Tumblr Is Hiring Journalists
Not sure how I missed this, but Tumblr is hiring writers and editors to cover itself:
“Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million,” Ms. Bennett said, referring to the number of Tumblr blogs that exist, “I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”
Journalists covering online communities – a novel idea.
Cachagua
She thought about it for a minute and then told me a remarkable story about her relationship with technology during the last 40 years living up the mountain a bit east of where we stood. She did not exactly answer my question, but made a point nonetheless.
“I pretty much stayed on the mountain. There are no phone lines. There is no electricity,” she said. “I have my iPhone and I can get 3G and I can get what I want and I have a little solar panel and propane and candles. I’ve been off the grid forever. Now, I have the small solar panel and I can turn on the light and charge my cell phone. I’m not used to it. My daughter tells me, ‘You can plug things in!’ And I say, ‘I don’t have anything to plug in.’ Blow out the lights, not turn out the lights, is my thing.”
Her boss, the chef Michael Jones, filled in the rest of Liz’s story on his blog (punctuation all his). “Liz lives in a trailer on the mountain with no power and no water…two horses, a goat and two dogs. Cats don’t count. She carries water in plastic buckets to the critters….and to her own self,” he wrote. “She pays child support to a scumbag in Missouri or one of those other M states or square states…..Her daughter that I know is an honor student at Davis…….Because she has no power or water, Liz hangs with us after working her 10 hr shift at The Store. We are her TV.”
I’ve ridden my bike out past Cachagua Road and I can attest to the beauty and isolation of the area. It was very near Jamesburg that, climbing a long hill, I passed a man in a cowboy hat and boots, his back to me, urinating. The two cyclists coming down the hill had a much better view and the man made no attempt to stand behind cover.
This particular excerpt reminds me of the photos I’ve seen and the stories I’ve heard about my mother-in-law’s family when they lived in the mountains above Big Sur – a kind of lifestyle that seems almost extinct.
new york times correction of the day
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 29, 2012
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described imagery from “The Shining.” The gentleman seen with the weird guy in the bear suit is wearing a tuxedo, but not a top hat.
Stop the Presses
I stopped the presses once. The 1977 Hanafi siege of D.C.’s city hall ended after the press run had started. It was the lead story in the Birmingham Post-Herald and I was the late copy editor that night. Calls were made, stopping the presses was a costly move and rarely done. But I persisted, saying the story had to be updated. I remember the printers’ boss nodding to me, smiling and saying, “Let her stop the presses.” I was trying to be authoritative but couldn’t. I looked at the eyeshade wearing men poised over the layouts, started laughing, and said it, “STOP THE PRESSES!”
I had no idea that in three years I would be in Washington, D.C., working for United Press International. No more stopping the presses for me. But that city hall building was the first place I went to cover a story, a news conference with Rosalynn Carter, the first lady, and Mayor Marion Barry, whose election came after he was lauded as a hero in the Hanafi siege. After, I walked to the front of the room, introduced myself, and shook Mrs. Carter’s hand. I told the Georgia native that I had just transferred from Alabama. She said, “I’m so glad to have another southerner up here with us.”
This story was partly an excuse to post a photo, taken in the UPI newsroom in D.C., showing one of my favorite bosses ever, Lucien Carr, a key member of the New York City circle of the Beat Generation in the 1940s. And that’s another yarn for another day.
from the comments
Carole Corlew quoting Royal Brightbill:
The Pig
A reporter invited to a roast pig dinner on a hog farm was amazed to see the main course had three wooden legs. He asked the farmer about it.
“Oh, that was the best pig I ever had,” the farmer said. “A few years back, my house caught fire while I slept. He ran through the flames to wake me.”
“Is that how he lost his legs?”
“And just a couple of months ago, I fell in an alligator-filled bayou. He jumped in and pulled me out.”
“But what about the legs?”
“My friend, a pig that valuable you just don’t eat all at once.”
Somewhere on Wall Street a dog was barking.
The Lake, The Hood & The Golf Course
After we’d talked for a while, we got in my rental car and went for a drive around his ward. “It’s beautiful, but it’s not for us,” Knowles said, as we rode through Harbor Shores. “It’s not for poor people.” I had asked Knowles if he slept at City Hall, and he took me by his house, which he said he rents for about $250 a month. “I don’t sell dope,” he volunteered, explaining how he pays his rent. “I come out and hustle — electrical jobs, cutting grass, whatever.” […]
When I dropped him back at City Hall, Knowles got out of the car and said goodbye, then poked his head back in the passenger window. “Hey,” he said, “can you spare a couple of bucks so I can get myself a bag of chips and a pop?”
This is an excerpt from Jonathan Mahler’s Simon-esque piece on Benton Harbor, Michigan, for the NYT Magazine a few weeks back. The bit above is from a conversation Mahler has with an unemployed Benton Harbor resident who is also a city commissioner for one of the city’s poorest wards.
For those of you who don’t know, I grew up in the area and my family has lived there for a few generations. The article is a longer piece focusing on the city’s socio-economic problems and new divisions over a golf course and property development on Lake Michigan called Harbor Shores, which is hoped to improve the impoverished city’s attractiveness for future investment. The only problem is that most of the developers and proponents for Harbor Shores are affluent and white, while most of Benton Harbor is impoverished and black – oh, and the golf course was built on a chunk of the city’s one nice park at the lakefront.
It’s a feature worth reading and not just because it’s about the clashes between a city’s residents and a group of well-intentioned (if not woefully ignorant) outsiders that believe they can solve deeply-rooted problems of poverty and crime by introducing the game of golf. I like to think it’s also because Mahler turned my old stomping grounds into a moral fable for today’s social, cultural and economic divisions.
A Lot Did Happen
Hey gang, putting together one of those year-end compilations isn’t as easy as you’d think.
12 Indicted On Hate Crimes Charges For Hair Cutting Assaults Led By Break-Off Amish Group
I think this is my favorite story of 2011.
Fox News Christmas Card
For your analysis. (via Brian Stelter)
LHC has discovered how many terrible Higgs Boson metaphors can fit in one article
The search for the Higgs has become the hottest pursuit in modern physics.
Professor John Ellis: “We’ve been living with Higgs theory now for almost 50 years… it’s become our Holy Grail”
You can think of it as being an enormous giant Jigsaw puzzle, but there’s a piece missing right in the middle there. We have been looking for this for 30 years now, and finally, maybe, hidden under the back of the LHC sofa…we are finally finding it”.
“This hunt for the Higgs is like fishing in an ancient way… instead of using modern tools you are removing the water from the pond… it might look tedious but it is the only way, at the end of the day, when you have removed all the water from the pond to find the smallest fish.”
On a related note
Quote out of context
Arugula is a type of lettuce that is offensive to some conservatives.
coming out of sleep
Owner of small town didn’t mention CIA before.
Bill Cunningham New York
Jason posted recently about the Bill Cunningham New York documentary, and we watched it last night. It is beautifully done in a straightforward way, and really the subject is what causes the movie to shine. At 80, Cunningham is still buoyant and exuberant, with a clear passion for what he loves: taking pictures of fashion as it is worn by people on the streets of New York (once you see the movie you’ll understand the awkward phrasing). He is the original Sartorialist. The movie is streaming on Netflix, and is available in various formats on Amazon. Recommended.
This study of Richard M. Nixon’s television-centered campaign remains a tour de force of reporting and analysis, as relevant today as when it first appeared
In a review of Joe McGinnis’s new book on Sarah Palin, we get this context for his first book of political reportage, The Selling of the President:
Remembering those days, Mr. McGinniss described an incident at a campaign stop when Kennedy’s motorcade came through. “I stood out there in the crowd, and he was in the open car waving to thousands and thousands of hysterical people. And he spotted me. I was tall, standing close. He said ‘Come on up here.’ ”
A Secret Service man pulled Mr. McGinniss into the car alongside Kennedy, who said, “I just want you to see what this is like from my side.”
“Then,” Mr. McGinniss remembers, “he made this wry comment. ‘They keep telling me talk about the issues. You think these people care about the issues?’ They were there because he had a star quality, and that was back in 1968.”
Less than two months later, Kennedy was assassinated. Mr. McGinniss flew to Los Angeles to report on his death, in the company of older journalists, like Murray Kempton, whom he idolized.
When he got back East, Mr. McGinniss learned that admen were already planning to market the presidential nominees “much the way they had for Avis, Volkswagen and Heinz ketchup.” The contrast with the tragic scene in Los Angeles was shocking to him.
This was the mood in which the brilliant “Selling of the President” was written. Its “New Journalism” cool rides on a young writer’s wounded idealism.
quote out of context
Cornhole, a simple yet addictive pastime with Midwestern origins, is sweeping the Northeast.
(via @dansinker)
The Decade Since
I realize now that those in history whose lives were short and mean and threatened by sword and disease gathered and told stories not as leisure, but as desperately needed distraction, and reassurance that they were not alone.
So if art cannot contain or describe this event, and if for now the suffering is too keen to be alleviated by parable… if stories are for the moment not as critically needed, as courage, as medicine, as blood, as bacon, they can at least revert to this social function. As time goes on, this will all pass away into memory, into a story with a beginning and a middle and finally an end.
The above quote is from John Hodgman’s McSweeney’s column on September 25, 2001, where he discusses narrative in the context of the attacks. This morning, for probably the first time since maybe 2002, I sat down and actually pondered the events of 9/11. I sat and looked through the many photos provided by The Atlantic and read columns from that strange time, reflecting on what this would all mean. I still don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about it a decade later, but I think most striking is the sheer sadness and emotion captured through the lens and in the words that were written.
I jokingly told a friend last night that I remember where I was the last time someone asked me if I remembered where I was on 9/11. Nowadays, I tend to think in broader terms about September 11th – namely how we’ve responded with irrational fear to the slightest threat of terrorism in our post-9/11 reality. But I had a moment this morning where I felt almost shameful at how much I had allowed things to gloss over in the years since. Not in a hollow sort of “remembering 9/11 as a form of dime store patriotism” way, but more in how much we’ve let the genuine feelings of unity and pride we felt for our neighbors slip, thrown away as talking points in elections or manipulated as tools of demagogues.
If September 11th was ever meant to be a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, I sometimes wonder whether we’ll ever get the closure of a happy ending.
Alice Laussade, restaurant critic extraordinaire
Pretty much everything about this makes me happy.
The Somerton Beach Mystery (or the enigma of the “Unknown Man”)
Let’s start by sketching out the little that is known for certain. At 7 o’clock on the warm evening of Tuesday, November 30, 1948, jeweler John Bain Lyons and his wife went for a stroll on Somerton Beach, a seaside resort a few miles south of Adelaide. As they walked toward Glenelg, they noticed a smartly dressed man lying on the sand, his head propped against a sea wall. He was lolling about 20 yards from them, legs outstretched, feet crossed. As the couple watched, the man extended his right arm upward, then let it fall back to the ground. Lyons thought he might be making a drunken attempt to smoke a cigarette.
Half an hour later, another couple noticed the same man lying in the same position. Looking on him from above, the woman could see that he was immaculately dressed in a suit, with smart new shoes polished to a mirror shine—odd clothing for the beach. He was motionless, his left arm splayed out on the sand. The couple decided that he was simply asleep, his face surrounded by mosquitoes. “He must be dead to the world not to notice them,” the boyfriend joked.
The journalistic equivalent of The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World.
(via the browser)
Matt Damon on Education Policy
Huh.
a book review cliché wish list.
Darryl Campbell’s suggestions are delightful. For example:
USE EPONYMS INSTEAD OF SYNONYMS
This neatly sidesteps the “elongated yellow fruit” problem. An author whose prose might be called “achingly beautiful” instead becomes “the Delacroix of literature”; a “darkly funny” book is now a “Rabelaisian comedy.” If fine artists aren’t your thing, then maybe American presidents might be a better comparison: “Taft-like excess,” “Cleveland-esque genre-bending” or “Clintonian eroticism.”
The Porsche 911 Spy Shot Industry
The Porsche 911 has been around for almost 50 years. It is an object lesson in an evolutionary design approach — refine rather than reinvent. Although the technology of the vehicle has seen tremendous changes, the shape of the original is still obvious in the current model. Which is why, every few years, when rumors of the next version surface, the spy shots and speculation seem like exquisitely redundant performance art. (If you’re not familiar with the automotive game of cat and mouse that surrounds new-model cars, an entire industry is devoted to photographing, and reporting on, the new hotness.) For a car renowned for fifty years of subtle shifts, the full force of that industry seems — what’s the word? — overkill, but the pattern, and inevitability, amuses me.
from the comments
I was working in the UPI Birmingham bureau, in Alabama, where the teletypes were pounding out the news from Jonestown. Reams of copy clacked from machines accompanied by bells signaling the urgency of the words on the paper. I couldn’t stop reading or saying “Oh my God oh my God!”
Then later, a year later, Iranian crowds were outside the U.S. Embassy screaming death to us all. I kept telling people LOOK AT THIS, this is not going to end well. But it was before the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and nobody was paying too much attention. Until they stormed the embassy.
I had a unique vantage point. The news was wild back then. But on some nights, it was so very quiet. And I would sit after my shift, going through old yellowed files in that bureau for many hours. Suddenly it would be 4 a.m., Sunday, and I would be surprised to find folders in my hands marked Bull Connor, Birmingham church bombing, Edmund Pettus Bridge Selma. I had been there.
quote out of context
I tried telling her that there was more to life than being liked, and she asked me how many Facebook friends I had.
this just in
1.
In an email to Sheila yesterday, I said, “That gets confusing if you don’t think about it too much.”
2.
Phung Bombaci is following me on Twitter.
3.
Today is Canada Day.
