Nishant choksi biography of barack obama
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Presidential Joke Writer
Jon Lovett on Kellyanne
Conway and Smoked Salmon
Presidential Joke Writer Jon Lovett on Kellyanne Conway and Smoked Salmon
by Jon Lovett 3.28.17
Jon Lovett was a speech—and joke—writer for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He’s now part of the team behind Crooked Media, a political-content startup that launched its first podcast, Pod Save America, after the election. Lovett quickly became Pod’s breakout star, injecting rapid-fire critiques of Trumpland with humor. And now he’s hosting the company’s most recent show, Lovett or Leave It. He told WIRED editor Maria Streshinsky about smoked salmon and the wisdom of Kellyanne Conway.
Whenever you’re talking about using humor in politics or in a policy speech or in a serious moment, you’re talking about using it as a tool to engage people. That’s why putting a joke in a political speech is a luxury, and it is always a risk. A boring speech can be just a boring speech. But a speech with a joke that
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Illustration by Nishant Choksi
Are you a mom? No? Then you don’t need to read one more word. Go on, shoo! I’m not trying to be mean; it’s just that you probably won’t understand a lot of what I’m going to say. It’s a mom thing. If you’re a mom, you know what I’m talking about. Right, moms? Go, us!
I’m not saying that moms are better than other people, but there is, well, something different, something special about us.
When Michelle Obama calls herself Mom-in-Chief, I am, like, “Amen, sister!,” because Mrs. Obama knows what we all know: your husband may be a very important person, but who runs the show at home? Not Dad. Mom. But I think Ann Romney carries the day here. Unlike Mrs. Obama, when Mrs. Romney talks so movingly to the women of America, she leaves out the childless gals, and there is a reason for that: they are not moms.
You can sugarcoat that all you like, but Mrs. Romney chose not to, and I say good for her. Because, if you’re not a mom, you may not be a bad pers
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On Monday, the National Institutes of Health released a fifty-eight-page report on the future of neuroscience—the first substantive step in developing President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, which seeks to “revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury.” Assembled by an advisory panel of fifteen scientists led by Cori Bargmann, of Rockefeller University, and William Newsome, of Stanford, the report assesses the state of neuroscience and offers a framtidsperspektiv for the field’s future.
The core challenge, as the report puts it, is simply that “brains—even small ones—are dauntingly complex”:
Information flows in parallel through many different circuits at once; different components of a single functional circuit may be distributed across many brain structures and be spatially intermixed with the components of other circuits; feedback signals from