Art rebels against Trump

👀 Revamping: this newsletter!

✈️ Flying: to France

💣 Reading: about the bluetooth “bomb”

🐕 Visiting: KC Pet Project

🎤 Dropping: out of Trump’s concert

It’s been another action-packed week at LNI, and to quote Freddie Mercury - Don’t Stop Me Now (I’m having such a good time). Last Sunday, I did a quick guest appearance on my favorite Survivor podcast with two of my favorite people, Mike Bloom and Liana Boraas. You can watch it here. At LNI, we debunked the Fox News masked man appearance, talked about the Trump $250 bill and my horrific Little Nicky-esque Biden impression made a return. Of course, Chris recapped all of this on Friday.

We’re slowly plugging in new graphics to our newsletter. You may have noticed in last Friday’s newsletter (Thursday, if you’re a paying member!), that the videos were now wider thumbnail images that actively look like links. In addition to being more aesthetically pleasing on vertical, we’re hoping that this will decrease the amount of metadata in a newsletter. On gmail, this newsletter tends to cut off. You can still read the whole thing! But not everyone knows to click on this:

So, while the newsletter will likely still cut off for most gmail users, the new video thumbnails should make it happen a little further down.

You’ll also notice our new subheading gifs, once again created by THE Sarah Hashemi, our former Post video graphics extraordinaire turrned current LNI video graphics extraordinaire.

Finally, many of the graphics have been squished to be shorter, which will hopefully allow for a better, less-metadata-y experience while still being easy to read. As an example, the graphic directly below this:

A few weeks back we won another award (!) for “Best in Audience Engagement” in the Americas division of the Digital Media Awards. These purty trophies are given out by WAN-IFRA, the World Association of News Publishers. Now we’re up for the GLOBAL award, against news outlets from Brazil, the U.K. and the Philippines. The winner will be announced June 2nd in France. Ten months into existing, we couldn’t be more delighted.

So, the three LNI co-founders are headed to Marseilles, France this week for the awards ceremony. Lauren and I will also be giving a talk on our work to a very international audience. I’ll also make some local news videos while there. Truly, a fitting week for a company cheekily called Local News International.

If you’ve got any news stories you’d like me to cover locally while there, let me know at [email protected]. So far, I’m interested in this story about rioters in France this weekend celebrating a soccer victory. Who knew Philadelphia sports fans weren’t an anomaly?

I really try not to promise a video before it comes out, but I keep doing it anyway (see: last week’s mask debunking newsletter). So, with a grain of salt that other more important news may make its way into the fold this week, I may make a video that provides the complete timeline of United Airlines going full parent mode and turning a plane around. Are you imagining a pilot looking to the back of the plane and saying “I will turn this plane around??” (which they literally said!) because I already am and this video is half-written in my head.

Best of all? So much of this took place on Reddit. As many as five Redditors claimed to be on the plane as passengers were continuously told to turn their bluetooth devices off. So what happened?

A 16-year-old had named his wireless speaker “bomb.” Maybe I should be treating this more seriously but I found it weirdly hilarious. As a four-year-old that once pulled the fire alarm at my sisters’ elementary school, I delight in emergency situations that turn out to be nothing. I also love that all three of my sisters, and 500 other students, had to do a fire drill right before school let out. Not many kids get to go to the principal’s office before they even attend the school. Anyway, I don’t know how “innocent” the bluetooth-bomb teen was … but I am excited to make a video about it either way.

We are in the very, very early stages of considering possibly maybe getting a second dog. The problem is that our current dog is perfect. She’s sweet, calm, good with kids. Why would we want to add another dog to the mix? But it’s a tale as old as time. Lola is getting a little older and we notice just how much she lights up when she sees her dog buddies on a walk. It puts a literal pep in her step and her entire demeanor changes. She becomes a puppy again. We know she prefers a buddy. Back in covid, she truly bonded with two other dogs on our floor, Kylo and Pilot. It was really hard on her when we moved out of that apartment.

On Saturday, we visited the main campus of KC Pet Project. This rescue has their act together. After signing in and writing down what we were look for, a volunteer introduced us to almost a hundred dogs. Unless the pups very recently rescued, they have a ton of information on them (are they good with other dogs, protective, good with kids, why were they given up, etc). Our daughter loved the experience thoroughly. There’s a couple we thought might be good for Lola, so we’ll see! In the meantime, if you’re in the area and looking to rescue a dog, I highly recommend KC Pet Project.'

Also, the cats are super cute too.

Last Wednesday, nine specific musicians and “many more,” if the flyer is to believed, were announced as part of the Great American State Fair. It’s a multi-day event taking place on the National Mall as part of America’s 250th birthday celebration. Many of the artists that signed up did not know the event, put on by Freedom 250, had some highly partisan programming. Within days, and in some cases hours, of the event being announced, most of the the performers had dropped out.

Then on Friday, during the wave of cancellations, a judge said the Kennedy Center broke the law when they put Donald Trump’s name across the building (“yeah, no shit,” I said to myself while reading the story).

There’s a clear line to draw between these two events: art and artists, and even judges, are ruling against Trump’s attempts to claim art for himself. Like the Reflecting Pool turning twenty different shades of blue, art and Trump just do not get along.

Perhaps it has something to do with his complete lack of taste (let’s turn everything gold!). But I think it’s something more obvious, sweeter even. Art isn’t just for one person and their political ambitions. It’s for everyone. No matter what you do to try and make it for yourself, you can’t. This cuts both ways too. People can hate how a TV show ended and eviscerate it. The creators can’t do anything about that. It doesn’t belong to them. Though, for what it’s worth, I loved The Boys series finale.

President Trump’s reaction to both the Kennedy Center and wave of canceled artists was basically the same. “Cancel it,” he wrote about the concert on Saturday. On Friday, after the judge made his Kennedy Center ruling, Trump wrote, “I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into ‘NEVER NEVER LAND.’

To put a fine point on this, the judge didn’t cancel Trump taking control of the Kennedy Center. He only blocked Trump from making major renovations without Congressional approval. But that doesn’t matter. He doesn’t care about making the Kennedy Center better. The point was never to promote art, it was to claim art.