What's Interesting on the (Video) Internet this Week
The Republican debate, Donald Trump recalls Thomas Jefferson's troubles in Georgia, India lands on the moon. Plus, AI deep fakes, football, and robots.
What is this?
Every week we’ll bring you videos and visuals from around the internet that we find interesting. These selections - as one might note on the platform formerly known as Twitter - are not necessarily endorsement, but rather items we find noteworthy for one reason or another. They’ll (usually) fall into a few categories: politics, culture, tech, international, war, and finance.
Politics
ABC has a summary of the debate, below. One moment of agreement among the candidates was that Mike Pence did the right thing by certifying the 2020 election on January 6th. Another apparent point of agreement was on red neckties.
(Source: ABC News)
Vivek Ramaswamy joined Margaret Hoover on Firing Line the week before the debate. Here, she asks him how he’ll defeat Trump.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/@FiringLine)
Trump skipped the debate for a prerecorded sit-down with Tucker Carlson, which was posted at 9pm on August 23 on Twitter X. The video had more than 240 million views** in less than 24 hours. One highlight is at 35:08 where Trump argues (near as I can understand it) that Thomas Jefferson refused to allow a recount of Georgia’s votes in the 1796 presidential election, thus keeping the votes for “Thomas Jefferson and his President.”
** Though a “view” seems loosely defined.
(Source: X)
The fires in Maui should not be a political story, but they are becoming one given the apparent failures of Maui County officials. This visual timeline from the AP is devastating.
(Source: Associated Press)
War
What is the Suwalki Gap and why is it called NATO’s Weak Spot?
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/@wsj)
In the least surprising news of the week, Yevgeny Prigozhin - the boss of Wagner - was killed when his private plane was shot down by Russian air forces over Moscow. Wagner is a private military corporation that came to prominence during the war in Ukraine, but the group has been operating around the world - from Africa to the Middle East - for years. The Wall Street Journal has an excellent three-minute summary (below) on the timeline from Prigozhin’s short-lived rebellion on June 24 to today. In sum, it seems apparent that Putin was merely waiting until the Wagner Group was safely relocated to Belarus and Africa before acting.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/@wsj)
Culture
John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia, a prolific author, and a columnist at the New York Times. One of his early books, The Power of Babel, is a fascinating exploration of the development of language. Glenn Loury is a professor of the Social Sciences and a Professor of Economics at Brown University, and is the host of The Glenn Show on Substack. Below is the first podcast conversation they had in 2007, in which John holds a cordless phone to his head. Here, McWhorter and Loury discuss “the contest of narratives around race.” If you only have ten minutes, watch their conversation about this conversation here.
(Source: The Glenn Show)
Ted Dabrowski is the President of Wirepoints, a public research nonprofit that focuses on “policy, facts, and numbers, not politics.” Their work has been cited from The Economist to Fox News to the New York Times. Here, Mr. Dabrowski talks with WMBD in Peoria, Illinois about his findings on the local public schools. “At one high school in Peoria, not a single student could do math at grade level. Not one. There were 11 other schools where fewer than 5 percent could read at grade level. If you looked at just the high school seniors, only 14 percent were proficient in reading, yet 80 percent graduated.” As News Items wrote: “During the Nixon Administration, when public policies were being discussed, the political question that always applied was: ‘will it play in Peoria?’ Here’s what’s playing in Peoria now.”
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/@wirepoints3937, News Items)
Science
The decade-long work of the Human Brain Project is soon to be complete. Below, the project discusses their findings on artificial neural networks. “(We’re) closing in on the gap between the brain… and the mind. We will better understand what it means to have, or to be, a ghost in the machine.”
(Source: The Human Brain Project)
Generative AI can do anything. Except make hands.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/@LeMondeInEnglish)
International
India lands on the moon. The world’s most populous democracy had been in a race with Russia to be the fourth country** to put a vehicle on the moon, but the Russian lander crashed and exploded; giving us the second least surprising story of the week. Also, this piece from CNBC is an interesting look at how India accomplished this feat on a shoestring budget, and here the Wall Street Journal looks at why reaching moon has again become a priority.
**The four countries are the U.S., China, India, and the U.S.S.R.; so technically it wasn’t a race to be fourth. Though Roscosmos, the Russian space agency that emerged after the Soviet Space Program was dissolved following the collapse of the Soviet Union, has not landed a vehicle on the moon under the Russian flag.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/@isroofficial5866)
Sports
In a move that united Democrats and Republicans during the NFL offseason, Dan Snyder finally sold the the Washington Commanders. On Monday, the Commanders ended the Baltimore Ravens 24-game preseason win streak in a thrilling game that no one saw because its preseason. But you should watch the five minute highlight reel.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/@commanders)
Miscellanea
In the last three years, California and New York have lost firms that manage $1 trillion in assets.
Why Trump’s fourth arraignment was the first time he was required to take a mug shot. Trump posted his mug shot to X in his first post to the platform since January 2021.
Ten year treasury yields hit the highest levels since 2007. Larry Summer’s take here.
Chris Cuomo talks with Michael Shellenberger, a long time environmentalist and self described ecomodernist, about the Maui wildfires. Shellenberger argues that “renewables mania and woke dogma” led to the extreme loss of life. The video Shellenberger references in the interview is here.
Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn discuss collapsing American competence and the effect it’s having on American’s confidence in their country. If you missed it, Walter Kirn wrote Up in the Air, which was adapted into a movie in 2009. The film version was (arguably) one of the best movies of the year, and it beautifully captured the sense of unease in the time following the Great Recession.
The iPhone of robots. Coming to you in 2025 for less than a cost of a car.
Ron DeSantis practices smiling.
Bonus: This weekly wrap-up isn’t a video, but we’re making an exception for Nellie Bowles at The Free Press.
(Sources: Bloomberg TV, NewsNation, Racket News, Free Think, X, The Free Press)
Editors Choice
This is *definitely* not for everyone. But for the two or three of you who watched Being John Malkovich, you definitely should watch this:
(Source: Nowness)
This video is a year old, but worth including as a stunningly beautiful five-minute escape.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/@SamNewton)
Infographics of the week
(Source: USA Facts)
Media Bias Chart:
(Source: allsides.com)
See you next week, send thoughts in the comments.