Artificial Stupidity

2 years after going all in on Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence, the listicle wankers Buzzfeed are circling the drain.

Gee, hoocoodanode that a pivot to AI would not work out?  (Spoiler, everyone knew that a pivot to AI would not work out.)

Why would people go to Buzzfeed when they could generate identical generic bullsh%$ from ChatGPT?

In January 2023, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced in a memo to staff that the company was making a hard pivot to AI — years before the word “slop” was added to the public lexicon.

In the memo, which was published roughly two months after OpenAI unveiled its groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot, Peretti said BuzzFeed would be using the software to enhance the company’s infamous quizzes by generating personalized responses.

The company’s stock price jumped aggressively, from around $3 per share to north of $15. But longer-term, neither insiders nor the public were particularly compelled by the move. Nonetheless, Peretti doubled down, promising in May 2023 that AI will “replace the majority of static content” on the site, just a month after shutting down its Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News division.

The stock price jumped because stock prices always jump after massive layoffs.  Wall street is populated by not particularly bright sociopaths. 

Reality soon set in. The AI quizzes were underwhelming, and the site was soon caught publishing entire AI-generated articles that were sloppy and repetitive. After the initial spike in enthusiasm, the company’s stock took a massive beating; as of this week, its shares are hovering around 70 cents.

Now, three years after its AI pivot, the writing is on the wall. The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released on Thursday. In an official statement, the company glumly hinted at the possibility of going under sooner rather than later, writing that “there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

I won't miss this sh%$ at all. 

Today in Evil, Elsivier Edition

It looks like the Ebola of the academic publishing world, Elsevier has so mismanaged one of their journals that the entire staff has resigned en masse.

They cut staff, upped the work load, removed copy editing support, and used AI to process articles, which has consistently introduced errors otherwise acceptable articles.

All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.” 

“Elsevier has steadily eroded the infrastructure essential to the success of the journal while simultaneously undermining the core principles and practices that have successfully guided the journal for the past 38 years,” the journal’s “joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor” said in their resignation statement posted to X/Twitter yesterday.

Among other moves, according to the statement, Elsevier “eliminated support for a copy editor and special issues editor,” which they interpreted as saying “editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.” The editors say the publisher “frequently introduces errors during production that were not present in the accepted manuscript:”

In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage. 

 Seriously, these guys make McKinsey & Company look good.

They Only Did This Because They Got Caught

Academic publisher Wiley has shuttered 19 academic publications because they were so-called paper mills.

Short version is that they published bullsh%$ articles that the authors paid to be published to bump up their academic profiles.

US publishing house Wiley this week discontinued 19 scientific journals overseen by its Hindawi subsidiary, the center of a long-running scholarly publishing scandal.

In December 2023 Wiley announced it would stop using the Hindawi brand, acquired in 2021, following its decision in May 2023 to shut four of its journals "to mitigate against systematic manipulation of the publishing process."

Hindawi's journals were found to be publishing papers from paper mills – organizations or groups of individuals who try to subvert the academic publishing process for financial gain. Over the past two years, a Wiley spokesperson told The Register, the publisher has retracted more than 11,300 papers from its Hindawi portfolio.

As described in a Wiley-authored white paper published last December, "Tackling publication manipulation at scale: Hindawi’s journey and lessons for academic publishing," paper mills rely on various unethical practices – such as the use of AI in manuscript fabrication and image manipulations, and gaming the peer review process.


The Hindawi affair coincided with the departure of Wiley president and CEO Brian Napack in October, 2023. In its fiscal Q2 2024 earnings report [PDF] last December, Wiley admitted its $18 million decline in research publishing revenue was "mainly due to the Hindawi publishing disruption."

………

Academic publishers, however, appear to want the benefits of AI writing assistance without the downsides. Springer Nature, for example, last October launched Curie – an AI-powered writing assistant intended to help scientists whose first language is not English. Hence calls for better tools [PDF] to detect generative AI output – a call answered by recent efforts to improve AI content watermarking – which some researchers argue won't work.

A Wiley spokesperson characterized the decision to shut the 19 journals as part of its previously announced plan to integrate the Hindawi and Wiley portfolios, and distinct from the paper mill issue.

Yeah, sure.  It had nothing to do with the profits generated by publishing garbage articles for Wiley.

This is yet another example of how the profit motive poisons scientific study in all forms.

The, "I am a Blithering Idiot," Defense

I understand that a lawyer has an obligation to provide a vigorous defense to their clients. 

In pursuing their clients' interests, they can make arguments that on their face are absurd.

That being said, this is the first time, outside of a criminal trial at least, where counsel is arguing that is too stupid to cut their own meat:

On August 22, oral arguments ended in the Justice Department’s antitrust trial to block the book publisher Penguin Random House from merging with rival Simon & Schuster. The result of the trial, which is expected to be decided later this fall, will have a massive impact on both the multibillion-dollar book publishing industry and on how the government handles corporate consolidation going forward. Perhaps fittingly for a case with such high stakes, the trial was characterized by obfuscation and downright disinformation nearly the whole way through.

Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster are two members of what’s called the “Big Five” of publishing, with the other three slots filled by HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan. The Big Five control roughly 80 percent of the trade market for books in the US, and Penguin Random House, with a market share of 25 percent in 2020, is the biggest one of all. Penguin Random House is itself the product of many mergers, with one independent publishing imprint after another joining together to form a massive conglomerate, culminating in the merger of Penguin and Random House in 2013 that brought the then-Big Six down to the Big Five.

………

It was clear that a new publishing house made of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster would dominate the industry in a way no one had seen before, but few in the industry appeared to believe that then-President Trump’s apparently corporate-friendly Justice Department would actually care enough about the proposed merger to try to interfere.

………

One year later, under the new Biden administration, the DOJ filed suit against both Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, as well as parent companies Bertelsmann and ViacomCBS. “Authors are the lifeblood of book publishing,” the suit argued. “Penguin Random House’s proposed acquisition of Simon & Schuster would result in substantial harm to authors, particularly authors of anticipated top-selling books.”

Most of us are familiar with the idea of a monopoly and how such a selling market can drive up consumer prices, but with this case, the DOJ was arguing that PRHS&S would form a monopsony — an unfair buying market that would drive down the money paid to authors. Such cases are historically rare. If the DOJ succeeds here, it will be setting a major precedent for the way the US prosecutes corporate giants.

It will also be putting a stop to one of the biggest publishing houses American publishing would ever be likely to see. Yet despite the very real possibility that Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster could combine to form a monster of a corporation, both publishers have continually presented themselves as scrappy underdogs doing their best to ride out a tough market. When the proposed merger between PRH and S&S was first announced in 2020, the prevailing narrative was that a combined PRHS&S would give helpless publishers the leverage they needed to push back against the almighty force of Amazon.

………

Over the course of the trial that ensued, publishers would continue to insist on their existing public image as helpless incompetents at the whims of larger companies and an irrational market. The government, meanwhile, stuck to the narrative that the publishers were savvy operators who knew exactly what they were doing with their billion-dollar companies. The question of which story was most convincing will help decide the future of American antitrust law.

A monopsony is the mirror image of a monopoly, and is sometimes called a buyer’s monopoly. Instead of a market with only one seller who can charge whatever they like, a monopsony is a market with only one buyer, who can set their price however they like. It’s still a case where the laws of supply and demand have been skewed to favor one party unfairly over the other.

A mining town where the mining company is the only major employer, and as such can set wages low, would be one example of a monopsony. The Justice Department’s argument was that the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster would create another.

Should PRH and S&S combine forces, they would be publishing what the Wall Street Journal estimated to be one-third of all the books in the US every year. The government’s model is more specific. It sets a market of what it’s calling “anticipated top-sellers”: books for which publishers pay an advance of $250,000 or more, which they presumably expect will sell very well when they hit bookstores. The government estimates that in such a market, a combined PRHS&S would have a 50 percent market share. The next largest publisher, HarperCollins, would have less than half that.

………

Under the most recent two Democratic presidents, though, monopsony theory has slowly become more mainstream. In 2016, President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers released an issues brief arguing that consolidation across industries could lead to monopsonistic labor markets that depressed worker wages. In 2021, Congress introduced the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, which would amend existing antitrust law to explicitly preclude monopsonies. Just this past July, President Joe Biden signed an executive order promising to use antitrust laws to combat “the harmful effects of monopoly and monopsony,” noting that his administration would be “especially” focused on the way these issues affect labor markets.

Some antitrust experts have been thinking of this trial as a kind of test balloon. If the government wins, we could be entering an era in which monopsonies in many other industries (Hollywood, for instance, as well as Big Tech) could face much more aggressive government scrutiny than before. Power could be redistributed away from giant corporations and back toward the independent workers they employ. If the publishers win, meanwhile, the government will have to rethink its strategy.

………

One of the ironies of this trial, industry magazine Publishers Weekly noted early on, was that “the government’s case relies in part on making publishers look extraordinarily savvy about the market in which they operate, in addition to benefiting from their sheer size.” For publishers to rebut that case, they in turn had to present themselves as essentially incompetent gamblers, risking the company’s money in an industry no one could predict, all for the sheer love of literature.

If they were as the publishers depicted themselves, this merger would never happen.  The only value for Penguin Random House buying Simon & Schuster at a significant premium is the ability to extract anti-competitive (in this case monopsony) rents.

“Everything is random in publishing,” Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle told the court during his testimony. “Success is random. Bestsellers are random. That is why we are the Random House!” He went on to describe the editors and publishers of PRH as “angel investors in our authors and their dreams, their stories.”

Throughout the trial, publishers depicted the industry as one of chaos and romance in equal measure, a hazy and lovely space in which publishers routinely hand out large sums of money for great works of literature, unable to either predict or care whether they would ever make their money back. Within this space, publishers argued, the narrow slice of publishing that the government was focused on — books with an advance of $250,000 and above — was meaningless. There was no true correlation, they said, between the books that they paid high advances for and the actual sales figures of those books. And so one by one, highly paid CEOs took the stand to argue that they had no idea what they were doing with all their money.

………

Both depictions of publishing on display at this trial, as Publishers Weekly acknowledged, have an element of truth. The book market really is notoriously unpredictable, and book publishers really are fairly savvy about manipulating that market in order to insure their own profits. That’s how publishing CEOs traditionally justify their enormous salaries: They are supposed to be the people who understand how to make money out of an irrational business.

If I were the government I would use the obscene pay for publishing CEOs as evidence that they know what the f%$# that they are doing.

If the publishing companies, who are publicly owned and have a responsible to shareholders, are paying millions of dollars to CEOs who are no better than flipping a coin, then they are defrauding the company.

………

In reality, as DOJ attorney John Read repeatedly emphasized, no new publisher has been able to successfully break into the ranks of the Big Five in over 30 years. The big publishers are now so big, with such extensive backlists and such deep pockets, that it’s nearly impossible to compete with them at scale. Regardless of their claims, they wield enormous power in the industry.

………

“Consolidation is bad for competition,” opined Stephen King, when he appeared at the trial to testify for the government. King, who introduced himself as a freelance writer, described a publishing landscape that’s changed dramatically over his 50 years in the industry.

When Stephen f%$#ing King says that the publishing giants have too much power, the publishing giants have too much power.  QED.

If the government loses, and this case is not a slam dunk, the hypocrisy of Robert Bork still dominates antitrust theory, they need to appeal, and not drop the case.

Fight this to the bitter end, because there have been two generations of bad and corrupt precedent that needs to be beaten back.

About Bloody Time

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will start requiring all that all publications receiving federal funding make their research immediately available to the public free of charge, which means that the good folks at Elsevier will no longer be able to extract the enormous rents that they currently do for their "Services."

Basically, the author of the study (generally) pays for publication, unpaid volunteers do peer review, and then the academic publishing giant charges thousands of dollars a year for subscriptions to their magazines.

Given that the US government is the largest source of funding for research in the world, this is a big f%$#ing deal.

Publicly funding research should be available to the public:

Many federal policy changes are well known before they are announced. Hints in speeches, leaks, and early access to reporters at major publications all pave the way for the eventual confirmation. But on Thursday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) dropped a big one that seemed to take everyone by surprise. Starting in 2026, any scientific publication that receives federal funding will need to be openly accessible on the day it's published.

The move has the potential to further shake up the scientific publishing industry, which has already adopted preprint archives, similar mandates from other funding organizations, and greatly expanded access to publications during the pandemic.

The change was announced by Alondra Nelson, acting head of the OSTP (a permanent director is in the process of Senate confirmation). The formal policy is laid out in an accompanying memorandum.

The US government is likely to be the world's largest funder of scientific research. For medical research, the US National Institutes of Health spends more than the rest of the top 20 organizations combined. Yet, for decades, the scientific publishing system was set up so that the government (much less the people it represented) didn't necessarily have access to the research it was funding. Instead, access was predicated on paid subscriptions to the journals the work was published in.

Two trends have undercut that limitation. One is the rise of open-access journals, which charge an up-front fee to the researchers and then provide anyone with Internet service access to the final research publication. The second is the trend toward "preprints." Preprint servers, pioneered by researchers in physics and astronomy, provide access to manuscripts submitted to publishers for peer review. Their use in the biological sciences expanded considerably during the COVID-19 pandemic.

No mention here of Sci-Hub, the Russia based library website that has been making millions of papers available free of charge for more than a decade.

That organization, under legal siege across the world, has shown what is possible in the world or academic research without parasites erecting paywalls.

This is arguably the greatest step forward in science in decades.

I'm Calling Political Ploy

Nameless bureaucrats in the Pentagon announce plans to shutter the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, and Trump reverses the decision with a tweet.

Call me a cynic, but I think that this was the plan all along.

In the middle of a minor sh%$-storm about Trump dissing dead soldiers, he gets to play hero:

Update: Following blowback, President Trump announced on Twitter that the publication will not be shuttered after all.

The United States of America will NOT be cutting funding to @starsandstripes magazine under my watch. It will continue to be a wonderful source of information to our Great Military!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2020

The Trump administration has decided to shutter Stars and Stripes, the award-winning independent military newspaper that began during the Civil War and has continuously published since World War II. The publication has broken many important stories, including highlighting predatory or unethical practices by military brass.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have been trying to prevent this move for months. “Stars and Stripes is an essential part of our nation’s freedom of the press that serves the very population charged with defending that freedom,” fifteen senators said in a letter sent to Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

Even Trump sycophant Lindsay Graham has attempted to save the paper, writing to Esper, “as a veteran who has served overseas, I know the value that the Stars and Stripes brings to its readers.”

But the administration announced it is going ahead with closing the publication as part of cost-cutting measures, ordering it to stop publishing by September 30th and setting a deadline at the end of January to dissolve it completely.

If you think that this is a sincere effort, or has resulted from the storm blowing up over this, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Also, I cannot believe that I am f%$#ing reposting a f%$#ing a f%$#ing Donald f%$#ing Trump Tweet.

Textbook Publisher Sees Brave New World of Screwing Students Even Harder

Kara Swisher of Recode has a remarkably credulous interview with textbook publisher CEO John Fallon, and swallows his line of crap without any challenge.

Fallon is claiming that somehow or other, the digital textbook will fix Pearson's flagging textbook business (it probably will) and will make things better for students. (It certainly will not.)

The text books have gotten expensive enough that the resale market, and the 3^rd party rental market, have been eating the publisher's lunch.

Pearson's solution is digital, not because it is more convenient, nor because it is better for students, but because it allows to lock down the market, preventing students selling their old books, and extend their monopoly rents.

This is just another way to f%$# their customers.

About F%$#ing Time

The University of California has just severed all ties with Elsevier because they were demanding too much money, and insisting on too many restrictions on the distribution of research:

The mammoth University of California (UC) system announced today it will stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher, headquartered in Amsterdam. Talks to renew a collective contract broke down, the university said, because Elsevier refused to strike a package deal that would provide a break on subscription fees and make all articles published by UC authors immediately free for readers worldwide.

The stand by UC, which followed 8 months of negotiations, could have significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the so-called open-access movement, in the United States and beyond. The 10-campus system accounts for nearly 10% of all U.S. publishing output and is among the first U.S. institutions, and by far the largest, to boycott Elsevier over costs. Many administrators and librarians at U.S. universities and elsewhere have complained about what they view as excessively high journal subscription fees charged by commercial publishers.

………

Indeed, UC’s move could ratchet up pressure on additional negotiations facing Elsevier and other commercial publishers; consortia of universities and labs in Germany and Sweden had already reached an impasse last year with Elsevier in their efforts to lower subscription fees.

………

Jeff MacKie-Mason, who heads UC Berkeley’s library and is also co-chair of the negotiation task force, says Elsevier just didn’t move far enough to UC’s position. The publisher’s final offer “was closer to what we wanted in terms of open access” but nevertheless included a price increase, he says.

………

UC published about 50,000 articles last year, and a substantial share, about 10,000, appeared in Elsevier journals. For subscriptions and article fees, UC paid about $11 million, the Los Angeles Times reported recently. (UC says the information is confidential under a nondisclosure agreement.)

………

UC also noted that some of Elsevier’s newer content is already freely available through open-access publishing, open-access repositories, interlibrary loans, and “other legitimate forms of scholarly sharing.”

That last bit is actually the folks at the University of California system in talking in code.

What they are really saying is that, not withstanding the multi-million dollar judgement that Elsevier got against it, the Russian based Sci-Hub has is the future:

Little more than three years ago, Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, took Sci-Hub to court.

It was a mismatched battle from the start. With a net income of more than $2.4 billion per year, the publisher could fund a proper case, while its nemesis relied on donations.

Elsevier won the case, including millions of dollars in damages. However, the site remained online and grew bigger. Ironically, the academic publisher itself appears to be one of the main drivers of this growth.
………

Several universities from Germany, Hungary, and Sweden previously let their Elsevier subscriptions expire, which means that tens of thousands of researchers don’t have access to research that is critical to their work.

This is where Sci-Hub comes into play.

The “Pirate Bay of Science” might just quietly play a major role in this conflict. Would the universities cancel their subscriptions so easily if their researchers couldn’t use Sci-Hub to get free copies?

Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has always been forthcoming about her goals. Sci-Hub wants to remove all barriers in the way of science. She also made that crystal clear when we interviewed her back in 2015.

“Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal. Also, the idea that knowledge can be a private property of some commercial company sounds absolutely weird to me,” she said at the time.

I feel nothing but glee at the misfortunes of Elsivier.

They are a bunch of contemptible parasites.

Typography Matters, Twitter Pun Edition

I got nothing to add to this:

The use of sans-serif could leave Pakistan sans-Sharif. https://t.co/XtRrkVVRfI

— Dhruva Jaishankar (@d_jaishankar) July 12, 2017

Yes

The Guardian asks, "Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?"

Why yes, yes it is.

With reasonable regulation and antitrust enforcement, parasites like Elsevier have plundered publicly funded knowledge.

The end of this business model has been predicted for years, but with great profits comes the resources to engage aggressive rent seeking, which mitigates against this.

I don't think that we will see any change in this until the government mandates another model for research that it funds.

Speaking of Corruption

Andrew Cuomo wrote a very poorly selling memoir. His publisher paid him $245 for a gook that had a suggested retail price of $29.99:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo's low-selling 2014 memoir netted him another $218,100 last year, pushing his total book payments to $783,000 over the past four years, according to his tax returns.

Cuomo's 2016 tax records, which his office made available for review Tuesday, showed the latest round of payments from HarperCollins, the major publisher that gave him a lucrative book deal in 2013.

The governor's memoir — "All Things Possible: Setbacks and Success in Politics in Life" — did not perform well: Just 3,200 copies sold since its release, including just 100 copies over the past two years, according to NPD Books, which tracks book sales nationwide.

It was a money-loser for HarperCollins, which ultimately paid Cuomo about $245 per book sold. It retailed at $29.99.

His Presidential aspirations are the subject of frequent speculation, which would be a f%$#ing disaster.

He needs not to be the Democrats 2020 nominee.

Heck:  He needs not to be the Governor New York State.

He needs to be fired ……… Out of a cannon ……… Into the sun.

A Good Start

For profit academic research publishers are firmly in the category of, "Mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

A particularly nasty player in this sphere is Elsevier, the publisher of such items as The Lancet and Cell, and Gray's Anatomy, and it is particularly aggressive in its charges, and in its aggressive use of copyright to enforce its charges.

All for publications where the content providers, and the editors work for volunteers.

It has now engendered a boycott in its home base of the Netherlands:

A long running dispute between Dutch universities and Elsevier has taken an interesting turn. Last week Koen Becking, chairman of the Executive Board of Tilburg University who has been negotiating with scientific publishers about an open access policy on behalf of Dutch universities with his colleague Gerard Meijer, announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier.

As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier to give up their post. If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals.

The Netherlands has a clear position on Open Access. Sander Dekker, the State Secretary of Education has taken a strong position on Open Access, stating at the opening of the 2014 academic year in Leiden that ‘Science is not a goal in itself. Just as art is only art once it is seen, knowledge only becomes knowledge once it is shared.’

Dekker has set two Open Access targets: 40% of scientific publications should be made available through Open Access by 2016, and 100% by 2024. The preferred route is through gold Open Access – where the work is ‘born Open Access’. This means there is no cost for readers – and no subscriptions.

However Gerard Meijer, who handles the negotiations with Elsevier, says that the parties have not been able to come close to an agreement.

 ………

The 2015 Dutch boycott is significant. Typically negotiations with publishers occur at an institutional level and with representatives from the university libraries. This makes sense as libraries have long standing relationships with publishers and understand the minutiae of the licencing processes . However the Dutch negotiations have been led by the Vice Chancellors of the universities.  It is a country-wide negotiation at the highest level. And Vice Chancellors have the ability to request behaviour change of their research communities.

This boycott has the potential to be a significant game changer in the relationship between the research community and the world’s largest academic publisher. The remainder of this blog looks at some of the facts and figures relating to expenditure on Open Access in the UK. It underlines the importance of the Dutch position.The 2015 Dutch boycott is significant. Typically negotiations with publishers occur at an institutional level and with representatives from the university libraries. This makes sense as libraries have long standing relationships with publishers and understand the minutiae of the licencing processes . However the Dutch negotiations have been led by the Vice Chancellors of the universities.  It is a country-wide negotiation at the highest level. And Vice Chancellors have the ability to request behaviour change of their research communities.

These folks are leeches, who have made their business plan out of the free effort of academics.

I'd love to dance on their corporate grave.

Tweet of the Day

Months ago, Rupert Murdoch bought National Geographic and fired most of writers. This just hit the stands. pic.twitter.com/sr3Savvdli

— Historical Pics (@HistoricalPics) November 24, 2015

This is a damn shame.

A national treasure has been destroyed in a matter of months.

Sh%$ Like This Makes Me Feel Unreasonably Smug

It appears that the New York Times has finally had enough of right wing publishers manufacturing data for its best seller list, and it's first target is the Ted Crux Book A Time For Truth:

Conservatives are furious at the New York Times for refusing to allow Ted Cruz and his publisher, HarperCollins, to game the system and “earn” his way on to the bestseller list via “strategic bulk purchases.”

In an email to Politico’s Dylan Byers, Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy explained why Cruz’s “A Time For Truth” was omitted, noting that the company has “uniform standards that we apply to our best seller list, which includes an analysis of book sales that goes beyond simply the number of books sold.”“In the case of this book,” she added, “the overwhelming preponderance of evidence was that sales were limited to strategic bulk purchases.”

Conservatives are complaining that “bulk purchases” should still count as sales:

………

And while they might have ground to stand on there — if by “bulk purchases,” the Times meant “10,000 copies purchased to be sold at Walmart” — but the Times specified that it believes HarperCollins engaged in “strategic bulk purchases.” In essence, The Times accused Cruz’s publisher of trying to buy its way onto the bestseller list by having a firm like Result Source hire thousands of people across America to individually purchase a copy of “A Time For Truth,” in the hope that some of those retailers are on the secret list of booksellers who report their sales to the Times, or that the aggregate purchasers will simply be too high for the Times to ignore.

In other words, conservatives are upset that HarperCollins got caught trying to rig the system in order to make “A Time For Truth” a bestseller, though that’s not quite how they see it:

………

Wingnut tears are salting my soup as we speak.

What the F%$#ing F%$#?

I understand that HIV remains a major public health image, but this is nuts:

The newest battle against HIV/AIDS stigma is being waged in blood and ink.

This month, the small Austrian magazine Vangardist will release a special-edition issue printed entirely in ink that has been infused with HIV-positive blood, in an effort to force readers to confront — and break — taboos that persist around the virus. The magazine, which is marketed toward “progressive” urban young men, plans to release 3,000 print copies of the spring “Heroes of HIV” issue, a theme inspired by the three donors who contributed their blood to the project, as well as people living publicly with HIV.

“We believe that as a lifestyle magazine it is our responsibility to address the issues shaping society today,” Vangardist publisher Julian Wiehl said. “With 80 percent more confirmed cases of HIV being recorded in 2013 than 10 years previously, and an estimated 50 percent of HIV cases being detected late due to lack of testing caused by social stigma associated with the virus [sic]. This felt like a very relevant issue for us to focus on not just editorially but also from a broader communications standpoint.”

As Wiehl explained to the Washington Post, the print edition will be packaged in a sealed wrapper, so the reader must “break the seal to break the stigma.” While it is well-known that HIV can only be transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids such as blood and semen, and there is no health or safety risk posed by handling the blood-infused ink, Vangardist hopes to make a statement that challenges the public. (The magazine did take extra measures to ensure the ink would be sterile, and autoclaved the donated blood before using it.)

 I have no words.

Fairy Tales is as Fairy Tales Does

I'm not particularly concerned with the afterlife.

It's never been a big part of Jewish theology.

I remember having a talk with a born-again Pentecostal, and my complete ambivalence toward the nature of the afterlife baffled her.

There is a consensus on the afterlife in Judiasm, but it is simply, "Yes".

Some Jewish theologians have expressed a belief in a conventional sort of heaven, while others (particularly Kabbalists) favor reincarnation, and in either case, no one gets particularly exercised about it.

That being said, as my Pentecostal friend indicated, it is a big deal for Christians, which we frequently see aggressive attempts to prove the existence of heaven and hell. (I find these rather comical)

Well, it now appears that there is a "Heaven-Industrial" complex which is determined to sell heaven for profit:

UPDATE 1 ! According to sources, Lifeway intends to pull this book from it’s bookstore! Warren Throckmorton has the story, but the gist is that in response to  Throckmorton’s questions, “Martin King, Director of Communications at Lifeway issued a statement saying the stores are pulling the book:

“LifeWay was informed this week that Alex Malarkey has retracted his testimony about visiting heaven as told in the book “The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven.” Therefore, we are returning to the publisher the few copies we have in our Stores.”

We have commentary on this and will be posting a fuller update tomorrow morning. 

UPDATE 2! The Washington Post confirms that Tyndale House will also stop selling this book

UPDATE 3! Emails Suggest Lifeway President Knew of Heaven Scam, Chose Not to Act

Lifeway has been selling The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven for many years now. It is part of the trifecta of books on “heavenly tourism” that Lifeway has sold and has promoted, along with 90 Minutes in Heaven and Heaven is for Real. The co-author of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven – the boy himself – has written an open letter to Lifeway and admonished them for not holding to the sufficiency of Scripture, and has recanted his tale. For those who may not be familiar with of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, the publisher’s description is as follows:

“In 2004, Kevin Malarkey and his six-year-old son, Alex, suffered an horrific car accident. The impact from the crash paralyzed Alex–and medically speaking, it was unlikely that he could survive. ‘I think Alex has gone to be with Jesus,’ a friend told the stricken dad. But two months later, Alex awoke from a coma with an incredible story to share. Of events at the accident scene and in the hospital while he was unconscious. Of the angels that took him through the gates of heaven itself. Of the unearthly music that sounded just ‘terrible’ to a six-year-old. And, most amazing of all . . . Of meeting and talking to Jesus. ‘The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven’ is the true story of an ordinary boy’s most extraordinary journey. As you see heaven and earth through Alex’s eyes, you’ll come away with new insights on miracles, life beyond this world, and the power of a father’s love.”

It’s in this context- the context of Lifeway selling this book and making money off of it for years- that Alex Malarkey, the co-author of the book, has reached out to us.  [Update: Many people have asked if this is the first time Alex has spoken out directly. Although Alex’s mother has tried to speak out and contacted book-sellers and has been flatly ignored, going back to at least December 2012, on her blog and in other places, I believe this is the first time Alex has himself spoken out in such a direct way in his own…except for posting a comment relaying this information on the Alex Malarkey fan page on Facebook, after which the comment was deleted by moderators and he was blocked from the group. It doesn’t matter that we are or are not the first. That point is utterly irrelevant. What is relevant is that God willing we will be the last, and that we’re able to provide Alex with a wider audience that he had received the first few go-arounds to get people’s attention.

Seriously.  I'm beginning to think that Tartuffe should be required for every school kid in the United States.

Mazel Tov!!

The new editor of The New Republic has announced that he will try to expand its bullpen beyond its white Ivy League past:

The best way for any new editor of this magazine to respect the spirit of the institution is to first recognize its defining characteristic is a habit of reinvention. The task before us is to ask what The New Republic should be one hundred years after its founding. We set out with many advantages: first, an owner who has committed to investing in quality journalism and who has granted his editorial staff the creative freedom to find a new path. We have an impressive editorial team that has demonstrated exceptional mettle and we will be adding to their ranks. And we have the heritage of sustaining a continuous conversation about America's promise.

As we revive one proud legacy of The New Republic—the launching of new voices and experts—those new voices and experts will be diverse in race, gender, and background. As we build our editorial staff, we will reach out to talented journalists who might have previously felt unwelcome at The New Republic. If this publication is to be influential, and not merely survive, it can no longer afford to represent the views of one privileged class, nor appeal solely to a small demographic of political elites.

You know, I think poaching Ta-Nehisi Coates from The Atlantic might be a good start.

He's a great writer, and has been aggressive critic of The New Republic's indifference, and occasional hostility, to the minority community, and it would do a lot to indicate that this is a clean break from the ignominious reign of the contemptible Marty Peretz.

It is Impossible to Avoid the Conclusion that Black Lives Didn't Matter Much at all to the Magazine.

This is an Actual TNR Cover

In case you haven't heard, there has been a kerfluffle at that bastion for white Ivy League affirmative action The New Republic, with the firing of  Franklin Foer as editor.

A significant portion of the deadwood on their masthead, along with other staff, resigned in protest.

While they consider it to be drawing an ethical line in the sand, it is, in fact, a mark of their missing ethics.

The fact that they were still on that masthead after years of racism and disregard for the minority community at TNR is how their stand should be viewed, as Ta-Nehisi Coates so ably states:

………

Earlier this year, Foer edited an anthology of TNR writings titled Insurrections of the Mind, commemorating the magazine's 100-year history. "This book hasn't been compiled in the name of definitiveness," Foer wrote. "It was put together in the spirit of the magazine that it anthologizes: it is an argument about what matters." There is only one essay in Insurrections that takes race as its subject. The volume includes only one black writer and only two writers of color. This is not an oversight. Nor does it mean that Foer is a bad human. On the contrary, if one were to attempt to capture the "spirit" of TNR, it would be impossible to avoid the conclusion that black lives don't matter much at all.

That explains why the family rows at TNR's virtual funeral look like the "Whites Only" section of a Jim Crow-era movie-house. For most of its modern history, TNR has been an entirely white publication, which published stories confirming white people's worst instincts. During the culture wars of the '80s and '90s, TNR regarded black people with an attitude ranging from removed disregard to blatant bigotry. When people discuss TNR's racism, Andrew Sullivan's publication of excerpts from Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve (and a series of dissents) gets the most attention. But this fuels the lie that one infamous issue stands apart. In fact, the Bell Curve episode is remarkable for how well it fits with the rest of TNR's history.

(emphasis mine)

I just need to note here, as I always do, that, in his late teens, the co-author of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray, burned a cross next to the local police station.

This event in his early life provides necessary context for the fact that most of his professional career has been about putting an academic gloss on racism.

Coates makes the point that the genteel racism of the magazine is not limited to the actions, and tenure, of the contemptible Marty Peretz:

Two years later, Washington Post writer Richard Cohen was roundly rebuked for advocating that D.C. jewelry stores discriminate against young black men—but not by TNR. The magazine took the opportunity to convene a panel to "reflect briefly" on whether it was moral for merchants to bar black men from their stores. ("Expecting a jewelry store owner to risk his life in the service of color-blind justice is expecting too much," the magazine concluded.)

TNR made a habit of "reflecting briefly" on matters that were life and death to black people but were mostly abstract thought experiments to the magazine's editors. Before, during, and after Sullivan's tenure, the magazine seemed to believe that the kind of racism that mattered most was best evidenced in the evils of Afrocentrism, the excesses of multiculturalism, and the machinations of Jesse Jackson. It's true that TNR's staff roundly objected to excerpting The Bell Curve, but I was never quite sure why. Sullivan was simply exposing the dark premise that lay beneath much of the magazine's coverage of America's ancient dilemma.

Read the rest.

BTW, after you read this, you might want to read Wonkette's Rebecca Schoenkopf's take on this.

While Coates' analysis is trenchant and thoughtful, Wonkette is just delightfully snarky and very funny.

So, When is Mark Zuckerberg Going to Jail?

I've always thought that there was something odd about how Facebook does business.

Even by the litigious standards of the various dot-com bubbles, the number of law suits that have have been filed alleging that he took money from people to develop stuff,. and walked off with said work product.

It's entirely reasonable to see the enormous amount of money involved as an inducement to file suits, after all, even a small settlement will still be a lot of money, but I'd make sure to dot my "i"s and cross my "t"s if I dealt with Facebook in a commercial capacity.

This is what online market provider Limited Run has discovered, when they realized that 80% of the ad click-throughs that they were paying through were bots:

Hey everyone, we’re going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do. A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn’t verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here’s what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn’t on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn’t have JavaScript, it’s very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What’s important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we’d keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That’s correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes. But let’s move on, because who the bots belong to isn’t provable.

While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we’re not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month. That’s correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage. So we did what any good hardcore kids would do. We cursed that piece of sh%$ out! Damn we were so pissed. We still are. This is why we need to delete this page and move away from Facebook. They’re scumbags and we just don’t have the patience for scumbags.

(%$ mine)

I'm thinking that the people who will win if this story goes mainstream will be the newspapers.

Much of the allure of online advertising is its ability to closely track response to a specific ad. If that turns out not to be true, then print ads become much more attractive.

H/t Naked Capitalism.