On Monday night, a cargo ship lost power and rammed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which then collapsed. The video was terrifying, and what we have learned since has not been more comforting: As Baltimore resident Max Alvarez reported this week, the ship sent out a mayday call moments before the crash, but the workers on the bridge, several of whom died, were not given any warning. Alvarez had just returned from a reporting trip to East Palestine, Ohio, when the bridge collapsed, and he sees some parallels between the two disasters. Among the many questions we asked last year in East Palestine and should be asking of Baltimore, Alvarez writes, is: “Why were these workers sitting in harm’s way with no direct line to emergency dispatch?”

Around the same time the Key Bridge went down, many media workers and pundits had their eyes on NBC News and its short-lived hire of Ronna McDaniel, the Donald Trump apologist and election denialist just ousted as chair of the Republican National Committee. After her first live appearance on Meet the Press, “even McDaniel’s new colleagues” offered “blistering on-air critiques of the Donald Trump apparatchik,” John Nichols reported. “Can NBC Be Shamed Into Reversing Its Ronna McDaniel Hire?” Joan Walsh asked in a piece on Monday. By Tuesday afternoon, the answer was “yes.”

Maybe it was the piling on or Rachel Maddow urging the network to reverse its choice. But whatever it was, Walsh warned us not to get ahead of ourselves. While McDaniel is out of NBC News, the “clueless people” who hired her remain in place. One has to have bizarre hiring practices or no good sense of politics, Walsh suggests, to hire McDaniel in the same year you lay off more than 20 real journalists.

Most of us who work in a newsroom would like to think that hard-working journalists with good character will always be needed. So it makes sense that some are worried about the potential capabilities of AI. As two philosophers of artificial intelligence, Sage Cammers-Goodwin and Rosalie Waelen, showed this week, one technology to look out for in particular is Sora, which “creates videos on the basis of text prompts.” After seeing how Sora works, filmmakers like Tyler Perry are apparently rethinking how they’ll produce videos. According to the philosophers, Perry even canceled an extension of his studio because he thinks AI will eliminate the need to build sets or shoot on-location. “I can sit in an office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. The implications of the technology are scary: laid-off workers, rampant misinformation, and impoverished art.

—Alana Pockros,

Engagement Editor, The Nation