a blog by Jack Limpert, Editor of The Washingtonian for more than 40 years.
From a story on lithub.com by Dr. Steven Novella with Bob Novella and Jay Novella headlined “So, What Does Our Robot Future Look Like?”:
While robots have made significant inroads into industry and elsewhere, they are just starting to make their way into the high-tech home. Robots in domestic service is a common feature of visions of the future—from The Jetsons Rosey the Robot to the more somber David from Prometheus—but so far these visions have not been realized.
From a column on politico.com by John Harris headlined “The Reporters Who Proved That Journalism Is More Powerful Than Trump”:
For many decades, the Right has had a consistent critique of journalism: The profession’s purported standards of objectivity and detachment are a hoax. Most reporters and editors are liberal, the argument goes, and whether they realize it or not their coverage tilts undeniably in the same direction.
Mark Pickering, formerly a journalist at the Boston Herald, recently went looking for his old company’s offices. With some shoe leather sleuthing, he found them — on the fourth floor of an office building in suburban Braintree. Some outsize photos and a relief of the paper’s familiar newsboy logo were mounted in the hall.
But midday, midweek, no one was there.
The Herald is among the ranks of still-publishing newspapers and websites that no longer have an office for reporters and editors. A partial list: Miami Herald, New York Daily News, The Hartford Courant, The Morning Call in Allentown, and the Capital Gazette in Annapolis.
From a Wall Street Journal story by Jon Hilsenrath headlined “What America Gave My Father—and What He Gave Back”:
In a poignant moment in the Ken Burns documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” Joseph Hilsenrath breaks into tears describing his first encounter with the Statue of Liberty. It was a foggy September morning in 1941 when he approached Ellis Island on the deck of a boat called the Serpa Pinto. An 11-year-old Jewish refugee separated from his parents, he had spent two years shuttling through French orphanages in flight from the Nazis. Remembering the sight of the statue 80 years later, he was still stirred by his first enchanted vision of freedom.
From an AP story headlined “How real are Putin’s nuclear weapons threats?”
Russian President Vladimir Putin warns that he won’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons to ward off Ukraine’s attempt to reclaim control of Moscow-occupied areas that the Kremlin is about to annex.
While the West dismisses that as a scare tactic, a top Putin lieutenant upped the ante by boldly saying the U.S. and its NATO allies wouldn’t dare strike Russia, even if it used nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
A look at the nuclear threats over Ukraine:
WHAT DROVE PUTIN TO MAKE THE THREATS?
From a New York Times review by Joe Klein of the book by Maggie Haberman titled “CONFIDENCE MAN: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America”:
Donald Trump is too much with us. We are stalled, rubbernecking the endless carnage of his road rage. There have been far too many books about him, with far too many “revelations.” After a while, the revelations melt into an indistinguishable muck; his boorish narcissism, a bludgeon. And so it’s hard to assess the news value of “Confidence Man,” Maggie Haberman’s much anticipated biography of the president she followed more assiduously than any other journalist. No doubt, there are revelations aplenty here. But this is a book more notable for the quality of its observations about Trump’s character than for its newsbreaks. It will be a primary source about the most vexing president in American history for years to come.
From a Washington Post obit by Emily Langer headlined ” Bill Plante, CBS News correspondent for a half-century, dies at 84″:
Bill Plante, who became a fixture of American television sets as a globe-trotting CBS News correspondent, covering the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, four U.S. presidents and more than half a century of national and world affairs, died Sept. 28 at his home in Washington.
Mr. Plante joined CBS News as a reporter and assignment editor in 1964 — two years after Walter Cronkite assumed the anchor’s chair on the network’s nightly news — and retired as senior White House correspondent in 2016, having become in his own right one of the most visible newsmen on television.
From a New York Times story by Patricia Mazzei headlined “Flying into the eye of Ian: An experienced hurricane hunter takes a wild ride”:
Nick Underwood has flown into the eye of a hurricane 76 times over the past six years as an aerospace engineer for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. His roughest flight so far? Early Wednesday, to the heart of Hurricane Ian.
“I’ve never seen so much lightning,” he said after landing in Houston.
From a New York Times story by Erin Osman headlined “At 91, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott Still Wants to Tell You a Story”:
At a friend’s rustic home in a tiny village about an hour north of San Francisco, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was trying to decide what to eat for breakfast. But he couldn’t resist telling a story.
“Some of the best oatmeal I ever had was in the L.A. County Jail,” the singer said from beneath an old felt cowboy hat, a blue bandanna tied around his neck. In 1955, while living in Topanga Canyon, he was pulled over on the Pacific Coast Highway because the taillight on his Ford Model A was broken. “They told me I could pay a $25 fine or spend six days in the clink.”
From a Washington Post column by David Ignatius headlined “4 years after Khashoggi’s murder, assaults on press freedom are getting worse”:
On the fourth anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, we should demand accountability from Saudi Arabia, louder than ever. But we should also denounce, as Khashoggi would have, the assaults against press freedom in so many other countries that continue unabated — and often go unremarked.
