Journalism Week! Podcast Week! Austin's most famous graffiti, Dallas' biggest d-bag, “Hornier than Hell” winter Texans, The Journalist and the Pharma Bro, My ex is dating Lady Gaga, recipes, & more.
As I prepped this week’s newsletter, I was struck by the amount of excellent journalism I’ve recently seen. So, that’s the theme this week. I think you’ll enjoy it. As always, please share this newsletter with a friend or family member. It means a lot.
Stop what you’re doing right now, and watch this piece about the poisoning of one of Vladamir Putin’s Russian political enemies. CNN reporter Clarissa Ward and her team produce what may be the best piece of television journalism I’ve ever seen. It also includes Ward fearlessly knocking on the door of a suspected KGB assassin’s home.
This is a decidedly not-fun read about how we got where we are. Four reporters share this byline. The piece is based on interviews with 48(!) senior administration officials, and it’s a damning look inside the federal government’s response to the pandemic.
“I think he’s just done with covid,” said one of Trump’s closest advisers who, like many others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal deliberations and operations. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with covid. . . . It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”
The number of coronavirus cases in the United States is reaching records daily. The nation’s death count is rising steadily as well, this past week surpassing 300,000 — a total that had seemed unfathomable earlier this year. The dark winter is here, hospitalizations risk breaching capacities, and health professionals predict it will get worse before it gets better.
The miraculous arrival of a coronavirus vaccine this past week marks the first glimmer of hope amid a pandemic that for 10 months has ravaged the country, decimated its economy and fundamentally altered social interactions.
Yet that triumph of scientific ingenuity and bureaucratic efficiency does not conceal the difficult truth, that the virus has caused proportionately more infections and deaths in the United States than in most other developed nations — a result, experts say, of a dysfunctional federal response led by a president perpetually in denial.
“There isn’t a single light-switch moment where the government has screwed up and we’re going down the wrong path,” said Kyle McGowan, who resigned in August as chief of staff at the CDC under Redfield, the center’s director. “It was a series of multiple decisions that showed a lack of desire to listen to the actual scientists and also a lack of leadership in general, and that put us on this progression of where we’re at today.”
The authors also explore the role played by Jared Kushner, and personally, I can’t get enough. It would be a lot funnier if it wasn’t all so tragic.
“It was entirely tactical troubleshooting and, to be fair, it was pretty successful, with the ventilators and this and that, but it was whack-a-mole,” said an outside Republican in frequent touch with the White House.
Part of Kushner’s coronavirus management approach was an ambitious effort to bring in a cadre of young consultants from the private sector as volunteers. The group was dismissively referred to as the “Slim Suit” crowd.
“[Kushner] is like, ‘I’m going to bring in my data and we’re going to MBA this to death and make it work,’ ” one senior administration official said.
Max Kennedy Jr., a senior associate at a private growth equity firm when he joined Kushner’s effort as a volunteer, was so alarmed by what he witnessed that he initially filed an anonymous whistleblower report.
Among his complaints was a culture that prioritized tips and leads from VIPs, which consumed an inordinate amount of the volunteers’ time and energy. Kennedy wrote in his report that Jeanine Pirro, a Trump booster who hosts a Fox News show, “repeatedly called and emailed until 100,000 masks were sent to a particular hospital she favored. No checks were completed to ensure that the hospital was in particular need of PPE.”
Though Kushner had initially promised thousands of testing sites, only 78 materialized, the document said, and the national stockpile was used to supply more than half of those.
“The knock against Jared has always been that he’s a dilettante who will dabble in this and dabble in that without doing the homework or really engaging in a long-term, sustained, committed way, but will be there to claim credit if things go well and disappear if things go poorly,” a former senior administration official said. “And this is another example of that.”
The evidence is overwhelming: masks work. So how did wearing a life-saving mask become a political issue?
Skepticism of masks became a hallmark of the Trump administration’s pandemic response. On April 3, when the CDC recommended that all Americans wear masks, Trump announced that he would not do so because he could not envision himself sitting behind the Resolute Desk with his face covered as he greeted visiting dignitaries. The president stressed that mask-wearing was “voluntary,” effectively permitting his legions of followers to disregard the CDC’s recommendation.
“What the Trump administration has managed to do is they accomplished — remarkably — a very high-tech solution, which is developing a vaccine, but they completely failed at the low-tech solution, which is masking and social distancing, and they put people at risk,” Offit said.
Remember those daily briefings from the White House? You better believe there are some details:
Over time, however, Trump decided he wanted to be the face of the government’s response, so he took over Pence’s role at the briefings. A number of Republican senators privately counseled the president to let the doctors be out front, according to a senior Republican congressional official, but “Trump just couldn’t let someone else get all that attention.”
Trump’s performances were riddled with misinformation, contradictions and indecorous boasts, while also predicting miracles and promoting cure-all therapeutics. Trump often said he was trying to be a “cheerleader” for the country, and a senior administration official explained that the president has said he drew lessons from Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking.”
The piece continues with information about how a TV doctor with no infectious-disease experience became a leading member of the administration’s coronavirus task force, how he elbowed Dr. Birx out of influence, and how the White House continued to host nightly Christmas parties despite experts pleading with Americans not to travel or congregate.
Some of the most damning criticism is pointed at the Vice President.
As for Pence, one consistent criticism was his reluctance to deliver tough news and dire coronavirus statistics to the president. As one former senior administration official put it, “He knows, like everybody else knows, that covid is the last thing Trump wants to hear about or see anybody making news about. If not touting Operation Warp Speed, it’s the topic that shall not be spoken of.”
Pence and second lady Karen Pence also hosted holiday parties at the Naval Observatory, where pictures from one such event earlier this month showed hundreds of guests mingling mostly maskless underneath an enclosed tent. Even Pence himself, the head of the coronavirus task force, did not wear a mask.
Members of military bands, servers and others were forced to work and exposed for hours to guests who were not wearing masks, officials said.
At least one worker who got infected never heard from anyone in the White House about the illness. They were replaced for the next party.
This is some amazing reporting. For years, every day, thousands of Austinites have walked, run, and biked past this large graffiti display adorning a train bridge across Lady Bird Lake. The river is a dividing line between North and South Austin, and the trail that surrounds it serves as a major activity hub.
It’s impossible to walk by this display without wondering, who painted this? How did they do it? It took four years, but Austin’s NPR station KUT has cracked the case. The story behind the scoop is just as good as the findings.
The graffiti does include the artist's initials: S.K.O. I couldn’t find any other graffiti signed like this. Googling turned up nothing. But then, a few weeks later, I got a message from a guy named Patrick Reetz. He had no idea I was looking for the person who painted on the bridge. Out of nowhere, he says: “Hey, if you ever want the story on the train bridge graffiti, I know who did it.”
I asked Reetz to connect us. A few weeks went by, and I got an email from “John St. John.” This was a fake name, of course, because the alleged artist wasn’t sure he wanted to use his real one. Of course, I was skeptical at first. Was this just some dude trying to claim credit for perhaps the greatest artistic crime in Austin?
We exchanged emails, but then he'd disappear for weeks or months without replying. After about a year of this, he vanished. I thought maybe he got bored and didn’t want to keep lying to me.
It was another year and half before I heard from him again.
“Hello again,” he wrote. “:)”
So who is this SKO anyway?
In February, we finally did a real interview. Scott Kimble O’Donnell is his name – S.K.O., just like the initials on the bridge.
O’Donnell, 49, is a sergeant in the U.S. Army now, stationed in El Paso. He moved to Austin in 2008, just before the first of the bridge pieces went up.
His inspiration:
“I think I went running around Town Lake and it was just covered in s- - - graffiti,” he recalls of his first time seeing the bridge. “I remember looking at it and thinking, ‘Well, if other people can get up there and paint, I could do it. I could paint it better.’”
O’Donnell had never done graffiti before, but when he saw the bridge for the first time, he just knew.
“’I have to paint it.’ It was like I was drawn to it almost," he says.
So how do you go about painting a giant mural on a bridge 40 feet above the water? Apparently, you head to REI and get some gear.
“I knew this was illegal and I didn't want someone to rat me out to the police,” he says. “So I sounded very vague about … what I wanted to climb. But they sold me a harness and some rope and told me how to make certain knots.”
“It's scary. Like heart-poundingly scary because you have to throw your legs over the side," he says, describing how he was lying on his belly with his feet hanging over, inching his way down."You really have to learn to trust your equipment.”
The rest of the piece details the cat and mouse game between the artist and authorities who would paint over the graffiti. Under state law, he can’t be charged for the displays from 2012 because too much time has passed. He met with the reporter over Thanksgiving, his first return to Austin in eight years.
And you might have noticed that a new version of his Focus One Point And Breathe piece went up on the train bridge last month.
This well-reported story comes to us from the Dallas Morning News. It’s a doozy. Shouts to Dave Ruff for passing this one along.
Justin Magnuson, a successful Dallas entrepreneur, sold his health care company for almost $100 million while still in his 30s and began investing in new business ventures.
He expanded his new spa company, became a partner in local bars and bought dozens of acres of rural Northern California land, court records show. But what really brought in the profits, federal authorities say, were the California fields that produced marijuana for sale across the U.S.
Magnuson, 39, a Southern Methodist University graduate, has multiple college degrees, was partly raised by a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent and was once named one of Dallas' most eligible men.
Authorities say Magnuson and other defendants transported marijuana inside soda vending machines in semi-trailers and then used his private jet to fly the cash proceeds back to the West Coast. Magnuson, who had been attending UCLA, laundered drug profits through his various Dallas businesses, including It's a Secret Med Spa and a bar named Vice Park, prosecutors say.
Of course, the wild details don’t stop there.
When agents raided Magnuson's penthouse Dallas condo this summer, they found a pile of cash; an "arsenal" of guns; a bulletproof helmet and body armor; and a "go-bag" packed with survival guides and gear, court records show. Slicker called it a backpack "loaded and ready for him to flee."
He stored the cash in his Dallas home and also held meetings there to discuss growing operations and distribution, authorities said. Magnuson lives in a $3 million penthouse apartment atop a Victory Park residential tower, court records show. He was arrested in August outside his home.
The "go-bag" agents found in his apartment contained, among other things, survival guides, a "special warfare book," a shovel, fire starters, a change of clothes and a bulletproof plate, court records show.
Agents found in the home more than 20 firearms, including pistols, shotguns and "assault-style" rifles like an AR-15 and AK-47, Slicker said. Also taken were five sets of body armor, about $25,000 in cash and a credit card with no spending limit, he said.
Authorities say Magnuson's net worth is estimated to be more than $13 million.
This guy is the ultimate Uptown Dallas douchebag, and I need to know everything about him. Someone reading this knows this dude. Please, DM me @micahwiener and tell me everything. Thx.
An estimated 50,000 seniors from northern states are heading to Texas for the warmer weather despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
The vast majority come from the Midwest, many from states where COVID-19 cases are surging at an even higher rate than in most Texas counties. For the Valley’s restaurateurs, shop owners, and RV park staff, business from Winter Texans is crucial to stay afloat. But local public health experts warn that the imminent arrival of thousands of high-risk individuals spells trouble for a hospital system that’s been stretched to its limits by the pandemic in a region where the COVID death rate is much higher than in other parts of the state.
OK. No one wants to hear another story about COVID. I featured this story because of the following paragraph (emphasis mine):
Winter Texans also typically engage in a high level of social interaction—frequently darting between happy hours, eating group meals in large dining halls, and congregating for karaoke and card games—that facilitates the spread of the coronavirus. “They’re out in the pool, playing shuffleboard, and having dances,” Melendez said, adding that Winter Texans are “hornier than hell.”
Hey hornier-than-hell midwesterners, just stay home this year, k?
You’ve probably heard about this wild-ass story about an author who fell in love with “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli. This Missouri School of Journalism graduate seems to be quite, I dunno, fucking confused and manipulated. The whole thing is bananas.
Check this lede:
Almost every weekday for six years, Christie Smythe took the F train from Park Slope downtown to her desk at Brooklyn’s federal court, in a pressroom hidden on the far side of a snack bar. Smythe, who covered white-collar crime for Bloomberg News, wore mostly black and gray, and usually skipped makeup. She and her husband, who worked in finance, spent their free time cooking, walking Smythe’s rescue dog, and going on literary pub crawls. “We had the perfect little Brooklyn life,” Smythe says.
Then she chucked it all.
Over the course of nine months, beginning in July 2018, Smythe quit her job, moved out of the apartment, and divorced her husband. What could cause the sensible Smythe to turn her life upside down? She fell in love with a defendant whose case she not only covered, but broke the news of his arrest. It was a scoop that ignited the Internet, because her love interest, now life partner, is not just any defendant, but Martin Shkreli: the so-called “Pharma Bro” and online provocateur, who increased the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent overnight and made headlines for buying a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album for a reported $2 million. Shkreli, convicted of fraud in 2017, is now serving seven years in prison.
I encourage you to read the whole thing. Or… You can hear it all on my podcast, Mind of Micah, coming next week. Consider it a post-Christmas week gift from me to you. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and get every episode as soon as it’s released.
Imagine being flooded with texts and tweets out of the blue about an ex. Sounds terrible. Now imagine that it’s because your ex is dating one of the most famous people on the planet. Weird.
We explored this story in-depth on last week’s Mind of Micah. Check the episode here.
This looks like a really nice outside-the-box side dish for Christmas dinner.
2 pounds medium carrots, scrubbed
2 tablespoons plus ¼ cup vegetable oil
Kosher salt
1 small shallot, thinly sliced
2 red Thai chiles, sliced
1 ½-inch piece ginger, peeled, thinly sliced
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
Preparation
Step 1
Preheat oven to 425°. Toss carrots and 2 Tbsp. oil on a large rimmed baking sheet and season with salt. Roast, tossing occasionally, until crisp-tender, 20–25 minutes.
Step 2
Meanwhile, bring shallot, chiles, ginger, garlic, fish sauce, sugar, and 2 Tbsp. water to a gentle simmer in a small saucepan over medium heat and cook just until aromatics are soft, 8–10 minutes (you don’t want the liquid to reduce much). Let cool. Transfer to a blender, add lime juice and mayonnaise and blend until smooth. With motor running, gradually stream in remaining ¼ cup oil; blend until emulsified. Season dressing with salt.
Step 3
Drizzle dressing over carrots just before serving.
This week 21 was a touchdown 3pt swish shot homer in the end-zone. That Russia reporting was wild. It's a real bummer reading that Covid denial stuff. So frustrating. Great read about my neighbor mogul here in Dallas too. Solid reading going in to the holidays. Appreciate you doing these. Stay safe!
This week 21 was a touchdown 3pt swish shot homer in the end-zone. That Russia reporting was wild. It's a real bummer reading that Covid denial stuff. So frustrating. Great read about my neighbor mogul here in Dallas too. Solid reading going in to the holidays. Appreciate you doing these. Stay safe!