Did you know Facebook established an independent oversight board a few years ago? Given the onslaught of news during that time, plus the fact Facebook wasn’t exactly putting on a PR blitz about it, you’d be forgiven for only discovering this fact; if you’re interested in catching up, the Yale Law Journal has an extensive overview. There’s also an ad-hoc “real” oversight board¹ made up of people who are much more critical of Facebook (Shoshana Zuboff, author of the The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is a member and a good indication of not only the caliber of members but the goals).

As someone who first advocated for social media companies to increase their independent accountability back in 2013, I was (extremely) cautiously optimistic about this, even though it took nearly two years to get going and, thus far, hasn’t been given much to do.

Well, now Trump has been “indefinitely banned” from using any Facebook service, which is exactly the sort of thing an oversight board should be taking on. Ben Smith, writing in his media column for The New York Times, talked to several members of the official board as it grapples with its first real test as a new kind of “supercourt” in an age where corporations wield as much power as most nations.

Banning Trump is the rare instance of Facebook both doing the right thing (eventually and much too late) and doing what’s best for their business. With Trump gone, both from Facebook’s properties and the White House, it’s surely a relief for their largely (allegedly) liberal workforce who no longer needs to have their noses rubbed in the actual results of their day-to-day work.

However, if the oversight board decides Trump should be allowed to return to the service, it will not only be a thorn in Zuck’s side and a depressing outcome for the thousands of Facebook employees who prefer not to be reminded their jobs have real-world consequences, but a principled (if ultimately wrong) stand that will undoubtedly have a dire outcome. There’s also a very real chance that Facebook will be the only major platform with a Trump presence, since Twitter, YouTube, et al have shown exactly zero interest in joining the Oversight Board.

It would be an interesting outcome for those of us who are longstanding critics of social media, and Facebook specifically. I’ve said for years that Trump should have to abide by the extremely generous and mercurial rules the platforms invent and cheered when Trump was finally shown the door. Letting Trump back on would be, as has been obvious for years and all the more so now that he’s been muzzled, an unequivocally bad thing. It would also shine a bright light on what Facebook is. If the ban stays in place, Trump would be denied a megaphone and rallying place for his revanchist supporters, but Facebook would be allowed off the hook.

Tom Dreisbach and Meg Anderson reporting for NPR:

As a violent mob descended on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, lawmakers and aides hid wherever they could, waiting for the military and police to arrive. But many of those who stormed the Capitol were military veterans themselves, who had once sworn to protect the Constitution. In fact, an NPR analysis has found that nearly 1 in 5 people charged over their alleged involvement in the attack on the U.S. Capitol appear to have a military history.

Some of those arrested are still active duty, in the reserves, and police officers. Still others are elected officials, all of them Republicans.

The level of planning and coordination among some of the insurrectionists shows a degree of training and willingness to kidnap and apparently murder elected officials. Spencer S. Hsu, Tom Jackman, and Devlin Barrett for The Washington Post:

In charging papers, the FBI said that during the Capitol riot, Caldwell received Facebook messages from unspecified senders updating him of the location of lawmakers. When he posted a one-word message, “Inside,” he received exhortations and directions describing tunnels, doors and hallways, the FBI said.

Some messages, according to the FBI, included, “Tom all legislators are down in the Tunnels 3floors down,” and “Go through back house chamber doors facing N left down hallway down steps.” Another message read: “All members are in the tunnels under capital seal them in. Turn on gas,” the FBI added.

This is a rot a the core of institutions meant to protect us and perpetuated by one of our political parties. It’s decades in the making and won’t be fixed quickly or easily. Seeing January 6 for what it is will be vital.

In addition to being one of the great American thinkers and writers, James Baldwin was also an expat (he left the United States in his early 20’s and would return to report and host lectures, but lived the rest of his life in France, Switzerland, and Turkey) and lover of American arts. He counted Miles Davis, Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, and Josephine Baker, among many others, as friends; fellow expat Nina Simone considered him a mentor on her own journey of activism and protest.

So this playlist¹ is a fitting and joyous encounter, compiled by Hammer Museum curator Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi from photographs of Baldwin’s record collection courtesy of La Maison Baldwin.

Perfect background music while reading Sonny’s Blues or even while watching Baldwin coolly and expertly dismantle William Buckley.

Amanda Gorman, the brilliant twenty-two year old poet, stole the show at yesterday’s inauguration. If you haven’t yet watched her perform the original poem she wrote, it really is stunning.

I found this bit of her biography all the more impressive.

Gorman was named the nation’s First Youth Poet Laureate at the age of 19. At 16, she was Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, where she was raised by Joan, a single mother and an English teacher. Gorman said writing became her way to overcome a daunting obstacle.

“I had a speech impediment. And so I couldn’t use my voice, then I would author my voice on the page. So it’s really been a godsend and a lifeline for me,” she said.

Gorman said poetry and spoken words became her own type of pathology.

“And so once I arrived at the point in my life in high school, where I said, ‘you know what? Writing my poems on the page isn’t enough for me. I have to give them breath, and life, I have to perform them as I am.’ That was the moment that I was able to grow past my speech impediment,” she said.

Gorman, who had particular trouble with the letter “R,” used music as therapy.

“My favorite thing to practice was the song Aaron Burr, Sir, from “Hamilton” because it is jam-packed with R’s. And I said, ‘if I can keep up with Leslie in this track, then I am on my way to being able to say this R in a poem,'” she said

When Mason asked what she felt when she was performing poems, Gorman replied: “When I am on stage, I feel electric. I feel like I could breathe fire…like I am summoning the energy not only of myself but of my ancestors.”

Recall that President Biden overcame his own speech impediment and has, for decades, quietly worked to help others.

I spent a decade in newsrooms and have watched far too many White House press briefings — most of them are boring, or too overt, or both. At times they have pushed for war, or to help forestall a crisis, or to provide some sense of normalcy. Obviously, the last four years have seen none of that, with the press secretary acting as an extension of the mendacity of the president, and the briefings, when the occurred at all, something to be ignored as more active disinformation.

Watching this very straightforward, professional, and yes, boring briefing was such a relief.

A nice round-up of the immediate undoing of some of the most shameful parts of the prior administration. From rejoining the Paris accords to ending construction of the border wall to codifying racial and gender equity

The Science Museum Group sounds like one of those fake organizations that either puts together bullshit Instagram virality traps or is a tax write-off for religious fundamentalists who actually think the earth if 6,000 years old. Turns out it’s very real, with a collection that includes Babbage’s difference engine No. 1 and the Apollo 10 command module.

Back in 2019, they started digitizing their entire collection — hundreds of thousands of objects — as part of a move to a new (physical) location. Given the very long tail of stuff, there are plenty of items that have never been seen before. To fix this gross inequity, they built a little app that pulls from the site’s API and finds pages with a view count of 0 then serves them up at random.

If you were hoping to be served a vaginal syringe with rubber bulb, well, I’m afraid I’ve already claimed that one.

Elle talked to 23 reporters, all of them women, about what it was like covering the White House during the Trump years. It’s as enlightening — even now! — as it is infuriating.

A sharp insight from Olivia Nuzzi, who had some of the best coverage for New York magazine, from when she broke the story John Kelly was about to get fired:

I was on no sleep and very late on my deadline. When you work on a palace intrigue story about the Trump White House, it activates nefarious actors and crazy people. You might have six sources that “independently” tell you something, but that doesn’t mean anything because they’re all actually insane and evil. The interview happened, and I went to smoke in Lafayette Park to unwind. I called my editor and asked, “Did I hallucinate this? Can you listen to my recording?”

I regretted in some ways how I told that story. It didn’t do a great job of conveying how powerful people in the country spend their time, in the middle of crises, talking about and trying to prevent the spread of gossip about their workplace. It’s been four years of psychotic drama, at the most personal, petty level you could imagine. That is the story of why Trump failed to do anything, for the most part, that he set out to do.

Trump’s contempt for other people — literally anyone else — should have made it obvious how patently unfit he is to public service. The way he treated the press was beyond the pale for a president of the United States.

But his smug, sneering, and disdainful treatment of these women, and in particular the Black women of the press, should never be forgotten. Just a rotten human down to his very core.

Letterboxd is such a wonderful site, harkening back to a time when social media wasn’t a monolith subsumed by a duopoly of megacorporations. Over the decade, it’s slowly built a steady audience of dedicated fans and, in the process, actually challenged and affected how we think about the movies, while going from a side project to a self-sustaining community.

I’m hardly a cinephile but I love movies and love talking about them and I love Letterboxd for creating a place where I can do that.