Steven Zeitchik

1 week ago | mindandiron.substack.com | Steven Zeitchik

Hi and welcome back to another tangy episode of Mind and Iron. I'm Steven Zeitchik, veteran of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, senior editor of tech and politics at The Hollywood Reporter and head lifeguard at this newsy pool. Every week we bring you word from our fast-accelerating future, without spin or hype. Please think about joining our community. A very happy Juneteenth. What better way to celebrate a holiday than with a little newslettering?

1 week ago | hollywoodreporter.com | Steven Zeitchik

When Mike Duggan took office as mayor of Detroit in 2014, the city stood on shaky ground. The core industry was fleeing, homelessness was skyrocketing and an iconic American town looked ragged around the edges. It was, in other words, a little like present-day Los Angeles. Duggan helped orchestrate a turnaround that now sees a lot of those problems reversed, one of the great urban comebacks of recent American history.

1 week ago | hollywoodreporter.com | Steven Zeitchik

Cooking? Sure. Makeup? Of course. Minecraft? We can think of a few hate follows. But when it comes to tech and science, “influencer” isn’t necessarily the job that flies into our minds. That’s a mistake — not only because tech and science are defining our future, but because there’s a slew of personalities with tons of followers who are worth paying attention to, creators who are explaining, and in many cases shaping, what our lives will soon look like.

2 weeks ago | hollywoodreporter.com | Steven Zeitchik

Nearly two decades ago, Wired journalist Chris Anderson wrote The Long Tail, in which he forecast a radical reordering of our consumption patterns. Anderson’s best-seller hypothesized that technology platforms would allow people to discover obscure or older material while simultaneously allowing businesses to display that material in a way the linear world, with its limited space, never could. Suddenly, products that would have fallen off quickly could hang around with durability.

2 weeks ago | hollywoodreporter.com | Steven Zeitchik

And so it begins…. And it finally happened…. Those were the two reactions —  seemingly opposite, actually harmonious —  to the news that Disney and Universal had finally bitten the bullet Wednesday and sued an AI company, the startup image-generator Midjourney. It had, after all, been nearly 18 months since The New York Times dropped the first shoe, suing OpenAI and its backer Microsoft in December 2023 over alleged unlawful training of its models on Times journalism.