For a sense of Bari Weiss’s approach to leading CBS News in her first weeks on the job, consider a phrase the new editor in chief has used as a rallying cry in meetings with colleagues: “I wanna blow this up.”
New things are always better than old things.
The Hoover Dam
The Hoover Dam was the tallest dam in the world when it was completed, but that was in 1936. What has it done for us lately, except impound Lake Mead and provide power for public and private utilities in Nevada, Arizona, and California? We’ve asked Bari Weiss to get under the hood, and we’re pretty excited about whatever she comes up with after she blows it up. Our first goal, as with “60 Minutes,” is balance. Lake Mead has been on the north side of the Hoover Dam for too long. When we’re finished, it will be on the south side, too.
The Jungle Cruise
Who doesn’t love the Jungle Cruise? It’s like “Heart of Darkness” with dad jokes. Not too fast for Meemaw, not too scary for children under seven, when accompanied by an adult. It has elephants, hippos, lions, tigers—and you don’t even have to feel bad about it, like at the zoo, because they’re robots. Best ride at Disneyland, period. But we asked ourselves: What if not that? So we’re turning off the animals and the water, and replacing the puns with jokes about how the powerful do whatever they want.
The Toyota Corolla
The Corolla is the global standard for reliability and affordability and the best-selling car in the world—a masterpiece of redundant strengths in materials and design, like a jean jacket with flat-folding rear seats. It can’t be stopped, only passed along to someone else, like a nebulous disease metaphor in an edgy horror movie. Why did we ask Bari Weiss to wreck it? Because it was there. And we heard her say “meritocracy” on a podcast.
Dawn Dishwashing Liquid
Best soap in the world—cleans dishes and windows, pretreats laundry, and unclogs toilets. It can wash your hair, your dog, and the driveway. A few drops stop your sunglasses from fogging up. It keeps ants off countertops and aphids off plants, and breaks down the rash-causing resin in poison ivy. It can wash a duck, or a pan after you’ve roasted a duck. Anyway, from now on, it’s tap water. Or crocodile tears and Sanka. Maybe it’s Mountain Dew Baja Blast. Who knows?
Keds
Once she gets done with CNN, we’re putting Bari Weiss in charge of Keds. Don’t get us wrong—we love Keds. It’s not so much a question of “How can we make this better?” as it is “How can we make this immeasurably worse?”
Popcorn
The smell of popcorn will be replaced with the smell of burnt popcorn.
“Casablanca”
You know the scene where the Nazis are singing and the French people drown them out by singing “La Marseillaise”? We’re tweaking that. The Nazis still sing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” but the French sing the Kars4Kids jingle.
Alcoholics Anonymous
We don’t even know how we ended up owning A.A., but we do. We’re guessing it was a tax thing? Anyway, we told everyone in management over there to shoot us an e-mail justifying their jobs and no one wrote back. Turns out, they don’t even have a leader. So we asked ourselves: If this thing works miracles as a fellowship of equals supporting one another on a path to sobriety, imagine what it could do with highly centralized top-down leadership, somewhere between a death cult and A.I.G. So we got them a C.E.O. He’s a guy Bari Weiss knows from around. You’ll like him. He’s nice. Except when he drinks. ♦
