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When someone feels “most deeply and intensely active and alive,” philosopher William James wrote to his wife shortly after they wed in 1878, “at such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: ‘This is the real me!’”
James was looking to an inner voice to help understand what it means to be “authentic,” a century and a half before Merriam-Webster picked it as the 2023 word of the year. The dictionary publisher called it “the term for something we’re thinking about, writing about, aspiring to, and judging more than ever.” Interest in the word grew this year — Taylor Swift and Elon Musk were just two of the celebrities to deploy it — “driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.”
But whether you hear that inner voice or not, being real is a goal that makes sense. Taylor Swift’s phenomenal success is partly owed to her aspiration to authenticity despite the “constant reinvention” that “pop iconhood” requires, as Jeff Yang noted.
“No one else does it with the same casual, frictionless aplomb as Swift; her self-shifts don’t come off as acts of extravagant pick-me theater in the mode of Ariana Grande, or explosive artistic statements a la Beyoncé. Instead, they’re more like chord changes; variations in the key of Tay — eyebrow-raising, but never too extreme or off-putting. Which means that throughout all of her evolutions, she has remained accessible, approachable, personable and projectable; a cool hang for the guys, trusted bestie to the girls.”
Swift’s Eras tour “could become the most lucrative music tour in history. It will, all in, represent a $5.7 billion boost to the US economy, while injecting a profound degree of monetary stimulus into every city hosting her, given that her fans collectively spend around $93 million per show.” Yang noted that Swift, already a billionaire, could personally make more than $4 billion from the tour, not including her concert film, which has already scored $250 million at the box office. And on her 34th birthday, December 13, Swift is releasing the film for home viewing on demand, which will earn her millions more. No wonder that “Swiftie” was shortlisted for the Oxford Word of the Year.
“Authenticity” is so hard to pin down that its choice by Merriam-Webster gave Holly Thomas pause.
“Are the airbrushed Kardashians inauthentic, or are their choreographed photoshoots just an extension of their Botoxed aesthetic IRL? Are filtered selfies inauthentic, or are they more authentic than forced-casual ‘woke up like this’ snaps? Was YouTuber Emma Chamberlain as authentic hosting the Met Gala as she was when she made videos about her meltdowns?
“Even assuming we have sufficient insight to identify our own authentic traits, we can never be entirely sure we’re communicating them effectively to the world, nor that it’s a good idea to do so. The things we feel comfortable sharing online don’t necessarily align with what we’re prepared to say in ‘real life,’ and either way, we can’t control how we’ll be received.”
What’s your word of the year? CNN Opinion wants to know the term you think best sums up 2023. We’ll report back on the standout choices.
SE Cupp: Trump didn’t pave the way for George Santos. Another president did
“Authentic” is the last word that should feature in the saga of George Santos, who concocted a biography and won a House seat from New York, only to have that stripped away in a rare expulsion vote on Friday over alleged ethics violations. In the week that Americans said goodbye to Rosalynn Carter, Henry Kissinger and Sandra Day O’Connor, it was jarring that Santos occupied our minds.
But as SE Cupp argued, in a more rational world, Santos would have resigned from Congress long ago. So too would New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, who was charged, as Cupp noted, with using “his power and influence to benefit the Egyptian government in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes — including cash, gold, and a Mercedes. He, too, denies any wrongdoing.”
Santos and Menendez “are defiant and seem totally unashamed of the scandals and bad headlines swirling around them … Of course, neither Santos nor Menendez invented this strategy. Former President Donald Trump perfected it. … But it’s worth pointing out, Trump didn’t invent this either.”
“No, that credit goes to former President Bill Clinton.”
In a book publishing Tuesday, Former Rep. Liz Cheney issues a clarion call to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House, CNN reported. “Every one of us — Republican, Democrat, Independent — must work and vote together to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled, and collaborated with him are defeated,” Cheney writes.
Historian Julian Zelizer observed that “Nobody is spared in this account. In the book, Cheney exposes former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for his jarring U-turn in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Just weeks after he said Trump should ‘accept his share of responsibility’ for the attack, McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago and posed for a photograph with the former president.”
“When Cheney saw the photo of the two men smiling together, she recounted, ‘Not even Kevin McCarthy could be this craven, I thought. I was wrong.’ When she confronted McCarthy in person, he justified his visit by saying he was worried that the former president was depressed and not eating.”
“Many Republicans just don’t care,” wrote Zelizer. “It isn’t simply that some voters have bought into Trump’s election lies — Cheney argues that many prominent Republicans were simply willing to accept Trump’s actions, seemingly believing that all is fair in partisan warfare.”
If Trump is the 2024 Republican nominee for president, Democrats are already preparing to capitalize on his role in overturning Roe v. Wade. But now Trump has given Democrats another gift, with his suggestion that he would again try to repeal the increasingly popular Obamacare program.
It’s a big mistake, argued Patrick T. Brown, a Republican. “After years of railing against the Affordable Care Act, and pledging to ‘repeal and replace Obamacare,’ Trump endorsed a Republican effort to unwind the health care law in a rushed and haphazard process,” Brown recalled.
“Trust in the GOP’s health care plan sank, the lack of preparation became clear, and after the late Sen. John McCain gave a final thumbs-down to the effort in the summer of 2017, the party largely slunk away from the topic.” That doesn’t mean the GOP should avoid health care as an issue.
“Republicans will suffer politically if they return to the messaging of repealing Obamacare. And more importantly, health care will continue to be an albatross around their neck if they aren’t able to offer some solutions that can make finding and paying for health care less of a pain in the neck for individuals and families.”
One month before the presidential primary voting begins, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is gaining support; the Koch network announced last week that it would back Haley. She has been praised for her debate performances and has run a largely “error-free” campaign, according to Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia.
Haley’s surge could capitalize on Trump’s “vulnerabilities,” Duncan wrote. “While the public has consistently expressed concern over President Joe Biden’s age (71% of registered voters described the incumbent as too old to be an effective president in a recent New York Times/Siena College survey), the 77-year old Trump has also raised eyebrows of late with some of his recent slip-ups. On the trail, Trump has confused Biden with former President Barack Obama and claimed that Biden could ‘plunge the world into World War II’ — which ended nearly eight decades ago.”
“Haley has sharpened her attacks on Trump, asserting that ‘chaos follows him.’ She has also accused him of being ‘incredibly reckless with our national security.’”
“Haley is not perfect — no candidate is — but right now she is the best hope for anyone seeking to prevent another Trump nomination or a Biden second term.”
For more:
Nicole Hemmer: Nikki Haley embodies the test America can’t afford to fail again
Bill Carter: What Hannity was up to in that weird DeSantis-Newsom debate
Everything Henry “Kissinger did was surrounded by controversy,” wrote Fareed Zakaria, who knew the former secretary of state for three decades. Kissinger died last week at 100. “He was a complicated man — warm, witty, proud, thin-skinned, sometimes paranoid but always deeply curious and intellectually serious about the world. He was the only celebrity I ever met who, when the lights dimmed, retreated to his library to read the latest biography of Stalin or reread Spinoza.”
“In a country of optimists, Henry Kissinger was a European pessimist. He began his career worrying about nuclear weapons and ended it worrying about artificial intelligence.”
Kissinger fled with his family from Nazi Germany in 1938 to escape that regime’s atrocities against Jews, and that experience shaped him, Zakaria noted. “From start to finish, over a century, Henry Kissinger’s abiding fear was that disruptive forces once set in motion could easily rip off the thin veneer of civilization and stability, pushing the world into the abyss — like the one in which he came of age.”
Jeremi Suri, a historian and author of a book on Kissinger, observed that he “described Wilsonian idealistic impulses as naïve and dangerous. The hate and violence always shadowed his views of society.”
“Kissinger wanted to use American power as a better alternative, a lesser evil, for salvaging the best of humanity and limiting the damage from human frailty and flaws. That calculus drove him to dark places. That is how he sought to justify intense bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War — killing some innocent people, he claimed, to prevent what he viewed as the far greater suffering that accompanied communist tyranny.”
For more:
Peter Bergen: Christopher Hitchens was right about Henry Kissinger
David Andelman: Joe Biden is not getting the credit he deserves on foreign policy
The war resumed in Gaza after negotiations to extend the truce broke down. Frida Ghitis asked, “Is there a way to stop the carnage? Is there any way to bring an end to this war and open a path to lasting peace?”
“The answer is yes. There is a perfectly reasonable, though extremely difficult and perhaps unrealistic solution. But it’s not an impossible one. … The answer to ending the war, and even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is hardly a mystery. Negotiators have come close to solving the decades-long conflict before.”
It would take the ouster of Hamas from Gaza, the restarting of a process to create a Palestinian state, the replacement of the right-wing Netanyahu government with one more favorable to long-term peace, the support of neighboring Arab nations and reform of the Palestinian authority, Ghitis wrote. “Every step toward a solution comes wrapped in a hundred problems. Reasonable and realistic are not synonymous in this conflict. That’s why the world’s top diplomats have failed to solve this problem in 75 years.”
Among those killed in Gaza were six members of the family of Hani Almadhoun, director of philanthropy at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency USA. One of their bodies was found, Almadhoun wrote. “The remains of my other family members still lie unrecovered, while my 71-year-old mother mourns in a pile of rubble, grieving for her tender and loving child.”
Elon Musk’s trip to Israel, in the wake of the controversy over his antisemitic tweet, was a sideshow, wrote Jill Filipovic. “A tour of Israel in the middle of a war doesn’t even come close to solving the root problem of antisemitism — and it shouldn’t absolve Musk of responsibility for his own words and actions.”
“Under Musk’s leadership, X has turned into a swamp of prejudice and bigotry. Known neo-Nazi and white supremacists have had their accounts reinstated. Members of the Islamic State returned to the platform and some QAnon conspiracy theorists have been allowed to pay for verification badges on the site.”
For more:
Dean Obeidallah: An anti-Muslim tirade inspires a beautiful response
Keith Magee: We must fight hate with empathy
“America has always had a gun problem,” wrote historian Dominic Erdozain, “but never on this scale. Every day, 327 people are shot in the United States, more than a hundred of them fatally. And the numbers are rising. Mass killings, involving four or more victims, have nearly doubled in five years. Gun deaths among children, already at record highs, increased by 41.6% between 2018 and 2021.”
Things were very different in the mid-20th century, he wrote. “In 1959, nearly 6 out of 10 Americans favored a total ban on handguns, and only 16% of American households contained such a weapon, many of them in the South.”
“In 1969, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence recommended drastic measures to reduce the number of handguns in circulation, then estimated at 24 million…”
“What changed? The short answer is President Ronald Reagan, whose crisp, Cold War thinking reduced domestic policy to a series of simple choices. Good and evil. Light and darkness. Arm the righteous, he promised, and crime will take care of itself. It was a ‘nasty truth,’ he said, but criminals were not fazed by gun laws. The answer was to make firepower accessible to the good people: the silent majority who sustain the nation. The good guys, who never miss.”
Sports Illustrated, the magazine known for the quality of its writing, suffered the embarrassment of having to take down several articles after it was revealed that they had been generated by AI. “The blowback has been overwhelming,” wrote Will Leitch, “from a full-on (human) staff revolt to an industry-wide lament of just what the once-revered institution, one that once published William Faulkner, Robert Frost and John Steinbeck, had become. How could Sports Illustrated have come to this?” The articles had been created by a third-party company, the magazine said.
Leitch suggested that the formulaic state of sports journalism makes it particularly vulnerable to disruption. “Sports writers insist, as we fight back against a creeping AI world, that we can always do our jobs better than a robot can. If we’d like to continue working in this industry and having the trust and eyeballs of our readers and viewers … I’d humbly suggest we work a little harder to make sure we can prove it.”
Amy Klein: The women of “The Golden Bachelor” gave me what I needed
Stuart E. Eizenstat: The Rosalynn Carter I knew
Carmen Cusido: Rosalynn Carter’s legacy changed my life
Jemal Polson: ‘I messaged 180 people and got 6 viewings.’ The crushing reality of renting in this city
AND…
Sandra Day O’Connor
As a 12-year-old girl in 1981, Traci Lovitt was riveted by the appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman on the Supreme Court.
“One couldn’t help but wonder: If she could succeed in the legal field, why can’t I? Justice O’Connor received no offers for an attorney position in private practice after graduating in the top 10% of her Stanford Law School class. Through merit, government service and grit, she nonetheless became a formidable force in Arizona and ultimately, in her words, the ‘FWOTSC’ (First Woman On The Supreme Court).”
“On that day in 1981, Justice O’Connor proved that women could succeed at the highest levels of the legal profession. She gave generations of women hope. And today we benefit from the spark of optimism she ignited.”
Lovitt wound up clerking for O’Connor, and she owes her something else beyond gratitude for her mentorship. The justice planned an end-of-term kayaking trip down the Potomac for her clerks and their partners. Since Lovitt didn’t have a partner at the time, O’Connor conspired with fellow Justice Antonin Scalia to find her one. A clerk in Scalia’s chambers became Lovitt’s kayak buddy — and eventual husband.
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