Linked List: March 11, 2025

Tuesday, 11 March 2025

Aaron ‘Homeboy’ Tilley Among Those Laid Off From the WSJ’s Tech Staff Last Week 

Last week The Wall Street Journal laid off about a dozen tech reporters and editors — not on the fun side, where folks like Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen work, but on the straight news side. Chris Roush at Talking Biz News obtained a memo sent to the staff from WSJ editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, which concluded:

We’re also creating a new Tech & Media enterprise team, reporting to Sarah, and we’re creating two new jobs on this team based in San Francisco. In the coming weeks, we’ll be reconfiguring beats on the tech team to give more of them a wide ambit. Fewer will focus narrowly on individual companies. We are also advertising for a new tech-focused job on Heard in New York.

These changes do mean that some reporters and editors in San Francisco and New York will be leaving us. I want to thank them for their contributions to the Journal. I want to especially thank Jason Dean, who is departing, for his long and distinguished service.

It was the reporters who focused on specific companies who got laid off, including the Journal’s beat reporter for Apple for the last 6 years, Aaron Tilley. Tilley was last in the news himself a month ago, when one of his former sources, a now-former Apple engineer named Andrew Aude, settled a lawsuit filed by Apple (and who addressed Tilley in text messages as “Homeboy”) and issued the following public apology:

I spent nearly eight years as a software engineer at Apple. During that time, I was given access to sensitive internal Apple information, including what were then unreleased products and features. But instead of keeping this information secret, I made the mistake of sharing this information with journalists who covered the company. I did not realize it at the time, but this turned out to be a profound and expensive mistake. Hundreds of professional relationships I had spent years building were ruined. And my otherwise successful career as a software engineer was derailed, and it will likely be very difficult to rebuild it. Leaking was not worth it. I sincerely apologize to my former colleagues who not only worked tirelessly on projects for Apple, but work hard to keep them secret. They deserved better.

I have no idea whether this fiasco had anything to do with Tilley being laid off (perhaps not, given Tucker’s decision to have fewer reporters on staff who “focus narrowly on individual companies”) but it couldn’t have helped. It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement to have someone publicly declaring that they deeply regret ever having been a source for a Wall Street Journal reporter, and that doing so not only cost them their job but ruined their entire career.

It also probably didn’t help Tilley’s case that he wasn’t very good at covering Apple.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in 2016, on Donald Trump as President: ‘This Is Not Going to End Well One Way or the Other’ 

A clip from this 2016 interview with Marco Rubio — then a candidate for the Republican presidential primary, today Trump’s secretary of state — by CNN’s Jake Tapper is making the rounds on social media. It’s extraordinary. I’m linking here to the full video, hosted on Rubio’s own YouTube account (for now — watch for this to go down the memory hole) starting at the 7:54 mark:

Tapper: You compared Donald Trump to a third world dictator yesterday in an interview with The New York Times. How so?

Rubio: Well, I don’t know about a dictator. I said a third world strong man. You know, he’s running for president. So no matter what, he won’t be a dictator unless our republic completely crumbles, which I don’t anticipate it will. But, yeah, here’s what happens in many countries around the world: You have a leader that emerges and basically says, Don’t put your faith in yourselves. Don’t put your faith in society. Put your faith in me. I’m a strong leader, and I’m going to make things better — all by myself. This is very typical. You see it in the third world. You see it a lot in Latin America for decades. It’s basically the argument he’s making. That he, single-handedly, is going to turn the country around. We’ve never been that kind of country.

We have a president. The president is an American citizen who serves for a period of time, constrained by the constitution and the powers vested in that office. The president works for the people, not the people for the president. And if you listen to the way he describes himself and what he’s going to do, he’s going to single-handedly do this and do that without regard for whether it’s legal or not.

Look, I think people are going to have to make up their mind. I can tell you this. No matter what happens in this election, for years to come, there are many people on the right, in the media, and voters at large that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump, because this is not going to end well one way or the other. He’s going to be the nominee, and he’s going to lose. Or, he’ll have thrown this party into its most chaotic and divisive period ever. And that’s unfortunate because the Republican Party is the home of the limited government free enterprise movement in America. And if it crumbles or divides or it splits apart, it’ll be very difficult to elect candidates that hold those views at any level of government until we can bring the party back together.

Breathtakingly prescient and succinct.

The New Yorker Modernizes a Few Words in Its Style Guide 

Andrew Boynton, head of copy at The New Yorker:

Keen-eyed grammar fans may notice some changes in our pages — and in this newsletter. Last fall, David Remnick, the editor, suggested convening a group to talk about the magazine’s house style, to see if any rules might bear reëxamination. The group — comprising copy editors, current and former, and editors — met this past January and came up with a list of styles that might qualify for changes, and in a subsequent meeting the following month the director of copy and production and I came up with a limited list of proposals. It was decided that, while no one wanted to change some of the long-standing “quirky” styles (teen-ager, per cent, etc.), some of newer vintage could go. Along with a few other changes, “in-box” is now “inbox,” “Web site” is now “website,” “Internet” is now “internet,” and “cell phone” is now “cellphone” (though everyone acknowledges that the word “cell” in this context will soon disappear altogether).

Some of you may lament the changes as being radically modern, while others are likely to greet them as long overdue. Welcome to 1995, you may be thinking. (Italicized thoughts are new, too.) Regardless, it should be noted that the diaeresis (see that “reëxamination,” above) has overwhelming support at the magazine, and will remain.

I’m in favor of all these changes except for lowercasing “Internet”. I actually started lowercasing it years ago — I think right around when the AP changed its style — but I was chatting post-Dithering with Ben Thompson a week or two ago and he offhandedly mentioned that lowercasing “internet” is a pet stylistic peeve of his, because there’s only one Internet. He said that and I was like, Yeah! — But so why did I start lowercasing it? The Internet is a lot like the Earth. It’s everywhere. It is our universe, in a sense, from the human-scale perspective. But it’s a unique and distinct thing, thus deserving to be treated as a proper noun. (The universe doesn’t get capitalized because while it’s a one-off, it’s not a name. We speak of the universe like we speak of the planet, which is lowercase.) It’s almost disrespectful to lowercase it, and the Internet is one of the great achievements in the history of mankind.

New MLB Caps Are So Fugly They Make MAGA Hats Look Well-Designed 

If these caps were a student project it’d get an F. Who thinks you can print one logo on top of another? They look like mistakes, like caps that got run through the embroidery machine twice. The only good one is for the “ASHOS”, which comes close to the actual word everyone uses for that team of cheaters.

Update, 3pm ET: It looks like maybe MLB and New Era (the hatmakers) have put the whole lineup of caps out of their misery.

Josh Marshall on Kevin Drum 

Josh Marshall:

I think more than anything I admired Kevin’s restraint and his caution. Blogging is a hustle and the incentives for hyperbole and breathlessness are endless. That makes most people easy to ignore. But Kevin — who had a whole career in the normal-person rat race before he started this — sweated the details. He had a serious mind for facts and numbers and he knew how to work with data. His posts were always overflowing with numbers and charts and levels of detail and nitty gritty I couldn’t pile into my brain because I was too scattered and unfocused. When he said something, you had to take it seriously. When he disagreed with you, you knew it was time to re-check your work. Kevin was almost all signal and very little noise. That was his defining mark.

Kevin Drum, Pioneering Political Blogger and Columnist, Dies at 66 

Marian Drum, posting yesterday on Kevin Drum’s site:

With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025.

No public memorial services are planned.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to the charity or political cause of your choice.

He was writing right up until the end. No one, on either side of the political spectrum, better wrote about “DEI”. Just in the last week, he had posts on Ukraine/Russia, the LA Times’s stupid new AI-generated “bias meter”, the looming congressional budget crisis, Trump’s tariff crusade. He remained on top of everything that’s going on, not only while cancer was killing him, but while he was stoically keeping his readers fully abreast of his declining health. I mean, Christ, read this update from February 12 — I thought that was it. Dying from cancer is harrowing. He knew the end was near, and as with everything he wrote in his long career, he had the numbers to back it.

I didn’t know Drum personally at all, but there’s a certain kinship amongst bloggers from the very turn of the century. I’ve read Drum’s site continuously for over 20 years and I don’t know anyone whose style and approach can fill the void he leaves. He was obviously a very kind and generous person, but his approach to policy was ruthlessly (and thus to me, admirably) data and evidence driven. Strong opinions, loosely held. He brimmed with curiosity. Who, what, when, and where are all good questions but why is the most interesting one, and Drum always wanted to figure out why. I sure didn’t get his love for cats, but I’m also so glad he shared stuff like that. His approach to actual politics could come across as wonky, but his personality was always there. As natural-born a blogger as anyone who’s ever done it.

I miss his voice already.