++And that you should probably wear shoes. +
++Does anyone have it figured out as well as Fran Lebowitz? She spent the 1970s hanging out with Andy Warhol and writing two books that made her the toast of her generation (1978’s Metropolitan Life and 1981’s Social Studies). Then she claimed writer’s block, hung it all up, and declined to publish anymore. Now she’s in the amorphous career of public speaker: acerbic and crankily funny, but not exactly a standup comic; politically engaged and insightful, but not exactly a pundit. You know. She’s Fran Lebowitz. +
++Ahead of Lebowitz’s speaking event at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre on October 21, I called her up to see if I could get her to give me a piece of her mind. Lebowitz obliged. Together, we discussed whether AI is stealing, what makes art art, and how to build a life you love. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. +
++So you are about to do a new show in conversation with Marlon James at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. Do you know what you’ll be talking about? +
++No, because I don’t ever allow the person interviewing me to tell me what the questions are that he wants to ask me, to cheat. I like to be surprised. +
++Are you a fan of Marlon James’s work? +
++Yes, I am. He’s a wonderful writer, don’t you think? +
++Oh definitely. Although I couldn’t get into the last trilogy that he’s been working on. +
++Well, you know, there’s certain things he writes about — not things, but ways of writing. I don’t know what the word is, I wouldn’t say it’s really science fiction, but it’s not totally realistic. That’s something I’m just not interested in in general. But he’s still wonderful. +
++You’ve been doing this work for about 40 years now. What do you like most about it? +
++Oh, much more [than 40 years]. More, more, more. More. +
++I love answering questions. I mean, I actually love answering questions. And I love the surprise of it. +
++The questions with the audience are, to me, the most fun. The interviewer, that can really vary. Some are very good, some are not very good. But the interview is also more serious, because they prepare and everything, which I do not. With the audience, you just never know. +
++The writers’ strike just ended a couple of weeks ago. What do you think of the deal they got? +
++I’m not in the Writers Guild, so I don’t know all the particulars, but here’s what I’m sure of: They didn’t get enough. Whatever they got, it was unquestionably better than what they were initially offered, but I’m certain it was not enough. +
++People also seem to forget that in the last writers’ strike, which was in 2007, far fewer writers were hired after that. The movie business and TV business has always tried to get rid of writers. Every single person on a movie set thinks they could write. Every single executive certainly does. +
++I’m sure they didn’t get enough, but obviously they got enough that they would settle, because you know, they starve them out. +
++Do you think there’s potential for the studios to try to replace writers with AI? +
++They have tried to replace writers with executives, who know less than AI, believe me. So any way they can replace writers, they would be happy to do so. +
++I don’t have a great understanding of AI, I have to tell you. I mean, I understand it more than I did initially. But as far as I can tell, it’s just stealing. They take a lot of things that writers wrote and then steal them and then mix them up and then put them together in some other way so that it seems like it’s something else. +
++Employers would like to replace every employee if they could. That’s the biggest expense to any business, no matter how poorly they pay the employees. That is the trajectory of capitalism, you know: How can we get the most money with the most profit? That is usually by having the fewest employees. They never think, “Why don’t we replace the executives?” +
++What was the last piece of art you encountered that you thought was really good? +
++It’s kind of hard to say. First of all, I’m certain you’re young, because everyone is. You have a very broad definition of art — I don’t mean you personally; I don’t know you — that very often seems to include pasta. It seems to include food. +
++I love to eat. I’m not saying I don’t. I’m as gluttonous as the next person. But I have a much more, I suppose, more old-fashioned idea of it. +
++What was your question? Which piece of work did I really like or did I think was great? +
++That you thought was really good. +
++Really good. People say things are great all the time. I reserve the word great for actual greatness. +
++I don’t know. I just finished Colson Whitehead’s last book. +
++Oh, I liked that a lot. It felt like he was having fun writing it. +
++I have no idea whether he was having fun writing it, I don’t know him. But I will tell you that I don’t know how old he is. He’s probably by now 50, at least, right? He’s quite a bit younger than I am. But I remember when he first appeared, I thought — because as I’m sure you’ve observed — we live in a world where every week there’s a new genius, despite the fact that it’s simply not true. But when he first appeared and they kept saying how great he was, I thought, “You know what? He actually is extremely talented!” +
++You mentioned you had a more old-fashioned definition of art than is currently in style. What is involved in that definition? +
++I don’t think food is art. I don’t think a baker is an artist. I actually think that great cooks are a boon to mankind. I’m sure you’re not supposed to say mankind anymore. Whatever you’re supposed to say, humanity or whatever. +
++Here’s my definition: Art should be useless. When it has utility, it can be artistic, it can be artful, but it’s not art. +
++This would put a baker in the same category, frankly, as an architect, because an architect has clients. In fact, if you have a client and you’re making something that has use, like a building, then it’s not a pure form like writing or music or painting or stuff or something like that. That’s what I mean. +
++All right, let’s move into a little bit more of a quick-fire thing. You’ve said [in the Martin Scorsese docuseries Pretend It’s a City] that you used to walk around New York barefoot. When did you stop? +
++I was really young when I did that. Truthfully, when I think about that, I realize it was insane even then. Even if I was, say, 19, like, that would be a crazy thing for a 9-year-old, too. It’s amazing I lived through it because frankly, just imagine what the streets of New York will pull up. +
++I wouldn’t say it lasted that long. It probably lasted maybe a month or so. Some people didn’t comment on it at the time, but some people did. I don’t know at which point I thought, “This is insane.” But it was a very stupid thing to do. I would not recommend it. +
++Are there places you like besides New York? +
++Yeah, there are a lot of places I like besides New York. Doesn’t mean I want to live there. There’s no place I would want to live in besides New York. +
++Why is New York the only place you want to live? +
++Because it’s New York. +
++Fair enough! +
++Whenever people ask me why New York, I always say, “Well, have you ever been?” To me, it’s the greatest place to live in the world and that is why I live here. I don’t have to live here. There’s not a law saying you must live in the most expensive place on the planet Earth. But it’s a place that I find to be the best place to live. +
++What is the worst thing you’ve ever seen a tourist do here? +
++Boy, that is such a rough field. Truthfully, anyone who lives in a place with a lot of tourists complains about the tourists. It’s not just New York. It’s because tourists ruin places. It doesn’t matter what the place is. It doesn’t have to be some exquisite, dreamlike city like Venice to be ruined. +
++Tourists are the opposite of residents. They don’t care about the city. They don’t care about it at all. This was true even before phones, but now it seems that people go all over the world just to photograph. Which to me is ridiculous. Truthfully, you can just look at a photograph. You don’t have to actually come and annoy the local people. +
++To me, I suppose the most annoying thing is that they don’t move. I don’t think that’s the worst thing they do. But the fact that they do not move. And they are oblivious to the fact that there are people living here. We have to get places! We have to earn money here so that we can make this place where you can take photographs of yourself standing in front of things. +
++Do you think people’s behavior has gotten worse since Covid? +
++Not that I’ve noticed. I mean, how much worse could it have gotten? +
++What’s gotten worse since Covid, I mean aside from Covid itself, is that I can no longer guess how long it takes to get anywhere. I used to know exactly how long it took to get from one place to the other, walking or by subway or cab, and now you could not possibly guess. You just can’t. The subway used to come every five minutes and now they come every three hours. There could be massive traffic. Yesterday I was in a car and I had to go uptown and it took an hour. It should have taken 15 minutes! You never know. There’s no rush hours anymore. +
++I know a lot of people think of your life as very glamorous and aspirational. Is there anything that you think a person needs to know to build a life by themselves that they love? +
++I have no idea. +
++Here’s the thing. Lots of kids — I’m sure you’re not a kid, but to me, you’re a kid — they come to see me speak or they talk to me in the street. They are so organized. +
++I never thought about anything in the future when I was young. I barely think about it now. I’m just not that organized. And in general people my age were not that organized when we were young. +
++These kids are incredibly organized. Which is in some way, I guess, good. But in another way, it’s bad because it definitely engenders anxiety, you know? And then I can see, and people are seeing, that kids are anxious. I think this is one of the reasons they are anxious. +
++Don’t worry about the future. Instead, savor the fact that you’re young. Because let me assure you, life does not get better and better. Just stop thinking about it. And just have fun. +
++Biden has avoided Middle East peacemaking. Now, it’s the only path forward. +
++President Joe Biden’s quick visit on Wednesday to wartime Israel was designed as a show of support for the close US ally, one that inspired confidence in Israel as it pursues its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza. His presence, it was thought, would calm things down. +
++But that only addresses one side of the conflict. If Biden fails to do everything he can to curtail the violence now, say analysts and insiders, his visit may ultimately damage the United States’ standing in the Middle East and its ability to lead in the world. That’s because the short-, medium-, and long-term implications of Israel’s operation against Gaza, should it continue unabated, will be much worse than the political risks Biden would need to take to secure a ceasefire and invest in a sustainable political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. +
++As Biden boarded the plane to Israel on Tuesday, an explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City killed at least 471 people. The cause remains unclear and hotly disputed; the Gaza Health Ministry blamed an Israeli strike, while Israel pointed the finger at the armed group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The White House National Security Council released a rare statement on its intelligence-gathering, largely siding with Israel: “our current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday.” +
++In any case, that preliminary conclusion, which has yet to be independently verified, will do nothing to contain the massive demonstrations in the Arab world sparked by the fatal explosion, as well as the ongoing bombing of Gaza. Even as Biden was en route to Israel, anger over the deaths also led Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestine Liberation Organization to cancel a planned summit in Amman that would have been the second leg of his trip. That Egypt and Jordan — close security partners of the US — would snub Biden was a major embarrassment for the president. +
++In Israel, though, Biden spoke more forwardly about Palestinian rights than he had previously, stating clearly that “we mourn the loss of innocent Palestinian lives.” He pledged $100 million of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza. But even that shift contrasted with the US’s efforts at the United Nations, where US diplomats vetoed a resolution calling for a humanitarian pause in the fighting. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said it would undermine the US’s diplomatic initiatives in the conflict. +
++“It’s clear that they don’t have a full appreciation for the humanitarian disaster unfolding before us in Gaza,” Khaled Elgindy of the Middle East Institute told me. Palestinians “have been completely stripped of their humanity, and that’s been normalized.” +
++Elgindy’s recommendations for the Biden administration are straightforward. “Call for a ceasefire,” he explained. “Tell Israel to turn the lights back on. Electricity, water, food — all of that should be unlimited. Don’t push people out of Gaza. Don’t let Israel go in on the ground. Put some guardrails and clear red lines about protecting civilians.” +
++Elgindy calls these policies “obvious, minimal stuff” that might have been possible under previous administrations. But the sheer scale of Hamas’s attacks on October 7 and the ongoing hostage crisis, as well as significant fractures within the domestic politics of Israel, Palestine, and the United States, can make even minimal policies seem impossible. +
++But if the unprecedented scale of human suffering among Palestinians doesn’t get the attention of Washington policymakers, then perhaps the potential for massive blowback across the Arab world will make the difference. +
++Where US policy stands after the Biden trip +
++Former US officials who were involved in the Iraq War are already proposing ideas for Gaza’s postwar planning, including reviving the Palestinian Authority’s administration of Gaza. But the focus on the day after misses what is happening to Palestinians right now. +
++“Nobody knows what the day after is because nobody knows what the day of is,” Elgindy told me. +
++Israel itself has not articulated its goals beyond getting rid of Hamas, which seems to contradict the vast human toll Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing. The experts I called are particularly concerned that the lack of a strong US perspective on that question is effectively enabling a military campaign based on revenge, not a bigger strategy. +
++“If Israel’s going to ask the world to support it as it does what it feels it needs to do to root out Hamas, that support should be contingent on understanding what its plan is at the back end,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Israel advocacy group J Street, told me. +
++Without such clarity, the risks of the war spilling into other countries only grows. And it is dire. Arab citizens came out to protest en masse in the middle of the night in capitals across the Middle East, and Arab governments appear frustrated with Biden’s tepid response to the situation in Gaza. The militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon poses a particularly acute danger should it get involved. And Lebanese citizens are already holding America responsible. Protesters outside the US Embassy in Beirut — an intensely fortified compound — threw rocks and lit fires. “We’re officially off the rails at this point,” Zaha Hassan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told me. +
++Adjusting the administration’s language to humanize Palestinians is an important first step, said Hassan. And the Biden administration is slowly and cautiously tweaking its rhetoric. “Civilian lives must be protected and assistance must urgently reach those in need,” the White House said in a statement announcing the $100 million of aid. +
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Yuri Cortez/AFP via Getty Images
++But nothing can move forward without a ceasefire, Hassan says, and without urgent humanitarian relief reaching Palestinians in Gaza, where there have been 3,478 fatalities, 12,500 injuries, and 1 million internally displaced people as of October 18, according to the UN. +
++Only a bigger strategic rethink that focuses on a resolution to the core conflict between Israelis and Palestinians will bring security to the people there. “The festering nature of the Palestinian issue is what brought us to this moment,” Hassan told me. Beyond appointing an envoy to address the humanitarian situation, “the administration needs to start thinking about rolling up its sleeves, and starting to think about how it’s going to build an international or a multilateral coalition of folks to work on a political solution.” +
++What Biden could do now +
++President Biden came into office with a team of advisers who were adamant that the US could focus on countering China and Russia in the world, and finally pivot away from the Middle East. +
++Ten days of unprecedented war have shown how farcical that was. Biden has said before that when it comes to domestic policy, he’s all about going big. Foreign policy is trickier — there’s not a strong domestic constituency for radically changing US statecraft, and the inertia of carrying on with outdated policies is difficult to escape. +
++But the Israel-Hamas war exposes a basic truth: Ignoring Palestine, as both the US and Israel have been guilty of doing, will make the Middle East more combustible. “There’s no way for this spiraling cycle of never-ending violence to ever end if there isn’t a state of Palestine,” Ben-Ami of J Street told me. +
++Ben-Ami said that Biden could recalibrate his message. “I think there’s a space here for the president, and perhaps it’s in concert with other world leaders, to articulate where they think things have to go when the fighting stops,” he told me. “And I think that may be important to put out there, even as the fighting is ongoing.” (J Street, for its part, hasn’t called for a ceasefire, and 100 former members of the advocacy group have urged it to do so.) +
++What Palestinians need is not more economic peace, the main focus of the remarkably unambitious policy of outgoing US ambassador to Israel Tom Nides. And it’s not empty talk of a two-state solution that seems further than ever from reality. “Out of this rubble and out of this disaster, the world has to be committed to actually building a real state” for Palestinians, Ben-Ami said. “That may be a 20-year Marshall Plan–style investment, and it means not only rebuilding the physical infrastructure and building out an economy, but building a viable political structure.” +
++As Biden himself put it in Tel Aviv, “We must keep pursuing a path so that Israel and the Palestinian people can both live safely, in security, in dignity, and in peace.” +
++Waiting at the trailhead of that path, however, will only make the situation worse. “Neglect isn’t going to make these things go away, and it’s a very explosive situation,” Hassan said. Though Biden has largely stayed out of the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking game, he can no longer avoid it. +
++
++Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is easy to find online. Here’s how to avoid spreading it. +
++After Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on Israel on October 7, killing at least 1,000 and taking at least 150 hostages, and Israel declared war against Hamas and retaliated, photographs and videos of violence flooded out of the region and onto social media. Some of the images were posted by victims on the ground at the attacks. Some were reportedly seeded by Hamas, but others were years old, taken from conflict zones in other parts of the world, or even from a fictional video game. For the average internet user, knowing what information to trust online has never been more challenging. +
++Complicating matters even further are the ways in which unconfirmed reports are outpacing the process of verification, finding their way into news coverage and the statements of elected officials, further fueling online falsehoods and confusion. “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” President Joe Biden said last week, referring to widely circulated but as yet unconfirmed reports of Hamas militants beheading infants during the initial attack. The White House later said that Biden had not seen any such pictures and had not independently confirmed reports about the beheading. +
++As someone who has covered misinformation through dozens of major news events, I know that people flock to social media during a crisis for many reasons. Maybe it’s because the mainstream news doesn’t feel fast or immediate enough, or because the crisis has put them or someone close to them in harm’s way and they need help. Perhaps they want to see and share and say something that captures the reality of an important moment in time because they don’t know what else to do when the world is on fire. Misinformation and manipulation often spread for the same reasons, slipping into the feeds of those who believe it can’t hurt to share a startling video or gruesome photograph or call for aid, even if they’re not sure of the reliability of the source. +
++When war goes online, the churn of good and bad information is supercharged by the stakes. While state-sponsored information wars existed well before the invention of the internet, social media has enabled all kinds of propaganda and dangerous falsehoods to rapidly reach millions. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, for example, livestreamers and scammers reposted old videos to TikTok, claiming they showed the latest from the front lines, in order to get views and trick people into donating to fake fundraisers. +
++Journalists have had a difficult time following up on video-fueled updates about the situation in Gaza circulating on social media because it is extremely dangerous to be reporting in the region right now. Many news outlets have reporters working from Israel to cover the conflict. Correspondents on the ground in Gaza are trying to keep themselves and their families alive during the Israeli bombing campaign in retaliation for the Hamas attack. +
++For example, Hamas and Israel have traded blame over a deadly hospital bombing in Gaza City. Hamas is blaming Israel, though US intelligence officials have said, based off initial intelligence, that they think Israel’s assertion that the bombing was the result of a misfired rocket from a militant group in Gaza is correct. Neither version of events has been independently confirmed. And yet, false confirmations on both sides are proliferating, whether from a random X account pretending to be a reporter or a statement from a member of Congress. +
++Last year, I wrote a guide to being online in wartime to help people navigate the misinformation around Russia’s war in Ukraine. A lot of the advice about how to quickly evaluate a river of online information hasn’t changed much over the years. But social media has changed quite a bit in just a few months and some of the old tricks for verifying unreliable posts need to be modified or unlearned altogether. +
++This is particularly true on X, formerly known as Twitter, which was once a central destination for those who wanted to follow major news events in real time. Elon Musk, the platform’s owner and CTO, spent the hours after Hamas attacked Israel spreading misinformation about the conflict and even told his 150 million followers to get news on the attack from two verified accounts that have a clear history of sharing false information. Musk’s recommendation had at least 11 million views before it was deleted, according to the Washington Post. This is after Musk spent months diminishing the platform’s capacity to moderate against misinformation and hate speech. +
++Since the initial attack, X users circulated a fabricated White House memo that claimed the US government was sending $8 billion in aid to Israel. An account posing as the Jerusalem Post fueled a false rumor that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in the hospital. And because Twitter’s verification system has been repurposed into a premium badge for paying subscribers, who also get boosted engagement with their tweets, it’s now relatively easy to buy eyeballs on X and imitate expertise on the platform. +
++Misinformation is an exhausting topic, one that’s difficult to define, and on some platforms, including X, tackling misinformation is no longer a company priority to address. So, increasingly, it’s up to you to sort through the mess. No online guide will fully protect you against the bad and untrue stuff online. But there are things you can do to navigate the online chaos that follows a major news event. +
++Understand the platform you’re on +
++Many large social media platforms have shifted back to prioritizing engagement over reliability for the posts their users see on their feeds. That has created a friendlier environment for online nonsense and coordinated disinformation. The situation is certainly made worse by the transformation of Twitter, once a useful news feed, into X, something drastically different. +
++X is much less trustworthy and useful these days during breaking news, and evaluating sources on the platform is trickier. On X, a blue check mark once meant that the platform had verified the identity of the person or people behind the account, or that the account officially belonged to an organization. But the badge no longer serves as a verification of identity; it’s now a feature for X’s paying users, who also get better engagement and features, putting their posts in front of more people. Some verified users are also part of a program that pays them based on their engagement on X, so for them, going viral literally pays off. +
++Plenty of blue-checked X users have indeed been sharing misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war. Some claim to be sharing footage of the war in action when in fact they are just repurposing clips from a video game and getting millions of views. Those videos are also getting views on TikTok. +
++TikTok has, in some ways, stepped into the role Twitter once had as the key social media app that people turn to in order to follow a major news event. The app, which many think of as an entertainment platform, is very different from Twitter in the 2010s, when it was a must-read for breaking news. While Twitter anointed its share of expert influencers, creators are the main conduit for news on TikTok. The app’s news creators build fandoms around their personalities and promise of independence from, say, mainstream sources. All that said, TikTok also has issues with misinformation. +
++And then there’s Telegram, one of the platforms Hamas is using to release violent footage. Telegram, which is part group chat and part social media platform, is popular globally, has few moderation practices, and has long been a home for extremists and conspiracy theorists who have left or been banned from more mainstream platforms. More on that later. +
++Learn to SIFT +
++The SIFT method, developed by digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield, is a good framework for learning how to evaluate emotionally charged or outrage-inducing online posts in the middle of an unfolding crisis. There are two reasons I like it: First, it’s adaptable to a lot of situations. And second, the goal here isn’t a full fact-check. SIFT is meant to be a quick series of checks that anyone can do in order to decide how much of your attention to give what you’re seeing and whether you feel comfortable sharing a post with others. +
++The SIFT method breaks down to four steps: “Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.” That “Stop” step can do a lot of work during a major, violent conflict like the Israel-Hamas war. People get engagement on questionable or untrue posts during breaking news by tugging on your emotions and beliefs. So if a video, photograph, or post about the war seems to confirm everything you’ve ever believed about a topic or makes you immediately furious or hopeful or upset, stop yourself from instantly sharing it. +
++Then, investigate the source. This can be done pretty quickly. Click on the account sharing the thing you saw and glance at their information and previous posts. You’re not launching a full-scale investigation here. You’re just trying to get a sense of who has ended up in your feed. Next, find better coverage. That means you open up a bunch of tabs. Is this being reported anywhere else by trustworthy news sources? Has this claim been fact-checked? And finally, trace the source. Open up the news article and run a search for a phrase in the quote you’re about to share. See if you can find that image attributed elsewhere, and make sure the captions describe the same thing. +
++Check in with yourself +
++During acts of unfathomable violence, videos of death and maiming circulate online with the imperative to witness. Please understand that you do not have to view violent footage circulating online in order to process a horrible event, whether you feel you can handle seeing it or not. +
++Check in with yourself and think critically about the role you want to play on- and offline in a moment like this. That might mean resisting the impulse to become an instant breaking news reporter in your group chat. If you don’t have the skill set to evaluate for accuracy the videos of on-the-ground footage in a neighborhood you’ve never visited, you’re not likely to develop it in a matter of minutes. +
++I’ve tried to avoid giving specific instructions in this guide in terms of what platforms to use or not use as a regular person trying to get news. I’m going to make one now: Especially if you’re unfamiliar with Telegram, now is not the time to indulge in your curiosity and dive into the app looking for “raw” footage and live updates. In addition to the risk of encountering and engaging with literal propaganda, Telegram is notoriously bad at surfacing good information. +
++Your attention is valuable +
++Online falsehoods need attention and amplification to work. You might not have a big account with a ton of followers, but every reshare matters, both to the circle of people who see your posts online and to the engagement numbers for the original post. Interacting with something on social media — whether a cautious share “in case” it’s true or a repost to point out that something definitely isn’t — signals to the site’s algorithms that you’re interested in that content. In other words, outrage shares are still shares, even if you’re talking about a bad analysis, an unsourced photograph, or an outright lie. +
++Update, October 18, 6:10 pm ET: This story, originally published on October 12, has been updated to include details on the bombing of a Gaza hospital and the confusion over reports that Hamas militants were beheading children in Israel. +