Linked List: February 15, 2021

Monday, 15 February 2021

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain on Twitter 

Speaking of the Biden administration, I’ve been greatly enjoying the Twitter feed of chief of staff Ron Klain. He’s put his personal account (@RonaldKlain) mostly on ice, and primarily tweets from the official @WHCOS account. He’s very good at Twitter — I began following him early in the campaign.

Klain’s use of Twitter is a fascinating contrast with Trump’s. For many of you, I’m sure, there are nothing but bad connotations when it comes to the use of Twitter from the White House. But Klain’s use of Twitter strikes me as nearing the canonical ideal of how Jack Dorsey might have imagined Twitter being used by, say, the White House. It harks back to the early days of Twitter, when the prompt was “What are you doing?” Except Klain is tweeting not about what he, personally, is doing, but rather what the administration is doing. What they see as their accomplishments, drip by drip, and what issues they deem their highest priorities. (COVID vaccinations, decreasing the spread of COVID, and economic stimulus, I think it’s fair to say in that order — but all three of them are inexorably related.)

Following Klain is of course in no way a substitute for reading news coverage of the administration. Of course Klain is biased — he’s the White House chief of staff. But just as it’s important to follow news coverage and analysis from outside observers, it’s useful to see what the Biden administration itself — unfiltered — deems important. Klain’s Twitter feed is an hour-by-hour log of what they see as their accomplishments and what they see as important.

Biden’s Daily Routine 

Kevin Liptak, writing for CNN:

As Biden settles into a job he has been seeking on-and-off for three decades, the daily routine of being president — with a phalanx of Secret Service agents, regular updates on the nation’s top secrets and an ever-present press corps — has come more naturally for him than for his more recent predecessors.

He has established a regular schedule, including coffee in the mornings with the first lady, meetings and phone calls from the Oval Office starting just after 9 a.m. and a return to his residence by 7 p.m. As he walks home along the Colonnade, he’s often seen carrying a stack of binders or manila folders under one arm. He still brings a brown leather briefcase into the office.

I love stories like this, about the mundane details of how people work, like that Biden digs a real fire in the Oval Office fireplace.

(Via Taegan Goddard.)

A Fool and His Money… 

Shawn Boburg and Jon Swaine, reporting for The Washington Post:

Like many Trump supporters, conservative donor Fred Eshelman awoke the day after the presidential election with the suspicion that something wasn’t right. His candidate’s apparent lead in key battleground states had evaporated overnight. The next day, the North Carolina financier and his advisers reached out to a small conservative nonprofit group in Texas that was seeking to expose voter fraud. After a 20-minute talk with the group’s president, their first-ever conversation, Eshelman was sold.

“I’m in for 2,” he told the president of True the Vote, according to court documents and interviews with Eshelman and others.

“$200,000?” one of his advisers on the call asked.

“$2 million,” Eshelman responded.

Over the next 12 days, Eshelman came to regret his donation and to doubt conspiracy theories of rampant illegal voting, according to court records and interviews.

Now, he wants his money back.

‘Postcard From Peru: Why the Morality Plays Inside the Times Won’t Stop’ 

Good piece from Times media columnist Ben Smith on l’affaire McNeil:

The questions about The Times’s identity and political leanings are real; the differences inside the newsroom won’t be easily resolved. But the paper needs to figure out how to resolve these issues more clearly: Is The Times the leading newspaper for like-minded, left-leaning Americans? Or is it trying to hold what seems to be a disappearing center in a deeply divided country? Is it Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden? One thing that’s clear is that these questions probably aren’t best arbitrated through firings or resignations freighted with symbolic meaning, or hashed out inside the human resources department.

One thing is clear: Don McNeil was an absolutely bizarre choice to lead a two-week expedition to Peru with a group of wealthy private school teenagers.

Update: Alex Leo, on Twitter, summing up what a bad idea this was:

“I’ve got a great idea: we charge teenagers $6,000 for two weeks and we send Archie Bunker to watch over them.”

Clubhouse and the Primacy of iPhone 

From a post on Clubhouse’s blog a few weeks ago, laying out their plans for 2021:

From the earliest days, we’ve wanted to build Clubhouse for everyone. With this in mind, we are thrilled to begin work on our Android app soon, and to add more accessibility and localization features so that people all over the world can experience Clubhouse in a way that feels native to them.

Clubhouse, though it remains invitation-only, is growing fast, and has a lot of buzz. And it remains iPhone-only. They’ve only just begun working on an Android app. Nothing in this regard has changed in the 10 years since Instagram launched as an iPhone-only app in October 2010. Expanding to Android is inevitable, but it can wait. Conversely, if Clubhouse were Android-only, it’s likely almost no one would have heard of it today. I don’t really even see anyone talking about this with Clubhouse. It just goes unnoticed, like the oxygen we breathe, that iPhone is dominant, culturally.

See also: Ben Thompson: “Clubhouse’s Inevitability”.