We are 1st century A.D. men reading The New Yorker in the 21st century, and we are astonished at what we're reading.
The title: “Marty Baron on the Washington Post ‘spineless’ endorsement decision.” Subhead: “The former executive editor discusses his relationship with the newspaper's owner, Jeff Bezos,” the second most successful man in the solar system, “who was reportedly behind the last minute call to kill an editorial supporting Kamala Harris.” This is an interview by Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker.
I did not expect this, nor did I expect The Washington Post not to endorse Kamala Harris, and now The New Yorker's interview suggests that Bezos is a villain, who paid an enormous sum of money to own The Washington Post personally (this is not an Amazon acquisition).
However, this article goes on at great length talking to Marty Baron, who is revered, that he had no prior knowledge of Bezos reversing course, and then they questioned the present publisher, Will Lewis, who is the man who signed the editorial saying there would not be an endorsement.
The puzzle here is, it is November 6th, the day after the election, we are presuming, because we can only see so far, that this editorial decision at The Washington Post and this unhappy interview in The New Yorker are anticipating a success for the former president, and a defeat for the vice president. We're presuming that there is a suggestion here of something alarmingly wrong, and that we're headed to a catastrophe. So the puzzle here is, it's the day after, and this looks that the optimates are turning on themselves—something that's happened very often in the Roman Senate.
We've seen it many times. Sometimes we call it a civil war, sometimes we call it a purge. Sometimes men ask for exile rather than execution. Sometimes they open their own veins. There are various forms of it. How do you measure this? Was the Senate turning on itself? Do they all have their daggers out? Or were they anticipating there's advantage here?
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