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In today’s edition:
WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight- Kate Middleton shows us our artificial intelligence future
- Why colleges shouldn’t help out boys
- Trump on taxes, on immigration and on TikTok
On her majesty’s secret software
First things first: Here are the instructions on submitting an anonymous news tip to The Washington Post. You can protect yourself by using Signal, the SecureDrop whistleblower system, postal mail or encrypted email.
Now: Do you know where Kate Middleton is?
Molly Roberts writes that the conspiracy theorizing over the “disappearance” of the Princess of Wales reached fever pitch this week when Kensington Palace put out a photo of Kate and her kids in honor of British Mother’s Day and British Princess Is Still Alive Day.
One need not have had one’s monocle on to see how obviously the photo was manipulated — bent lines, blurred borders, fuzzy textures, inconsistent depth of field. My favorite tweeted piece of proof:
not to be too conspiratorial, but one very odd detail I noticed on close inspection: that all these people appear to happy and having a good time, despite being obviously British pic.twitter.com/rj0m1X8BAw
— Arthur Spirling (@arthur_spirling)
March 12, 2024 Kate (or someone tweeting as Kate) eventually claimed credit for editing the image, most likely, Molly writes, using photo software’s new AI tools.
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Molly buys the explanation but writes that it has problems of its own: The more we incorporate these little manipulations into our lives, the more we need to question everything we see online. And then that questioning can be taken to excess, too, to convince people that nothing can be trusted.
As Molly writes, “Catherine edited a photo, maybe a little, maybe a lot, and apparently, this is evidence that, next time we see her, we’ll be seeing a body double instead.”
And just in case that body double is real — and reading this — here’s our tip line one more time.
Chaser: Cartoonist Edith Pritchett charts how the British public’s attitude toward each royal has evolved over time.
From Kate Cohen’s column arguing against the admissions boost boys often get to preserve gender parity on college campuses. If universities awarded spots without considering gender, many would skew decidedly female.
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The issue with helping out these poor boys, Kate writes, is that they’re not poor boys at all; like the “legacy” children of alumni, men “enjoy outsize prominence in almost every professional sphere.” Colleges are giving an advantage to a group that already has one.
So let colleges become “decidedly female,” Kate writes. Every time they make decisions or lower their admissions standards to avoid that fate, she says, “they perpetuate the notion that there is such a thing as having too many female students — and by extension, too many women in any given space.”
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Chaser: Virginia just banned its public colleges from offering legacy boosts. Other states should follow, the Editorial Board writes — with a nudge from Congress.
More politics
Donald Trump policy roundup! On taxes: unrealistic. On immigration: unpopular. On TikTok: unstable — and maybe for sale.
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Jen Rubin writes that trickle-down economics is a scam; she pulls from a great deal of research showing that tax cuts for the rich don’t send benefits downstream to the middle class and to poor families.
She says Trump’s proposal for “renewing tax cuts for the rich that are due to expire at the end of 2025 would do about as much for you as a degree from Trump University.” The Editorial Board lays out President Biden’s proposals and judges that, though “far from ideal,” they are the much better option.
On immigration, things get curious. Catherine Rampell writes that Trump’s actual policies — family separation, militarized detention camps, slashed legal immigration — are on their own deeply unpopular. See, for instance, how well supporting the “dreamers” (the opposite of Trump’s proposal!) polls, even among Republicans:
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Yet Trump himself polls much better on immigration than Biden does. Catherine shares her theory on how voters so readily separate the politician from his policies.
Finally, Josh Rogin tracks how Trump suddenly reversed his position on restricting U.S. access to social media site TikTok — after making nice with a top Republican donor who happens to be a big investor in TikTok’s parent company, which is based in Beijing. The episode suggests, Josh writes, that “there is no foreign policy issue on which Trump can’t be moved by a high bidder.”
Chaser: Non-Trump policies on the right can be unpopular, too! Ramesh Ponnuru believes in fetal personhood, but he writes that the currently circulating bills aren’t the way to protect it.
Smartest, fastest
- Vladimir Putin’s next term as president of Russia is illegal, imprisoned dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza writes. The world should call him out on it.
- One of government’s best-kept secrets could offer the solution to its workforce crisis, write Stanford law professors Daniel E. Ho and Anne Joseph O’Connell.
- It’s fun to be just Ken, Gene Robinson writes in an Oscars-inspired column, but we have a responsibility to grapple with our country’s dark history presented in this year’s movies.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Democratizing
AI lets anyone be
Photoshop princess
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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You’re reading the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In today’s edition:
First things first: Here are the instructions on submitting an anonymous news tip to The Washington Post. You can protect yourself by using Signal, the SecureDrop whistleblower system, postal mail or encrypted email.
Now: Do you know where Kate Middleton is?
Molly Roberts writes that the conspiracy theorizing over the “disappearance” of the Princess of Wales reached fever pitch this week when Kensington Palace put out a photo of Kate and her kids in honor of British Mother’s Day and British Princess Is Still Alive Day.
One need not have had one’s monocle on to see how obviously the photo was manipulated — bent lines, blurred borders, fuzzy textures, inconsistent depth of field. My favorite tweeted piece of proof:
not to be too conspiratorial, but one very odd detail I noticed on close inspection: that all these people appear to happy and having a good time, despite being obviously British pic.twitter.com/rj0m1X8BAw
Kate (or someone tweeting as Kate) eventually claimed credit for editing the image, most likely, Molly writes, using photo software’s new AI tools.
Molly buys the explanation but writes that it has problems of its own: The more we incorporate these little manipulations into our lives, the more we need to question everything we see online. And then that questioning can be taken to excess, too, to convince people that nothing can be trusted.
As Molly writes, “Catherine edited a photo, maybe a little, maybe a lot, and apparently, this is evidence that, next time we see her, we’ll be seeing a body double instead.”
And just in case that body double is real — and reading this — here’s our tip line one more time.
Chaser: Cartoonist Edith Pritchett charts how the British public’s attitude toward each royal has evolved over time.
From Kate Cohen’s column arguing against the admissions boost boys often get to preserve gender parity on college campuses. If universities awarded spots without considering gender, many would skew decidedly female.
The issue with helping out these poor boys, Kate writes, is that they’re not poor boys at all; like the “legacy” children of alumni, men “enjoy outsize prominence in almost every professional sphere.” Colleges are giving an advantage to a group that already has one.
So let colleges become “decidedly female,” Kate writes. Every time they make decisions or lower their admissions standards to avoid that fate, she says, “they perpetuate the notion that there is such a thing as having too many female students — and by extension, too many women in any given space.”
Chaser: Virginia just banned its public colleges from offering legacy boosts. Other states should follow, the Editorial Board writes — with a nudge from Congress.
Donald Trump policy roundup! On taxes: unrealistic. On immigration: unpopular. On TikTok: unstable — and maybe for sale.
Jen Rubin writes that trickle-down economics is a scam; she pulls from a great deal of research showing that tax cuts for the rich don’t send benefits downstream to the middle class and to poor families.
She says Trump’s proposal for “renewing tax cuts for the rich that are due to expire at the end of 2025 would do about as much for you as a degree from Trump University.” The Editorial Board lays out President Biden’s proposals and judges that, though “far from ideal,” they are the much better option.
On immigration, things get curious. Catherine Rampell writes that Trump’s actual policies — family separation, militarized detention camps, slashed legal immigration — are on their own deeply unpopular. See, for instance, how well supporting the “dreamers” (the opposite of Trump’s proposal!) polls, even among Republicans:
Yet Trump himself polls much better on immigration than Biden does. Catherine shares her theory on how voters so readily separate the politician from his policies.
Finally, Josh Rogin tracks how Trump suddenly reversed his position on restricting U.S. access to social media site TikTok — after making nice with a top Republican donor who happens to be a big investor in TikTok’s parent company, which is based in Beijing. The episode suggests, Josh writes, that “there is no foreign policy issue on which Trump can’t be moved by a high bidder.”
Chaser: Non-Trump policies on the right can be unpopular, too! Ramesh Ponnuru believes in fetal personhood, but he writes that the currently circulating bills aren’t the way to protect it.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Democratizing
AI lets anyone be
Photoshop princess
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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