Eve Fairbanks @evefairbanks Twitter profile

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

9 months

The Inheritors comes out in Catalan next week!

núria alemany pérez

@NuriaAlemany78

9 months

I, parlant de feina, ben aviat a @Ed_Periscopi …

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

11 months

Somebody simply has to write the ultimate catch-all essay on disruptive, libertarian, private-sector-touting entrepreneurs simply begging and demanding for state intervention at the end of their journeys. (This is the Titan sub company's adviser.)

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

11 months

Also breathtaking is the lack of respect for the efforts gov't *is* making to find these ingrates' passengers. The Coast Guard didn't say, "You made your bed, lie in it." It's busting its ass to save your private-enterprise heinies. But you still can't bear to give it any credit.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

11 months

The submersible creator long negged government as "illogically ... obssessed with safety" and "anathema to innovation." Now Concannon, OceanGate's adviser, complains that "when I e-mail the United States government, I get 'out of office' replies. That is unacceptable."

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

11 months

On a podcast, OceanGate's CEO said his goal is to "hit the media every way we can" to "spur more people" to take submersibles & see & love the deep sea. This will ruin his industry. This short-term mentality--everything has to be done MAX COOL & RIGHT NOW--ends up so destructive.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

11 months

It's a much bigger cultural mindset--everything worth doing oughta be done in the most disruptive, badass, & quickest way possible, b/c why build slow over generations when you could be a rocketship? But the effect is paradoxical: it's making us believe no risks are worth taking.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

This makes me violently angry. My own *mother* believed Sidney Powell. I'm so angry people like Powell claim they are "the patriots." They hate America. This woman thinks her country is a toy--to be played with, snapped in half, and then discarded as soon as it no longer charms.

Zoe Tillman

@ZoeTillman

3 years

Sidney Powell has moved to dismiss Dominion's defamation lawsuit. She argues that when she accused Dominion of being part of an election-rigging scheme with ties to Venezuela, "no reasonable person would conclude" those "were truly statements of fact"

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 months

Ackman’s 77-page letter demanding Business Insider retract articles about his wife is actually worth reading. It’s a truly wild look into the mind of a billionaire—incl. dozens of outraged 3AM texts demanding callbacks from people who were in rural Uruguay or awaiting surgery

Bill Ackman

@BillAckman

2 months

Over my 35-year career, I have been the subject of many thousands of articles, including extremely negative, inaccurate, and libelous articles, yet I have never sued a media organization or a journalist. Beginning in early January of this year, Business Insider released a series…

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

6 years

Reports of sexual harassment destroyed his career. But I want to talk about the far deeper, subtler, more insidious effect Mark Halperin had on our politics.

Opinion: Mark Halperin Poisoned Our Politics

Reports of sexual harassment destroyed his reputation and his career. But I want to talk about the deeper, subtler, more insidious effect Mark Halperin had on our politics.

www.buzzfeednews.com

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

If you try searching Twitter for @kenklippenstein —the major investigative journalist who recently posted footage of a Tesla crash—you can’t find him anymore. This is all you get.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 years

Hi from South Africa, birthplace of your newest Covid variant! I see hot takes that SA’s problem is we don’t have enough nice American vaccines. WE DO NOT HAVE A PROBLEM WITH VACCINE SUPPLY!!! We’re TURNING AWAY vax shipments. Our problem is FEAR of vaccines. Same as you.

L Graves

@LGSentinel

2 years

@snolen If this newest variant doesn't prompt us to see the light and push for world-wide vaccination against COVID, what then? World-wide vaccination worked with polio, smallpox. John Donne was right. No one is an island.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

4 months

Do you wonder what happened to DeSantis's campaign? For @politico , I spent a year digging into the wild backstory of his top aide, Christina Pushaw, who had no U.S. campaign experience outside the Republic of Georgia prior to becoming his press secretary.

The Political Education of Christina Pushaw, Ron DeSantis’ Enforcer on X

Ron DeSantis’ enforcer on X has said she spent a few years living abroad in Georgia, traveling and enjoying life. It’s actually where she learned an especially ruthless kind of politics.

www.politico.com

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

11 months

@WilhelmArnesen A lot of aspects of this story I don't find fundamentally wrong. When a teen friend flipped his car transporting a "HUMP" sign he'd stolen from a speed bump after prom, police still helped him. Feds don't nearly treat all fairly, but the gov is supposed to help even idiots.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

11 months

@Von_Weeden It's self-care, man

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

Recent coverage of South Africa has been a nightmare. An American editor called me to say the "world's concluded South Africa is 'over'"--"falling apart" (NYT), "in ruins" (New Yorker), "destroyed" (UK Sunday Times). Would I write about the end of South Africa? she asked.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

11 months

@WilhelmArnesen It's the bitter unwillingness even to admit you needed gov't help and continuing to crap on the feds that are hurtling to your rescue that's so wrong. Prob this guy's in shock. But furiously continuing to nail individualist flags to a sinking ship, Moby Dick-style, is outrageous

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

4 years

I still basically don’t understand @nytimes and others’ reporting that Sweden’s #Covid -19 approach has preserved its economy. Sweden projects a 7% contraction this year. US’s contraction is projected at 6%.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

I wasn’t born yesterday and I still CANNOT get over the absolutely pathetic TV coverage of the Sudan crisis. Near 100% focused on the evacuation of Westerners. BBC minutes ago: “The biggest question tonight is how to get them out.” The biggest question!?!

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 months

Still shocked by the number of South Africa-ICJ analyses I read in major, serious publications that boiled down to "those Africans don't know what they got themselves into, don't really understand international law, and have probably never set foot in such a nice building before"

Antony Altbeker

@antonyaltbeker

3 months

Wait. I was told the icj case was baseless, meritless and obscene.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

Many conservatives now hate their own followers in the mode of classic con men--"if you're stupid enough to be conned by me, you deserve it." If you claim your followers are the real Americans and you hate them, you hate America, period.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

It’s so sad to see this post go viral when every sentence is a lie. - 3.6 unweighted GPA / 1450 SATs are uncompetitive for Stanford. This white student didn’t get robbed - 0% chance “POC” C students are “all headed to Berkeley” - *average* Berkeley GPA is 3.9. Pure fabrication

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 months

And the most Upper West Side evocation of “actual harm” ever: that the plagiarism allegations against Ackman’s wife were as hurtful as “the loss of a pregnancy from the last remaining frozen egg.” It’s like a Succession episode. A must-read

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

I'm angry because I know people who've been misled into honest despair about their country by these breathtakingly unpatriotic, cynical, viperous contemporary "conservatives." I'm also angry because no matter how angry I get, my anger will never be taken as seriously as theirs.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

A huge problem in modern life is that most people presume there is a group of powerful people, or “officials,” who are happy with how things are and are consciously driving or sustaining the status quo—but nobody believes they’re in that group. Not top columnists. Not presidents.

Walter Kirn

@walterkirn

3 years

Officialdom wants us to fight. They’re promoting a match between “two Americas,” then will watch from on high, not like referees but vultures. They’ll make big side bets on the action — actual market bets — as they guide the action. Afterwards, they want the wreckage Don’t play

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

@lionel_trolling My father was a scholar of the Soviet Union. He really loved the movie “The Death of Stalin” for how accurately it captured the bumbling, comic quality of Stalin’s politburo. That power structure also killed at least 20 million people.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 years

South Africa’s vaccine problem is not, currently, the West’s unwillingness to export its vaccines. Our problem is what the West IS exporting.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 years

Tucker Carlson, Bret Weinstein, Dr. Robert Malone, all your British celebrity vax skeptics—they’re all popular. The biggest South African vax-skeptic celebrity, Nick Hudson? 3/4 of his tweets are just retweets of Westerners. I went thru a week of them and counted.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 months

Late-night texts to friends on the board! Complaints an exec promised to call back in “about an hour” but it’s been 80 minutes! A tutorial on “intent” to show Oxman had no intent to plagiarize paired w/ the claim the author has anti-Semitic intent b/c she dissed Henry Kissinger!

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 months

Texts complaining that nobody gave Ackman enough time to respond punctuated by the irate line “what are you waiting for and why have you not called me back”! The claim that by ending an email “Warmly,” a reporter “revealed the smug satisfaction she garnered” in harming Ackman!

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

Thank you @FacesofCovid —which started as a thread of American Covid-19 victims—for your expanded work to remember those lost to Covid worldwide

FacesOfCOVID

@FacesOfCOVID

3 years

KARIMA BROWN, 54, of Johannesburg, South Africa 🇿🇦, died of COVID on March 4, 2021. She "was a fixture in South African journalism, a former anti-apartheid activist turned beloved radio host who spoke fearlessly about women’s rights & democratic norms."

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

11 months

Seeing this go viral as an anti-woke point from huge accts like @JackPosobiec , @JeffYoungerShow , @stillgray , &c it's hard to express how wrong it is. OceanGate was *fully run* by 50-yr-old white guys. Nobody BUT 50-yr-old white guys sank the Titan. Here's its ENTIRE management!

Paul Golding

@GoldingBF

11 months

The CEO of OceanGate, which is operating the Titanic tourist submarine, explains that the company didn’t want to hire any experienced ‘50 year old white guys’ because they weren’t ‘inspirational.’ They're all now trapped at the bottom of the ocean slowly running out of air.…

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

I don't want flying cars. I don't want A.I. editors. I don't want towns on Mars. ALL I WANT out of technology in the 21st century is the capacity to easily de-capitalize a string of words I originally typed in all caps, and vice versa.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 years

South Africa has long been more vax-hesitant—only ~70% of its children receive the MMR—and for comprehensible reasons. To be frank—just thirty years ago, medical science was being used here to “prove” black people were inferior. “Trust the science” can be problematic.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

11 months

This wish to attribute to government the most implausibly dark motives and evil competence is unreal. Shapiro literally believes politics is a video game and the U.S. gov't is the final boss, ever-respawning w/ no damage & no worry it's wasting all its resources to destroy you.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

@JJ_Stellies Honestly, Jonathan, why do you keep asking this question w/o trying to answer it? Loads of people of all political views have *already* researched this & concluded no single individual's answer is meaningful, b/c pre-'94 less than 55% of SA households had access to electricity.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

4 months

The postmortems of @rondesantis ’s campaign will say he was limp or “weak.” I think the truth is the opposite: his campaign was thuggish, willing to lie, brutal, fear-mongering. I learned a lot about those inside it reporting this piece on his top aide:

The Political Education of Christina Pushaw, Ron DeSantis’ Enforcer on X

Ron DeSantis’ enforcer on X has said she spent a few years living abroad in Georgia, traveling and enjoying life. It’s actually where she learned an especially ruthless kind of politics.

www.politico.com

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

@benshapiro Thread: The Greatest Men in History—Almost All of Whom Wore Floofy Dresses. Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 years

The thing that makes me angriest? Dr Robert Malone—the American celebrity anti-vaxxer I see pop up most on South African socials—TOOK THE COVID-19 VACCINE. He’s preaching South Africans a devastating vax austerity from the comfort of a vaccine Learjet, figuratively speaking.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

So baffled by the scramble for Andre de Ruyter’s book. It’s really gross to profit off whistleblowing if you *led* an organization & did little to fix it. These stories should be told first to police & judges, not packaged in a sexy-headshot airport thriller for personal profit.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

My Dad was Reagan political appointee and voted GOP for 50 years until Trump. He’s still a registered Republican. I called him & said, “Doesn’t look like the GOP is doing as well as they hoped.” Him, bitterly: “Good. I hope the Republican Party gets ground into the dust.”

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

4 months

And thanks to all the Georgians who spoke to me. This was tough to report, and not a piece of reporting that Pushaw wanted people to read. But I went to Tbilisi, found old emails & deleted Facebook posts, dived deep into Georgian gov't records, & it taught me a lot. Do read.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

A friend once told me he was invited to Davos and the vibe was “everybody running around looking for the innermost sanctum”—to understand it, to rebuke it, to join it, or all of the above. “But there was no innermost sanctum,” he said.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

@fmanjoo I heard lots of honking I'm in Johannesburg, South Africa The world really was watching.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

9/n The coverage laments riots occurred after S. Africa imprisoned a corrupt ex-president. I don't understand why the country isn't getting more credit for *that*! It's hauled more major players to corruption hearings--and dealt them more consequences--than the US can manage.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

4 years

Wow. What an extraordinarily unstatesmanlike response by S. Africa's increasingly baffling main opposition party. SA's Covid-19 governance could've been better and it could have been far worse--I know it's not in the news much, but have you heard of my native land, America?

Democratic Alliance

@Our_DA

4 years

It would have been a clear admission that our economy was ruined – along with the livelihoods, and even lives, of millions of South Africans – for nothing at all. - @jsteenhuisen #cyrilramaphosa

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

4 years

Imagine if someone at the New York Times openly said, “Much as I despise Trump, he’s jet fuel for our business!” You’d have to conclude—as many have—that the speaker doesn’t entirely despise what he’s talking about, but profits off making it seem like a bigger phenom than it is.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

I wrote a big ol’ reckoning for @WIRED w/ how we’ve come to rely on Twitter—and why it’s uncool to admit we care if it dies. “Twitter now functions as one of the world's biggest status banks, and the investments stored in it are terrifyingly unsecured.”

We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion

Elon Musk’s platform may be hell, but it’s also where huge amounts of reputational and social wealth are invested. All of that is in peril.

www.wired.com

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

24/n: At any rate: People still live here, in this place you've called "ruined." South Africa doesn't have an ending. It is not a dramatic miniseries that's been canceled, or whose finale is here and ours to deconstruct.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 years

However: 70% of South African families vaccinate their kids. Less than 40% of South African adults have gotten the full Covid vaccine. This is a LOT of extra hesitation.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

4 months

She's wiped evidence of this work off social media. But in Tbilisi, basically everyone interested in politics knows her name. It's a story with, I think, a plethora of fascinating stuff about Pushaw's Georgian adventures, what it's like to do politics in a post-Soviet country ...

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 months

The only thing those writers did was show their own ignorance. South Africa's entire 1990s transition to democracy was a complex legal process--it has *way* more experience with this kind of stuff than most Western countries do

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

Nine-tenths of TED talks, Oprah appearances, NYT columns, and Davos lectures, now, are about tearing down the power structures that got the speakers those platforms. And most of those speakers really *do think* they believe what they’re saying!

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 years

You can go to any vax site in Johannesburg and get a jab. VACCINE SUPPLY IS NOT SOUTH AFRICA’S BIG PROBLEM. The other day, an acquaintance declared he’d rather listen to America’s biggest anti-vax MD than any South African authority. I see this on my socials all the time.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

11/n (Frankly, the miracle in S. Africa is ALWAYS that there's NOT war given its inequality and trauma. And so many South Africans--journalists, ordinary ppl--stand in the tinderbox day after day with firehoses, at the expense of their individual dreams, keeping it together.)

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

4 months

... fabrications she appears to have woven about her past (Saakashvili's mother told me that Pushaw told her she was Ukrainian), and why DeSantis may have felt someone trained in a post-Soviet political culture would be the special sauce for his campaign.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 months

@whitney1234 what do you appreciate about his worldview? I don’t follow him closely but this feels like a departure and a case of double standards, w/ outsized threats against a publication. oddly, the letter includes a text from a friend seemingly pleading him to “please” “take a breath”

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

12/n But why write that a country is "ruined"? I mean that. Why write it? It's a huge thing to say. Remember that a pronouncement that a society is "ruined" can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s *never* an observation. It is an act.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

I don't think it's necessary to make a story about a rogue Supreme Court justice about his ultrarich friend's dictator art. Seriously. My Dad was an anticommunist warrior and our house was packed w/ Bolshevik propaganda art. He had a Stalin portrait in his bedroom. (We're Jews.)

Elie Mystal

@ElieNYC

1 year

There is a serious discussion happening in the year 2023 about whether being friends with a Nazi sympathizer is a good thing. Republicans literally can’t even be bothered to pretend anymore about what they’re about.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 years

(I am aware Dr. Malone targets people who point out his vax status and claims he took the vaccine because he hoped it would help with his long Covid. Whatever—there’s zero evidence he changed his mind before it became totally obvious it would make him famous if he did so.)

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

Whenever people say "cancel culture" is a new thing, I think about how Paul Robeson's 1948 concerts were canceled by the FBI, or how, when visiting my parents from college in 2003, I actually--seriously--wasn't allowed to buy French cheese for them from the grocery store.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

4 years

It's incredible how little interest there is, among elite U.S. analysts, in Africa's low coronavirus numbers and mortality rates--and in S. Africa, in particular, and its rapid control of its epidemic. If this was ANY other continent it would be the subject of serious analysis.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

10 months

I asked ChatGPT to write a Twitter CEO's speech introducing a brand shift to "X". ChatGPT's knowledge base ends in 2021. But it was almost exactly the same as Yaccarino's tweets. Strong chance she used ChatGPT here 😅 "Welcome to X – the future state of unlimited interactivity."

Linda Yaccarino

@lindayaX

10 months

X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

20/n As for the "ruined" South Africa: People still live here. They have no other passports. They still have to maintain faith it isn't ruined and look for solutions.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 months

@whitney1234 If Ackman stands by his 77-page letter he should have filed it as an actual legal suit, in my view. Instead, he’s literally using the court of public opinion and Twitter pressure to try to effect an outcome (retraction) we have a legal system designed to adjudicate

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

7 months

@AmiDar There’s some (loose) precedent for this: “I am often asked, ‘Why did India not attack Pakistan after the attack on Mumbai?’ Why not use overt force against Pakistan for its support of terrorism? I myself pressed at that time for immediate retaliation.”

Why India didn’t attack Pakistan after 26/11 Mumbai attacks

An insider account by the former foreign secretary on the restraints shown by the UPA government towards Pakistan after the terror attacks

www.livemint.com

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

7/n The NYer notes South Africa was once "viewed as an exception to the poor governance and graft that plagued other parts of the continent," even if its government was unjust. That was a veneer. The apartheid government was totally corrupt.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

"By late afternoon, [Capitol] police had made fewer arrests (13) in the storming of the U.S. Capitol than are typically made at the New York Giants stadium during a home game (21)." Well-reported via @vermontgmg

Behind the Strategic Failure of the Capitol Police

Experts and police chiefs ask: How could a pumped-up, post-9/11 force with its own bomb squad and intelligence department have flunked the most basic security drill?

www.politico.com

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 years

What’s happening to the South African news media is bonkers—and bizarrely little covered. Over the last 10 yrs, a fabulist & Chinese state media have bought 75% of shares in South Africa’s top historic newspapers—120-year-old ones serving Johannesburg, Cape Town, & beyond.

Daily Maverick

@dailymaverick

2 years

Daily Maverick has found that an attack ‘writer’ with Independent Media, ‘Jamie Roz’, does not exist.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

“On the merits,” this student absolutely did not earn a shoo-in place at Stanford. But what were her supposed “safety schools”? While not great for Stanford, a 1450 SAT is great for 100s of incredible American universities. I don’t believe one word of this story.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

Elon’s goal was to disrupt “legacy media,” but paradoxically I think he’ll end up strengthening it. I find myself visiting newspapers’ homepages a lot more now, b/c they have the breaking news & range of stories I used to see here, & their websites reliably load.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

5/n To some degree, Mandela's dream was the end of apartheid and a peaceful transition to one-man-one-vote democracy. That was accomplished. That dream of his can never can be fully killed. Why do we want so badly to take even that triumph away from South Africa?

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

13/n South Africa depends on foreign investment. To deem it "ruined" is a speech-act that can hasten that outcome.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

@booktweeting @averyhartmans This was pretty much the version of millennial personal finance I learned growing up. Buy ridiculously pricey things like robot vacuums for the marginal elements of your life (things you spend an hour or less a day doing); scrimp performatively on necessities like dishware

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

15/n But this REALLY gets prurient when it combines with the pre-existing, strong tendency to make such conclusions about postcolonial African societies. That they have only two possible storylines: to succeed, or to crash and burn completely.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

4 years

@RachelBLevinson @Nanjala1 I talked to some war survivors about how they felt about the 'war' rhetoric. To my surprise, they thought some features of this pandemic are *harder* than war. But they also thought, by calling it 'war,' we're totally avoiding really *looking* at it

A Pandemic Is Not A War

Relying on tired metaphors to understand an unprecedented crisis is just setting us up for greater suffering.

www.huffpost.com

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

8/n Was the dream that it would suddenly *become* what it claimed to be, but never was--a "Western," rich country--and simultaneously beat poverty and racism? That whites would feel like nothing changed while black people would feel like everything did? This was impossible.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

4 years

I'm an American citizen but live in a house with people who've long voted DA. They don't know what to do anymore. They now have no political home. It's a dangerous tragedy for South Africa that the main opposition party has chosen a role of unrelenting troll.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 months

This is, in fact, far closer to the kind of rhetoric that *provoked* the Rwandan genocide than anything any similar influential Democrat has ever said. Rwandan radio and media celebrities constantly warned their listeners that their *adversaries* were plotting a genocide.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

The Trump backlash is temporarily delicious. But it’ll be a huge pity if the GOP is allowed, in the media, to blame its midterms on Trump. That lets SO MANY PEOPLE skate! Trump isn’t responsible. The whole Republican Party—1000s of officials & influencers—chose its midterm path.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

10 months

40 years old, in the reflection of a photograph of my mother at 39 and me just out of the hospital at three months.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

@fmanjoo Called my Dad Screaming in neighboring apartments He's in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 months

@whitney1234 The ability to sue for defamation is crucial, but defamation threats have become badly overused in ways the public rarely sees. recently I had a piece cut after a meritless defamation threat. I don’t think the suit would’ve been filed, but the pub couldn’t have paid to defend it

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

Talk about the second half of a sentence not being what you expected

Will Sommer

@willsommer

1 year

Staffers for right-wing operative James O'Keefe denounced him in a memo, claiming he's "outright abusive," blew their money on his musical theater dreams, and even took a sandwich from a heavily pregnant woman.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

21/n I was interested to see that the writer who, last week, called South Africa an "orgy of arson and looting" and "incalculably" damaged--as if he was shocked--was the same writer who confessed, in 2010, he never would believe South Africa could manage after apartheid.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

4 months

The DeSantis campaign was incredibly aggressive, combative, and nasty. That shouldn’t be memory-holed. The outright anger, pompousness, messianism, and smears that perpetually streamed from that campaign—it didn’t work. It had a Twitter audience that wasn’t real life.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

16/n A U.S. diplomat who worked on Africa once put it to me: "Either post-colonial Ghana was going to be the next Renaissance--the flowering of new human possibilities for growth, justice, and culture--or it was going to let us all down." Let US down. Think about that phrase.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

19/n Well, it's 2021 and surprise--Kenya is still a country. What took all of about 15 minutes was that news story.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

6/n People use the word “dream” and “miracle” with respect to South Africa as shorthand for accomplishments they wouldn’t want to define more specifically--because if they tried, it would become clear they’re unattainable or incompatible.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

@sugan2503 I’m amazed and so grateful you’re still doing this daily. I have friends who live in countries where nobody’s providing this data, not gov’t’s nor any individuals, and it adds to the feeling of desperation. These tweets are a huge service to many.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 years

20 years ago, I went with my father to shul to observe Yom Kippur: the end of the ten-day Jewish New Year. We sat near the choir, which chanted Avinu Malkeinu: "Our father / answer our prayers / For we have little to commend us." Throughout the service, my father cried. 1/x

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

17/n In the Western press, still, post-colonial African societies can only succeed according to improbable, contradictory terms we never define—to look "Western" while somehow exceeding any Western country in cool factor—or they can fail. Be destroyed. Ruined.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

One thing I hate about Twitter, TikTok, etc is you can just make shit up and have it become an above-the-fold news story when your tall tale actually still wouldn’t get past the most ideological magazine editors.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

You can argue against test-based admissions, but this young woman’s reality is the EXACT opposite of what the OP describes: she’s being taught a lie by her elders that her work doesn’t matter because some “POC” is going to steal what you earned.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

1 year

Five years ago, Cape Town was headed straight for “Day Zero,” the first time a major global city would run out of water. That didn’t happen—but not by accident. How did its gov’t and—notably—its citizens prevent it? I explained the fascinating story here:

The Unlikely Upside of Cape Town's Drought

What are human beings capable of when it feels as if the world is about to end?

highline.huffingtonpost.com

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

11 months

"Being woke [is] deadly," one concluded. "Imagine dying b/c submarine owners wanted diversity," another snarked. No: You could wonder if this is a *lack-of-intellectual-diversity* tragedy. Just on chance, some 17-y-o queer kid was likelier to question its deadly groupthink

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

4/n Often, South Africa--like a wayward teen--is characterized as having frittered or destroyed the dream it inherited from Nelson Mandela. But could this writer define what Mandela's dream was?

Mandela’s Dream for South Africa Is in Ruins

Following the imprisonment of Jacob Zuma, and at a time when inequality is worse than during apartheid, mob violence is threatening the country’s constitutional order.

www.newyorker.com

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

Yes, I know a lot of splashy scientific studies can’t be replicated or extrapolated to humans. But I still love the fact that, when you put one drunk zebrafish in a tank full of sober fish, all the sober fish begin to follow Drunk Fish as their leader.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 years

One way to address the erasure of local journalists @bcsolomon documents here is to abolish the word "fixer." It's a horrible word. First of all, it totally degrades local reporters' work by implying it's just a kind of real-estate staging or light carpentry before the big show--

Ben C. Solomon

@bcsolomon

2 years

Here are some of the headlines from many of the top news networks in the world. All of them without a mention of the slain Ukrainian producer Sasha Kuvshynova. Inexcusable.

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

3 years

18/n And we're so quick to see failure. During Kenya's '08 post-election violence, the NYT wrote: "It took all of about 15 minutes … for [Kenya] to explode, [lose] its sheen as an exemplary democracy and descend into bloodletting." THE NYT CALLED KENYA "LOST" IN 15 MINUTES!

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

5 years

@juliaioffe Haven’t but can we all start calling it “Breitbat” please

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Eve Fairbanks

@evefairbanks

2 years

✨✨SOUTH AFRICA BOOK UPCOMING!✨✨ So happy to say the book I’ve been writing for 10 years will be out July 19! Starred by Publisher's Weekly, it explores what happens when the world's most segregated country suddenly becomes a full democracy. 🧵

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