about what is real. Designers of VR have described some consumers as having such strong emotional responses to a terrifying experience that they rip off those chunky goggles to escape. Studies have already shown how VR can be used to influence the behavior of users after they return to the physical world, making them either more or less inclined to altruistic behaviors.

Researchers in Germany who have attempted to codify ethics for VR have warned that its “comprehensive character” introduces “opportunities for new and especially powerful forms of both mental and behavioral manipulation, especially when commercial, political, religious, or governmental interests are behind the creation and maintenance of the virtual worlds.” As the VR pioneer Jaron Lanier writes in his recently published memoir, “Never has a medium been so potent for beauty and so vulnerable to creepiness. Virtual reality will test us. It will amplify our character more than other media ever have.”

Perhaps society will find ways to cope with these changes. Maybe we’ll learn the skepticism required to navigate them. Thus far, however, human beings have displayed a near-infinite susceptibility to getting duped and conned—falling easily into worlds congenial to their own beliefs or self-image, regardless of how eccentric or flat-out wrong those beliefs may be. Governments have been slow to respond to the social challenges that new technologies create, and might rather avoid this one. The question of deciding what constitutes reality isn’t just epistemological; it is political and would involve declaring certain deeply held beliefs specious.

Few individuals will have the time or perhaps the capacity to sort elaborate fabulation from truth. Our best hope may be outsourcing the problem, restoring cultural authority to trusted validators with training and knowledge: newspapers, universities. Perhaps big technology companies will understand this crisis and assume this role, too. Since they control the most-important access points to news and information, they could most easily squash manipulated videos, for instance. But to play this role, they would have to accept certain responsibilities that they have so far largely resisted.

In 2016, as Russia used Facebook to influence the American presidential election, Elon Musk confessed his understanding of human life. He talked about a theory, derived from an Oxford philosopher, that is fashionable in his milieu. The idea holds that we’re actually living in a computer simulation, as if we’re already characters in a science-fiction movie or a video game. He told a conference, “The odds that we’re in ‘base reality’ is one in billions.” If the leaders of the industry that presides over our information and hopes to shape our future can’t even concede the existence of reality, then we have little hope of salvaging it.

Learn more at The Atlantic

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — In highway billboards and radio announcements, the government of Malaysia is warning of a new enemy: “fake news.”

On Monday, the lower house of Parliament passed a bill outlawing fake news, the first measure of its kind in the world. The proposal, which allows for up to six years in prison for publishing or circulating misleading information, is expected to pass the Senate this week and to come into effect soon after.

The legislation would punish not only those who are behind fake news but also anyone who maliciously spreads such material. Online service providers would be responsible for third-party content, and anyone could lodge a complaint. As long as Malaysia or Malaysians are affected, fake news generated outside the country is also subject to prosecution.

What qualifies as fake news, however, is ill defined. Ultimately, the government would be given broad latitude to decide what constitutes fact in Malaysia.

“Fake news has become a global phenomenon, but Malaysia is at the tip of the spear in trying to fight it with an anti-fake news law,” said Fadhlullah Suhaimi Abdul Malek, a senior official with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission. “When the American president made ‘fake news’ into a buzzword, the world woke up.”

But members of Malaysia’s political opposition say the legislation is intended to stifle free speech ahead of elections that are widely seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Najib Razak, who has been tainted by a scandal involving billions of dollars that were diverted from Malaysia’s state investment fund.

“Instead of a proper investigation into what happened, we have a ministry of truth being created,” said Nurul Izzah Anwar, a lawmaker from the People’s Justice Party and the daughter of the jailed opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

Learn more at the New York Times