Linked List: March 26, 2025

Wednesday, 26 March 2025

The Atlantic Has an Owner Committed to the Cause: Laurene Powell Jobs ★

Oliver Darcy, writing at Status (paywalled — great content, terrible CMS experience that keeps logging me out on all my devices and requires a stupid email magic link to get back in), in a brief interview with Atlantic editor-in-chief and man of the moment Jeffrey Goldberg:

It goes without saying that there are many ironies associated with this particular story. One of them is that Goldberg, a journalist who Donald Trump loathes for his past reporting (remember the “suckers and losers” piece), somehow became the unintended recipient of high-level, real-time military intelligence from inside his own inner circle. One wonders whether any heads will roll as a result of the whole matter. On Monday, Trump again made his disdain for Goldberg known, blasting him at a press conference and absurdly claiming The Atlantic is “a magazine that is going out of business.”

If anything, of course, publishing a story like the one Goldberg did on Monday proves how strong the outlet currently is. That type of muscular journalism requires skill, strong leadership, and the backing of a courageous publisher. I asked Goldberg about owner Laurene Powell Jobs’ role in the matter. He declined to comment specifically on this particular story, but offered words of praise: “Laurene Powell Jobs is a stalwart and brave publisher at a time when cowardice rules the day.”

If it had been a Washington Post reporter who was inadvertently included on the Trump national security team’s Signal group chat, would they have run the story? No fucking way with that abject lickspittle coward Jeff Bezos running the show.

Apple Now Selling PCs From Other Companies at Apple.com ★

The work remains mysterious and important.

2026 Porsches Still Won’t Have Next-Gen CarPlay, Which Was Announced in 2022 ★

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

Apple’s next-generation CarPlay experience is still nowhere to be seen following Porsche’s announcement of a major upgrade of its infotainment system for 2026.

The upcoming 2026 model year Porsche Taycan, 911, Panamera, and Cayenne feature an upgraded version of the Porsche Communication Management (PCM) system, making it more responsive, adding Dolby Atmos support, and integrating Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. The new system brings the Porsche App Center, a kind of app store for the vehicle, to all of the new models.

It continues to support the standard version of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Support for Apple’s next-generation CarPlay experience is again conspicuously missing from Porsche’s new lineup, and the automaker did not mention it at all during its latest announcement — another bleak sign for the delayed feature.

I’d crack a joke about it looking less and less likely that next-gen CarPlay was going to appear in 2024, but I already did that in January, when Apple itself took the date off its CarPlay page. That announcement came at WWDC 2022.

In this case (unlike the advanced personalized features of Apple Intelligence) it was actually sensible for Apple to pre-announce the existence of next-gen CarPlay, given the reliance on third parties. But it also should have been clear just how incredibly hard it would be to get third party carmakers up to snuff on being able to ship it, so Apple giving a date, any date, was always odd. Apple doesn’t make a car, and you can’t promise what you can’t control. They should have just said “soon”.

Calling the White House’s Bluff, The Atlantic Releases the ‘Houthi PC Small Group’ Signal Text Thread ★

Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris, reporting once again for The Atlantic:

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat — the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz — we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump — combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts — have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.

I linked yesterday to a quote from Hannah Arendt, whom Wikipedia aptly describes as “one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century”. The quote I linked to was her observation that the ranks of authoritarian governments inevitably wind up being filled with “crackpots and fools” because they’re the people whose loyalty is most assured. In some sense the Jedi mind trick is real — it works on the weak-minded. Regardless of one’s political beliefs, no intelligent person of integrity (as opposed to, say, a foreign mole) would participate in a discussion of obviously classified and highly sensitive war plans in a Signal chat. It’s jarring to see it so clearly but U.S. national security is now led entirely by morons.

Most of the quotes on the Goodreads page I linked to, culled from Arendt’s seminal The Origins of Totalitarianism, are related to truth, not idiocy. Here’s one:

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.

And:

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

And:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

When The Atlantic’s initial story hit, everyone responsible in the Trump administration, right up to the president himself, just immediately began telling bald-faced lies about what happened, despite the fact that they knew Jeffrey Goldberg literally had the receipts to prove otherwise. That works, until it doesn’t.