More troops in our cities, AI slop and more!

On Wednesday evening, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that Susan Monarez was no longer the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But then hours later, Monarez’s lawyers released a statement saying that because President Donald Trump appointed her, only he can fire her. They say she’s still CDC director. So far Trump hasn’t said anything publically, but Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday that “the president fired her, which he has every right to do.”

The Washington Post reported that Monarez refused to resign after HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials pressured her to support rescinding some approvals for covid-19 vaccines. The same day the White House announced that Monarez was out, the Food and Drug Administration limited approval for new vaccines.

In a meeting this morning, Dave tried to explain the Wolf of Wall Street reference he was going to make in this video while I stared blankly at him.

The Trump administration plans to deploy more National Guard troops across the U.S.

One official reportedly told Newsweek that the planned deployment of 1,700 troops to 19 states is unrelated to the National Guard’s deployment in Washington, D.C., but part of a separate effort to use the National Guard for immigration enforcement.

But the Trump administration also plans to expand its use of the National Guard to crack down on crime, even though violent crime is falling in many U.S. cities. Pentagon officials plan to deploy troops to Chicago, where I live! And where local activists and officials are already planning protests.

A promotional video on Will Smith’s YouTube channel shows telltale signs of AI, including crowd shots of people with distorted hands and faces and shots of the same sign with different spellings of certain words at different parts of the video.

Journalists haven’t independently verified whether parts of the video were AI-generated. But blogger Andy Baio found real images of signs and crowd members from the video — and noted that the original images look a lot less like AI slop than what made it into the final video.

Biao also noted differences between the video on YouTube and other platforms. YouTube’s creator liason has said the platform is using “machine learning technology to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos during processing.” The practice has drawn criticism.

You’ve probably heard already. Taylor Swift is more savvy at breaking news than I’ll ever be.

I’ve read so many “Love Story” puns in connection to this. I won’t put you through the same fate.

Have you seen “Catching Kelce”? Let me know if it’s any good.

Last week, Dave and I spelled the Ukrainian President’s last name differently in his video closed captions and in my newsletter. Oops! So we made a video about it.

There’s not one exact way to transliterate the name from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin one we use. So we’re now spelling it “Zelenskyy” with two Y’s. His administration has said that’s his preference, there are broader conversations about honoring Ukrainian-derived spellings and pronunciations, and we’d generally ask sources for their identifiers then honor them.

This is part of our ongoing effort to create our style guide, and this video was also Dave’s and my first proper co-production in over two years. But you knew that because I teased it in last week’s newsletter and you read until the end, right? Right??