Tangled Web

"Marquee columnist"

"Marquee columnist" was a phrase used by Matt Yglesias in reference to the ongoing Brooks brouhaha, which you may not have heard about: Somebody finally figured out the the New York Times "marquee columnist" David Brooks is getting paid for the Aspen gig, chairing "Weave: The Social Fabric Project", probably in six figures, and BuzzFeed has been exploring the thought that he might have a bit of a conflict of interest there, since he's composed a substantial number of columns praising himself for his involvement in the thing without warning us that he has a financial interest in it.

Which I thought initially looked like a bit of a stretch, because what kind of idiot imagined he wasn't getting paid? But wait, there's more!

Was Lukoil just asking for a friend?

Lukoil station in New York City, via Wikimedia Commons.

Well, this (from Danny Hakim and Matthew Rosenberg at the Times) is sort of interesting:

When the Russia question came up during a hearing at the British Parliament last month, Alexander Nix did not hesitate.

“We’ve never worked in Russia,” said Mr. Nix, head of a data consulting firm that advised the Trump campaign on targeting voters.

“As far as I’m aware, we’ve never worked for a Russian company,” Mr. Nix added. “We’ve never worked with a Russian organization in Russia or any other country, and we don’t have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.”

Only Nix's interrelated companies, the UK SLC Group and US Cambridge Analytica, the Robert Mercer–created "psychographic profiling" firm hired by Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner to create the in-depth picture of how Trump's message resonated around the country that dictated the candidate's travel schedule in 2016, did claim that they worked in Russia in some of their promotional material (SLC says one employee did "commercial work" for a "private company" in Russia 25 years ago, but the brochure suggests that SLC has clients on its active list with the firm's elections division), and then apparently they had at least three meetings in 2014 and 2015 with executives from the privately owned but deeply government-connected Lukoil oil export firm, discussing some possible work that never got going.

Douthat on the Great Facebook Massacre

Image via Michael Ferry at First Draft.

So apparently deep in the subterranean regions of the Facebook world, the News Curators toil, unseen and unappreciated, writing their headlines and teasers for the trending topics in the upper right of your timeline, and a little bit more. It turns out that the Trending Module algorithm doesn't work quite as well as advertised, or, more to the point, as well as Twitter's, and it needs to be goosed from time to time, and one of the things they do is to "inject" stories that fail to trend on their own into the mix, from the front pages of ten different big-time sources (CNN, the New York Times, BBC, and the like), or just stories that seem so serious that it's embarrassing not to have them (the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the killings of the Charlie Hebdo staff, Syria stories, #BlackLivesMatter). They're also empowered to switch a story from its coverage in a less respectable source like RedState or Breitbart to a more trustworthy one, or deactivate it altogether, if not enough sources are covering it.

Perhaps because their backgrounds are more literary than techie, they're not regarded as real Facebook people but "disposable outsiders". They're not employees but contract workers, like proofreaders or Uber drivers, supplied by a temp agency, a dozen or more squeezed into makeshift quarters in the New York offices. Though they have fancy degrees from Ivy schools and résumés from the New York publishing scene, they are not invited into the Facebook world. If there's an 8:00 happy hour for the proper employees, the News Curators aren't invited; they keep working, into the night. The turnover is pretty high. They believe that their real function is to train the algorithm—one day it will know how to do their jobs and they'll all be fired.