Ronan Farrow

New project for you all: I produced “Musk,” Alex Gibney’s extraordinary documentary, rolling out now.

The film unearths new dimensions of this story, and underscores an important point: the phenomenon of oligarchs acquiring supra-governmental power, without elected roles and often with little accountability, is bigger than Elon Musk, and we’re all living with the consequences.

From Jigsaw Productions, in association with Ronan Production Group, in theaters nationwide this Friday, Oct 16.

New project for you all: I produced “Musk,” Alex Gibney’s extraordinary documentary, rolling out now.

Three years ago I wrote a piece for The New Yorker about how much the government had come to rely on one man’s companies: the rockets, the satellites, the cars, and, at times, the Ukrainian army’s ability to communicate. Then Musk actually went into government.

In recent weeks he was also named to a new role co-leading a Pentagon study on the future of war. Alex, whose work I’ve admired for years, was also rolling his cameras on this, and I came aboard as a producer to support the effort.

Grindr is training its AI on your photos, your age, and your taps by default, without asking. This video shows where the app buried the off switch. The stakes are high on an app like Grindr. Numerous countries criminalize same-sex relations, so being outed through your data can be dangerous.

(1/5) Pentagon leadership has said that by the end of this month, Palantir's Maven artificial intelligence system will become a line item with stable, long-term funding in the defense budget (a "program of record"). #News #Palantir #AI

(4/ 5) I saw strikes go wrong with deadly consequences during my State Department days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pentagon hasn't answered questions about how far along they are in designating Maven as a program of record. They could push back the timeline.

(5/5) But as these AI tools enable more rapid killing, potentially with less opportunity to catch errors, it's worth knowing about the stakes.

(2/5)The military already relies on Maven more than any other AI system to select targets for strikes. The Army says it intends to use Maven to meet a goal of making 1,000 targeting decisions an hour, averaging out to one to every 3.6 seconds.

(3/5) A Pentagon official made assurances that a human will always be involved in the decisions. But humans working at superhuman speeds may be especially prone to errors, including the lethal kind. On the first day of the Iran war, a U.S. missile killed at least 150 people, many of them children.

Georgia audited its own data center tax breaks and found that the state gave up $474 million in sales taxes in one year—and got back just $41 million from the industry. At least 38 states have deals like this. #AI #News #US

Bloomberg analyzed seven regional power grids across the country last year and found that wholesale prices near data centers have risen as much as 267% since 2020. Around Washington DC, near the world's largest cluster of data centers, power bills rose about $20 a month last summer.

It's not clear whether all that money the state waived was needed to attract the construction: in Georgia's case, by the state's own estimate, 70% of the data center construction would have happened anyway.

19 Aug

Nearly 10M American kids live below the poverty line. There is a proven fix—the expanded Child Tax Credit, which in 2021 helped cut child poverty nearly in half. But Congress let the expansion expire, and the bill to bring it back has been stalled. #Affordability #CostOfLiving #News #Politics

19 Aug

The Census Bureau also asked families what those 2021 payments were going toward: Food, 51 percent. Clothing, 30 percent. Utilities, 29 percent. School supplies, 25 percent. The lower the household income, the more likely the money went to those four things.

7 July

Private equity is buying America's hospitals and nursing homes. The playbook: pile on debt, sell the building, cut staff. The result, one landmark study found: patient deaths up about 11%. #news #information #privateequity

7 July

Do you find this explainer informative or useful? Please share it and save it, it’ll help us get the information to others. Have you, or has a loved one, had an experience with private-equity-owned healthcare? Share in the comments if so.

24 June

The government has a formula that decides whether safety rules are worth passing. And that formula was rewritten to put a new price on your life: zero dollars. #PublicHealth #EPA #News #Trump #climatechange

10 June

Tonight, June 10th, at Tribeca Festival. Join me for a sneak preview of my next two HBO investigative series: The Palladino Files and Not a Very Good Murderer, back-to-back. I’ll be there to take your questions after. Would love to see you there. A few tickets left: tribecafilm.com/films/not-a-...

(🧵1/14) When OpenAI board members hired the law firm WilmerHale to investigate Sam Altman's firing over two years ago, many executives at the company expected to see extensive findings. Instead, OpenAI released a brief announcement with few details.

(13/14) The absence of a written report can make it harder for directors to demonstrate they met their fiduciary duties. If OpenAI IPOs, shareholders could invoke corporate law in Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, to demand underlying records.

newyorker.comSam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.

(14/14) Some board members told us that ongoing questions about the integrity of the report could prompt, as one put it, "a need for another investigation." Much more in the full story: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

(11/14) Corporate investigations generally aim to confer legitimacy. At private companies, their findings are sometimes not written down—this can be a way to limit liability. But in cases involving public scandals there’s often a greater expectation of transparency.

(12/14) Given OpenAI’s 501(c)(3) status at the time and the high-profile nature of the firing, many executives there expected there would be a written report. An "oral-only" report can actually create legal exposure.

(9/14) Instead, findings were limited to oral briefings, which were shared with Summers and Taylor, the two new board members Altman had helped to pick. The decision to keep things out of writing was made in part on the advice of Summers’s and Taylor’s personal attorneys.

(10/14) So what was found, and kept kept out of writing, on the question of trustworthiness that had motivated the firing? One person close to the inquiry said: "The review did not conclude that Sam was a George Washington cherry tree of integrity."

(7/14) One emailed Summers and Taylor to complain. "They were just interested in the narrow range of what happened during the board drama, and not the history of his integrity," the employee recalled of his interview with investigators.

(8/14) When OpenAI announced that Altman would be returning to the company board, it released only some 800 words acknowledging a "breakdown in trust"—and no report detailing what it had found. People involved said no report was even written.

(5/14) Summers and Taylor brought in WilmerHale, the law firm behind the Enron and WorldCom investigations. But six people close to the inquiry alleged that it seemed designed to limit transparency.

(6/14) "Everything pointed to the fact that they wanted to find the outcome, which is to acquit him," an OpenAI employee said. Some employees said that investigators didn't initially contact important figures at the company.

(3/14) When Altman sought the removal of board members who had fired him over an alleged pattern of deception and manipulation, they made an independent third party investigation a condition of their exit. Altman initially resisted any inquiry, but eventually acceded to a review.

(4/14) But the two new board members who controlled the review—Larry Summers and Bret Taylor—were selected in close consultation with Altman. He texted Satya Nadella: "bret, larry summers, adam as the board and me as ceo and then bret handles the investigation."

newyorker.comSam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.

(2/14) One new disclosure in our @NewYorker investigation: there was no written report, and findings were kept deliberately out of writing. Full story here: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... And a thread below.

newyorker.comSam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.

6 Apr

The reporting on OpenAI and Sam Altman I've been working on for the past year and a half, for @newyorker.com, with Andrew Marantz: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

6 Apr

As always, if you have a tip on this subject, I'm at ronan_farrow@newyorker.com.

Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post offering “financial runway." This month it gutted its newsroom—more than 300 layoffs. Whatever you think of legacy news, the hard data shows us that newspaper closures hurt Americans. Here's how: 🧵

carnegie.orgDoes Local News Reduce Polarization? | Carnegie Reporter Summer 2024 | Carnegie Corporation of New YorkMore than half of American counties are without access or have very limited access to local news. Political scientist and Andrew Carnegie Fellow Joshua P. Darr has been studying what the loss of local...

Research shows that when communities switch from local to national news, it measurably increases partisan voting. This is part of what's polarizing America. When newspapers close, we only see partisan labels. Split-ticket voting drops nearly 2%. www.carnegie.org/our-work/art...

The Post’s slogan is "Democracy Dies in Darkness." That isn't a metaphor: there is more darkness now.

journals.sagepub.comSage Journals: Discover world-class researchSubscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Separate research on California mayoral races found that when newsrooms shrink, elections grow less competitive: fewer candidates run, margins widen, and more incumbents go unopposed. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

When a local paper closes, residents switch to national news—which is trending away from costly general reporting, while cheaper opinion-driven (and often partisan) content booms. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-m...

sciencedirect.comPress and leaks: Do newspapers reduce toxic emissions?This study investigates the effects of media on corporate environmental decisions. Using data on plant-level toxic emissions from 1996 to 2009 from th…

Newspaper closures even affect public health. Plants located near more newspaper headquarters tend to produce fewer toxic emissions. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... And—you guessed it—when newspapers close, emissions tend to go up. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

tandfonline.comDo Newspapers Matter? Short-Run and Long-Run Evidence From the Closure of The Cincinnati PostThe Cincinnati Post published its last edition on New Year's Eve 2007, leaving the Cincinnati Enquirer as the only daily newspaper in the market. The next year, fewer candidates ran...

The death of newspapers harms democratic participation. Research on the closure of the Cincinnati Post found that voter turnout fell—and stayed down years later—after the paper shut its doors. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

It also drives up borrowing costs. When no one is watching the public ledger, investors treat cities as higher risk and demand higher yields. Municipal borrowing costs increase by 5 to 11 basis points—roughly $650,000 in added cost per bond issue. Taxpayers absorb this.

cjr.orgHow the lack of newspapers feeds a rise in local corruption.Our study also found that digital media sites didn’t make much of a difference.

One large study found that when a major daily newspaper covering a federal judicial district disappears, corruption cases there—bribery, embezzlement, fraud—rise by more than 7%. The researchers suggest officials feel emboldened when no one's looking. www.cjr.org/analysis/loc...

pewresearch.orgU.S. newsroom employment has fallen 26% since 2008While newspapers have seen steep job losses from 2008 to 2020, digital-native news organizations have seen considerable gains.

Between 2008 and 2020, U.S. newspaper newsroom employment fell 57%. More than 200 counties are now "news deserts"—no local outlet at all. In another 1,500+ counties, only one remains. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...