Entertainment

By LouOne More Question

Can I say something nice before I get into my notebook? The Kennedy Center Honors has gone off at the same address every December since 1978, and whoever's kept that streak alive deserves some credit, because my own car can't manage forty-eight hours without a hitch, let alone forty-eight years.

I carry the notebook because my memory's garbage, not because I think I'm smart. So — just a second, let me find where I wrote this down... here it is. "The Capital One Arena in Washington DC is now set to host the ceremony." A Kennedy Center spokesperson said that. First time, as far as I can tell, that the ceremony hasn't been held at its own building.

I don't pretend to know what happened in between. I know about my garage, mostly — the kind of place where you keep telling yourself you'll clear out the extension cords someday. But I went looking the way you go looking for a torque wrench you know you own, and I found this: on a Tuesday in September, the board — handpicked, I wrote that word down twice because it struck me — voted to close the main building. Renovations, somebody said. I wrote that down too.

And then there's a photograph. I didn't take it, a photographer named Brendan Smialowski did, on Air Force One, of a printout somebody was holding. I can only read my own handwriting on this part, so I'll just read it back: the printout said "Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED." Capital letters, the way I wrote it.

My dog won't go back in that garage once I've told her it's dangerous in there. She takes my word for it and she stays out the next morning, too. I only bring her up because I keep turning this over: if a building is dangerous enough that the board votes to shut it, dangerous enough that a man carries a printout with the word "demolished" on his own airplane, dangerous enough that an awards show skips its own home for the first time — what is it doing holding an orchestra?

I wrote the headline down because it put the question better than I could: "If the Kennedy Center Is Dangerous, Why Is the Symphony Rehearsing There?" That's the paper asking, not me. I don't have an answer. I checked my notebook twice.

Kerry Kennedy called the board's vote a tragedy. I wrote that down. And somewhere in my notes — I had to read this one back slow, because it surprised me — somebody from the Kennedy family itself called the whole business "how small minded, how narcissistic." Family, about family. I don't know what to do with a quote like that except hand it back to you the way I found it.

So here's where I keep getting stuck, and maybe it's nothing. The main building's closed. The ceremony left for a basketball arena. The printout exists, DEMOLISHED, capital letters. And this week — not next year, not someday, this week — the National Symphony Orchestra is inside that same building, rehearsing.

Oh — hang on, before you go, one thing almost got past me. If that building's too dangerous to host an awards ceremony it's hosted every single December, the first skip of its kind, then what exactly changed about it since 1978?

By RuthThe Money Desk

The paperwork says $111 billion. That is the number on the table September 21, when California Attorney General Rob Bonta and eleven other states announced they had settled with Paramount Skydance over its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, resolving the states' lawsuit and a separate Writers Guild suit the same Monday.

Three days after the settlement, on Thursday, September 24, a Biden-appointed federal judge held a hearing to check that the deal still complied with antitrust law, and the Washington Examiner's own headline that day conceded the merger was "not a done deal." That hearing came after the Justice Department, on September 16, had already filed a statement of interest arguing that the states suing to block the deal — the same Paramount Skydance merger, named as such in the department's own filing — should have to post a bond if they believed their case.

Six days after the hearing, on September 30, the judge signed off. NBC's own account of that approval puts the price at $110 billion. The number had moved one billion dollars, a little under one percent, between the settlement that was supposed to fix the deal's competitive problems and the deal a judge then let close.

On Tuesday the merger closed, and the invoices came in. CBS News, NBC News and the BBC each filed the post-settlement number: $110 billion. The Daily Caller, filing the same day, put the price at $81 billion — a third figure, on the same transaction, in the same news cycle. The New York Times ran no dollar figure at all; its story led instead with a memo to employees hinting at cost cuts to come, the usual place the savings in a deal like this get found.

So: a historic antitrust settlement, negotiated over state lawsuits and a Hollywood guild's objections, moved the price of the merger it was meant to discipline by about one billion dollars out of one hundred eleven — and the record can't even agree on whether that one billion ever happened. The concessions were sized to clear the docket. The docket cleared. Nothing else moved, hon.

By LouOne More Question

My nephew's in his second year of law school now, nonprofit clinic track, and I called him Tuesday with a question about a word. "Humanitarian" — what does that actually mean, in writing? He laughed and said it means whatever's in the filing, Uncle Lou, and he'd have to see the filing to tell me. He's got more patience with paperwork than I ever managed, so I figured he was the one to ask.

So I drove over — the car took three tries, that belt's been on my list for a month — and we sat on his porch while he pulled the paperwork up on his phone. Robert Kraft's charity, Kraft's LLC: donations to Friends of the IDF, donations to AIPAC's super PAC. The Intercept ran that September 18th, off the tax forms themselves. I told him I thought Kraft's donations were supposed to be Palestinian aid. He said that's what Kraft's own statement called them.

There's a second statement too, the one where Kraft told Ed Sheeran's people he'd match a two-million-dollar donation "to aid in the region." So there's a dollar figure Kraft said was headed to aid in the region, and there's a filing that says where Kraft's aid money actually lands. Has anybody set those two pages side by side? I haven't, not all the way.

Dave Portnoy went on the radio and backed the ban on Macklemore "1000%" — his figure, not mine. A thousand of a hundred, for a T-shirt and a sentence. I asked my nephew what the going rate usually runs for banning a man from a stadium over something he said onstage. He said he hadn't come across that one filed anywhere either.

My wife asked what had me so worked up, standing out in the yard with nothing to show for it. I told her I was trying to work out how one word covers two different places in the same calendar year. She said most press releases do that. Does this one have a filing attached, same as the rest?

Friday night, Zach Bryan played that same stadium. Same message, stitched across a shirt. No ban came down, not that made the papers. I called my nephew again to ask if there'd been a new one filed since September. He said not that he'd seen.

I called him a third time Wednesday evening, right as he was headed out the door, and asked whether the next disclosure — whenever Kraft's people file it — lands that match money anywhere different than the last filing did. He said he'd have to wait and see it post, same as the rest of us. That's the thing about filings, he said — they only tell you where the money was, not where it's going next.

Oh — hold on, before you go. One more. The stadium that wouldn't let a man say "Free Palestine" onstage is the same stadium whose owner's humanitarian donations the Intercept traced to Friends of the IDF. Which of those two was actually the thing that got banned?

By ChipStaff Writer

On September 9th, Page Six reported that Jimmy Kimmel's contract will not be extended past 2027, that the twenty-fourth season of "Jimmy Kimmel Live" now airing will be the last, and that Kimmel has held the chair since 2003. The Hill ran it the same day under a headline that said ABC "pushes back." Pushes back — not denies, not calls the report false. That's a distinction worth holding onto. Actually, maybe it isn't. A company that pushes back on a story is disagreeing with it, full stop, and the rest is just — no. Pushing back and denying are two different verbs for a reason: one disputes the frame, the other disputes the facts. ABC chose the first one.

A week later, on September 16th, Stephen Colbert sat across from Kimmel on Kimmel's own show and said he doesn't miss hosting late night, that covering the news every night is "a cup of poison every day." Colbert's own show at CBS had ended that May. The same week, he told the Washington Examiner he isn't thinking about returning to late-night television at all. One canceled host, sitting with the host whose cancellation is being reported, saying he doesn't miss the job.

Then, on October 2nd, the New York Post's headline on Disney president Dana Walden read plainly: she "dodges key question on future of Jimmy Kimmel's late night show." The story under the headline says Walden "did very little to quell" the Page Six report. Quell — the word for calming something you believe is false, which is also the word for a thing a company does not do when it believes a report is true. The company that owns the show, asked about the show, did very little. That is the whole sentence. It should be reassuring. It is not reassuring, and here's where the defense runs out of road: silence from the network that signs the checks is still, on the page, silence.

None of it is a no. The closest thing to one, so far, is a headline with the word "dodges" in it.

By MortThe Records Bureau

The custom that a president ask Congress before tearing down a memorial to a dead president died Monday night on the Senate floor, killed by a single word of objection. It leaves behind no monument of its own, having never been written into law in the first place, which is exactly how the administration wanted it found.

The custom had already outlived one humiliation this month. On September 4, responding to Democrats' criticism of his habit of renaming buildings around Washington after himself, the president said he doubted anyone else would bother doing it for him once he was out of office. It was offered as a kind of justification. It reads now as a kind of epitaph, since the building he wanted his name on would not take it either way.

Eleven days later, on September 15, a federal judge made that plain. Christopher Cooper ruled that the Kennedy Center board's attempt to put the president's name on the outside of the building was still unlawful, no matter that the board called it an honor for his "current" service. The president answered that the Kennedy Center was "destined to doom" — a threat, stated as weather, about a building he does not own and cannot rename, but can apparently still tear down.

That threat is what Monday's bill was written for. Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, co-led the Protecting Presidential Memorials Act, a bill requiring congressional approval before a president demolishes a memorial to a president. Merkley tried to pass it by unanimous consent — the Senate's fast lane, open to any bill so long as nobody stands up and says no. Sen. Mike Lee stood up and said no. It got ninety-nine.

Survived by: a federal judge's order that the president's name does not go on the building anyway, which required no act of Congress to enforce, only a courtroom. Preceded in death by: the president's own words, three weeks earlier, guessing that nobody would put his name up once he was gone — an admission that outdid the objection that followed it, since it conceded the memorial he wants was never really about memory.

Penny-ante is the word for a procedural block that costs one senator nothing and the public a wrecking ball's worth of discretion. In lieu of flowers, the Senate could pass the Protecting Presidential Memorials Act the ordinary way — on the floor, by name, on the record — the next time it comes up.

By ChipStaff Writer

A guy says two words on a stage, gets his name pulled off a tour by a billionaire who then brags about doing it — that's not a booking decision, that's a bill collector for a war showing his badge. Then the whole opening lineup quits one by one and Sheeran stands up and says "I'm not complicit" like the sentence does the work the exits already undid. The math doesn't care how it feels to say it out loud.

By SalStaff Writer

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By ChipStaff Writer

By Sunday night the story had already settled into two separate objects that happen to be the same five seconds of tape. NBC News reported it plainly: the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America was captured on video grabbing an animal rights protester at New York Fashion Week and covering her mouth with his hand. That is the whole incident, stated once, correctly.

The Daily Caller reported it differently. Their headline: "PETA Protestor Crashes NYFW Show, Gets Reality Check From Fed Up Fashion Exec." A reality check. Delivered by a man described, in their own copy, as fed up — which is doing a great deal of work for a word that usually means annoyed, not a hand over someone's mouth.

And here the defense has to be made, so it will be made. He was provoked. A show was disrupted. Executives are not obligated to stand still while their industry is interrupted, and a firm hand — a firm hand covering a woman's mouth on camera, that's — that's not a reality check, that's the incident NBC already described, just relabeled by a headline writer who watched the same tape and reached for a gentler verb.

The Daily Caller's own body text does not stop at "fed up." It goes further than NBC did: he pinned her on the floor with his legs. Not held her back. Not escorted her out. Pinned, floor, legs — offered by the outlet defending him, as if the detail helped the case. It does not help the case. It is the case.

So the talking point has to be that context matters, that protesters accept certain risks when they crash a show, that fashion has a right to protect its runway — and that's true as far as it goes, except it doesn't go anywhere near covering someone's mouth with your hand while your legs hold her to the floor. That's not risk. That's the video. The one outlet reported. The other one renamed.

Two headlines, one clip, and the gap between them is the entire story: what one network calls an assault, another calls a correction, and the only difference is which side of the runway you're standing on when the hand goes over the mouth.

By SalStaff Writer

An executive order works on a lake the way a memo works on a company: it does not touch the water, it touches the label. On August 27th the President signed one renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America," a parting shot after trade talks with Canada broke down. The lake stayed exactly where it has been for centuries, half in New York and half in Ontario. The order was never really about geography. It was about which name the software would carry.

Google went first. By Saturday, two days after the signature, Google Maps showed "Lake America" to users in the United States. Apple took longer: its maps didn't catch up until September 1st, five days after the order, trailing Google by three days. The gap is the whole story in miniature — two of the largest companies on earth changed the name of a lake for the government that regulates them, and even they couldn't agree on how fast to do it.

Ontario didn't wait on either app. On August 29th, Premier Doug Ford put up a large sign reading "Lake Ontario" and left it standing. It's not much of a rebuttal to an executive order, except that a sign doesn't take software updates. That's the whole appeal of a road sign in a fight like this one.

By September 1st, the same week Apple fell in line, a Reuters/Ipsos poll had the count: 63 percent of Americans opposed the renaming. A majority said no in the same stretch of days two of the country's biggest tech companies said yes. The order didn't need the public's permission. It needed the map's, and the map said yes twice, at two different speeds.

Which is what makes South Park's move this week almost redundant. Trey Parker and Matt Stone announced the show will rename itself "South America," crediting the "bravery and patriotism" of Apple and Google for the inspiration. It lands as satire because it's staged as one — a title card, a press line, a joke everyone's in on. But strip the delivery and it's the same act Google performed on a Saturday without one: change the name because the change came from above. The cartoon needed a punchline to do what the map did as routine maintenance.

Line up the dates — the order, the map, the sign, the poll, the cartoon — and only one of them was trying to be funny.

By ChipStaff Writer

Let's be clear about what happened, because the coverage is getting ahead of the facts. A source says organizers of the Mar-a-Lago law enforcement fundraiser had no knowledge of Jelly Roll's jokes about the president when they pulled his invitation. No knowledge. That's the statement, that's what we're standing behind, and frankly the timeline supports it if you don't look at the timeline.\n\nHere's what actually happened, in order, because order matters here. On August 27, Rep. Jimmy Patronis, a Florida Republican, told the press that Jelly Roll -- born Jason DeFord -- was no longer welcome in his Panhandle district. Why? Because of a Kimmel monologue where the singer made fun of the president's weight. A sitting congressman, on the record, naming the singer, naming the jokes, twelve days before Mar-a-Lago's own event. Twelve days. That's the number. I want to be precise about that number.\n\nThe next day, Jelly Roll went back on Kimmel and explained himself -- said he's "down the middle," said watching a fight on TV doesn't mean he supports the administration. Same day, a separate item has him walking back his apolitical stance entirely, saying he plans to vote this November. So within twenty-four hours you've got a congressman disowning him and the singer politically radioactive enough to make news twice for the same monologue.

By September 4, Fox News is running a piece asking whether Jelly Roll just Bud Lighted himself -- the story notes his monologue "mirrors Bud Light's brand-destroying misstep," fan backlash and all. That's four days before the Mar-a-Lago fundraiser reportedly decided he wasn't welcome there either.

So walk it with me: congressman disowns him by name over the jokes, singer responds publicly, singer gets compared in the trade press to the last celebrity who tanked a brand this way, and then -- twelve days after the congressman's statement -- a law enforcement fundraiser at the president's own club uninvites him over the identical jokes and says, through a source, that organizers didn't know.

Didn't know what? The congressman's name was in the story. The singer's name was in the story. The jokes were the same jokes.

Okay. I'm not saying anybody's lying. I'm saying the paper trail runs twelve days deep and it has the same name in it every time, and "no knowledge" is a phrase, and phrases don't have to survive contact with a calendar to get printed. They just have to get printed.

By MortThe Records Bureau

OBITUARY. The presumption of authorship — the working assumption, held for as long as anyone alive can remember, that the person whose name sat atop an essay or a song had, in fact, made the thing — died this week. It was old enough that nobody thought to check its age. It is survived by a great deal of paperwork.

Born sometime before anyone bothered writing it down, the presumption served two institutions faithfully for generations: the college admissions office, which took your essay at your word, and the record industry, which took your melody at your word. It asked for very little in return. Trust, mostly, and the occasional benefit of the doubt.

It began to fail this year in colleges first. Admissions officers, per this week's reporting, no longer trust that the application in front of them was written by the applicant rather than assembled by a large language model, and grade inflation upstream hasn't helped them sort out who's telling the truth. The essay, once a decent proxy for a seventeen-year-old's mind, became a coin flip.

It failed a second time in music. Jason Isbell and a group of fellow artists filed suit against Suno, an AI company accused of generating music built on their work without so much as a byline, let alone a check. If the presumption of authorship were still alive, that would have been a contract negotiation. Instead it was a lawsuit, because there was no longer a shared assumption to negotiate from.

A related notion — the idea that meritocracy itself measures anything real once a machine can produce the application and, apparently, the song — is now in critical condition and not expected to recover soon, according to this week's commentary.

Preceded in death by: the take-home essay, the benefit of the doubt, several assumptions about who actually wrote your kid's personal statement.

Survived by: two lawsuits, one admissions office running background checks on grammar, and a great deal of malarkey about what a machine can and cannot be credited with.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that any institution still capable of verifying authorship — a school, a court, a copyright office — actually do it, before there's nothing left to check.