The Remarkable Calm Of Jeffrey Goldberg
Would YOU have sat in a supermarket parking lot waiting for the scoop of a lifetime?
I’ve just got to Washington, DC. Honestly, it’s exciting to be here in the midst of a crisis, although it’s such a crisis that meetings are being rescheduled left, right and center, which is vaguely irritating.
I’m hearing that, behind the facade, there is some nervousness about the fates of Pete Hegseth, who landed back in DC early this morning, and Mike Waltz. Probably, they survive, is the thinking…But even the most die-hard Trump loyalist knows that “SignalGate” was a very stupid own goal.
You also may recall that I’ve written here before that I am myself part of a group chat of what appears to be right-wing military types and I have no idea if any of them knows that I am on it.
Even some of them threw their hands in the air at the stupidity of it all.
“It was a crazy unforced error” someone posted, followed by the image I’ve reposted above.
There was also a fair degree of mirth.
“He’s running a more fun chat group than we are!” said one wag.
Another: "How can one get added?”
And: “It’s outrageous. They should have added XXX XXXX [our chat name] to this Signal Group!!!”
One (albeit very minor) aspect of the real group chat fiasco that seems to be under-reported is the remarkable flat-line temperament of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic who was accidentally added to the Signal group chat. I get that when Goldberg first saw he’d been invited, his instinct was to think, Ha ha I’m being played…But ask yourself this:
If you’d been added to it, and if, as the days went by and the thread gathered momentum, and, you began to realize that the chat may very well not be a hoax, AND that, on Saturday morning you were alerted to the strong possibility there could be a drone strike on the Houthis in two hours…would you have done what Goldberg apparently did when reading the strike was imminent and wait in his car in a supermarket parking lot?
Hmm…
It’s a small detail. He doesn’t say where the supermarket was. Or what he was doing there. Maybe he was too far from home to make it back in the two hours before the operation was a GO. Maybe he just really, really needed groceries…
But had I read that text, I am pretty sure I’d have dropped whatever I was doing, and rushed to create my own “war room” either at home or in the office, depending on which was closest, laptop at the right hand, news streaming on the TV above my head, phone at the ready, in preparation to call lawyers or whomever if bombs did indeed drop….
Call me easily excitable or worse (others have)…but I do not think I could have sat for two hours in a car in a supermarket parking lot, possibly simultaneously thinking about weekly food supplies, amid the giddy realization that I was possibly in the midst of a major, major national security breach …and the scoop of a career.
But I recognize that this excitability on my part may very well explain why I am not the editor of the Atlantic - and the much more phlegmatic Jeffrey Goldberg is.
In other news:
After my newsletter a couple weeks ago, reviewing Othello, I promised you all Broadway news. I’ve now seen Glengarry Glen Ross; Operation Mincemeat; And Good Night, and Good Luck.
Ranking order:
Operation Mincemeat.
Good Night and Good Luck
Glengarry Glen Ross
Given that I am a native Brit, I am biased towards the quirky musical about a madcap British Intelligence operation that, unbelievably, really worked in World War II. And it’s true that as it starts, I thought to myself: Oh no! this is the British riff on Hamilton: Which is to say that instead of having a cast that oozes with magnetic sexuality and attractiveness, this cast oozes with - well, the opposite of that.
And yet.
Within minutes it has a way of bringing you in…and you don’t feel the same skepticism towards the cast by the end. Critics have said that perhaps the British sense of humor does not work for American audiences. Being a citizen of both countries, I’m the wrong person to test that theory on.
I thought it hilarious, witty, innovative, moving - and so did my un-British American friends. So far, I’d say, it’s the best thing I have seen on Broadway - by quite a margin.
Then we come to George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck. A tip: it’s in an enormous theater and it has an enormous set, on two levels. The kinetic set is actually what makes this production, and therefore I think that the best seats are not in the orchestra, but at the front of the mezzanine level. It’s a play with an urgent, relevant message about press freedom, and it works on a didactic level, if not a grandiose theatrical one. Clooney is a fabulous movie star, but he’s not a stage actor and in this production, tellingly, it’s the use of celluloid that works most effectively.
Glengarry Glen Ross, the David Mamet play about the cost of salesmanship feels dated. But worth seeing for Kieran Culkin fresh off his Oscar win.
Still, for my money, the best performance of the season remains Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago.
Finally, last night I saw the premier of a documentary “Can’t Look Away”, based on fabulous reporting in Bloomberg about the horrific effects of social media on kids; The film, which streams on Jolt on April 4, takes us into the homes of some of the many families who have lost their children to suicide, or accidental death, because of targeting by bad actors on the platforms, but also, the film argues, by the big tech companies themselves, whose algorithms appear deliberately designed to hook consumers in at an early age, regardless of the affect on their mental health. Meta, Snap and TikTok have so far been able to avoid being sued succesfully by the families of the victims, due to the protection of something called section 230, which is a law that was written before these social media giants even existed.
You finish the film, knowing it’s time for legislative change, whichever side of the aisle you are on politically. The film does a great job of showing how bipartisan this issue is in Congress. The surprise for me personally and for others in the audience (a New York media crowd) was Josh Hawley, the Republican senator for Missouri and a parent of young children.
Hawley is an attack dog on this issue and he had me - and others - cheering for the way he ripped into Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg for alleging in his opening statement to Congress that there was no science showing any link between social media and harm to children’s mental health. While Zuckerberg was stuttering, Hawley produced posters, reprinting an internal email to Zuckerberg telling him that data research showed the exact opposite.
It was powerful stuff.
And one that made me think that Hawley will almost certainly be a competitive candidate for Republican Presidential nominee in the not too distant future.
As long as, that is, he doesn’t start sending out classified information on a commercial app….
I hadn't thought of this take on JG of the Atlantic, so true!! But also, what COULD have been done!? It's awful and exciting; a journalistic gift, and a nightmare. 💫