Brian Steinberg and Pat Saperstein, reporting for Variety over the weekend:

The White House Correspondents’ Association has canceled plans to have comedian Amber Ruffin perform at its annual dinner on April 26, a new sign of the pressures being brought to bear on news organizations during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The journalism group, which has seen its control over interactions with Trump eroded in recent weeks, made the decision after Taylor Budowich, a White House deputy chief of staff, raised comments Ruffin has made in the past that are critical of Trump. Earlier this week, Ruffin told a podcast backed by The Daily Beast that she would not try to make sure her jokes targeted all sides of the political spectrum as the WHCA had requested, and likened the Trump administration to “kind of a bunch of murderers.” Playing to both sides “makes them feel like human beings,” she said, “cause they’re not.” [...]

“The WHCA board has unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year. At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists,” WHCA president Eugene Daniels wrote to members in a statement.

“For the past couple of weeks, I have been planning a re-envisioning of our dinner tradition for this year,” he added. “As the date nears, I will share more details of the plans in place to honor journalistic excellence and a robust, independent media covering the most powerful office in the world.”

What an enormous mountain of obvious horseshit this explanation is. The WHCA only announced that Ruffin would be hosting this year’s show on February 4, at which point this lickspittle clown Eugene Daniels was quoted thus by The Hollywood Reporter:

“When I began to think about what entertainer would be a perfect fit for the dinner this year, Amber was immediately at the top of my list,” Eugene Daniels of Politico, president of the association, said in a statement on Tuesday. “She has the ability to walk the line between blistering commentary and humor all while provoking her audience to think about the important issues of the day. I’m thrilled and honored she said yes.”

So eight weeks ago this obsequious bootlicker Daniels thought Amber Ruffin “would be a perfect fit for the dinner this year” but now, four weeks before the show, he’s trying to claim with a straight face that “For the past couple of weeks, I have been planning a re-envisioning of our dinner tradition for this year”?

The kids magazine Highlights for Children has a long-running comic strip called “Goofus and Gallant”, the premise of which is that Goofus is a kid who always does the wrong thing, and Gallant always does the right thing. Goofus, especially in the older strips, is an absurd parody. This Eugene Daniels toady is the Goofus of journalism. The entire point of the WHCA is to assert the group’s collective independence as journalists — and the independence they assert is specifically from the White House. So of course they shouldn’t have responded to White House pressure to fire Ruffin as this year’s host. But it’s even worse for an ostensible journalist — the president of the WHCA for chrissakes — to try to get even a single person in the world to believe that this is anything other than caving to White House pressure, and that in fact (“Yeah, that’s the ticket!”) he’d been planning to cancel the entire concept of having a comedian host at all “for the past couple of weeks” when just eight weeks ago he described Ruffin as “a perfect fit for the dinner this year”.

This is Baghdad Bob level nonsense. I’m not one for performative resignations, but how does any news outlet or journalist agree to remain a member of the WHCA after this?

My thanks to Lex Friedman for sponsoring this past week at DF to promote Lex.Games, a collection of eight daily word games. Quoting from Friedman’s own description in the sponsored RSS entry at the start of the week:

I paid Gruber many thousands of dollars to run this ad for free games which themselves have no ads. Please keep reading.

The games:

Conlextions: Inspired by NYT’s Connections
Lexicogs: Solve crossword-style clues by assembling letter “cogs”
By a Vowel: A word jumble game with missing vowels
Six Appeal: Wordle with six-letter words

There’s also a daily Mini Crossword; a Full-Size Crossword; and Mind Control, which is a whole lot like Mastermind and not actually a word game at all; don’t sue me.

Oh, and if you only counted seven games here, the eighth is iOS-only. It’s called Letter Opener, and it’s my favorite.

I actually hate Letter Opener, because I’m terrible at games like that. Looking at the leaderboard, though, obviously some of you are really good at it. Six Appeal is more my speed (which is to say, like Wordle, it has no clock). But go ahead and download the iOS app and try Letter Opener. Maybe you’re a fast enough thinker for it.

So the basic pitch is that Lex.Games really is just a bunch of fun daily games that are free to play, without ads (let alone without annoying ads). But you can — and should! — pay a modest $20/year to subscribe to get access to extra games, leaderboards, and just to support a very fun and satisfying endeavor.

Calfskin for $1,500, flip-foldables for $5,000, and whatever these are for a lot more. Who needs any sense (or a spelling checker) when you’ve got “elesant charisma / heroic essence”?

Or as I cited Andy Warhol back in 2012:

A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Interesting excerpt at the WSJ from Keach Hagey’s upcoming book The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. (Main link is a gift link, but also here’s a News+ link.)

Perhaps Apple’s leadership simply believes, as I do, that cinema is the grandest and greatest form of art the world has ever seen — one that encompasses acting, writing, photography and/or illustration, and music — and but that great cinema is expensive and delicate and needs, from deep-pocketed studios and their deeper-pocketed corporate parents, more than patrons, but *champions*.