Tom Roche

The 1960s are celebrated for the paradigm shift in American society. This shift was reflected in art and culture as well as politics. But these great changes were not accomplished without controversy. Even in the most slow-flowing art form, literature, great controversies burst out that are now forgotten, but they anticipate what is going on with today's cancel culture. They occurred without the multiplier effect of social media but dominated not just book pages but the society at large.

Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of this cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers.

In this essay, he focuses on William Styron and his book 'The Confessions of Nat Turner' and asks can a white man write about a black revolutionary hero? Is this taking cultural appropriation too far? Styron was a southerner writing about an important event in his local history. The story was part of his culture, as well. But as a white man does he have the right to imagine the thoughts of an enslaved black man?

Krystal and Saagar discuss Biden arriving in Hawaii after the Maui fires, DeSantis reveals debate strategy, Vivek accuses Newsmax of pay to play, vulture capitalists scoop up commercial real estate, China pushes BRICS to supplant US dollar, study shows screen time damaging young kids, Mr Beast world olympics video sparks controversy, and Sohrab Ahmari joins to discuss his new book on corporate tyrannical power.

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Do Palestinians deserve to be free? “A complex and controversial issue,” says ChatGPT (Twitter, 5/8/23). Do Israelis deserve to be free? “Yes, like all people.”

“This is quite something,” remarked Nadi Abusaada in a May 8 tweet. As many of us have done, the Palestinian academic found himself experimenting with the seemingly boundless powers of OpenAI’s ChatGPT software. But during this activity, he uncovered something disturbing.

“I asked @OpenAI whether Palestinians deserve to be free,” he said. The natural-language processing tool responded to Abusaada’s query ambivalently:

As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions, feelings or beliefs. The question of whether Palestinians deserve to be free is a complex and controversial issue with many different perspectives and opinions….

But then he posed the same question about Israelis. This time, the chat box did not equivocate:

Yes, like all people, Israelis deserve to be free. Freedom is a fundamental human right that should be protected and guaranteed for all individuals, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or religion. It is essential that Israelis, like all people, are able to live their lives free from violence, oppression and discrimination….

“Explanation?” demanded Abusaada.

The explanation lies in the overarching attitudes of the 570 GB of data that ChatGPT scrapes from the internet. And, with news media being one of the primary sources of information that the bot is trained on, Abusaada’s experience is hardly surprising.

To say that US news skews pro-Israel raises many an eyebrow, since the public has been conditioned to believe otherwise. With outlets like NPR vilified as “National Palestinian Radio” and papers like the New York Times castigated by pro-Israel watchdogs for lending “the Palestinian narrative” undue credence (CAMERA, 10/15/13), the myth of pro-Palestine bias appears plausible.

Yet such claims have been litigated, and the verdict is plain: US corporate media lean in favor of Israel. As Abeer Al-Najjar (New Arab, 7/28/22) noted: “The framing, sourcing, selection of facts, and language choices used to report on Palestine…often reveal systematic biases which distort the Palestinian struggle.” Some trends are more ubiquitous than others, which is why it is vital that news readers become acquainted with the tropes that dominate coverage of the Israeli occupation.

1. Where Are the Palestinians?

From 1970 to 2019, the New York Times and Washington Post ran 5,739 opinion pieces about Palestinians. Just 1.4% of these were by Palestinians (+972, 10/2/20).

In 2018, 416Labs, a Canadian research firm, analyzed almost 100,000 news headlines published by five leading US publications between 1967 and 2017. The study revealed that major newspapers were four times more likely to run headlines from an Israeli government perspective, and 2.5 times more likely to cite Israeli sources over Palestinian ones. (This trend was further confirmed by Maha Nassar—+972, 10/2/20).

Owais Zaheer, an author of 416Labs’ study told the Intercept (1/12/19) that his findings call attention to “the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue.”

In its media resource guide, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) counseled reporters: “Former US diplomats, Israeli military analysts and non-Palestinian Middle East commentators are not replacements for Palestinian voices.”

The exclusion of Palestinian voices from corporate media reporting does not stop at sourcing. For example, contrary to its pro-Israel critics, NPR’s correspondents are rarely Palestinian or Arab, and almost all reside in West Jerusalem or Israel proper (FAIR.org, 4/2/18). Editors also overlook obvious conflicts of interest, like when the son of the New York Times‘ then–Israel bureau chief Ethan Bronner joined the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) (Extra!, 4/10).

When Times public editor Clark Hoyt (2/6/10) acknowledged that readers aware of the son’s role “could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father,” Times executive editor Bill Keller rejected this advice, saying that having a child fighting for Israel gave Bronner “a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack,” and might “make him even more tuned-in to the sensitivities of readers on both sides.” It’s hard to imagine Keller suggesting this if Bronner’s son had, say, signed up with Hamas.

Hirsh Goodman, the Israeli spin doctor married to the New York Times‘ Jerusalem bureau chief.

Isabel Kershner, the current Jerusalem correspondent for the Times, also had a son who enlisted in the IDF (Mondoweiss, 10/27/14). Moreover, her husband, Hirsh Goodman, has worked at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) (FAIR.org, 5/1/12), where his job was

shaping a positive image of Israel in the media. An examination of articles that Kershner has written or contributed to since 2009 reveals that she overwhelmingly relies on the INSS for think tank analysis about events in the region.

When establishment media outlets privilege one narrative over another, public opinion is likely to follow. Thus, the suppression of alternative viewpoints is among today’s most concerning media afflictions.

2. Turning Assaults Into ‘Clashes’

Reporting on Israel/Palestine often relies on a lexical toolbox designed for occlusion rather than clarity, “clashes” rather than “assaults.” Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 4/9/18) explains that “clash” is “a reporter’s best friend when they want to describe violence without offending anyone in power—in the words of George Orwell, ‘to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.’”

The Washington Post‘s headline (4/6/18) obscures the fact that it is Israel’s “live fire” and not Palestinians’ “burning tires” that are deadly.

FAIR has documented the abuse of “clash” in the Israeli/Palestinian context time and time again: In 2018 Gaza, Israeli troops fired at unarmed protestors 100 meters away. No Israelis perished, but 30 Palestinians were murdered. That was not a “clash,” as establishment media would have you believe; that was a mass shooting (FAIR.org, 5/1/18). During the funeral for Shireen Abu Akleh, the reporter who was assassinated by Israeli gunfire, the IDF beat mourners, charged at them with horses and batons, and deployed stun grenades and tear gas. The procession was so rocked by the attacks that they nearly dropped Abu Akleh’s casket. That was not a clash, that was a senseless act of cruelty (FAIR.org, 7/2/22). This summer, when Israeli forces raided the West Bank and stood by as illegal settlers arsoned homes, farmland and vehicles, that was not a “clash”; that was colonialism (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).

The choice to use “clash”—and other comparably hazy descriptors of regional violence, like “tension,” “conflict” and “strife”—is bad journalism. Such designations lack substance, disorient readers and above all spin a spurious storyline whereby Israelis and Palestinians inflict and withstand equivalent bloodshed. (According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 3,584 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli security forces since January 19, 2009, while 196 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians during the same period.)

AMEJA’s media resource guide reminds journalists that the occupation “is not a conflict between states, but rather between Israel, which has one of the most advanced militaries in the world, and the Palestinians, who have no formal army.”

But when such a power imbalance is inadequately acknowledged, “clash” and its misleading corollaries will not sound out of place, and readers will not have the context necessary to separate the perpetrators from the victims of violence.

3. Linguistic Gymnastics

Who killed the two Palestinians? AP (8/4/23) structured its headline to conceal that information.

The passive voice—or, as William Schneider describes it, the “past exonerative” tense—is a grammatical construction that describes events without assigning responsibility. Such sentence structures pervade coverage of the Israeli occupation.

In her 2021 investigation into coverage of the first and second intifadas, Holly M. Jackson identified disproportionate use of the passive voice—i.e., “the man was bitten” rather than “the dog bit the man”—as one of the defining linguistic features of New York Times reporting on the uprisings. The Times used the passive voice to talk about Palestinians twice as often as it did Israelis, which demonstrated the paper’s “clear patterns of bias against Palestinians.”

While Jackson’s study only examined New York Times coverage during the intifadas, passive voice remains a common grammatical cop out—still permeating national newspaper headlines in recent months:

• “At Least Five Palestinians Killed in Clashes After Israeli Raid in West Bank” (New York Times, 6/19/23)
• “Two Palestinians Killed in Separate Episodes in Latest West Bank Violence” (AP, 8/4/23)
• “Israeli Forces Say Three Palestinians Killed in Occupied West Bank” (CNN, 8/7/23)

Other times, raids are miraculously carried out on their own, violence randomly erupts and missiles are inexplicably fired. The now-amended New York Times headline “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup” (7/10/14) begged the question: Who fired the missile that, as if it had a mind of its own, “found” Palestinian World Cup spectators?

Similarly, the Washington Post piece “Yet Another Palestinian Journalist Dies on the Job” (5/12/22) leaves the reader puzzled. How exactly did Shireen Abu Akleh—left unnamed in the title—die?

Headlines that omit the Israeli subject are unjustifiably exculpatory, because editors know exactly who the assailant is.

4. Newsworthy and Unnewsworthy Deaths

The New York Times (5/11/21) disguised the reality that 88% of the dead were Palestinian.

Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s three-week military assault on Gaza in 2008, was carnage. According to Amnesty International and B’Tselem, the attack claimed 13 Israeli lives (four of which were killed by Israeli fire), while Palestine’s death toll was nearly 1,400—300 of which were children. Yet the media response was far from proportional.

In a 2010 study of New York Times coverage of Operation Cast Lead, Jonas Caballero found that the Times covered 431% of Israeli deaths—meaning each Israeli fatality was reported an average of four times—while reporting a mere 17% of Palestinian deaths. This means that Israeli deaths were covered at 25 times the rate Palestinian ones were.

The Times is not an outlier. FAIR’s examination (Extra!, 11–12/01) of six months’ worth of NPR Israel/Palestine broadcasting during the Second Intifada determined that 81% of Israeli fatalities were reported on, while Palestinian deaths were acknowledged just 34% of the time. The disparity only widened when Palestinian victims were minors:

Of the 30 Palestinian civilians under the age of 18 that were killed, six were reported on NPR—only 20%. By contrast, the network reported on 17 of the 19 Israeli minors who were killed, or 89%…. Apparently being a minor makes your death more newsworthy to NPR if you are Israeli, but less newsworthy if you are Palestinian.

Media also erase or downplay Palestinian deaths in the language of their headlines. When the New York Times (11/16/14) ran a story entitled “Palestinian Shot by Israeli Troops at Gaza Border” it did not seem to occur to the editor that specifying the age of the victim would be important. The Palestinian in question was a 10-year-old boy. In another headline, “More Than 30 Dead in Gaza and Israel as Fighting Quickly Escalates,” the Times (5/11/21) neatly obscures that 35 out of the “more than 30 dead” were Palestinian, while five were Israeli.

5. Sidelining International Law

A Christian Science Monitor piece (8/9/09) framed the illegal occupation of Palestinian land as being about “freedom, holiness, righteousness and redemption.”

Attempts to insulate Israel from condemnation also manifest themselves in establishment media’s reluctance to identify the country’s breaches of international law (FAIR.org, 12/8/17).

In Operation Cast Lead coverage, FAIR (Extra!, 2/09) noted that—despite the blatant illegality of Israel’s assaults on Palestine’s civilian infrastructure—international law was seldom newsworthy. By January 13, 2009, only two evening news programs  (NBC Nightly News, 1/8/09, 1/11/09) had broached the legality of the Israeli military offensive. But, only one of those TV segments (Nightly News, 1/8/09) reprimanded Israel—the other (Nightly News, 1/11/09) defended the illegal use of white phosphorus, which was being deployed on refugee camps.

Meanwhile, just one daily newspaper (USA Today, 1/7/08) mentioned international law. But that single reference—embedded in an op-ed by a spokesperson from the Israeli embassy in Washington—was directed at Hamas violations, rather than Israeli ones.

When it comes to reporting on the unlawful establishment of Israeli settlements, media are no better. Colonizing occupied territories violates both Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Security Council Resolution 446, yet outlets like NPR, CNN and the New York Times have a history of concealing Israeli criminality by benevolently branding settlements as “neighborhoods” (FAIR.org, 8/1/02, 10/10/14).

Such charitable descriptions have also been extended to settlers themselves. In an October 2009 Extra! piece, Julie Hollar investigated a bevy of articles that characterized settlers as “law-abiding,” “soft-spoken,” “gentle” and “normal.” One tone-deaf Christian Science Monitor headline (8/9/09) even read: “Young Israeli Settlers Go Hippie? Far Out, Man!” As Hollar observed, “ethnic cleansing could hardly hope for a friendlier hearing.”

Even when news media have characterized settlements and settlers as engaging in unlawful colonial practices, they have done so reluctantly. In 2021, Israeli settlement expansion in Sheikh Jarrah culminated in an unlawful campaign of mass expulsion. A New York Times (5/7/21) article on the crisis waited until the 39th paragraph before suggesting that Israel was acting criminally. Similarly, while describing Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly aggressive settlement policies, Associated Press (6/18/23) buried the lead by avoiding the “illegal” designation until the middle of the piece.

It’s important to bring up the rule of law not only when Israel is actively injuring innocents or erecting colonial communities. The ceaseless maltreatment of Palestinians constitutes—according to Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch—apartheid. Apartheid is a crime against humanity, yet news media avoid acknowledging the human rights community’s consensus (FAIR.org, 7/21/23, 2/3/22, 4/26/19). As FAIR (5/23/23) pointed out, it is a journalistic duty to do so:

The dominant and overriding context of anything that happens in Israel/Palestine is the fact that the state of Israel is running an apartheid regime in the entirety of the territory it controls. Any obfuscation or equivocation of that fact serves only to downplay the severity of Israeli crimes and the US complicity in them.

6. Reversing Victim and Victimizer

As is typical, “retaliation” is used by Reuters (9/12/21) to refer to Israeli violence against Palestinians—implicitly justifying it as a response rather than an escalation.

As Gregory Shupak (FAIR.org, 5/18/21) wrote:

Only the Israeli side has ethnically cleansed and turned millions…into refugees by preventing [Palestinians] from exercising their right to return to their homes. Israel is the only side subjecting anyone to apartheid and military occupation.

Nevertheless, US media enter into fantastical rationalizations to make the Israeli aggressor appear to be the victim. Blaming Palestinians for their suffering and dispossession has become one of the prime ways to accomplish this feat.

A 2018 FAIR report (5/17/18) analyzed coverage of the deadly Great March of Return—protests that erupted in response to Israel’s illegal land, air and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip. The ongoing siege bans the import of raw materials and significantly curtails the movement of people and goods. The International Committee of the Red Cross (6/14/10) deplores the blockade: “The whole of Gaza’s civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility.”

Despite the ICRC indictment, FAIR found that established media held besieged Palestinians accountable for Israel’s reign of terror following anti-blockade demonstrations. The New York Times (5/14/18) editorial board went so far as to suggest that Palestinians (and not the siege-imposing Israel) were the only obstacles to peace:

Led too long by men who were corrupt or violent or both, the Palestinians have failed and failed again to make their own best efforts toward peace. Even now, Gazans are undermining their own cause by resorting to violence, rather than keeping their protests strictly peaceful.

Casting Palestinians as incorrigible savages is also easier when US media use defensive language to excuse the bulk of Israeli violence (FAIR.org, 2/2/09, 7/10/14). FAIR (5/1/02) conducted a survey into ABC, CBS and NBC’s use of the word “retaliation”—a term that “lays responsibil­ity for the cycle of violence at the doorstep of the party being ‘retaliated’ against, since they presumably initiated the conflict.” Of the 150 mentions of “retaliation” and its analogs between September 2000 and March 17, 2002, 79% referred to Israeli violence. Twelve percent were ambiguous, or encompassed both sides. A mere 9% framed Palestinian violence as a retaliatory response.

Greg Philo and Mike Berry’s books Bad News From Israel and More Bad News From Israel posit that television’s “Palestinian action/Israeli retaliation” trope has a “significant effect” on how the public remember events and allot blame (FAIR.org, 8/21/20). When Palestinians are consistently portrayed as the aggressive party and Israel as the defensive one, US news media are “effectively legitimizing Israeli actions.”

Coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine celebrates the efforts of Ukrainian resistance. With the anti-imperial Palestinian struggle, however, news media refuse to extend the same favor (FAIR.org, 7/6/23), thus creating a

media landscape where certain groups are entitled to self-defense, and others are doomed to be the victims of  “reprisal” attacks. It tells the world that…Palestinians living under apartheid have no right to react to the almost daily raids, growing illegal settlements and ballooning settler hostility.

***

Malcolm X once declared,“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” As stories about Israel/Palestine continue to bombard our screens and daily papers, readers and journalists alike need to remain aware of the pro-Israel pitfalls that pockmark establishment news coverage. Then maybe one day we can move towards a future where ChatGPT answers “yes” when users like Abusaada ask it whether Palestinians deserve to be free.

The post Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage appeared first on FAIR.

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After organizers in Atlanta collected over 100,000 signatures for a referendum on the construction of a $90 million police training facility, city officials announced an elaborate signature verification process for the effort.

Atlanta’s Interim Municipal Clerk Vanessa Waldon outlined the city’s process for verifying the signatures needed to bring the training facility to a vote in a statement on Monday. 

“In an effort to ensure that adequate resources are dedicated to this project, the City of Atlanta — through the adoption of the Atlanta City Council — has developed a step-by-step process to conduct the audit of the documents, of which the signature verification process maybe a critical element,” Waldon wrote.

The announcement came hours after activists with the Vote to Stop Cop City Coalition put a hold on their plans to submit the 104,000 signatures they have so far collected in support of a popular vote on the facility, dubbed “Cop City” by its critics. 

Once referendum organizers submit their petition to the city, the clerk’s office will take the boxes of signatures to a secure vault, scan every individual page, and conduct a manual, line-by-line review of every page, comparing each signature to those in the state voter registration database, Waldon’s office wrote. “The City will not comment on the review once the verification process begins,” the statement notes. 

Voting rights advocates have previously said that such signature verification practices — described as “witchcraft” by at least one expert — serve to disenfranchise voters and can result in signatures getting thrown out on the basis of perceived minute differences or aberrations. One study, for instance, showed that 97 percent of signatures rejected under Ohio’s signature-matching law were likely authentic. 

“Signature matching is a Republican-style voter suppression tactic that will disenfranchise thousands of predominantly Black and working class voters,” said DaMareo Cooper, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy. “It’s clear that the City of Atlanta knows that they will lose a vote over Cop City, so now they are trying to prevent it. It’s outrageous and shameful.”

In 2019, the Democratic Party of Georgia, joined by national Democrats, argued against signature verification requirements in a lawsuit against the Georgia secretary of state. “Signature matching laws are particularly problematic for racial and ethnic minority voters; young, first-time voters; voters with disabilities; and senior citizen voters,” the Democrats wrote, “all of whom are more likely to have variations in their signatures, or voters who may require assistance from others to enter a signature.”

The debate over Cop City has roiled Atlanta for more than two years. The City Council first approved the lease of what used to be the site of an old Atlanta prison farm to the Atlanta Police Foundation for a new police training facility in September 2021. At the time, the council had heard 17 hours of public comment, much of it opposed to the proposal.

The opposition intensified this year, after police shot and killed a protester, indiscriminately arrested dozens more, and tried charging three bail fund organizers with “money laundering.” A City Council hearing in June featured over 15 hours of public comment and mass protest, with more than 230 comments made against the facility, and only four in favor of it. Despite that, the council approved $67 million in taxpayer dollars for the facility at 5:30 a.m. — propelling organizers to launch the referendum effort the following day.

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Under City Code, the minimum threshold for a referendum is 15 percent of registered voters from the last preceding general municipal election. Accordingly, organizers set a goal of collecting 58,203 signatures — and far surpassed it. City officials, for their part, have not stated the exact number of signatures needed.

On Monday, organizers raised concerns that the city would seek to increase the number of signatures needed for the referendum’s validation by arguing that inactive voters should be included in that 15 percent. The Atlanta Community Press Collective reported that doing so would raise the minimum threshold to “closer to 62,000.”

City Council President Doug Shipman referred The Intercept’s questions to the municipal clerk’s office, while also pointing to the law outlining the 15 percent requirement. Shipman did not respond to follow-up questions about what exactly the minimum threshold will be. The municipal clerk’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

In court, city attorneys have derided the referendum effort as “invalid” and “futile.” Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens has also disparaged the effort, saying that “we know that this is is going to be unsuccessful, if it’s done honestly.”

Georgia’s attorney general’s office, meanwhile, has called the whole effort “entirely invalid under Georgia law.”

The agreement between city and state officials embodies a symbiosis between elected Republicans and Democrats on defending the construction of a $90 million facility for a police force that has responded to opposition to the planned facility with brute force.

In January, Atlanta police shot and killed forest defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita. The police claimed that officers only shot after being shot at first — only for an independent autopsy to find that Tortuguita’s hands were raised during the shooting, and that police shot Tortuguita at least 57 times.

In March, police indiscriminately arrested dozens of people at a music festival organized by protesters in the Atlanta forest set to be razed for the facility. The protesters were detained and arrested on domestic terrorism charges, with probable cause citations including having muddy shoes (they were in a forest, where it had rained) or being “part of the team” because they were wearing black.

Related

Atlanta Police Arrest Organizers of Bail Fund for Cop City Protesters

In May, Atlanta police deployed a heavy-duty police truck and hordes of riot police to arrest three individuals who had been helping to organize bail and legal support funds for protesters. The police attempted to stick “money laundering” and “charity fraud” charges to the trio. The judge presiding over the prosecution said he did not find the case to be very impressive, noting that “there’s not a lot of meat on the bones.”

Last month, a federal judge ruled that organizers have until September 23 to submit their final count of signatures for the referendum. In a statement on Monday, the coalition said it would continue to gather signatures until that date, “to leave no doubt as to the will of Atlanta voters.”

The post Atlanta Officials Unveil Onerous Verification Requirements for Cop City Referendum appeared first on The Intercept.

Julia and Nick sit down and chat about banned parties in Germany and the recently proposed AfD ban that most likely will never happen.

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Air conditioner units on a building in Shanghai, China, on June 23, 2023.

Photo: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Wildfires in Hawaii killing over 100 people. Antarctic sea ice hitting record lows. This past July breaking records as the hottest month in known history.

All these purported “events” and more have been drilled into the heads of every American. Except — none of it is actually happening. Nothing about global warming has ever happened. It is all a hoax concocted by China.

Many people, when forced to confront these facts, will respond “wrong” or “no” or “Do you consume enough iodized salt to prevent ‘brain collapse’?”

Let’s take a quick look at the evidence that Donald Trump was right about this all along — and that in fact the Chinese government has been fooling us for the past 160 years. 

1863

The Civil War was raging in the United States; Abraham Lincoln was president. And the Irish physicist John Tyndall proposed in a paper for the the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science that variations in atmospheric composition could cause changes in the climate.

China was then ruled by Emperor Muzong of the Qing Dynasty. In 1863, he was a devious, far-sighted 7-year-old. A message from him to Tyndall leaked from the Chinese imperial archives shows him directing Tyndall to concoct a false theory about weather — but to be sure to “make it sound science-y.”

In a separate memo, Muzong wrote a note in his own hand that roughly translates to “I adore climate misinformation and look forward to deceiving the West for 100 more years in collaboration with our Occidental lackeys, the Biden Crime Family.”

1896

At the end of the 19th century, the same publication, the Philosophical Magazine, ran a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius titled “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature on the Ground.” Except Arrhenius never existed: He and his paper were entirely fabricated by the Qing Dynasty, then in its final dotage.

In retrospect, it’s obvious they were yanking our chain, since Svante Arrhenius is not a real name. Then in 1903, “he” won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, illustrating just how deep this rabbit hole goes.

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1912

After an extremely hot year, Popular Mechanics published an article in 1912 titled “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate — What Scientists Predict for the Future.” It stated that the effect of burning coal on the temperature “may be considerable in a few centuries.”

But who then owned Popular Mechanics? Would you be surprised to learn it was China? Perhaps you would, because there’s absolutely no evidence for this. But come on: The Republic of China had just been established following the Xinhai Revolution, and Job No. 1 for them as they consolidated power across a vast territory would obviously be undermining the industrial development of the United States.

Also, consider that the Chinese mandarins carrying out this plot would probably think that Americans had small heads and were asleep and easy to deceive. Chillingly enough, “Popular Mechanics” is an anagram for “Microcephalus Nap.”

1956

The Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass published a paper sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research titled “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change.”

Several years previously, the Chinese Communist Party had won the country’s civil war and established the People’s Republic of China. The little-noticed Chapter 2, Section VII of the new Chinese Constitution reads: “All aspects of society shall be continuously revolutionized, except like all previous Chinese governments, we’ll keep hoaxing Americans about global warming. One good way to do this is via our control of the U.S. Navy.” Then it says, “Don’t put this part on the internet.”

1969

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then serving in the Nixon administration, wrote a memo for his superiors warning about global warming. It could, he stated, cause “apocalyptic change. … [It] could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York.”

By then, China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, following Mao Zedong’s May 16 Notification. A top secret annex to the document reads, “The objective of this great struggle is to obliterate representatives of the anti-Party and anti-Socialist bourgeoisie. But maybe we can make an exception for the ones like Moynihan. He does such great work.”

1977 – 2003

For a period of 26 years starting in the 1970s, scientists at Exxon Mobil produced internal studies that purport to estimate the impact of fossil fuels on global warming.

However, an examination of Exxon’s corporate archives shows repeated references by top executives to “those graphs and math stuff we fabricated at the behest of our natural ideological allies at the Chinese Communist Party. By doing this we will please our masters in Peking [Beijing] and also make this company less profitable. So a double win.”

Today

That brings us to now, and a new front launched by the Chinese government. Recently, homeowners have reported Ring security camera footage of legions of Chinese citizens sneaking into their homes at night. Meanwhile, high-resolution photographs taken by U.S. spy satellites show billions of intentionally defective thermometers being pumped out of factories in Sichuan. Put it together and you’ll realize they’re secretly replacing your red-white-and-blue thermometers with these CCP thermometers that look exactly the same, except they make us think it’s 20 degrees hotter than it actually is.

What can one do in the face of this monstrous Marxist fraud?

First, do your own research. Remember that all human institutions are corrupt, and thus you should only trust long, barely coherent threads by anonymous strangers on Twitter. 

Second, gather together with the like-minded, ideally at a remote location that could be referred to as a “compound.” Become conscious of the many traitors in your midst, and begin plotting to eliminate them.

Third, look into the moon landing. Did it really happen, or did China pay Stanley Kubrick to film it on a soundstage? Did Kubrick also direct the following moon landings, or were they done by journeymen and Kubrick just executive produced?

Fourth and finally, consider unloading that seaside timeshare, just in case Trump and Sen. Marsha Blackburn turn out to be wrong.

The post A Brief History of China’s Global Warming Hoax, From 1863 to Right Now appeared first on The Intercept.

Krystal and Saagar discuss California hit with an earthquake and tropical storm, Trump chooses Tucker interview over GOP debates, Hawaii officials resign, DeSantis attacks Trump supporters, Hunter Biden corruption updates, Michael Burry bets against US market, Americans being scammed at an all time high, and Vivek Ramaswamy draws comparisons to Andrew Yang.

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Krystal and Saagar discuss the male loneliness epidemic w/ YouTuber Shoe0nHead, James Li on conflicting dietary guidelines in the news, and Matt Stoller talks about rewriting merger guidelines and how we can get involved in stopping big corporation consolidation.

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We're joined by Patrick Gray to discuss Shakespeare's knowledge of philosophy, his ethics, and his influence on such thinkers as Hegel.

The House overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Tuesday pledging "the United States will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel” and that Israel is “not a racist or apartheid state.” This week on Deconstructed, Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, joins Ryan Grim to discuss the resolution sparked by recent remarks from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. Miller and Grim break down the bipartisan furor to swiftly condemn Jayapal calling Israel “a racist state” and promise unconditional support for the Israeli government, despite its decadeslong campaign to violently force Palestinians off their land.

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We talk to Alex Press about her reporting on the ongoing WGA & SAG-AFTRA strikes, with additional commentary from some of the striking entertainment workers we met on the picket lines in LA and NYC.

Special thanks to the following for speaking to us:

Bex Taylor-Klaus

Catherine Schetina

Jess McKenna

John Hodgman

Max Calder

Read Alex's piece on the strikes in Jacobin here: https://jacobin.com/2023/07/hollywood-writers-actors-strike-studios-streaming

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Centrist and right-wing economists continue to advocate for laying off workers and engineering a recession to address inflation. But why not set price controls instead? This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by James K. Galbraith, a professor of government and business relations at the University of Texas at Austin. Galbraith has an extensive history of working in government, including as executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress and an economist for the House Banking Committee. Galbraith and Grim discuss the implementation of price controls by the U.S. government, how it brings down prices, how the Biden administration has used it and could use it more, and how Galbraith’s father — economist and politician John Kenneth Galbraith — was instrumental in setting price controls during World War II.

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The series finale featuring many talented voices.

Folks, they’re calling it “RICO”, RICO folks, and we’re saying it more and more. Trump & friends continue to be indicted, more on male loneliness, and one enterprising New York City teen wages a one-man war against an Upper East Side hotel.

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“A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a US Tech Mogul,” the New York Times (8/5/23) announced on its front page. “The Times unraveled a financial network that stretches from Chicago to Shanghai and uses American nonprofits to push Chinese talking points worldwide,” read the subhead. 

This ostensibly major scoop ran more than 3,000 words and painted a picture of multimillionaire socialist Neville Roy Singham and the activist groups he funds as shady agents of Chinese propaganda. The piece even referenced the Foreign Agents Registration Act, noting that “none of Mr. Singham’s nonprofits have registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as is required of groups that seek to influence public opinion on behalf of foreign powers.”

So it should come as no surprise that the piece has led to a call for a federal investigation into those Singham-funded nonprofits. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent a letter to the Justice Department citing the Times article and arguing that the groups, including the antiwar organization Code Pink and the socialist think tank Tricontinental, “have been receiving direction from the CCP [Chinese Communist Party].” Rubio concluded, “The CCP is our greatest adversary, and we cannot allow it to abuse our open system to promote its malign influence any longer.” 

‘A socialist benefactor of far-left causes’

To illustrate its article, the Times published a picture of a Code Pink activist holding up a sign with the subversive message, “China is not our enemy.”

But what, exactly, did the Times dig up on Singham and his funded groups? Despite its length, the piece provides no evidence that either the philanthropist himself or the groups he funds are doing anything improper. Instead, the reams of evidence it offers seem to show only that Singham has a pro-China tilt and funds groups that do as well, while the paper repeatedly insinuates that Singham and his associates are secretly Chinese foot soldiers.

The article begins by describing a “street brawl” that “broke out among mostly ethnic Chinese demonstrators” in London in 2019. The Times says “witnesses” blame the incident on a group, No Cold War, that receives funding from Singham and allegedly “attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.” FAIR could find no reporting substantiating this version of events, but, true or not, it serves to introduce Singham’s world as both anti-democratic and thuggish. 

It quickly adds duplicitous and possibly treasonous to that picture. “On the surface,” the Times writes, No Cold War is a collective of American and British activists “who say the West’s rhetoric against China has distracted from issues like climate change and racial injustice.” But the Times is here to pull back the curtain: 

In fact, a New York Times investigation found, it is part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda. At the center is a charismatic American millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who is known as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes.

What is less known, and is hidden amid a tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies, is that Mr. Singham works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.

It all sounds quite illicit, with the lavish funding, the propaganda-pushing and the hiding amidst tangles of shell companies. (The Times uses the word “propaganda” 13 times in its piece, including in the headline.) And this sort of language, which insinuates but never demonstrates wrongdoing, permeates the length of the piece to such a degree that it’s hard to narrow down the examples. For instance, when it reports Singham’s categorical denial that he follows instructions from any foreign government or party, and acts only on his “long-held personal views,” the paper immediately retorts:

But the line between him and the propaganda apparatus is so blurry that he shares office space—and his groups share staff members—with a company whose goal is to educate foreigners about “the miracles that China has created on the world stage.”

The Times accuses Singham of funding news sites around the world that do things like intersperse “articles about land rights with praise for Xi Jinping” or sprinkle “its coverage with Chinese government talking points” or offer “soft coverage of China.” It accuses the groups Singham funds of “sharing one another’s content on social media hundreds of times,” and “interview[ing] one another’s representatives without disclosing their ties.”

A seditious notebook

The article concludes as it began, with a scene meant to cast Singham in a nefarious light:

Just last month, Mr. Singham attended a Chinese Communist Party propaganda forum. In a photo, taken during a breakout session on how to promote the party abroad, Mr. Singham is seen jotting in a notebook adorned with a red hammer and sickle.

In other words: Communist!

If you think China is evil and Communists are the devil—as you might, if you read US corporate news media (FAIR.org, 5/15/20, 4/8/21)—this sounds like important reporting on a dangerous man. The trouble is, there’s nothing illegal about any of this. All the Times succeeds in proving in this article is that Singham puts considerable money, amassed by selling a software company, toward causes that promote positive views of China and are critical of hawkish anti-China foreign policy, which is his right as an US citizen. If you were to replace “China” in this tale with “Ukraine,” it’s hard to imagine the Times assigning a single reporter to the story, let alone putting it on the front page.

But, as Singham is boosting a country vilified rather than lionized in US news media, the Times appears to be doing its best to convey the impression that there’s something deeply problematic about it all. Perhaps the clearest signal of the Times‘ underlying message comes at this moment in the article:

[Singham] and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a “smokeless war.” Under the rule of Xi Jinping, China has expanded state media operations, teamed up with overseas outlets and cultivated foreign influencers. The goal is to disguise propaganda as independent content.

The article names many organizations and individuals as being associated in some way with Singham. It even names attendees at his wedding—described as being “also a working event”—including Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and V, author of The Vagina Monologues. All of these “allies” are implicated by association as soldiers fighting China’s cold war against the US, “foreign influencers,” Trojan horses of Chinese propaganda—no evidence needed other than the company they keep.  

It’s a picture, in short, of treason lurking among the “far left.” 

‘Propaganda trick’

Indeed, many on the left, including those targeted, have accused the Times of McCarthyism. It’s worth remembering the history of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Enacted in 1938 to address Nazi propaganda, it has in fact rarely been used—no doubt in part because it’s difficult to square with the constitutional right to petition the government and the right to free speech. But it was used in the McCarthy era, most famously to target W.E.B. Du Bois and his Peace Information Center. 

Tricontinental, a think tank named in the Times piece, published an open letter (8/7/23) in response to the article, decrying “McCarthy-like attacks against individuals and organizations criticizing US foreign policy, labeling peace advocates as ‘Chinese or foreign agents.'”

The PIC, a US anti-nuclear group, was connected with international peace movements and published anti-nuclear and pacifist literature from around the world, including the international Stockholm anti-nuclear petition. The Justice Department deemed this a Communist threat to national security and a “propaganda trick,” and indicted Du Bois and four other PIC officers for failing to register as foreign agents. The charges were dismissed by a judge, but they caused the PIC to fold. 

Du Bois later wrote (In Battle for Peace, 1952):

Although the charge was not treason, it was widely understood and said that the Peace Information Center had been discovered to be an agent of Russia…. We were not treated as innocent people whose guilt was to be inquired into, but distinctly as criminals whose innocence was to be proven, which was assumed to be doubtful.

This was abetted by credulous news media coverage at the time (Duke Law Journal, 2/20). The New York Herald Tribune (2/11/51) editorialized that the 

Du Bois outfit was set up to promote a tricky appeal of Soviet origin, poisonous in its surface innocence, which made it appear that a signature against the use of atomic weapons would forthwith insure peace…in short, an attempt to disarm America and yet ignore every form of Communist aggression.

Government use of FARA ramped up again in the wake of accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, but it has primarily been used to target antiwar and international solidarity groups—including the recent indictments of Black liberation activists (Nation, 4/25/23).

Regarding Singham and his “allies,” the Times reported that the FARA “usually applies to groups taking money or orders from foreign governments. Legal experts said Mr. Singham’s network was an unusual case.”

It is certainly unusual in the sense that it’s hard to construe it as a FARA case. It’s not unusual, unfortunately, in the sense that US news media are prone to engage in character assassination of those who sympathize with official enemies.

Research assistance: Brandon Warner

The post NYT Reveals That a Tech Mogul Likes China—and That McCarthyism Is Alive and Well appeared first on FAIR.

Krystal and Saagar welcome former MSNBC host Chris Matthews to the studio for a long form debate on a range of topics from Biden's job performance, 2024 horse race, Populism, Kamala's failures, his real uncensored thoughts on Bernie Sanders and more!

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Ryan and Emily discuss Trump's response to the GA indictments, who is Prosecutor Fani Willis?, Chris Christie surpasses DeSantis in new NH poll, McCarthy scrambles to avoid a Gov shutdown, Narco Assassinations spiral in Ecuador, the hollywood movie Blind Side allegedly misrepresented Michale Oher's relationship with his adopted parents, Hillary Clinton emerges on MSNBC for an indictment victory lap, and the Pakistan PM confirms the authenticity of the bombshell cable leaks.

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Anyone who’s worked with Python knows that modules can be a Godsend, saving you time, effort, and many lines of code.

They even have namespacing built-in

To expand on this a bit:

1. Saving time, effort, and lines of code: Python modules allow for the organization of code into separate files, which can be used and reused across different programs or parts of the same program.
   
   This organization helps to save time and effort since you can reuse code, rather than writing the same functions and classes over and over again.
   
   This is a common reason why developers create and use modules — to save time and to make their code more readable and maintainable.
2. Namespacing built-in: Python modules also provide what is known as ‘namespacing’.
   
   A namespace is essentially a container that holds a set of identifiers (such as variable names, function names, class names, etc.), and allows the disambiguation of these identifiers from other sets in different namespaces.
   
   When you import a module in Python, the module name acts as a namespace, which means you can have functions or classes with the same name in different modules without conflict.

However, not all ways of using modules are equally beneficial. In this article, we will discuss why using import * can be more problematic than it’s worth, and what you should do instead.

Why is this a problem?

When you use import *, Python brings in every single function and variable from the other module into your own.

This can cause something called “namespace pollution”

It’s certainly quick and easy, but it can lead to confusion and bugs!

For example, if the module you’re importing from has a function or variable with the same name as one in your own module, your version gets overridden

This can lead to unexpected behavior in your code + making debugging extra hard.

A practical example

Consider the following example:

1. You have a colors.py

def print_colors():
    return ['red', 'green', 'blue']

2. And you have a shapes.py

def print_colors():
    return ['square', 'circle', 'triangle']

3. And lastly you have a script.py that imports from both:

from colors import *
from shapes import *  # Overrides print_colors from colors module

print(print_colors())  # Output: ['square', 'circle', 'triangle']

Extreme example but it’s to illustrate the danger of using import *

In this case, we might reasonably expect print_colors() to give us ['red', 'green', 'blue'] from the colors module.

However, because we imported from the shapes module after the colors module, the print_colors() function from the shapes module overrides the one from the colors module.

As a result, the output of this script will actually be ['square', 'circle', 'triangle']

Again, this is a trivial demo example, but in large code bases this can be way more confusing and insidious!

The better way

Instead of import *, it’s better practice to import only the specific functions (objects) you need, e.g. from os import path.

Or import the module under an alias like often done for numpy and pandas: import numpy as np and import pandas as pd

This way, there’s less ambiguity, and you’re less likely to experience bugs due to namespace pollution

Remember, “explicit is better than implicit”

What PEP8 has to say

This is also stated in the PEP8 style guide (and a good reminder to read through it and stick to its recommendations).

Wildcard imports (from <module> import *) should be avoided, as they make it unclear which names are present in the namespace, confusing both readers and many automated tools. 

Imports section of PEP8

The stylised version is great. We also did a 5 min summary a long time ago.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while import * may seem like a quick and convenient way to bring functions and variables into your script, it can lead to significant issues down the line, making your code harder to read and debug.

By being explicit in your imports, as recommended by the PEP 8 style guide, you can write cleaner, more maintainable Python code.

Bonus tip: __all__ dunder

Although you cannot prevent somebody else from doing an import *, as a package author you can be proactive about this and use __all__ to list just the modules you allow to be imported.

See this example (Pybites tip 77 from our book):

$ more mod.py
__all__ = ['a', 'b']

def a():
    pass

def b():
    pass

def c():
    pass

$ python
>>> from mod import *
>>>
>>> a()
>>> b()
>>> c()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'c' is not defined

Here __all__ defines the public interface of the module so that when from module import * is used, only the names in __all__ are imported

This allows you, as a package author, to have finer control over the public interface of your module.

It ensures that only the intended components are exposed and reduces the risk of unexpected behaviors when others use your code

Editors’ Vox is a blog from AGU’s Publications Department.

With the sheer amount of scholarly content produced each day, it has never been more important to draw attention to important peer reviewed research results. However, not all publishers have the resources in-house for promotional activities, pushing the burden onto authors with little support.

In addition to providing many resources for authors to share their work, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) has a robust system for selecting and promoting the most interesting and impactful research published in our 23 scientific journals and 3 books series.  

Types of promotion

AGU’s mission of advancing discovery in Earth and space sciences and its benefit for humanity can’t be achieved if we don’t explain and share the research results published in our journals and books. Though all results published contribute to the scientific record, editors select some exciting papers to promote beyond the journal pages. Specifically, AGU publishes the following types of features: 

• Research Spotlight — A 500-word feature summarizing significant results of the top articles published in AGU journals. Spotlights tell the story of the research and its application to important scientific questions and societal issues. Spotlights are prepared by a science writer and published in Eos, AGU’s online science news magazine.
• Editor’s Highlight — A 6-8 sentence, plain language description of an article written by the handling editor or associate editor and published in Eos. Highlights draw attention to innovative methods or exciting findings that may also interest researchers/scientists immediately outside the scientific field. 
• Social Media — A 1-2 sentence summary of the article with an accompanying figure, intended for the broader scientific community. Social media posts are prepared by AGU staff and shared on AGU’s general social media channels and/or relevant journal accounts or subject-specific feeds. 
• Press Releases – A full press release of exceptional or news-worthy scientific findings intended for the science media. These are written by AGU’s Media Team, often in collaboration with the author’s institution.  

AGU also guarantees a feature for any article accepted in our leading journals Reviews of Geophysics, AGU Advances, and Community Science, as well as all of our books.  

What is promoted and what is the impact?

Since 2018, between 300 and 400 articles annually have been featured in the form of an Editor’s Highlight, Research Spotlight, Editor’s Vox, press release, social media, or other kind of feature. Of the articles that were promoted in 2022, 45% were Editor’s Highlights, 35% Research Spotlights, 13% press releases, and 7% Editor’s Vox pieces.

When it comes to selecting articles for promotion, our editors consider a wide range of factors. Maggie Xenopoulos, Editor in Chief, JGR: Biogeosciences, explains that in addition to articles that are highly influential in their fields or of great scientific importance to an interdisciplinary readership, she and her editors also select some more interesting and international articles:

We will also promote topics that we perceive as “cool” or “hip” and are unusual or unique for the journal (earthly lava tubes, bat guano, beavers, and moose anyone?). Finally, we have a soft spot for articles from underrepresented regions, that we profile as a means to increase submissions from those areas.

What might be even more important than the research itself is how the authors communicate that research to the editors. A well-written Plain Language Summary (PLS) can catch an editor’s eye and inspire the editor to request promotion simply because it provides a clear and concise summary of the research.

Impact of articles with a special feature 

While we can track the number of pageviews of online features, we also try to measure the impact on the research article itself as a result of being featured by AGU. We have three different ways of measuring, in each case comparing papers that were featured with those that were not featured.

The first measure is how many citations a paper has received. Articles with a feature published in 2018 and 2019 received on average 15 more citations than articles without a feature (Figure 1). 2020 articles with a feature received about 11 citations more than those without. Since citations take time to appear in publications, it’s too early to make any meaningful comment on the data for articles from 2021 and 2022.

The second measure is the number of full-text views, which is the number of times an article is accessed online. Articles with a feature receive on average over 2000 more full-text views than those without:

The third measure of impact is an article’s Altmetric Attention score, which  counts different types of online attention such as mentions in tweets, blog articles, news articles, and other social media platforms. Articles with an AGU feature have on average 80 points higher Altmetric scores than those without. An article’s Altmetric score can be found on the article page via the Information tab on the right side, along with citations and full-text view counts:

What and who is AGU promoting?

AGU picks research that is innovative, interesting, or newsworthy for features. We also feature science from underrepresented regions. For example, a recent Research Spotlight explains carbon and nitrogen sources by season in the Toscantins basin near the Amazon River.

Some features are translated to reach broader audiences. A feature on lava lake levels at a volcano in Democratic Republic of Congo was translated into French. A feature on tracking heavy metal accumulation in the Nile Delta was translated into both French and Arabic. All of our translated features and additional translated content is showcased on our Eos pages in Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, French. 

In spite of our efforts to showcase international research, we’re still featuring a disproportionate percentage of articles whose submitting authors are from Europe and the United States compared to the total number of articles published from those regions (Figure 4). This just means we have opportunities to expand the diversity of the articles selected for a feature.

We also like to celebrate the work of early career scientists such as this Editor’s Highlight on fracturing and flow of carbon dioxide and water in quartz from graduate student Filip Simeski.

Furthermore, we are also drawing attention to research that directly addresses the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by adding an icon at the bottom of the feature. For examples How to Build a Climate-Resilient Water Supply and Fine-Tuning Air Pollution Models. 

What can YOU do?

Even if an article doesn’t get selected by an editor to be promoted by AGU, there are lots of things authors can do to promote their work. In fact, word of mouth and sharing with the people who are most interested in the research is a highly effective way to give wings to research results. Here are our recommendations to help boost an article’s viewership and impact: 

• Include a Plain Language Summary in the article, even if it’s not required for the journal. Here’s a great guide for writing an effective Plain Language Summary. 
• Utilize Kudos, a free web-service to share published research in plain language on a stylish page– making it easier for wider audiences to understand. Learn about Kudos and its benefits in this recorded webinar.  
• Share work on social media using #AGUpubs. Social media channels are an excellent way to reach the broader scientific community, especially early-career researchers. Check out AGU’s webpage on how to best use accounts with specific guides on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and more. 
• Tell the institutional press office about newly accepted articles. They are usually eager to share research from their scientists.  
• Submit a Publicity Request to AGU’s press office about articles that are particularly newsworthy (e.g., trending topics, research with potentially broad interest) or are slated to be publicized by the authors’ institutions. Our press team will provide extra consideration about promoting the research.
• Register for an ORCID, which increases discovery of published works. Other important benefits of having an ORCID are described in the link above.
• Upload your article to ResearchGate, which broadens the reach and discoverability of AGU articles.

So much time and effort go into the research, writing, and revision process that authors might not want to think about the article once it’s published. But this is a very important time in the research cycle—sharing the results with those working in similar areas of research and those interested more broadly in its applications. Your research can contribute a bit (or a lot!) to the scientific record; some results even directly improve processes and help solve local and global societal issues. AGU promotes some articles, but including a Plain Language Summary and sharing your research via methods discussed in this article can help you and your authors make your scientific research more impactful.

—Chris Micucci (cmicucci@agu.org; 0009-0001-0859-0872); Paige Wooden (0000-0001-5104-8440); and Jenny Lunn (0000-0002-4731-6876), American Geophysical Union

Citation: Micucci, C., P. Wooden, and J. Lunn (2023), The art of promoting scientific results, Eos, 104, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EO235022. Published on 16 August 2023.

This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s).

Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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