Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In the epochal summer of 2024, The New York Times decided to remind everybody who was boss. It had hesitated long enough; now was the time for action. It tensed its stringbean muscles, firmed its collective brow, and dedicated its full editorial resources to prying a sitting president from pursuing reelection, its columnists, political reporters, pundits, and pollsters leaning on the lever with a rare unanimity of purpose and tone. This wasn’t one of those feeding frenzies where everybody gleefully bares their teeth, enjoying the thrash and froth and surfacing subplots. This was a more somber and orderly eviction process, a journalistic duty to be done as only the Times could do it, for the good of the nation and to the sound of distant trumpets. On July 21, the Editorial Board (druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic) got its wish. President Biden stepped aside as the Democratic Party nominee, justifying and sanctifying the paper’s decision to go all-in and all-out, without fear or favor, no matter how many column inches it took. While debate continues to bustle online over whether the political desk of The New York Times has devolved into a barrel of crabs, drunk with power and sanctimony, less remarked upon has been the paper’s prostration before the altar of celebrity. Politicians the Times can try to push around or nag nonstop in the opinion pages. Celebrities, however, they approach as courtiers, on little mouse slippers. Starstruck at the slightest glimmer, the paper has evolved into the foremost upper-middlebrow fanzine in the country, a cultural studies delicatessen staffed by nimble utility players with a flair for turning a slick phrase and finding Easter eggs in the most formulaic offering (“Spoiler Alert: Here’s a Guide to the Cameos in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’,” July 27).  When it comes to show business, personal branding, and the entertainment-memetic complex, the paper of record has never been more soft, malleable, coddling, cuddling, and susceptible to hype, happy to add its own shot of giddyup. The insatiable Buzzfeedification for clicks that hollowed out so many once popular web agglomerations (including BuzzFeed itself) has found a happier home at the Times, which applies a fine nail gloss of sophistication to its trivial diversions that makes them a suitable companion to Wordle. But to what end? The case could be made that entertainment now means less than it ever did, that its importance has never been so disposable. There is too much scripted and unscripted content to matter, the turnover is too fast, and an endless rotation of remakes and reboots keeps the culture spinning its wheels, stuck in the glut. Many had hoped that the Pandemic Pause would produce a refreshing infusion of pent-up energy and ideas, but so far it’s been more like a fitful hangover, a fumbling around for the door knob in a dystopian haze.  If the overall significance of pop culture is in deflationary decline (apart from the super-phenomenon of Taylor Swift, a true hyperobject in the object-ontology-orientation sense), the claims made for the Latest Thing have never been more inflationary, whether it be “Brat Summer” (quickly consigned to the ledgers) or the latest auteurist kink in low-budget horror films. So much entertainment coverage in the Times and elsewhere reads as overcompensation, an effort to will something into more than fleeting relevance. The Times being the Times, eminently full of itself, raises puffery to imperial extremes. The paper that panned the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper in 1967 greeted the release of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album with a Matisse daisy-chain dance of reviewers, symposiasts (“Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Is a Vivid Mission Statement. Let’s Discuss”), and semioticians (“Dissecting the ‘Cowboy Carter’ Cover: Beyoncé’s Yeehaw Agenda”), including a sidebar on Beyoncé’s opera dabbling that earned a predictable free pass: “The superstar doesn’t have the voice of an opera singer, but that doesn’t really matter.” Of course not. Superstars transcends such paltry considerations.  Beyoncé hardly needs all this heavy lifting on her behalf, but when the Times embraces something now, it squeezes the everloving life out of it, turning even a fun pop phenomenon into an ongoing tutorial. After Times writers had examined every variable of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, from the pop sociology