Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

February 3, 2024

Tate Frantz, a ski jumper from Lake Placid, N.Y., should be in the field of international ski jumpers for next weekend’s World Cup Ski Jump in Lake Placid. The community is bidding to host sliding events in the 2026 Winter Olympics. Nancie Battaglia

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

Psst, have you heard? Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce aren’t a lovely young couple enjoying the time of their lives, they’re part of a conspiracy to re-elect President Biden. Naturally, for the conspiracy to have its greatest effect, the NFL had to rig things so the Kansas City Chiefs made it to the Super Bowl, where a rapt audience in the hundreds of millions will tune in, presumably to be psychologically manipulated in ways only the truly gifted will be able to call out.

“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl,” failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wrote on social media on Monday. “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.” He then doubled down, telling The New York Times, “What your kind of people call ‘conspiracy theories,’ I simply call an amalgam of collective incentives hiding in plain sight.” Makes you wonder why people didn’t vote for him.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page joined the mockery, calling the paranoia spurring theories about the subject, “frankly, weird.”

Alas, the Pentagon says it’s not true, that Taylor Swift is not a psy-ops asset. … But then, what would you expect them to say!

WINTER GAMES: Nine U.S. athletes learned this week that they are Olympic gold medalists, two years after they competed. That’s because Russian skater Kamila Valieva has been disqualified for doping at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, giving the U.S. the gold medal for the team competition. Sarah Hirshland, the head of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, told reporters at a news conference, “This is about celebration. It's also about having hope that a system is growing and improving, insuring that all athletes from around the world can count on showing up to compete on a level playing field.” Speaking of the Winter Olympics, 2024 is the 100^th anniversary of the first Winter Games, and the first gold medal awarded went to a speedskater from Lake Placid.

FRIENDLY FIRE: Gerard Baker was never one to mince words, not as editor of The Wall Street Journal and not now, as a weekly columnist and podcast host. But, wow. He took the verbal equivalent of a flamethrower to defeated rivals of former President Trump who, as the secondary headline of his column put it, “bow and scrape, making fools of themselves and a mockery of their principles.” “Meatball Ron has done it. Lyin’ Ted did it years ago. Little Marco too. Maybe Birdbrain will prove to have more cojones than that growing parade of men who once asked us to believe they were leaders but turned out to be sycophants,” he scorches. “They’ve all endured ritual humiliation at the hands of their master and then bowed and scraped for some small scrap of recognition from him. Some do it grudgingly at first, qualifiedly, until they realize that only complete obeisance will do for Donald Trump. These days they know the safest form of submission is unconditional. The former president will brook nothing but abject fealty, so just get straight to your knees and kiss the ring.”

A winter sunset casts a warm glow over a farm on Meeting House Road in Easton, N.Y. John Bulmer

TEAM LEADERS: An analysis of more than 400,000 Ivy League graduates over a 50-year span found that those who played a team sport in college earned more money in their careers and were more apt to land an executive role than graduates who were not athletes. Paul Gompers, a Harvard Business School professor and co-author of the study, was a track All-American at Harvard. He said being part of a team in college forges valuable soft skills, such as working well with and learning to lead people from different backgrounds. “If I were an HR person, and two people were pretty similar, and somebody spent 20 hours a week doing women's basketball, I’d give them the nod,” he told Harvard’s Working Knowledge newsletter. “Because I think that they're likely to have those other kinds of skills that are just far more difficult to achieve.”

Brian Straight, a lieutenant in the Troy (N.Y.) Fire Department, is the founder of First In Coffee.

YOUR FIRST CUP: “First In” is the phrase sometimes used to describe the firefighters and first responders who arrive first at the scene of a catastrophe. It’s also the name of a new coffee company, First In Coffee, dedicated both to great coffee and to honoring the heroism of firefighters, EMTs, police officers, nurses and other front liners. “In my profession, we live on coffee,” says owner Brian Straight, a lieutenant in the Troy (N.Y.) Fire Department. Characteristic of many in the fire and police service, Straight is donating a portion of each month’s proceeds to charity. There’s no brick and mortar, at least for now; First In Coffee is an on-line business. You can grab your first cup of First In Coffee here.

RISING STAR: Glens Falls Symphony cellist Eva Roebuck had a front-row seat to the filming of the new Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro,” the Bradley Cooper film nominated for seven Oscars. She was hired to play in an orchestra scene filmed at Tanglewood Music Center in The Berkshires. “It is my hope that this film places Leonard Bernstein even more firmly into history as a household name,” she writes. “As musicians, many of us grew up listening to Bernstein’s recordings, studying his conducting, listening to his lectures, etc., but sadly those experiences are often limited to those who pursue music professionally. Lenny is such a beloved (even revered) figure to many and a titan of bringing classical music to the masses, and perhaps ‘Maestro’ will help continue that legacy via a different medium.” In addition to the Glens Falls Symphony, she is a member of The Orchestra Now at Bard College and the Hartford Symphony. The Glens Falls Symphony is in its 40^th season. Glens Falls is the smallest city in the country with a professional symphony.

PRISON FOOD: Who knew that incarcerated individuals provide significant support to food production in the United States? The Associated Press spent two years investigating the link between prison labor and the nation’s food supply, and the results are pretty astonishing — nearly $200 million of farmed goods and livestock raised by prison labor were sold into the market over the past six years, and that’s not counting the millions of dollars more in sales to government entities. Much of the work, as you might imagine, is done under harsh conditions and for minimal pay, with serious repercussions for refusing to work. Several have died or been seriously injured providing cheap contract labor to businesses. “They are largely uncompensated, they are being forced to work, and it’s unsafe. They also aren’t learning skills that will help them when they are released,” law professor Andrea Armstrong, an expert on prison labor at Loyola University New Orleans, told the AP. “It raises the question of why we are still forcing people to work in the fields.”

DRUG DAZE: As if New York State’s rollout of legal cannabis hasn’t been controversial enough — the governor herself called it “a disaster,” faulting legislation that was “crafted in a way that was not poised for success,” the Buffalo News reports — now comes word of a lawsuit against New York’s Office of Cannabis Management in which the white male plaintiffs, who want to open a dispensary, allege racial and gender discrimination. The complaint, the Albany Times Union reports, adds that the Cannabis Control Board is made up of all members that would count as minorities or women, and that the board members are charged with implementing policies that the plaintiffs allege “favor and give preference to their own race and gender.” Meanwhile, out West, San Francisco finds itself in the grips of a drug epidemic that resulted in more than 800 overdose deaths just last year, and up the coast, elected leaders in Oregon declared a state of emergency for downtown Portland over a public health and safety crisis fueled by fentanyl.

EARHART’S PLANE?: Deep Sea Vision, an ocean exploration company based in South Carolina, announced it had used an unmanned underwater drone to make a sonar image of what appears to be an airplane similar to Amelia Earhart’s on the floor of the Pacific Ocean about 100 miles from the island where she was supposed to refuel. The disappearance of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, in 1937 remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of modern times.

BRAIN WAVES: Elon Musk announced this week that one of his companies, Neuralink, has implanted its brain-computer interface into a human for the first time. Each wireless Neuralink device, Scientific American reports, contains a chip and electrode arrays of more than 1,000 superthin, flexible conductors that a surgical robot threads into the cerebral cortex. There the electrodes are designed to register thoughts related to motion. In Musk’s vision, an app will eventually translate these signals to move a cursor or produce text — in short, it will enable computer control by thinking. 

LOST DECADES: The jury had deliberated three days, torn by the evidence and the fates they were weighing. Were the co-defendants before them, both teenagers, guilty of a New Year’s 1987 assault that killed a French tourist in Midtown Manhattan? They voted — “with great emotional turmoil,” the foreperson said — to convict. The two men, paroled after decades behind bars, never stopped asserting their innocence, and eventually, prosecutors agreed. This week, a New York judge officially corrected the record, overturning the convictions of Eric Smokes and David Warren and dismissing the original indictment against them.

A CUT ABOVE: It seems the diamond, the ultimate symbol of luxury, has met its match, and it’s made in a laboratory. Lab-grown diamonds are rapidly taking market share from natural diamonds, competition that is driving down the cost of all diamonds. Jeweler Jean Dousset, a great-great-grandson of Louis Cartier who spent his career in natural diamonds, tells Axios lab-grown diamonds, with their lower price points and growing availability, are the future. “The diamond industry is going through an existential crisis,” he said. “Technology and the human imagination have been able to replicate nature perfectly.”

IN THE MONEY: The good news for the upstate New York economy: The Belmont Stakes will be run in 2024 at Saratoga Race Course, part of a four-day bonus racing bonanza necessitated by an overhaul of Belmont Park. The bad news for upstate racing fans accustomed to low-cost admission and carrying their own coolers — race day general admission is $50 (Saratoga patrons are accustomed to paying $10) and no outside alcohol is permitted

ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION: For years, drivers on a stretch of highway near Albany, N.Y., have passed close enough to an 11-story hunk of blight to watch the paint peel. It was universally regarded as the city’s biggest eyesore, an embarrassment, and everyone wanted it gone. Soon, they’ll get their wish; the new owner, who had hoped to redevelop it, said he’ll tear it down as soon as developers secure funding.

CHITA RIVERA was a dynamo from the time she took the Broadway stage in 1957 as Anita in “West Side Story,” barely slowing down in a trailblazing career that saw her nominated for 10 Tony awards. She worked with some of the greatest writers and producers in theater, and consistently delivered energetic performances that audiences loved. She returned several years after a serious leg injury in a car accident to play the title role in the 1993 musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” for which she won the second of her Tonys (she was given a third, for Lifetime Achievement, in 2018). In 2009, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor the U.S. can give a civilian, by President Obama. “I wouldn’t know what to do if I wasn’t moving or telling a story to you or singing a song,” she told The Associated Press in 2015. “That’s the spirit of my life, and I’m really so lucky to be able to do what I love, even at this time in my life.” She was 91.

KEVIN QUINN grew from humble roots in Albany, N.Y., to the top of his profession as a communicator, serving as press secretary to former Gov. George Pataki and then for a decade as the top public affairs and communications executive at Syracuse University. He handled the media for Governor Pataki and had input on major speeches, including the State of the State, and advised senior staff on policy and strategy. “He was a political partisan,” according to his obituary, “but his strongest political allegiance was to democracy. Throughout his career, Kevin committed himself through his work to finding solutions to society's problems that would make good on America's promise as a place of opportunity for all.” He was 53.

JIMY WILLIAMS was a baseball lifer and an instructor at heart, teaching the game to generations of players as a coach and manager in both the minors and the major leagues. He got his first major league managerial job with the Toronto Blue Jays, winning a career-high 96 games in 1987, his second season. He was third base coach for the World Series champion Atlanta Braves in 1995 and returned to the dugout in 1997 as manager of the Boston Red Sox, where he was the 1999 American League Manager of the Year, the most recent Red Sox manager so honored. He managed the Houston Astros after leaving Boston and won another World Series ring as a bench coach with the Philadelphia Phillies in 2008. He was 80.

HARRY CONNICK SR. served as New Orleans’ District Attorney for three decades after unseating Jim Garrison, the prior incumbent known for his investigations into the Kennedy Assassination. Connick was undefeated as District Attorney and held the office longer than anyone, retiring in 2003. He faced scrutiny in later years over whether his office improperly withheld evidence that may have otherwise helped defendants, resulting in the reversal of several murder convictions. A Navy veteran who served in the South Pacific during World War II, Connick was also an accomplished musician who performed regularly in French Quarter nightclubs and encouraged his namesake son to play professionally. He was 97.

“He’s a dark-skinned Black man who went through a very traumatic thing as a child. I think it would only make sense for him to identify himself, as someone who has lived his experience, to an officer — why wouldn’t he make that clear?”
—    New York City Council member Sandy Nurse, on council colleague Yusef Salaam identifying himself as an elected official during a traffic stop. Salaam was wrongfully convicted in 1990 as a member of the Central Park Five.

BAR HOUND: A 16-year-old Shih Tzu named Bear wandered out of his yard in Milwaukee, sending his owner on a frantic and tearful search that ended when she got a text message telling her Bear was at a local bar, where he was the life of the party.

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Principal Author: Bill Callen

Sincere thanks to our contributors: Ryan Moore, John Brodt, Troy Burns, Kristy Miller, Leigh Hornbeck, Claire P. Tuttle, Nancie Battaglia, John Bulmer and Michael Burgess.

 FACING OUT is what we do. We help companies, organizations and individuals work effectively with their most important external audiences – their customers, their shareholders, their communities, the government and the news media.  www.behancommunications.com

Facing Out features news and other nuggets that caught our eye, and that we thought might be of value to you, our friends and business associates. Some items are good news about our clients and friends, others are stories that we hope will leave you a bit more informed or entertained than you were five minutes ago. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback. 

Let’s make it a conversation: mark.behan@behancom.com