Categories
Law

What courts mean by ‘the law of the case’

Lawsuits tend to produce a series of court rulings at each stage of the proceedings. In New York State such rulings can become part of a doctrine known as the law of the case.

The law of the case aims to prevent parties from litigating anew legal questions that have been determined at an earlier stage. (For example, a trial judge who rules on a legal question would be obligated to follow his own ruling; it’s the law of the case.) The doctrine doesn’t apply in instances in which the law changes, new evidence arises, or the earlier ruling was in error.

In July 1996, Richard Brownrigg, an employee of an elevator repair company, was injured in the elevator shaft of a building in Brooklyn owned by The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) when he was struck in the right eye by a screwdriver-like tool dropped by a co-worker four floors above.

Brownrigg sued NYCHA. The trial judge denied a request by Brownrigg, based solely on the allegations in court papers, to hold NYCHA, as owner of the building, liable for his injury. Though New York law makes building owners liable for injuries to laborers who are injured while working in construction or demolition of elevator shafts, the court found insufficient evidence in the court papers alone to relieve Brownrigg of the need to present evidence at trial.

On the eve of opening statements, Brownrigg renewed his request for summary judgement on the question of liability. This time, the judge granted it, the earlier ruling notwithstanding.

NYCHA objected, asserting that the earlier ruling constituted the law of the case. In short, NYCHA said that the question of its liability needed to be decided at trial – as the judge had ruled initially. The trial court overruled NYCHA’s objection and the trial proceeded to the question of damages (because liability already had been decided in Brownrigg’s favor when the court granted his request for summary judgment).

The appeals court disagreed. The ruling granting summary judgment for Brownrigg at the beginning of the trial “was based on the same facts and law as the prior order… which denied summary judgment to the plaintiff on the issue of liability,” a three-judge panel of the Appellate Division wrote in ordering a new trial on the question of liability. The earlier order “was the law of the case, and there were no extraordinary circumstances permitting the [trial court] to ignore the order,” the court said.

Categories
News Tech

Dance, dance. Revolution?

It’s a new year. If the past is a guide, the goal of getting into shape tops resolutions, including mine. Yet suddenly, going to a gym seems so yesterday. The latest generation of exercise equipment taps into social networking to allow us to exercise with one another from the comfort of our homes.

There’s Peloton, the maker of high-end stationary bikes and cringeworthy commercials, which lets you join a spin class from your study. There’s a smart mirror that brings live fitness classes to your den. It doubles as a full-length mirror; the company suggests you cap the lens when you’re not exercising. Of course, Fitbit figured out several years ago that fitness can be more fun when you challenge friends to join you.

The billions of dollars invested in these and other companies suggest it’s only a matter of time until we all sweat solo, together. Recently, I read a story by Lillian Ross, in The New Yorker, from February 1965 that got me thinking, of all things, about the next big thing: Might all this smart technology get us dancing in our homes?

I don’t mean a dance fitness class or a video game like Dance Dance Revolution. I mean dancing, dancing. Like the jitterbug or tango.

Fifty-four years ago, the Seeburg Corporation sold a coin-operated jukebox called the Seeburg Discotheque. The company marketed the machines, which each held up to 80 records, to taverns. As part of the kit, Seeburg also sold a dance floor at a cost of $70 a square yard.

“We want to bring dancing back to the local tavern, where everybody used to dance in the thirties,” a Seeburg vice president told Ross. “After the war, people started staying home and looking at television, regardless of what it was. Now the wife or girlfriend wants to go out. We give the corner tavern a night club the working man can afford. Five or six beers with the wife. And the fox trot. Or the Frug.”

The article sent me to Google. I had never seen the Frug, which I learned rhymes with rug. Or the Hully-Gully, another of the dances on offer. Here’s a video of the Hully-Gully.

There also was Bossa Nova, cha-cha, and a dance called The Cat. “The secret is noninterrupted music,” a company promotion manager said.

Imagine someone at home nowadays, dancing with an instructor or a partner via a smart studio. Could the combination of fitness and social networking combine into some force that has us frugging (or what have you) with others in the privacy of our homes? Might homes be sold with dance studios, or barres in the gym?

I mused. And then I read a piece about Bernie Sanders, in Politico, that instantly made the thought of all that dancing so real. In November, the Vermont senator attended a banquet with several hundred union members at a hall near the airport in Manchester, N.H. They ate steak and mashed potatoes.

Here’s what happened next:

Then Sanders, after repeating his call for an ‘unprecedented grassroots movement’ and a wholesale transformation of politics in the United States, began bobbing on the dance floor, laughing, clapping and twirling a procession of partners to the sounds of ‘I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),’ ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘The Way You Do the Things You Do.’ Channeling the anarchist and civil rights advocate Emma Goldman, the Vermont senator told the crowd, ‘Our revolution includes dancing.’

Might we become a nation of dancing socialists? Could there be a presidential inaugural ball attended by revelers at home? If so, you read it here first.

Categories
moon News

Remembering the Apollo 11 Moon landing

Sometimes when I see the Brooklyn Bridge, I wonder whether we could build another one if we wanted to.

“Of course, we could,” an engineer who knows about such things once told me. His answer made sense. We have steel and concrete. No doubt we’ve learned a lot about bridge building in the 136 years since the span between Brooklyn and Manhattan opened.

It’s not so much I wonder whether we can build a bridge. But could we build one that combines the beauty, function and sturdiness that characterizes the bridge built by Roebling

That’s a bit how I feel on the anniversary of the moon landing by Apollo 11, a half-century ago today. Could we do it again? Of course, we can, all the evidence suggests. The software, science, materials and communications that took humans to the moon and back in 1969 all have improved by orders of magnitude since then. NASA is planning to send astronauts to the Moon by 2024.

I was 6 years old when Neil Armstrong stepped off the stairs of the Eagle and onto the Moon. I remember playing with my friends earlier that evening at the end of the street in the subdivision where we lived. The July evening gave way to a summer night. My parents told me I could stay up late to watch the lunar landing. I liked staying up late.

Later, hours after my bath, I crawled into bed with my parents, who had a TV in their room. It was nearly 11 p.m. as we watched those grainy black and white pictures of Armstrong against the white lunar surface.

And then I remember feeling sleepy. It was way past my bedtime. I like to think about the next Moon landing. How will we experience it? Will we stay up late? Will we hold our collective breath? What will it be like?

Categories
Law

The Supreme Court permits partisan gerrymandering

In 2016, the Republican-controlled legislature of North Carolina mapped the state’s congressional districts with the aim of ensuring that elections produced more victories for their party than for Democrats.

“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” said one of the two Republicans who chaired the redistricting committee. “So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

In elections that November, Republicans won 10 of the state’s 13 congressional districts. That despite the reality that four years earlier, Democratic candidates received more votes statewide than Republican candidates. (States redraw congressional districts every 10 years based on census data.) In elections last year, Republicans won nine seats, while Democrats won three.

On Thursday, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that inequality drawn into the North Carolina map (and an equally partisan district drawn by Democratic officials in Maryland) did not intentionally dilute the electoral strength of Democratic voters in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nor did the map violate the First Amendment rights of Democratic voters (or, in Maryland, Republicans) by retaliating against them for their political beliefs.

The question, said Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote on behalf of the majority, is not whether legislators can be partisans when drawing the boundaries of congressional districts (they can, according to the court), but whether the so-called gerrymander has gone too far. Or, as Roberts quoted the court from in a 2006 ruling, “how much partisan dominance is too much?”

According to the majority, claims of partisan gerrymander are, in essence,  a contention that legislators should draw congressional districts so that they hew as closely as possible to allocating seats to the parties based on what they’re anticipated statewide vote will be.

But, said the court, the framers of the Constitution did not think it required such representation. Historically, “a party could garner nearly half of the vote statewide and wind up without any seats in the congressional delegation,” Roberts noted.

A federal court, as the majority sees it, cannot adjudicate whether the map is fair. That determination, said Roberts, falls to the states. “Federal judges have no license to reallocate politi­cal power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions,” he wrote.

Not so, said the court’s four more liberal justices. The gerrymandering at issue in the appeal “debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people,” Justice Kagan wrote in dissent. “In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review, the majority goes tragically wrong.”

The cases from North Carolina and Maryland show that politicians can, in essence, “cherry-pick voters to ensure their reelection” said Justice Kagan, who noted that the majority disputed none of the abuses documented in either state.

The majority’s “complacency” in the face of those wrongs means that partisan gerrymandering will only get worse (“or better, depending on your  perspective”) as the ability to collect and analyze data improves, Justice Kagan predicted.

Improvements in technology give officials who aim to diminish the influence of one group of voters at the expense of another the ability to do so with precision. “Big data and modern technology – of just the kind that the mapmakers in North Carolina and Maryland used – make today’s gerrymander­ing altogether different from the crude linedrawing of the past,” observed Justice Kagan.

“What was possible with paper and pen—or even with Windows 95—doesn’t hold a candle (or an LED bulb?) to what will become possible with developments like machine learning,” she wrote. “And someplace along this road, ‘we the people’ become sovereign no longer.”

Categories
News

The courts should take Trump at his word

As a candidate for president in 2015, Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of the nation’s borders to Muslims. 

Two years later, President Trump signed an executive order enacting a ban on visitors from a series of Muslim-majority countries. Opponents sued, citing those statements as evidence that the ban was little more than a pretext for discrimination in violation of the Constitution. 

Fast forward to Friday, when Trump declared a national emergency at the U.S. border with Mexico. The maneuver enables the White House to build a wall that Congress had just refused to fund in full. Candidate Trump promised his supporters a wall, which is likely to be a cornerstone of his campaign for reelection in 2020.

In support of its argument, the White House said the declaration marks a step “to stop crime and drugs from flooding into our nation.” 

Yet in the Rose Garden on Friday, Trump himself seemed to undermine his own argument. “I didn’t need to do this,” he told reporters. “But I’d rather do it much faster.”

Late Friday, both the governor of California and the American Civil Liberties Union said they would sue the administration to overturn the emergency. Both are likely to point to the president’s words as evidence that the arguments propounded in support of the emergency have nothing to do with facts. Data compiled by the Department of Homeland Security show no evidence of a flood of illegal crossings at the border. 

Trump predicted that the declaration would be challenged in court. And that the administration could expect “a fair shake” at the Supreme Court, where conservatives, two of whom Trump appointed, constitute a majority. 

There has been little litigation over the 1976 statute that the administration cited in support of its declaration. 

The reality – as the president himself suggested by his statements – appears to be that he needs to show supporters between now and November 2020 that he upheld his promise to build a wall.  Now Trump’s words are the words of a president. The Rose Garden is not the campaign trail. 

In a 5-4 decision last year upholding the travel ban, the majority looked away from the statements by candidate Trump. “[T]he issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote. “It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing a presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority had ignored the facts. Its decision, she wrote, “leaves undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a ‘total and complete’ shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ because the policy now masquerades behind a façade of national-security concerns.”

Categories
News

Americans deserve a Green New Deal

Last Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced a resolution that maps out a blueprint for defeating the dangers of a changing climate while reordering the U.S. economy for the next 100 years.

Dubbing their plan a Green New Deal, the Democratic duo presented it as a successor to the economic program that President Franklin Roosevelt charted to lead the U.S. out of the Great Depression. 

The parallel fits. According to a report released last October by an intergovernmental panel  on climate change, global temperatures must remain below 1.5 degrees Celsius above levels that predate the Industrial Revolution if the Earth is to avoid the most severe impacts of a changing climate. Those impacts would include, among other things, rising sea levels, wildfires, the loss of nearly all coral reefs, damage to infrastructure and property, billions of dollars in lost economic output in the U.S. alone, and mass migration from the regions most affected.

According to the panel, countering such climate change will require a reduction in emissions of greenhouse gasses from human sources by between 40 and 60 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and net emissions that total zero 20 years thereafter. The U.S. contributed a fifth of all greenhouse gasses emitted through 2014.

Ocasio-Cortez and Markey also note that the U.S. has experienced a decades-long slide into economic stagnation and rising inequality. 

“Climate change constitutes a direct threat to the national security of the United States by impacting the economic, environmental, and social stability of countries and communities around the world, and by acting as a threat multiplier,” the resolution says.

With that as background, the Green New Deal aims put the U.S. on a course to achieve “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” and “to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity for all people of the United States.”

The roadmap

The plan, which the sponsors envision enacting through varied pieces of legislation, would aim to:

Improve the infrastructure of the U.S. to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions as much as technologically feasible

Meet all power demand through renewable energy, and build or upgrade to so-called smart power grids

Upgrade all buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency

Promote the growth of clean manufacturing

Support family and sustainable farming

Overhaul transportation systems to eliminate pollution with investment in technologies such as high-speed rail

Mitigate and manage long-term adverse effects of pollution on communities

Promote storage of carbon in the soil and reforestation, as well as restore and protected threatened ecosystems

Clean hazardous waste sites

Promote the sharing of technology, expertise and funding among nations with the aim of making the U.S. a leader on climate action

Prioritize the creation of high-wage jobs in communities that may struggle during the transition away from greenhouse gasses, as well as strengthening the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively

Guarantee all Americans a job with a livable wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacation and financial security in retirement

Ensure the protection of public lands and waters, as well as the consent of indigenous people for decisions that affect them and their territories

Promote competition through antitrust

Providing all Americans with high-quality health care; affordable, safe housing; economic security; access to clean water and air; affordable food; and nature. 

Categories
News

The Davis Cup is getting a makeover

This November, the Davis Cup will feature a face-off among 18 countries that meet in Madrid, marking the first time in 119 years that the tournament will not conclude in a two-team final on the favorite’s home court.

The new look for the top event in men’s team tennis will condense into two singles matches and one doubles match, with the outcome of each match determined by the best-of-three sets. That’s down from four singles and one doubles match, with the winner determined by the team that won three of the five matches.

The change, which the International Tennis Federation announced in August, aims to lure elite players who have tended to pass on competing for their countries thanks to the demands of their schedules. For example, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have played each other 38 times but never in Davis Cup competition.

“I honestly don’t see it as the end of an era as much as I see it as the end of a chapter of a long book,” David Haggerty, president of the ITF, told the Times.

Some current and former players disagree. “The Davis Cup is dead, and part of the history of our sport is gone for a handful of dollars,” tweeted Nicolas Mahut of France, the third-ranked doubles player in the world

The reformatting comes amid a rivalry in team tennis competition. This January, the men’s tour will launch the ATP Cup in Australia with a 24-team format. The prize money for both cups — $18 million for the Davis Cup and $15 million for the ATP Cup – will be similar. But the ATP Cup also will enable players to compete for points toward their ranking.

In 1900, teams from the U.S and Britain (competing as the British Isles) faced off at the Longwood Cricket Club in Boston in the first Davis Cup.

The Americans won the cup that year and again the next in Brooklyn, setting off a rivalry that reversed when Britain won the title at Longwood in 1903. Fast forward to November, when Croatia, led by Marin Cilic, the seventh-ranked player in the world, clinched the title in a 3-1 victory over France. 

Categories
Finance

Fallout from the financial crisis, a decade on

Saturday marked the 10th anniversary of Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy, a failure that catalyzed the financial crisis. Over the past week, I’ve read some of the retrospectives. Though the looking back summons those days a decade ago when a replay of the Great Depression loomed as a possibility, I am drawn mainly to the reporting on the economy over the years that followed.

In that connection, an analysis led by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco grabbed my attention more than perhaps anything else I have read. It finds that the crisis cost every American about $70,000 over the course of our lifetimes.

The reason ties to the hit to the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services in the aftermath of the crisis.

“The size of the U.S. economy, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), adjusted for inflation, is well below the level implied by the growth rates that prevailed before the financial crisis and Great Recession a decade ago,” write the researchers, who add that “the level of output is unlikely to revert to its pre-crisis trend level.”

The economies in the U.K. and across Europe also remain well below the levels implied by rates of growth before the crisis, they note.

So how to make sense of the rosy headlines about the economy that tend to dominate the news nowadays? Clarity on that comes from David Leonhardt at the Times, who on Sunday explained how statistics like GDP and the Dow Jones Industrial Average describe “the experiences of the affluent” more than they do the economy overall.

For example, stocks are now worth nearly 60% more than at the outset of the crisis in 2007, but stocks also tend to be owned by the wealthy, notes Leonhardt. Most Americans depend for wealth on the value of their homes.

“That’s why the net worth of the median household is still about 20% lower than it was in early 2007,” he writes. “When television commentators drone on about the Dow, they’re not talking about a good measure of most people’s wealth.”

Similarly, the unemployment rate reported by the U.S. government does not include people outside the labor force, including people who are not looking for work. It’s a quirk of history that ties to the measure’s creation in 1878, when the statistician who conceived it “wanted the count to include only adult men who ‘really want employment,’” notes Leonhardt.

The analysis further shows that while the cumulative change in GDP and income is indeed up for the wealthiest 10% of the population since 2000, it has barely budged for the remaining 90% of earners.

That leads to the third piece that stays with me. It’s by Neil Irwin in the Times, who notes that the policies that sought, above all, to stabilize the banks and keep capital flowing during the crisis succeeded in containing the crisis, set the stage for the expansion that followed, and improved the ability of regulators to identify and address risks on the balance sheets of banks.

At the same time, the crisis, and particularly the bailout of the banks, probably contributed to the populism that has ensued. The problems had been there all along, “but it was the experience of the crisis, and the sense among Americans of all ideological dispositions that they were being asked to foot the bill for someone else’s mistakes… that helped make those long-simmering problems boil over,” Irwin writes.

Categories
Sports

Serena Williams wipes out

A documentary that played recently at the Film Forum, “McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection,” assembles hours of footage of the tennis legend on the courts of Roland Garros in Paris. Over years at the French Open – the film centers on McEnroe’s battle in the final there against Ivan Lendl in 1984 – McEnroe displayed both the greatness and outbursts that defined him.

During one tirade, McEnroe, exasperated by the whir of a recorder, turns on the recordist. “Keep that thing away from me, you understand? ” he says. Pointing at the grip end of his racket, McEnroe adds, “In your mouth.”

The narrator, the actor Mathieu Amalric, notes that the fury McEnroe struggled to contain throughout his career on the court reflected a competitor who played “at the edge of his senses.” The flutter of a recorder amid the silence in the stadium during the moments preceding a point reverberate within McEnroe like an eruption.

I was reminded of that acuteness of sensitivity while watching Serena Williams melt down during the women’s final against Naomi Osaka at the U.S. Open. Williams shares with McEnroe both a game to behold and a tendency toward tirades.

On Saturday, Williams became furious when the umpire Carlos Ramos called out her coach Patrick Mouratoglou for signaling to Williams from the stands, a violation of the rules. Though the fault lay with Mouratoglou, Williams perceived it as a slight. “I don’t cheat to win,” she told Ramos. “I’d rather lose.”

Williams could not let it go. A few games later, while serving and up 2-1 in the second set, she forfeited a point when she smashed her racket on the ground after an unforced error.

A few more games later, during a changeover with Osaka ahead 4-3, Williams continued to insist to Ramos that she did not receive coaching. She demanded an apology from the umpire.

“Say you’re sorry,” Williams implored. “You stole a point from me. You’re a thief, too.” Ramos issued a third violation, which resulted in the automatic loss of a game.

Williams appealed, without success, to the tournament referee and the Grand Slam supervisor, to whom she raised a charge of bias. “Do you know how many other men do things that are — that do much worse than that?” she said, referring to the comments that cost her a game. “This is not fair.” (The Times has chronicled each moment of the meltdown.)

As we now know, Osaka defeated Williams, whom Osaka had called her idol. Ditto for the fans. The nearly 24,000 of them who filled Arthur Ashe Stadium booed during the trophy presentation. Social media exploded (what else) with criticism of Ramos and support for Williams.

Afterward, I wondered why Williams took such offense at Ramos’ warning her coach about coaching from the stands. It was, after all, a warning to her coach. And yet it became Williams’ unraveling.

Thus the flashback to McEnroe. Perhaps Williams, too, plays at the limits of everything. What for others, including her fellow competitors, might be an annoyance to shrug off, or a cue to get on with the match, to Williams it became an indictment of her character. She  would rather lose than “cheat to win,” Williams told Ramos.

Williams was neither cheating nor losing when Ramos warned Mouratoglou. And while she never cheated, she later lost a point for smashing her racket. And then she forfeited a game for calling Ramos a thief.

The ruling by Ramos on that last point seemed to be an excess. As Sally Jenkins notes in the Washington Post, he could have de-escalated, by warning Williams without penalizing her, and “let things play out on the court.”

That leaves the racket-smashing as the only one of Williams transgressions that, strictly speaking, ran afoul of the rules. And yet Williams unraveled, which cost her the match.

Like a pro skier on a downhill run who catches an edge and crashes, blowing out her knee instead of winning a medal, Williams wiped out. The edge of her senses turned out to be a razor.

Categories
News

Disinvited

Eight years ago, I attended the opening of the New Yorker Festival. The program, which was held at the Frank Gehry-designed headquarters of IAC, on Manhattan’s West Side, featured a conversation between one of the magazine’s staff writers, and, I recall, some star in the field of creating effects for movies.

Though my memory of the event has faded, I remember the strangeness that I felt milling about the reception, where guests, who had purchased tickets, mingled with one another and with reporters from the magazine.

Across the room, I spied Ken Auletta, a writer who covers the media for the magazine, with his hands in his pockets, speaking to no one. I wondered whether he and his colleagues felt an obligation to mingle. Though I didn’t ask him, I wondered whether he had been conscripted to put on a show.

I am reminded of that feeling in the wake of the dustup over The New Yorker’s disinviting Steve Bannon from this year’s festival. The invitation to Bannon, a hero of the alt-right and the architect of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president, had been extended by David Remnick, the editor of the magazine, who wrote to Bannon that the magazine “would be honored” to have him as headliner.

Bannon accepted. The plan was for Remnick to interview him on stage. “I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation,” Remnick told the Times.

But the plan went awry. Actor Jim Carrey, comedians Patton Oswalt and John Mullaney, and director Judd Apatow all threatened to back out of the festival if Bannon appeared. Kathryn Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer at the magazine, tweeted that she was “beyond appalled” by the prospect of Bannon as headliner.

“I don’t think an advocate for ISIS would have been invited to the Festival,” tweeted Osita Nwanevu, another staff writer. “I don’t think a literal Klansman would’ve.”

The backlash forced Remnick to reverse course. “The reaction on social media was critical and a lot of the dismay and anger was directed at me and my decision to engage him,” Remnick wrote on Monday. “Some members of the staff, too, reached out to say that they objected to the invitation, particularly the forum of the festival.”

The decision did not sit well with Bannon, who called Remnick “gutless” for withdrawing the invitation. The move also elicited criticism from some writers at the magazine.

“Journalism is about hearing opposing views,” tweeted Lawrence Wright. “I regret that this event is not taking place.” Malcolm Gladwell noted that shining a light on views we may abhor can transform a platform into a “gallows.”

Over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi also blasted Remnick. “You just removed, from the interview stage, one of the few people in the country that a) knows some of Donald Trump’s darkest secrets, and b) might have an inclination to talk about them,” he complained.

The varying views seem to turn on whether you think the festival is journalism, as Gladwell, Wright and Taibbi all seem to, or a forum for the sharing of ideas, as the critics contend.

A few observers zeroed in on the tension. “The issue, it seems, is the blurry line between content produced by news organizations (i.e., journalists) and live events hosted by the same outlets,” wrote Thu-Huong Ha at Quartz.

Zack Beauchamp, writing at Vox, explained the challenge for news organizations in straddling moneymaking events such as the New Yorker Festival:

“These kinds of events are, by their very nature, difficult to manage. They need to be attractive to audiences, which means booking interesting and/or controversial speakers. The events need the speakers to show up, which often means paying them, and they might not want to walk into the lion’s den of an adversarial interview in front of a live audience.

At the same time, the interviews themselves can’t betray the core journalistic mission of the publication — they can’t somehow do reporting and brand promotion at the same time. That means the journalists onstage shouldn’t (in theory) just suck up to the speakers and sing their praises — though that’s all too often what happens — but rather should respectfully challenge their ideas and arguments.”

That, I suspect, was the idea of inviting Bannon to headline the festival. Remnick had every intention of challenging Bannon. But the forum just didn’t work, as Remnick noted when he explained to the staff that the interview would find its place in the pages of the magazine, where the journalism takes priority.

I see it both ways. Part of what has allowed me to sharpen my critique of Bannon is listening to him in interviews or reading his words. In March, I watched an interview that he did with Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times.

During the conversation, Bannon admitted to being fascinated with Mussolini (he previously praised the dictator’s virility and fashion sense), glossing over Il Duce’s description of Jews as a people destined to be wiped out completely, let alone the destruction he wreaked on Italy.

In August, New York magazine published an interview with Bannon, who asserted that the financial crisis paved the way for Donald Trump.

“He’s the first guy to tell the Establishment to go fuck themselves,” said Bannon. “And we’re just in the beginning stages, and that’s why right-wing populism’s gonna win, because the left wing, you’re a bunch of pussies. The Democratic Party is owned and paid for by Wall Street.”

To be sure, the financial crisis fueled misery on both the left and right. And that some of the resentment that followed found its footing in support for Trump. But if a president who signs a tax cut worth $150 billion a year isn’t “owned and paid for by Wall Street,” I don’t know who is.

To me, the surest way to see the holes in Bannon’s theories is to hold them up for scrutiny and challenge. But I also appreciate that my experience differs from that of a person of color. As Damon Young at Very Smart Brothas writes:

Decision makers at large, mainstream publications and platforms keep inviting and providing space for men like Bannon and Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos, as if the things they have to say are riveting and engrossing, as if any novel insights can be gained from handing them the spotlight… A dive into the thoughts and inclinations and sensibilities of openly bigoted white men isn’t just old hat. It’s America’s oldest hat. Need to ask Steve Bannon about his racism and xenophobia? OK. While you’re at it, exhume Christopher fucking Columbus’ corpse to ask about the lunch menu on the Santa Maria.”

Young doesn’t need to hear more. At least not in a forum that celebrates a sharing of ideas. He knows the thing. He lives it.

Margaret Sullivan, who covers media for the Washington Post, echoed the concern, calling inviting Bannon a “lousy idea.” “There is nothing more to learn from Bannon about his particular brand of populism, with its blatant overlay of white supremacy,” she wrote. (In March, Bannon told Marine Le Pen, the right-wing politician in France, to wear her racism like a “badge of honor.”)

In his message on Monday, Remick elaborated on his reversal. “I’ve thought this through and talked to colleagues — and I’ve re-considered. I’ve changed my mind,” he wrote.

To Bannon the capacity for reflection signals a lack of guts. But Remnick’s decision to disinvite Bannon reflects something that we don’t see every day in public and never from the president whom Bannon helped to elect: A willingness to change one’s mind based on facts.