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President Donald Trump has always been a master marketer. He is particularly adept at lending his name to products and buildings, which has proven to be a lucrative business. Now in office, he’s bringing that same licensing mindset to the very act of governing. Last week, the State Department said it renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) after Trump and put his name on its building in Washington, D.C. This comes after Trump fired the board members and nearly all U.S. employees of the USIP. The USIP’s open, natural-light-drenched headquarters was designed by Safdie Architects to symbolize conflict resolution. But it has ironically become the flashpoint of what former board members have described as a hostile takeover of the federally funded independent nonprofit in Trump’s second term. DOGE staff and police entered the building in March, but USIP took control two months later after a judge ruled the firings were illegal. Then a federal appeals court stayed the ruling in June. The building’s switched hands several times, and with it back in the Trump administration’s hands, they’re looking to make it formal with signage. The US Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, D.C., on Friday, December 5. [Photo: Alex Kent/Bloomberg/Getty Images] The politics of unearned credit The building’s new “Donald J. Trump” signage is just the latest example of a larger trend where Trump has assigned his name to policies and initiatives that he once opposed. For example, Trump campaigned against the infrastructure bill signed into law by then-President Joe Biden in 2021, and yet Trump’s name went up earlier this year on new signage in Seattle for an Amtrak rain project funded by Biden’s bipartisan law. “President Donald J. Trump, Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure,” the bright “Make America Great Again” hat-red sign says. The words, “Funded by the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act,” are written in smaller type below. Then there’s the Nation Park Service (NPS), which Trump has taken an axe to, cutting staff 16.5% and the budget by more than a third. Still, Trump’s image is going on two designs for next year’s annual NPS passes. The Interior Department is also making Trump’s birthday, which falls on Flag Day, one of several “resident-only patriotic fee-free days” to parks next year while dropping it for MLK Day and Juneteenth. When Trump put his name on stimulus checks funded through the CARES ACT, passed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it was unprecedented, the first time a president’s name had appeared on an IRS disbursement. Now, it seems, it’s just politics as usual. The man who once gave us Trump Steaks now seeks to gives us a Trump peace institute, and some might say its good politics. Biden called it “stupid” that he didn’t put his own name on stimulus checks funded through the 2021 American Rescue Plan. But with Trump’s approval at a second-term low of 36%, according to Gallup, these branding efforts don’t exactly seem to be working.
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E-Commerce
Judge a book by its cover, and you might think that American Canto, the memoir by Vanity Fair‘s outgoing West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi, is destined to be a classic. The memoir, which chronicles Nuzzi’s drama-filled life and career as a political reporter in the Trump era, features a strikingly simple cover that serves as shorthand for the book’s ambitions. The intent was to give the book a clean, no-frills design that felt both classic and contemporary, says Simon & Schuster senior art director Alison Forner, whos also designed book covers like Ezra Kleins all-type cover Why Were Polarized and Garrett M. Graffs Watergate: A New History. [Cover Images: Simon & Schuster] Nuzzi’s book features a stark white cover with the title and her name rendered in a serif typeface inspired by fashion magazine typography of the 1980s. The typeface does a lot of work for the book, which appears to be off to a slow start amid the ongoing media storm surrounding its rollout. A political reporter since 2014, Nuzzi was fired last year from New York magazine following an alleged relationship with now-Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Her publisher Simon & Schuster describes the much buzzed-about book by what it’s not: “not a memoir, nor a tell-all, nor a book about the president,” but “a character study of a nation undergoing radical transformation in real time.” Critics have called it a “tell-nothing memoir” that falls short of its ambition and is less interesting than the scandal that surrounds it. [Cover Images: Wiki Commons] Typographic covers using a vintage-inspired font is a surefire way to evoke a classic mid-20th century look, like in covers for John F. Kennedy’s 1956 Profiles in Courage or Robert A. Caro’s 1990 The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. Most bestselling books today, however, use pictures and illustrations. On the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, just two books have type-led covers, and both have numbers in their titles and also use other visual elements. (Andrew Ross Sorkins 1929, about the year’s market crash, uses a cratering market line to divide the bright red cover, and the cover of former Vice President Kamala Harriss 107 Days about her 2024 campaign counts down in serif numerals from 1 to 107 on a blue background.) [Cover Images: PRH, Simon & Schuster] American Canto goes further, relying on just text and a subversively patriotic white, red, and black color palette to communicate its message. I wanted something simple and evocativered, black, and white give the jacket an urgent minimalism, Forner tells Fast Company. Olivia specified wanting a red without blue undertones, and I was more than happy to oblige. To capture the right shade of red, Nuzzi sent still photos of wildflower petals and cropped stills from films by director Martin Scorsese, including a scene in Goodfellas where a bodys in the back trunk of a car and the taillights are lighting up the fog. “When there’s no imagery to rely on, every detail becomes extremely importantfrom the typeface choices and letter spacing, to the negative space and color,” Forner says. “They all need to work on an almost subliminal level to become the ‘voice’ of the book.”
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E-Commerce
Artificial intelligence is the most exhaustively covered technology since the dawn of the internet. As any tech editor will tell you, it can be challenging to find stories about AI that are not merely new but big. So when our editorial director, Jill Bernstein, forwarded me a pitch from journalist John Pavlus, who wanted to write about a mad scientist attempting to stomp out hallucinations and other gen-AI nonsense from Amazons cloud security/ chatbots/robots/agents, I said yes in seconds. (He actually used a more pungent term than nonsense, but for decorums sake, Im keeping that to myself.) And then I braced myself. The pitch promised to explain the abstruse formal mathematics behind neuro-symbolic AI, a totally different kind of AI that is not based on the kind of large language models that power ChatGPT and just about every other AI product that has infiltrated our lives over the past three years. The mad scientist was Byron Cook, who heads up Amazons automated reasoning group. Reader, I trust your intelligence, but this sounded like heady stuff. My concern was not that the piece wouldnt be smart or interesting. It was that you might need to be Byron Cook himself to understand it. I neednt have worried. Ive worked with countless reporters over my three-decade career, and many of them dazzled me with their brilliance. But Im not sure Ive worked with anyone as gifted as Pavlus at translating the difficult into the digestible, let alone the delightful. See his story, Amazon’s hallucination hunter. This article closes out our third annual AI 20 package. For this years list, global technology editor Harry McCracken and senior editor Max Ufberg set out to identify the unheralded scientists and ethicists, CEOs and investors, and Big Tech veterans and first-time founders of the AI universe, as McCracken writes in the introduction. Household names, theyre not. Yet theyre already changing our world, with much more to come. You may have noticed that Ive now spent nearly 300 words touting our AI coverage without using the word bubble. That was intentional, and a bit superstitious. Do you have any idea how nerve-racking it is to produce a quarterly print magazine, in the age of AI, amid one of the frothiest stock markets in history, hoping that the tech reporting will hold? Because of course its a bubble. The question is when it will pop, and how loudly, and how long it will take for the market (and the industry) to recover and settle into a more sustainable trajectory, with costs and revenue in alignment and real value returned to shareholders. A bubble can be a bubble and still be revolutionary, as we learned after the dotcom crash of the early 2000s. Not everyone agrees, of course, especially the publicist, gadfly, podcaster, and mini media mogul Ed Zitron, who has become famous predicting that AI isnt just a bubble but a colossal fraud. He makes his case to McCracken in Meet Ed Zitron, AIs original prophet of doom.
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E-Commerce
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