Orszag’s Ascension, Lonsdale’s ’24 Pick, A.I. Polemics

Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon dispatch featuring the latest reporting from Puck.

Today, we lead with Dylan Byers’ elegy for a bygone media era, in which generational talents armed with outsize ambitions held the reins of our most august institutions. Is this mere Golden Age thinking, or have times really changed?

Then, below the fold: Bill Cohan chats with Lazard’s new C.E.O. about his Ken Jacobs-sized shadow. Teddy Schleifer offers a hearty helping of Bill and Melinda dish, notes on Biden’s maiden Bay Area fundraising voyage, and DeSantis’s big donor get. And on The Powers That Be, Baratunde Thurston connects with Ben Landy for a rollicking debate on the A.I. panic—and what Washington can do to help.

DYLAN BYERS

An elegy for media’s old guard in an age of generational change.

WILLIAM D. COHAN

Is the new C.E.O. of Lazard actually in charge? Adventures in creative 8-K writing and organizational management at my favorite Wall Street bank.

THEODORE SCHLEIFER

The view from inside Bill and Melinda’s $50 billion philanthropy. Plus notes on another Musk-Thiel acolyte signing on with DeSantis, and a Biden fundraising journey to the Wall Street of the West.

BEN LANDY & BARATUNDE THURSTON

Baratunde Thurston joins Ben for a rollicking debate over whether the latest A.I. panic is self-aggrandizing hysteria or cynical ass-covering. Then they dig into what Washington can do to help—or if new red tape will make everything worse.