While I was teaching this afternoon, Chuck Schumer (!) signed on to a Warren call for Biden to cancel $50K in student debt for every borrower in the country. Wow. (And quick thread.)
So this is presented as a Senate resolution, but that's just a way of getting attention. The premise here is that the president has the power under federal law to wipe out student debt. Unilaterally. With a stroke of the pen.
This isn't a call for congressional action, or a proposal to draft a proposal to create a plan. This is "Biden, you could wipe out $50K of student debt for every borrower in the country on January 20. You should do that." And it's cosigned by Chuck Schumer.
And of course because this is an executive action, it's something that Trump could do today. (Or tomorrow. Or yesterday.) They're basically daring him to do it, confident that he won't.
Which raises an extremely big and extremely obvious question to which I don't know the answer: What coordination with the Biden campaign preceded this announcement?
It could be that there was none, of course, though that seems very much not in line with how Warren has been comporting herself since the primaries, and VERY much not like something Schumer would do.
Or it could be they got a green light to make the announcement and introduce the resolution but no commitment from the Biden camp to do it. Which seems plausible, but also deeply weird—and more weird the more you think about it.
So maybe the plan is to get a wave of publicity for this as a Schumer-Warren kumbaya moment, and then ... announce it as a new Biden campaign promise. Which would be wild on multiple levels.
Or maybe they're just going to leave it hanging out there on the assumption that it'll be a question at the first presidential debate, and that Biden's pledge to do it will immediately become the biggest story of the night.
I've honestly got no idea. I don't even have a strong hunch. But wow. This is a whole huge thing, however it shakes out—and would be utterly momentous if it were implemented.
Anyway, the first debate is in twelve days.
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(I tweeted about it last night, but as I sometimes do, I frontloaded conclusions rather than explanation, so I'm rebooting.)
There are a lot of people around—including a lot of people in my comments—who start from the premise that tearing down these posters is hostile to free expression, and so what happened to this guy was a free-speech victory. Let's unpack that.
I ran the first paragraph of Orwell's 1984 through ChatGPT, asking it to fix any "spelling, grammatical, or usage errors."
I think my copyediting gig is safe. Check it out:
Orwell: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions..."
ChatGPT: "It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, with his chin nuzzled into his chest in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped rapidly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions..."
It's only—the quoted text—not dangerous because it's so ignorant. If your goal is to "evaluate grammar" in order to determine whether a manuscript is publishably competently written, all you need to do is have a copy editor spend three minutes reading a random page. (1/?)
It's not an onerous task. But it's not also a useful task. Because lots of books that get published are written by authors who have a shaky grasp of grammar. Lots of GOOD books are written by such authors. Such manuscripts are the baby, not the bathwater.
Me, to my partner, also a copy editor, or vice versa: "How's the book you're working on going?"
Them, to me, or v-v: "It's fine. The author doesn't know how commas work, but it's fine."
"Meryl Streep is grievously miscast in Postcards from the Edge."
My view: Streep was perfect in the breakup scene with Dennis Quaid and a few others, but she needed to (1) be meaner to, and more like, her mom and (2) give the impression that she'd be a fun person to get high with.
I can buy Streep being Maclaine's daughter in Postcards, and I can buy her living the life she's living in the movie, but to believe the former I have to disbelieve the latter, and vice versa.
It would have been SO EASY to leverage the cachet of the celeb blue-checks in monetizing the new buy-in system. It really is astonishingly perverse how far he’s gone to do the opposite.
Seems like this may be about to reach exit velocity, so to be clear: I'm applauding Megan Hunt here. She is upholding and insisting upon decency by refusing to reciprocate empty civility from her colleagues.
Don't hurt my family and send me a Christmas card. Don't reveal yourself to be a bigot and ask me how my weekend went. Don't vote for evil and assume my ongoing goodwill. Don't be indecent and expect civility in return.