Platforming Big Liars four months on from the insurrection
Yesterday, the
Washington Post hosted a live video chat with Josh Hawley, the Republican senator for Missouri. The interview was billed as being about Hawley’s new book on the “tyranny of big tech,” but before discussing that, Cat Zakrzewski, a tech-policy reporter, asked Hawley about tyranny of a different type the coup attempt at the Capitol, which took place four months ago tomorrow, and Hawley’s responsibility for it. (He refused, both before and after the insurrection, to certify Joe Biden’s election victory, and made a fist-pump gesture toward protesters.) In response, Hawley offered bluster about “election integrity,” whataboutism targeting Democrats, and technicalities about supposed legal irregularities in Pennsylvania; Zakrzewski tried to intercede on a factual point, but Hawley pressed on. “Don’t try to censor, cancel, and silence me here,” he said. “Senator,” Zakrzewski replied, “we’
Yesterday, after months of speculation, the
LA Times appointed its next executive editor. The paper has given the job to Kevin Merida, the editor in chief of
The Undefeated, an arm of ESPN that reports on the intersection of sports, race, and culture; prior to working there, he spent twenty-two years at the
Washington Post, including as a managing editor, and also worked as a reporter at the
Dallas Morning News and
Milwaukee Journal. Merida, who is Black, will be just the third top editor of color in the history of the
LA Times; his hiring follows a public promise that Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner, made last year to diversify the paper’s ranks. Merida will be tasked with growing the paper’s digital-subscriber base, which currently lags those of bigger rivals, as well as its own goals. “I see nothing but opportunity,” he told Meg James, an
The artist Gabriel Rico will inaugurate the new ICA San Diego Photo: Diego González Argüelles/Courtesy of Gabriel Rico Estudio and Perrotin Gallery.
Two art institutions in San Diego, California the Lux Art Institute and the San Diego Art Institute have announced plans to merge and create the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego. The institute is slated to open in September this year and will operate in the former locations of each organisation in Encinitas and Balboa Park.
The space in Encinitas, the current home of the Lux Art Institute, a museum and working studio founded in 1998, will focus on artist residencies, workshops and educational programmes, and will also focus on installations and outdoor commissions. The building of the San Diego Art Institute in Balboa Park, a space founded in 1941 that remains the only museum devoted to contemporary art in the museum cluster of Balboa Park, will be dedicated to exhibitions, site-specific installations an