Cheap Shots

 

Ioffe's Russian-themed title is the best part of her blog. I guess the martini is OK too, at least it seems to be a real one, with an olive. I haven't found out how to navigate it, the blog I mean, but she emails me the installments one at a time, which must be why I spend so much time talking about her. I think she's just toying with me, though, and I'm getting fed up.

There are actually some signs that tomorrow might be marginally better, but don't get too excited.

There are now an unprecedented almost nine million stories in the Naked City, according to the 2020 Census, 8.8 million residents, up 629,000 from 2010. Making nonsense out of pundits' belief that New York was getting emptied as folks fled the taxes and viruses. New York State is losing a congressional seat, but it's going to be a Republican one in the western part of the state.

“The city’s growth actually outpaced the growth of the nation,” said [chief demographer Peter] Lobo. “That is unusual for a mature city like New York.”

The great thing is the city managed to make what appears to be the most accurate count in its history in the face not only of a pandemic but also the determination of the Republican federal administration to make it fail:

Nostalgie de la Boue Journalistique

Book cover by Lau Rivers, 2021.

A fascinating-appalling journalistic inside-baseball piece from Julia Ioffe, who seems to be engaged in the development of some as yet unnamed United Artists–like project where the journalists run the show, and in the meantime has started a sort of blog under the appropriately Russian-sounding title Tomorrow Will Be Worse, on a not very well-designed platform. The post ("The Agony and Ecstasy of the Trump Reporters, After the Fall of Trump") deals with the post-Trump crash in reportage futures:  

True to everyone’s predictions, cable news ratings have gone off a cliff. In the second quarter of 2021, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC each lost at least 30 percent of their audiences. Viewership at CNN, Trump’s favorite punching bag, was down a whopping 45 percent. “There’s a reason that TV networks cover plane crashes and condo crashes, and Trump was the plane crash of democracy,” said Susan.

That's Susan Glasser of The New Yorker, of course, spouse and occasional collaborator of Peter Baker of The New York Times, a couple of Ioffe's informants for this piece. I'm very fond of Ioffe in particular, of course, on account of the Russia connection, which leads her to do work that I think is often really valuable, unlike most White House political coverage, which she doesn't herself do, as she carefully points out, unlike so many of her friends and cable talking-head colleagues.