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.
the shot that nearly killed me
I’d been in Afghanistan for a month when I stepped on the landmine. I was the third man in line, and as I put my foot down, I heard a metallic click and I was thrown in the air. I knew exactly what had happened. As the soldiers dragged me away from the kill zone, I took these pictures. When people around me have been hurt or killed, I’ve recorded it. I had to keep working. The soldiers were yelling for the medics. I knew my legs had gone, so I called my wife on the satellite phone and told her not to worry. The pain came later, back in intensive care, when infections set in and they nearly lost me a couple of times.
This is a quote from photographer João Silva in a longer article about photojournalists who document war. Many of the images and recollections are difficult, so be warned. I’m realizing Silva is one of the photographers in a transcript from NPR I used in Mockingbird.
(via the browser)
non-observational
This is probably a big yawn, but I downloaded a bunch of screenshots from movies I like, photos from admired photographers, illustrations, graphics, designs and other images and have them stretched to match the dimensions of my screen, rotating on the desktop every fifteen minutes. I’m sure lots of people do this, but I’ve been surprised how much it pleases me.
fyi
#letsmakelove is trending on Twitter.
Update: I’d like to point this one out, both for the tweet, and the background image.
Dateline Paris
I was on temporary assignment, holding a postcard or photo of a belly dancer. Which seemed appropriate for the time and the place, somehow.
Journalists start out wanting to save the world and after a while get jaded. You write and write and write. You’re accused of having a secret agenda when really you don’t. Then, in the middle of the night you examine your motives for one that maybe you’ve hidden from yourself. At least having accusers is better than people who don’t read you at all.
Everyone is tired. Stressed. People with strong opinions aren’t likely to change them after a certain point. Back then, lots of folks would get their notions from television and it is hard to explain a complicated issue in a sound bite. Now, I’ll sometimes hear people citing as fact opinion pieces or blogs or the things coming out of talking head yelling matches. And it has gotten completely confusing, I admit.
I talk about the difference between fact and opinion. I say it is difficult to isolate a fact, but I’ve been told that statement makes no sense. Let’s see, try to isolate an actual fact from opinion or something made up or slanted or spun. How’s that.
And on and on and on it goes.
words we don’t say
tacked to the bulletin board in the office I took over was a single page titled “Words We Don’t Say.” It contained, as you might surmise, words and phrases that Kurt found annoying and didn’t want used in his magazine.
headline of the day
Secret Service issues mea culpa for accidental anti-Fox News tweet
coming out of sleep
A little drool.
“PBS will never be defunded.”
“Proof:”
headline of the week
From The [Weekly] Flash (Warren, Illinois):
APPLE RIVER LIONS JOE VONDRA PANCAKE BREAKFAST
Which is BREAKFAST PANCAKE VONDRA JOE LIONS RIVER APPLE backwards, notice.
John Moore photographs Egypt, Bahrain, and Libya
Moore told the NewsHour from his hotel room in Cairo that his latest assignment — a six-week trip that took him to the uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain and Libya — might have been his most dangerous.
(thanks, Josh)
Hearing a familiar voice seemed to encapsulate everything that camaraderie came to mean
Over the years, all of us had seen men detained, blindfolded and handcuffed at places like Abu Ghraib, or corralled after some operation in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now we were the faceless we had covered perhaps too dispassionately. For the first time, we felt what it was like to be disoriented by a blindfold, to have plastic cuffs dig into your wrists, for hands to go numb.
The act is probably less terrifying than the unknown. You don’t know when it’s going to end or what comes next.
The story of four journalists from The New York Times caught in country without visas by the Libyan army.
from the comments
As an atheist, I find myself in an unusual position here when I argue that dangerous aspects of human behavior are not clearly subject to scientific reduction. This seems, initially, to fit in with religious views I don’t wish to support–to wit: that there is a kind of “knowledge” that may be called such without need of test, and that the warrant for this understanding is the fact that humans have for so long regarded such knowledge as essential. I take a somewhat different view: humans have been concerned with religious matters for ages–but this is evidence of irrationality and fear, not of knowledge that is somehow above the need of questioning. In the situation under discussion in the thread posted, the standard model of what is likely to result from the reactor problems is only part of the question. But whereas some derisive commentors jumped instantly to comments like “I guess space aliens could invade and we could nuke them and destroy ourselves,” I would be more inclined to note that people watch other people running away, and then they run, and then economic disruptions shut down manufacturing of all sorts across the world–and so on, to the point that much suffering occurs regardless of questions about specific core meltdown consequences.
nuclear disasters and press coverage
The question is what to infer from this gap in the coverage. Is it that newspapers have been asked by a government not to panic people? Is it that newspapers are simply feckless? Is it that we are in “uncharted waters,” relative to previous knowledge and previous nuclear disasters? Or could it be “all of the above”?
moving to fiction
From an interview in the Paris Review with Amy Hempel:
Moving to fiction was a straight transition—journalism was great training, as it turned out, because you have to grab readers instantly and keep them. I knew how to do that, and it happened to work very well in fiction. I hadn’t been a good reporter because I didn’t care about getting the story before the general public had it. I didn’t care about being the first one on the scene, the first one at the accident. I also started to feel the limitations. Obviously, in journalism, you’re confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it’s in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are trained to get rid of anything nonessential. You go in, you start writing your article, assuming a person’s going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: don’t give them one. Frontload and cut out everything extraneous. That’s why I like short stories. You’re always trying to keep the person interested. In fiction, you don’t need to have the facts up front, but you have to have something that will grab the reader right away. It can be your voice. Some writers feel that when they write, there are people out there who just can’t wait to hear everything they have to say. But I go in with the opposite attitude, the expectation that they’re just dying to get away from me.
Inside Job
Inside Job does make a few cheesy rhetorical moves, but the case it proffers is compelling. It requires that those who bought into the conservative narrative in their early twenties (read: “Andrew Simone”) reassess their posture. This doesn’t mean, of course, buying into a liberal narrative necessarily, but it does mean recognizing our government, even now, is a Wall Street government.
Really Bad Reporting in and about Wisconsin
Not every news report gets it wrong, but the narrative of the journalistic herd has now been set and is slowly hardening into a concrete falsehood that will distort public understanding of the issue for years to come unless journalists en masse correct their mistakes. From the Associated Press and The New York Times to Wisconsin’s biggest newspaper, and every broadcast report I have heard, reporters again and again and again have written as fact what is nonsense.
David Cay Johnston points out that the money Wisconsin’s Scott Walker claims the state “contributes” is actually part of compensation negotiated with state workers in advance. In other words, it is their money, and they have chosen to take it in the form of pension payments in the future rather than as cash wages or other benefits today.
from the comments
There’s the tale about the broadcaster who was ripped and reading a story about the overthrow of a dictator with a very long, complicated name. The writer had forgotten to put in a pronouncer. So the broadcaster told about the overthrow of the leader of blah blah, then added the former dictator’s “name has been withheld pending notification of next of kin.”
Quote Out of Context
[The] judge said his sado-masochistic party had nothing to do with Nazis and was a private matter. Now he is fighting in 21 other countries to clean the internet of images of his flailed buttocks and has most recently taken the battle to Strasbourg, where he is fighting for the privacy of others.
(via)
from the comments
A guess: the photograph was taken by Princess Marianne Fürstin zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn and the boy is her eldest son, Alexander.
