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These people are just trolling now. My God. From a New York Times article titled, “I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think”:

What if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought? The evidence that supports this belief is thin at best… I don’t rely on prepared scripts when I teach, and few of the teachers I most admire do. Instead, I engage my seminar students through messy, searching conversation… If the only way that I could teach my courses was to sculpt written paragraphs, I’m not sure I would actually know the material. If I do not treat writing as essential for achieving thought, it is not clear why I should force my students to.

The latest diatribe in the Times against a once-uncontroversially wonderful human activity is written by Professor Joe Cruz, chair of the philosophy department at Williams College. He appears as an advocate for permitting students “the use of A.I. writing tools,” which he believes can take place “without undermining the next generation of thinkers.”

After all, Cruz reports, when he allowed students to use A.I. for their final essays within “specific guidelines” — a comical set of “restrictions” that boil down to “you shouldn’t let A.I. completely compose your essay” — the only notable result was that students performed better:

I was reassured by the results. In no case did I suspect that an A.I. had written a student’s paper in the substantive, objectionable way that we are all concerned about. The students were all too sharp on the ideas, too deft in reconfiguring their thoughts and extending them dynamically. Moreover, at least half of the class was more agile, more reflective and clearer during oral exams than they were in their papers.

I was aghast reading Cruz’s description of a beneficial use of A.I. The aforementioned rules at Williams don’t allow students to offer prompts like “come up with a topic” or “generate a thesis,” but do allow them to solicit “objections” from the machine. In other words, instead of writing for people, you can bounce your ideas off an A.I. This is like calling an erotic chat with a bot a form of sex.

It isn’t. The writing process does not work without the element of pain and rejection from a human audience. The whole idea is to put a part of yourself on paper and allow yourself to be vulnerable by showing your writing to another person. A negative reaction can be crushing, but it forces writers to confront the reality of how others view them. It might hurt the first time, or the first thousand times, but the human element is how you learn.

Replacing that process with an A.I. mirror that gives pillow criticism before helping students touch up “their” prose for presentation to an actual person is the ultimate in participation trophy-type infantilization. Worse, it inserts a machine — a deeply politicized, biased machine that teaches a conformist, submissive intellectual instinct — in the middle of a student’s thought process.

To the extent that a student taught this way ever learns writing (or as Cruz puts it, “archiving”), he or she will be like a healthy, ambulatory person trained to get through a Wal-Mart with the aid of a “mobility scooter.” The benefit of mobility scooters for Wal-Mart is obvious: they get everyone through the store. Functional shopping! Doing this with writing, though? It might be good for a school, in the sense that students will be able to present the appearance of literacy all the way through graduation, but it turns thinking — for college students — into a machine-aided process. Who imagines this will incentivize better thinking? Has it made fitter Wal-Mart shoppers?

I’m not anti-A.I. I think the technology is amazing, and people will be able to do wonderful things with it, already have in fact. What Cruz is arguing, though, is nuts. He goes far beyond saying A.I. can be a useful tool and makes the case that perhaps we shouldn’t teach young people to write, because writing may not be so inherently valuable. He reduces it to a technical process, useful for “cognitive scaffolding” and organizing, but not for learning, which takes place through “speaking, answering, and defending our ideas.”

He references Socrates, who once said that “only through conversation among minds… does reason yield real insight.” What we need more of, Cruz argues, is precisely this “messy” conversation, and if we spend less time writing, we may end up “spending less time isolated, gain more practice resolving disagreement and find ourselves a clearer sense of what we believe.”

This is suspiciously like the argument the Times went with earlier this week about romance, suggesting men and women don’t “need” to get married. It’s the same category error. Cruz argues we don’t need to teach young people a miraculous and distinctly human form of communication, when that’s not the point. We should want to give them this gift.

More insidiously, he’s saying A.I. helps people find “a clearer sense of what we believe,” when it does the opposite. Dialogue with an A.I. can trick impressionable minds into thinking they’ve arrived, on their own, at ideas that in fact have been advanced by a monstrous, invisible consensus-making machine. Ironically, learning to write well, which only takes place after a person learns to read well, is the best protection young people can get from being deceived in this way.

The part that blew my mind was the notion that writing is an antiseptic, solitary behavior, lacking benefits that students gain from dialogue. Just consider, Cruz says, what “we might gain if we practiced speaking more and carrying around the resources of mind through our own attention, memory and engagement with one another.” Right, because why would a chair of a philosophy department think writing is a form of “engagement with one another”?

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The New York Times just greeted readers with the following headline, as part of a series asking writers to “revisit previously published guest essays”:

Eleven years ago, on the occasion of the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges case legalizing gay marriage, the Times asked novelist Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld to write a “Welcome, everyone, to the right to marry!” column. She’s since divorced, so the paper is running her annotated downgrade of the institution. Note the loony image of two ink-blot humanoids crawling off the wedding cake, as if sniffling: We couldn’t do it! It’s too sad! You may or may not find it significant that the Times decided to revisist the merits of marriage at the same time it printed another rethinking-prior-assumptions piece called, “A Hospital Death Can Be a Good Death.”

The last few years have seen a spate of features and columns and TV segments describing “exhaustion” between the sexes. Headlines both in the media mainstream (tending to the anti-marriage position, i.e. “Women aren’t too picky to date. They Just don’t need men to feel fulfilled”) and on social media and YouTube (tending in the other direction, e.g. “Women actually NEED men. Here’s why”) have increasingly assumed a martial tone, with groups lining up to do battle over whether or not men and women need one another.

The UK paper i was typical in embracing the theme of “heterofatalism” as a left-right matter, in which misogynists are “fuming” that women are finally admitting they have “zero interest in living with a man who will mess up their scatter cushions, eat all their food, and try to shag their friends.” The tone of the new Times piece isn’t as political, but like so many of these pieces, it’s remarkably pessimistic and joyless. The word “love” does not even appear in the body of the 2015 piece, which was supposed to be the passionate pro-marital proclamation.

In the original article, Sittenfeld instead compared the decision to marry to the question of whether or not to bring a cardigan on a walk. The answer is yes, because when the temperature falls below 70 degrees, and “I didn’t bring a sweater, I usually wish I had.” (Yes, her husband is the cardigan in that metaphor.) In the annotated update, a changed Sittenfield asked: “Maybe, between perimenopause and climate change, I no longer need to bring a sweater?”

Her other observations about marriage included noting that it confers major financial and legal benefits, but also “less tangible” ones, like that “it’s reassuring to officially have an ally, or extra cushioning between the individual and a sometimes harsh world.” In other words, it’s better to have a husband than not, like that cardigan you take on a walk in middling weather.

That’s a remarkably grim endorsement not just of marriage, but romance. Nobody who’s been in love or even dreamed of it would think this way. The very idea has been a joke for as long as people have thought about the subject. In Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick and Beatrice spend the early part of the play declaring themselves immune to romance, only to have a smitten Benedick declare in the end, “The world must be peopled!” In real life, love hits like a hurricane, and no one has time to ask the “need” question.

But you’ll constantly find the word in headlines about romance now: here and here and here and here and in a million other places. The issue of need was always obviated by the fact that men and women so clearly wanted to be together. No one needed to leave an instruction manual for audiences to understand the Katherine Ross-Dustin Hoffman ending in The Graduate — people have always instinctively wanted to ride off into the sunset in someone’s arms. For men and women, searching for and ultimately finding that person has always been one of the great joys in life, far above pragmatic questions, a thing for poets and artists to describe, not social scientists.

Are men and women really so “exhausted” now that they can’t be happy together without the glue of “need,” or are we just being lied to, again, by a cultural elite that demands that everyone else be as miserable as they are? It has to be the latter again, doesn’t it?

A good starting point with this question is a reminder that one of the dumbest media errors in modern memory started the ball rolling on a lot of these “do we really need love” articles:

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Racket readers should recall an interview published in this space in March with Dimitri Simes, a prominent Russian journalist who in August of 2024 became inveigled in one of the strangest and most disturbing speech cases of our times. While he and wife Anastasia Rurikova Simes were away, the FBI raided his Virginia home, seizing all his possessions but one. “My handgun,” Simes said. “They put it on my night table.”

A month later, Simes was indicted under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”), charged essentially with violating a sanctions regime by hosting a television program in Russian, in Russia. It was “a totally unprecedented use of the sanctions laws,” said Michel Paradis, one of several attorneys representing Simes. Paradis has worked on some of the more vexing national security cases of this era, including representation of Guantanamo Bay detainees. In the Simes case, Paradis — who’s written books about Dwight Eisenhower and the extraordinary flight over Tokyo by the “Doolittle Raiders” — finds a prosecution with few historical analogs. He and fellow Steptoe counsel Jason Wright will be part of today’s press conference.

While speech advocates have tended to focus on offenses that either took place before the second Trump presidency (e.g. the Twitter Files) or after his re-inauguration (the “jawboning” of Jimmy Kimmel, the recent revocation of White House passes for MS NOW, CNN, and Politico, cases involving defendants like Simes who’ve been pursued by both Democratic and Republican administrations have garnered little coverage. Simes today will give an update on his case, with lawyers Paradis and Wright on hand to answer legal questions. I’ll be moderating. You can participate in the event here.

Or, watch the event live on Substack, YouTube, and Twitter.

Below also is the press release issued by the Simes team:

DIMITRI SIMES, INDICTED JOURNALIST, TO HOST PRESS CONFERENCE FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 TO DISCUSS PRESS FREEDOMS & RUSSIA/U.S. RELATIONS

Moderated by Matt Taibbi

Dimitri Simes, the federally indicted, internationally celebrated journalist and political commentator, will speak with U.S. press in a virtual press conference from Moscow on Friday, September 25th, from 2:00 pm to 2:45 p.m. Eastern time.

Matt Taibbi, award winning author and journalist, will moderate the discussion. Simes will make a brief opening statement and then will have a moderated discussion with Taibbi. Journalists will be able to ask questions after the discussion.

Simes, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Russia, is under a federal indictment filed in the waning days of the Biden Administration. He and his wife’s Huntly, Virginia, home was raided on August 13, 2024, and their possessions, including valuable art and an icon that was a gift from Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, were seized by federal agents.

The Simeses were in Moscow at the time of the raid and were indicted in September 2024. They presumably will be arrested if they return to the U.S.

The accusation against Simes is simply that he openly works for Channel One, a Russian television channel that the U.S. government placed under economic sanctions in 2022.

Simes and his attorney will discuss the prosecution and the First Amendment freedoms he believes the Department of Justice violated by indicting him, as he puts it, “for the so-called crime of working as a legitimate journalist for a Russian television station.”

Simes, who is 78, helped to establish and served as president of the Washington-based think tank, the Center for the National Interest, and advised former Presidents Nixon and Reagan on security matters, particularly regarding the former Soviet Union. He also informally advised members of the Trump campaign and transition team prior to the President’s first taking office in 2016.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel who investigated alleged ties between the Russian government and the 2016 Trump campaign, carefully studied Simes’ role in the alleged “Russiagate” conspiracy, mentioning the journalist some 100 times. Simes was completely exonerated in the Mueller Report.

Simes has frequently been a contributor to major American media, including The New York Times and Washington Post. He has also appeared dozens of times as a guest on American television as an expert commentator.

Simes began working as a talk-show host in Moscow in 2018, for Russia’s Channel One, which was sanctioned by the Biden Administration in 2022.

The New York Times recently interviewed Dimitri Simes and has described Simes’ criminal case as a core test of the First Amendment. “This moment highlights the importance of the First Amendment protections against the government efforts to crack down on whatever it wants to call propaganda,” Stanford Law Professor Evelyn Douek told the Times, “because once you give that power to the government, you don’t get to choose which government gets to wield that power.”

The DOJ added money-laundering charges against Simes, apparently because he paid his substantial U.S. tax bill with earnings from Channel One. The indictment does not allege that Simes hid or misappropriated any money.

“It’s perfectly understandable that the Department of Justice would look askance at a Russian-owned business, whether in concrete or communications,” Simes says. “But attacking a journalist just trying to do his job is miles beyond what the First Amendment allows.”

He continued: “I value my American citizenship, and I revere the freedom of the press as historically championed by the United States. This indictment is an outrageous perversion of that freedom, and is an affront not only to me, but to anyone who embraces the free and open exchange of ideas among journalists and the public at large.”

“My work falls entirely within the realm of what our Constitution was designed to protect—vigorous, informed dialogue, including ideas contrary to the majority view. The Founders formulated no exception for ‘speech we don’t like.’”

Simes and his U.S. lawyer will address the details of the U.S. indictment; the progress of his defense against the DOJ case; and the general circumstances of his struggle to remain free and to be able to resume working in both countries and to visit with and consult his former colleagues in the U.S.

“Working for a foreign broadcaster should not make me an exile,” Simes added. “My journalism work is just another piece of American apple pie, if of a different flavor.”

DIMITRI SIMES PRESS CONFERENCE

What: Dimitri Simes, Russian/American television commentator, holds press conference about his federal indictment.

Who: Dimitri K. Simes, dual U.S./Russian citizen, Matt Taibbi, and his legal counsel, Michel Paradis and Jason Wright.

When: Friday, September 25th 2 p.m. Eastern Time

Where: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86984468429?pwd=Dv5t5VkEWB7YBcQEzF46chqdzSa9oH.1

Note: The Zoom feed will also concurrently stream on Substack, YouTube, and Twitter.

This administration’s speech messes have become an excuse to whitewash history

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 09/21/26:

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A lot of people wrote in, both in comments and in my DMs, after yesterday’s article criticizing Donald Trump’s goofball policies with White House credentials. It’s true that no one has a right to a press pass. It’s also true that presidents deny passes all the time for political reasons. The issue is that a president can’t say, out loud, that he or she is denying a pass for speech reasons. From Perry v. Sindermann:

For at least a quarter-century, this Court has made clear that, even though a person has no “right” to a valuable governmental benefit, and even though the government may deny him the benefit for any number of reasons, there are some reasons upon which the government may not rely. It may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected interest, especially his interest in freedom of speech.

This doesn’t rate high on my personal list of First Amendment threats (I actually laughed the first time I heard about the “Gulf of America” story), but it’s clearly verboten and when Trump does things like this, it underscores that he doesn’t care about rules. If you want to show that you “cherish” the free press, do what every president does: mess with them legally.

From the New York Times:

CNN, MS NOW and Politico filed a legal challenge on Monday against President Trump’s order barring them from the White House grounds, the latest battle in a fight over journalistic independence instigated by the president. Four major TV networks said they were suspending their shared coverage of presidential events in response to the president’s action.

In yanking the White House credentials of outlets like CNN, Politico, and the artist formerly known as MSNBC, Donald Trump is clearly on the wrong side of the First Amendment. His Truth Social post spelled out his rationale, deeming “fake news” not protected speech:

I don’t have much sympathy for corporate outlets that whine about credentials, since not one would ever help independents get passes. Also, it’s not like you need tags to cover the White House. News outlets should be comfortable being on the outside, geographically and figuratively. They should be more upset about being denied FOIAs than White House passes. Listening to coverage, you’d think Jim Acosta losing his pass was the modern version of Bobby Seale gagged in court. It’s absurd.

However, it absolutely violates the First Amendment when the Executive gives benefits to some organizations, and denies others because of what they say. In that sense, Trump’s “Truth” made things worse by spelling out the reasons for his “assault” (limited to purveyors of “FAKE NEWS”). If he’d just found merely underhanded and unscrupulous ways of punishing disfavored networks, like every previous president, he’d be fine. Even Trump’s most ardent supporters by now have to face the fact that he has a unique talent for handing political opponents the perfect bludgeon to beat his head in. He also continues to make an ass of every legislator, lawyer, or reporter who spent the pre-2024 period defending him on speech grounds.

That pre-2024 period, however, is the reason this story (and most every other speech story connected to Trump) will be misreported. I’m giving a talk in Philadelphia later this year that will spell out the problem more, but reporting on this administration’s speech offenses is increasingly becoming the means of whitewashing worse history by other actors. This story is a gruesome example:

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Today on Get Lit we are finishing William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

In the second half of the novel we finally get to hear from Addie, and learn that she was a deeply neurotic and disturbed woman who deserved the terrible family she had and sent them on this quest out of pure malice. We also hear from Jewel’s real father, and the deranged math by which Addie “made it up” to Anse for having a son by another man. The odyssey reaches its tragic conclusion, with Darl going insane and getting sent to Jackson, the crippling of Cash, and the rape of Dewey Dell. However, in a surprise ending that is hard to make sense of, everything seems to work out for Anse, who continues his streak of always getting the help he doesn’t deserve.

We hope you have enjoyed spending time in this most gothic South. Faulkner has certainly shown readers the grotesque.

Next week, we will be doing the first two sections of Émile Zola’s Germinal, his masterpiece about striking coal miners in 1870’s France, which will give us an entirely different view of the depravity of poverty, something which seems to be becoming an unintended theme on this podcast.

— Brad Pearce

Today on Get Lit we are finishing William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

In the second half of the novel we finally get to hear from Addie, and learn that she was a deeply neurotic and disturbed woman who deserved the terrible family she had and sent them on this quest out of pure malice. We also hear from Jewel’s real father, and the deranged math by which Addie “made it up” to Anse for having a son by another man. The odyssey reaches its tragic conclusion, with Darl going insane and getting sent to Jackson, the crippling of Cash, and the rape of Dewey Dell. However, in a surprise ending that is hard to make sense of, everything seems to work out for Anse, who continues his streak of always getting the help he doesn’t deserve.

We hope you have enjoyed spending time in this most gothic South. Faulkner has certainly shown readers the grotesque.

Join us at 4:30 PM ET today on:

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You can also find us on X, @mtaibbi or @waywardrabbler. See you soon!

Next week, we will be doing the first two sections of Émile Zola’s Germinal, his masterpiece about striking coal miners in 1870’s France, which will give us an entirely different view of the depravity of poverty, something which seems to be becoming an unintended theme on this podcast.