Business
William Langewiesche, the ‘Steve McQueen of Journalism,’ Dies at 70
William Langewiesche, a magazine writer and author who forged complex narratives with precision-tooled prose that shed fresh light on national security, the occupation of Iraq and, especially, aviation disasters — he was a professional pilot — died on Sunday in East Lyme, Conn. He was 70.
Cullen Murphy, his longtime editor at The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, confirmed the death, at the home of a friend, saying the cause was prostate cancer.
Mr. Langewiesche (pronounced long-gah-vee-shuh) was one of the most prominent long-form nonfiction writers of recent decades. He was an international correspondent for Vanity Fair, a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine and a national correspondent for The Atlantic.
For 10 years running, from 1999 to 2008, his pieces were finalists for the National Magazine Award, and he won it twice: in 2007 for “Rules of Engagement,” about the killing of 24 unarmed civilians by U.S. Marines in 2005 in Haditha, Iraq; and in 2002 for “The Crash of EgyptAir 990,” about a flight that went down in the Atlantic Ocean in 1999 with the loss of all 217 people aboard.
He chose to write often about calamitous events, piecing together a meticulous explanation for what went wrong while portraying the human subjects under his microscope with sympathy.
“At his best there’s a sort of cinematic omniscience in the way he writes,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview. “And so you feel almost as he feels, with your face pressed up against the window watching something unfold, often very rapidly, and often wishing that things would unfold very differently but knowing there’s nothing that can be done.”
Mr. Langewiesche’s account of the EgyptAir crash in 1999, which was profoundly enriched by his own aviation background, blamed a suicidal co-pilot. Egyptian officials refused to accept that conclusion, a response, he wrote, that was rooted in political and cultural chauvinism.
Mr. Langewiesche learned to fly as a boy and worked as a commercial pilot early on to support his literary ambition. He drew on his aviation expertise in a number of articles and books that laid out highly technical subjects in lucid prose.
Writing about Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III’s famous landing of a commercial airliner in the Hudson River in 2009, Mr. Langewiesche made the case that that injury-free belly flop was a testament more to modern airplane technology than to the heroism of the pilot.
Captain Sullenberger took issue with that account, telling The New York Times that Mr. Langewiesche’s book about the episode, “Fly by Wire,” contained “misstatements of fact.”
Reviewing “Fly by Wire” in The Times, the book critic Dwight Garner wrote, “Written quickly, it lacks some of the eloquence and steely control of Mr. Langewiesche’s earlier books.” Mr. Garner called Mr. Langewiesche “the Steve McQueen of American journalism,” referring to the author’s muscular prose style and often gripping subject matter.
In other projects — pursued thanks to editors who allowed him months for reporting and writing — Mr. Langewiesche wrote an account in The Atlantic in 2006 about how terrorists might obtain a nuclear bomb; another article, also in The Atlantic, in 2004, dissected the sinking of a ferry in the Baltic Sea a decade earlier.
His 2002 book, “American Ground: Unbuilding The World Trade Center,” based on a three-part series in The Atlantic, was reported over six months at ground zero as he meticulously covered the cleanup after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Not all of his work described life and death dramas. His profile of Robert M. Parker Jr. in The Atlantic, “The Million-Dollar Nose,” opened with the enticing line: “The most influential critic in the world today happens to be a critic of wine.”
Closer to form, he wrote about another aviation mystery: the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines flight with 277 passengers over the Indian Ocean in 2014, an article that generated enormous readership for The Atlantic.
The plane remained aloft for hours after someone in the cockpit shut down its communication signals, then plunged into the Indian Ocean.
Mr. Langewiesche hypothesized a scenario in which a pilot intent on murder-suicide had asphyxiated his passengers by climbing to 40,000 feet while depressurizing the cabin, then cruised onward until the fuel ran out and the plane plummeted.
“The scene would have been dimly lit by the emergency lights,” Mr. Langewiesche wrote, imagining those hours in chilling detail, “with the dead belted into their seats, their faces nestled in the worthless oxygen masks dangling on tubes from the ceiling.”
Of the captain, the last living soul in the plane, he wrote, “The cockpit is the deepest, most protective, most private sort of home.”
William Archibald Langewiesche was born on June 12, 1955, in Sharon, Conn. His mother, Priscila (Coleman) Langewiesche, was a computer analyst. His father, Wolfgang Langewiesche, a German-born émigré, was a test pilot for the maker of the Corsair fighter used by the U.S. Navy; he wrote a classic book on flying, “Stick and Rudder,” in the 1940s.
William, a late child, had an adult sister and brothers when he was growing up. His father taught him to fly before the boy could see over the instrument panel. Later, as an undergraduate at Stanford University, Mr. Langewiesche helped pay his way through college by piloting air taxis and charters.
After earning a degree in anthropology, he moved to New York City and worked for Flying magazine. But he quit the job because he aspired to write literary nonfiction, in part inspired by The New Yorker writer John McPhee. While struggling to be published, Mr. Langewiesche supported himself as a corporate pilot.
“Other people trying to break into writing have to work as waiters,” he told Aviation News in 2001, “and I considered myself as having a technical skill — like a welder — that I could use to support myself.”
His breakthrough came in 1991, when The Atlantic published as its November cover story his article “The World in Its Extreme,’’ a 17,000-word travelogue and natural history of the Sahara Desert. He went on to write for the magazine as a national correspondent for 15 years. In 2006, he became an international correspondent for Vanity Fair, where he contributed two to four lengthy articles a year through 2019.
Mr. Langewiesche married Anne-Marie Girard in 1977, and they had two children. The marriage ended in divorce in 2017, and the following year, he married Tia Cibani, who survives him.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son Matthew and his daughter Anna Langewiesche, both from his first marriage; his son Archibald and his daughter Castine Langewiesche, from his second marriage; and his sister, Lena Langewiesche. He lived in North Salem, N.Y., in Westchester County.
In a 2007 interview with Mediabistro, an online career site for designers and writers, Mr. Langewiesche described his method. Instead of reading exhaustively about a subject and writing questions for interviews in advance, he preferred to plunge right into a subject “with very little preparation, intentionally somewhat naïve about it.”
“I just talk to people and listen carefully and respond to what they’re saying and try to give of myself as much as I’m asking them to give of themselves, so that a true conversation can develop,” he said. “These conversations typically will go on for weeks, on and off. Sometimes I take notes.”
The real work, he said, came later when he sat down to write.
“Writing is thinking; writing is a form of thought,” he said. “It’s difficult for me to believe that real thought is possible without writing.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Among the government programs that produce more confusion than benefits, H-1B visas are right up there.
If you’ve been hearing about H-1B visas, it’s probably because President Trump abruptly changed its rules with a proclamation on Sept. 19.
As is typical of Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip policy-making, the proclamation produced an outbreak of fear and chaos, in this case among holders of the visas. That’s because it seemed at first that the administration was imposing a $100,000 fee not only on applicants for the visas, but on current holders reentering the U.S. from abroad, say from home leave or a business trip.
This is a de facto ban, as few organizations will be able to afford it.
— Robert D. Atkinson, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Until the White House clarified that the charge would be a one-time fee for new H-1B applications, not charged annually or for renewals or reentry, holders were advised by some employers not to leave the U.S. for the present; those who were caught off-guard overseas scurried to get home by Sunday, when the fee began.
A Sept. 19 Emirates flight from San Francisco to Dubai had to abort its departure to allow several panicky passengers to debark, according to Bloomberg.
The administration’s subsequent assurances have quelled the panic. But the proclamation has created new befuddlements, including over whether it opens the door to illicit dealings between Trump and companies bidding for the visas, and whether it’s even legal.
As my colleagues Queenie Wong and Nilesh Christopher reported, there are concerns that “a selective application of the fee could be a way the White House can reward its friends and punish its detractors.”
Importantly, there’s room to question whether the proclamation will solve long-standing problems with H-1B visas. So let’s take a look at the program’s malodorous history.
H-1B visas were created in 1990, under President George H.W. Bush, to relieve what high-tech companies asserted was a chronic shortage of U.S.-born workers in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math).
The idea was to give highly-skilled foreign workers in “specialty occupations” the right to three years of U.S. residence renewable for a further three years — an opportunity to obtain permanent residency or even citizenship.
After a few rounds of tweaking, the annual cap on new applications was set at 85,000, including 20,000 holders of advanced degrees from U.S. universities. Higher education and nonprofit research institutions are exempt from the cap.
Things didn’t work out as anticipated. U.S. employers came to see the H-1B visas as tools to replace native-born technicians with cheaper foreign workers. Scandalously, some of the American workers were required as conditions of their severance to train the newcomers to do their jobs.
I documented that practice at Southern California Edison in 2015. The giant utility acknowledged that the outsourcing of workers would cost the jobs of 500 technicians who did the work of installing, maintaining and managing Edison’s computer hardware and software for payroll and billing, dispatching and electrical load management.
Essentially, Edison was replacing domestic IT specialists earning $80,000 to $160,000 with workers provided by two India-based outsourcing firms, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, which were paying their recruits $65,000 to $71,000. By the time the outsourcing process was complete, Edison said, its IT expenses would fall by about 20%.
“They told us they could replace one of us with three, four, or five Indian personnel and still save money,” one laid-off Edison worker told me at the time, recounting a group meeting with supervisors. “They said, ‘We can get four Indian guys for cheaper than the price of you.’ You could hear a pin drop in the room.”
Then there’s the University of California, which announced in 2016 that it would lay off 49 career IT staffers and eliminate 48 other IT jobs that were vacant or filled by contract employees. The American workers were ordered to train their own replacements, who were employees of the Indian outsourcing firm HCL Technologies.
Although the visa law specified that hiring foreign workers would not harm American workers, “the H-1B program is most definitely harming American workers, harming them badly, and on a large scale,” Ronil Hira of Howard University, an expert in the visa program, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2015. “Most of the H-1B program is now being used to import cheaper foreign guestworkers, replacing American workers, and undercutting their wages.”
The high-tech industry’s dirty little secret, I reported, was that the STEM shortage was a myth. The same companies wringing their hands over the supposed dearth of STEM-qualified workers were simultaneously laying them off by the tens of thousands. Indeed, experts in technology employment consistently found that “the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry,” one told me. Anyway, a significant portion of H-1B recruits weren’t in jobs demanding unique skills, but workaday technicians.
Since 2020, the top employer of H-1B visa holders has been Amazon, with a total of 43,375 workers over that period — followed closely by the Indian outsource companies Infosys and Tata. In the current fiscal year, Amazon reigns, with more than 14,000 H-1B holders, followed by Tata, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Apple and Google. I asked Amazon why it needs so many foreign workers and what work they do, but didn’t receive a reply.
The Indian outsourcing firms have dominated the H-1B system since at least 2009. For years their role has stoked controversy, in part because their employment practices have come under question.
In court, government prosecutors and civil plaintiffs have alleged that Infosys and Tata were exploiting the guest workers they brought to the U.S. Infosys settled federal fraud charges with a $34-million payment in 2013, the largest penalty in an immigration case at that time. The company denied the allegations.
That same year, Tata settled a class action lawsuit with a $29.8-million payment. The plaintiffs alleged that workers imported by Tata were forced to sign over their federal and state tax refunds to Tata, among other claims. The company didn’t admit wrongdoing.
Over the years, the H-1B program has made for political controversy, though Congress hasn’t taken a firm hand in correcting its issues. Conservatives and progressives alike have found reason to complain that it undermines domestic employment. Near the end of his first term, Trump shut down H-1B issuance entirely, along with some other specialty visa programs, but his initiative was blocked in federal court.
But the program remains enormously popular in the high-tech world, which has long agitated for an expansion. Its fans include Elon Musk, who tweeted in December that “the reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H-1B.” He underscored his position with a burst of profanity, but he did promise to “go to war on this issue,” although he acknowledged that some fixing is in order.
That brings us to the issues with Trump’s proclamation. Its shortcomings resemble those that prompted federal Judge Jeffrey S. White of Oakland to overturn Trump’s ban in 2020 in a case brought by the National Assn. of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among others.
White ruled that the authority to change the terms of the visas belonged to Congress, not the president, and that the administration hadn’t evaluated the effect of the ban on the domestic economy, as federal law required. The case was rendered moot when Trump’s ban was reversed by President Biden. I asked the White House if it was concerned that this proclamation could also be blocked in court, but got no reply.
A bigger question concerns the ramifications of the $100,000 fee. “H-1B visa fees of this magnitude will strongly discourage the hiring of the most talented members of the global labor force,” says University of Chicago economist Steven Durlauf. Instead, the policy will create incentives to move high-tech and scientific activity to other countries, effectively offshoring economic activity that should occur in the U.S., he says.
The fee is so high that only the biggest and richest employers will be able to pay it, locking out small start-ups that have tried to use H-1B visas to build their professional teams. The proclamation doesn’t make clear whether universities and research institutions will be exempt from the fee. Even financially well-endowed universities would find it hard to justify paying $100,000 to import a faculty member from abroad.
“This is a de facto ban, as few organizations will be able to afford it,” says Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a high-tech think tank.
The White House says it intends to replace the current system, a random lottery apportioning available H-1B slots among all applicants, with one favoring applications to fill the highest-paid slots.
The proclamation states that H-1B abuses “present a national security threat by discouraging Americans from pursuing careers in science and technology, risking American leadership in these fields.” Never mind that students considering careers in scientific and technical fields are being profoundly discouraged by Trump’s freezes on research funding across the scientific landscape.
So the bottom line is that, as is usual, Trump’s H-1B policy works at cross-purposes with his other initiatives. For decades, the H-1B program has been ripe for fixing. If only the Trump White House took the time to craft a sensible repair.
ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show on Wednesday after conservatives expressed outrage over a monologue the host had given two days earlier.
Here’s an excerpt from Mr. Kimmel’s monologue:
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.
The suspension was the latest demonstration of how members of the Trump administration have been able to influence the operations of media companies without imposing new policies. In this case, a broadcaster that is pursuing a $6 billion merger, which must be approved by the Federal Communications Commission, put pressure on ABC before the network’s parent company, Disney, announced its decision to suspend Mr. Kimmel’s show.
1:00 p.m. E.T. on Wednesday, Aug. 5
Podcast video circulates of the F.C.C. chairman threatening ABC and calling on local affiliates to pull Mr. Kimmel’s program.
Hours before ABC made the announcement, the F.C.C. chairman, Brendan Carr, said on a right-wing podcast that local ABC stations should “push back” and “pre-empt” coverage that does not serve “their local communities.” (Pre-empting, in broadcast terms, refers to replacing programming with another show in advance of its airing.)
Mr. Carr also told the podcast’s host, Benny Johnson, that the F.C.C. might take action against ABC.
“When you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action frankly on Kimmel or you know there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead. …”
“I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘Listen, we are going to pre-empt.’”
6:11 p.m.
Nexstar, which owns ABC affiliate stations, announces it will not air Mr. Kimmel’s program.
After the podcast interview, Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC affiliate stations, announced that it would “pre-empt ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ for the foreseeable future,” and added: “Nexstar strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk.”
Nexstar has good reason to try to appease the F.C.C. at the moment: In August, the company announced that it intended to buy one of its competitors, Tegna, which owns 13 ABC affiliate stations. But in order for the deal to go through, Mr. Carr and the F.C.C. would have to not only approve it, but also potentially raise the nationwide cap on the percentage of households a single entity’s television stations are allowed to reach.
Broadcasters have pushed the government for decades to raise or repeal the cap, which is currently set at 39 percent. If the Nexstar-Tegna deal goes through, Nexstar’s reach is likely to exceed the limit.
Shortly after Nexstar’s announcement, Sinclair, a company that owns 31 ABC affiliate stations, said it would also suspend Mr. Kimmel’s program.
Of ABC’s 205 affiliate stations, 63 are owned by Nexstar and Sinclair, and another 13 are owned by Tegna.
Together, they make up about 37 percent of all of ABC’s local affiliates.
Approximately 6:30 p.m.
ABC says it will suspend Mr. Kimmel’s program “indefinitely.”
Minutes after Nexstar’s announcement, and just hours after Mr. Carr’s podcast appearance, ABC announced that it was suspending Mr. Kimmel’s program “indefinitely.”
It was unclear how big a role, if any, the plans for pre-empting by Nexstar played in Disney’s decision. (Sinclair did not publicly announce that it would also pre-empt the program until after Disney’s decision was made public.)
7:00 p.m.
F.C.C. chairman thanks Nexstar on social media, shortly after the company announced it would pre-empt Mr. Kimmel.
“I want to thank Nexstar for doing the right thing.”
As the outrage over Mr. Kimmel’s comments grew, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, along with a close lieutenant, had been hearing from worried advertisers, people familiar with the decision told The New York Times this week.
Last year, Mr. Trump sued ABC’s news division for defamation. ABC settled with the president in December, a rare and significant concession by a major news organization as the president grew increasingly antagonistic to media companies he viewed as critical of him and his allies.
Before Mr. Kimmel’s show was set to begin taping Wednesday, the people familiar with Disney’s decision said, executives had grown concerned that another opening monologue could further inflame the situation. So they made the call for the show to go dark — at least temporarily.
Business
Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery sue Chinese AI firm as Hollywood's copyright battles spread
Walt Disney Co., Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday sued a Chinese artificial intelligence firm called MiniMax for copyright infringement, alleging its AI service generates famous characters including Darth Vader, the Minions and Wonder Woman without the studios’ permission.
“MiniMax’s bootlegging business model and defiance of U.S. copyright law are not only an attack on Plaintiffs and the hard-working creative community that brings the magic of movies to life, but are also a broader threat to the American motion picture industry,” the companies state in their complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
The entertainment companies requested that MiniMax be restrained from further infringement. They are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, as well as attorney fees and costs.
This is the latest round of copyright lawsuits that major studios have brought against AI companies over intellectual property concerns. In June, Disney and Universal Pictures sued AI firm Midjourney for copyright infringement. This month, Warner Bros. Discovery also sued Midjourney.
Shanghai-based MiniMax has a service called Hailuo AI, which is marketed as a “Hollywood studio in your pocket” and used characters including the Joker and Groot in its ads without the studios’ permission, the studios’ lawsuit says. Users can type in a text prompt requesting characters such as Yoda from “Star Wars” or DC Comics’ Superman, and Hailuo AI can pull up high quality and downloadable images or video of the character, according to the document.
“MiniMax completely disregards U.S. copyright law and treats Plaintiffs’ valuable copyrighted characters like its own,” the lawsuit states. “MiniMax’s copyright infringement is willful and brazen.”
“Given the rapid advancement in technology in the AI video generation field … it is only a matter of time until Hailuo AI can generate unauthorized, infringing videos featuring Plaintiffs’ copyrighted characters that are substantially longer, and even eventually the same duration as a movie or television program,” the lawsuit states.
MiniMax did not immediately return a request for comment.
Hollywood is grappling with significant challenges, including the threat of AI, as companies consolidate and reduce their expenses amid rising production costs. Many actors and writers, still recovering from strikes that took place in 2023, are scrambling to find jobs. Some believe the growth of AI has threatened their livelihoods as tech tools can replicate copyrighted characters with text prompts.
Although some studios have sued AI companies, others are looking for ways to partner with them. For example, Lionsgate has partnered with AI startup Runway to help with behind the scenes processes such as storyboarding.
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