New York Magazine

[Commentary] At around eight o’clock am Sept 19, anyone in New York City who has emergency alerts turned on got a blaring message on their smartphone. It reads: "WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-yr-old male. See media for pic. Call 9–1–1 if seen." This is an extremely bad push alert to blast across the greater New York area. Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs for short), are to be used, according to the Federal Communications Commission, in three cases: Amber Alerts, alerts from the president, and alerts involving imminent threats to safety. This alert serves none of those purposes. It even acknowledges its own shortcomings: “See media for pic” is a stilted way of saying “Um, Google it.” It provides no useful contextual information, warns of no imminent danger. It essentially deputizes the five boroughs and encourages people to treat anyone who looks like he might be named “Ahmad Khan Rahami” with suspicion. In a country where people are routinely harassed and assaulted for just appearing to be Muslim, this is remarkably ill-advised.

As Rupert Murdoch seeks to stabilize Fox News in the wake of Roger Ailes’s ouster, a crucial question remains unanswered: How was Ailes able to spend millions of dollars to settle sexual-harassment claims without setting off alarm bells? Apparently, part of the answer is that there were few checks on Ailes when it came to the Fox News budget. “It was the culture,” one Fox executive said. “You didn’t ask questions, and Roger wouldn’t entertain questions.” One former News Corp executive explained that because Fox made more than $1 billion in annual profits, the funds that were used for settlements amounted to little more than “a rounding error.”

But with Ailes gone, Fox executives are now looking closely at how Ailes spent Fox money. And what they are discovering is that, beyond the sexual-harassment claims, Ailes was also able to use portions of the Fox budget to hire consultants, political operatives, and private detectives who reported only to him, apparently. Recently, Fox News dismissed five consultants whom Ailes had hired to do work that was more about advancing his own agenda than Fox’s. One of the consultants, Bert Solivan, ran negative PR campaigns against Ailes’s personal and political enemies out of Fox News headquarters.

[Commentary] When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to a Seattle stage to announce a new smartphone called the Amazon Fire, he spent an hour and a half describing feature after feature: unlimited photo storage, 24/7 video support, 13-megapixel camera, a 3-D-like "dynamic perspective" display, a visual-recognition shopping button called Firefly, and dozens more bells and whistles. But there was one question Bezos left unanswered about his new device's feature set. Namely: Could it, you know, make phone calls?

“I haven’t made a phone call on my phone in a long time,” Bezos said. “But I know people still make phone calls.”

Not so much. In fact, the use of voice calls -- which has been dropping since 2007, the year Apple introduced the original iPhone -- has fallen off a cliff lately. As of 2013, cell providers in the US are now making more money per user from data use than voice calling. (The US is only the seventh nation to reach the data-voice tipping point -- it happened in countries like Japan as early as 2011.)

A recent survey of 7,000 US high-school seniors found that only 34 percent made phone calls every day -- far fewer than the number who texted or used apps like Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. And companies like AT&T and Verizon, which saw the data boom coming years ago, have been spending more and more on new, bigger LTE data networks, while essentially giving away their voice plans for free.