Saturday, September 3, 2011
Why Political Coverage is Broken
[ed. From a talk to the Austrailian media, which, it sounds like, is not much different from the U.S. media. And why should it be?]
by Jay Rosen
This talk had its origins in my appearance about a year ago on the ABC’s Lateline with Leigh Sales. We were discussing election coverage that looks at the campaign as a kind of sporting event. Every day journalists can ask, “who’s ahead” and “what is the strategy for winning?” A perspective that appeals to political reporters, I said, because it puts them “on the inside, looking at the campaign the way the operatives do.”
I then mentioned the ABC’s Sunday morning program, The Insiders. And I asked Leigh Sales if it was true that the insiders were, on that program, the journalists. She said: “That is right.” I said: “That’s remarkable.” She… well, she changed the subject. And let me add right away that Leigh Sales is one of the most intelligent journalists I have ever had the pleasure to meet.
So this is my theme tonight: how did we get to the point where it seems entirely natural for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to describe political journalists appearing on its air as “the insiders?” Don’t you think that’s a little strange? I do. Promoting journalists as insiders in front of the outsiders, the viewers, the electorate…. this is a clue to what’s broken about political coverage in the U.S. and Australia. Here’s how I would summarize it: Things are out of alignment. Journalists are identifying with the wrong people. Therefore the kind of work they are doing is not as useful as we need it to be.
Part of the problem was identified by Lindsay Tanner in his book, Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy. He points out how often the Australian press reframes politics as entertainment, seizing on trivial episodes that amuse or titillate and then blowing them up until they start to seem important. I’m not going to dwell on this because Tanner has it well covered. So did my mentor in graduate school, Neil Postman, in his 1985 classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
From a TV programmer’s point of view the advantage of politics-as-entertainment is that the main characters, the politicians themselves, work for free! The media doesn’t have to pay them because taxpayers do. The sets are provided by the government, the plots by the party leaders, back benchers and spin doctors. Politics as problem-solving or consensus-building would be more expensive to cover. Politics as entertainment is simply a low cost alternative.
Tanner points out how the term “yarn” is often used by journalists here to describe the sort of stories they love to cover, as in: “it’s a good yarn.” A yarn used to refer to stories that were semi-fictionalized to make them more entertaining. That echo is still there, but Australian journalists don’t seem to realize this when they use the term to describe their work.
Politics presented as entertainment charges the press with a failure to treat the serious stuff seriously. And that is a valid critique. But here’s a trickier problem: even when the press is trying to be serious, to provide, say, “analysis” instead of a good yarn, it increasingly relies on an impoverished notion of politics, a cluster of bad ideas that together form the common sense of the craft in the United States, and in Australia.
I was here during the election campaign last year, and saw enough to see strong similarities between my country’s press and yours on most of the points I will raise. If I get something wrong, if I over-draw the comparison, I’m sure someone will tell me during the question period.
I’m going to concentrate on three impoverished and interrelated ideas that (I say) have too much influence in political coverage. Then I will present an alternative scheme that might improve the situation.
Three impoverished ideas:
1. Politics as an inside game.
2. The cult of savviness.
3. The production of innocence.
Politics as an inside game.
The first idea we could do without is the one I presented to Leigh Sales. When journalists define politics as a game played by the insiders, their job description becomes: find out what the insiders are doing to “win.” Reveal those tactics to the public because then the public can… well, this is where it gets dodgy. As my friend Todd Gitlin once wrote, news coverage that treats politics as an insiders’ game invites the public to become “cognoscenti of their own bamboozlement,” which is strange. Or it lavishes attention on media performances, because the insiders are supposed to be good at that: manipulating the media.
by Jay Rosen
This talk had its origins in my appearance about a year ago on the ABC’s Lateline with Leigh Sales. We were discussing election coverage that looks at the campaign as a kind of sporting event. Every day journalists can ask, “who’s ahead” and “what is the strategy for winning?” A perspective that appeals to political reporters, I said, because it puts them “on the inside, looking at the campaign the way the operatives do.”
I then mentioned the ABC’s Sunday morning program, The Insiders. And I asked Leigh Sales if it was true that the insiders were, on that program, the journalists. She said: “That is right.” I said: “That’s remarkable.” She… well, she changed the subject. And let me add right away that Leigh Sales is one of the most intelligent journalists I have ever had the pleasure to meet.
So this is my theme tonight: how did we get to the point where it seems entirely natural for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to describe political journalists appearing on its air as “the insiders?” Don’t you think that’s a little strange? I do. Promoting journalists as insiders in front of the outsiders, the viewers, the electorate…. this is a clue to what’s broken about political coverage in the U.S. and Australia. Here’s how I would summarize it: Things are out of alignment. Journalists are identifying with the wrong people. Therefore the kind of work they are doing is not as useful as we need it to be.
Part of the problem was identified by Lindsay Tanner in his book, Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy. He points out how often the Australian press reframes politics as entertainment, seizing on trivial episodes that amuse or titillate and then blowing them up until they start to seem important. I’m not going to dwell on this because Tanner has it well covered. So did my mentor in graduate school, Neil Postman, in his 1985 classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
From a TV programmer’s point of view the advantage of politics-as-entertainment is that the main characters, the politicians themselves, work for free! The media doesn’t have to pay them because taxpayers do. The sets are provided by the government, the plots by the party leaders, back benchers and spin doctors. Politics as problem-solving or consensus-building would be more expensive to cover. Politics as entertainment is simply a low cost alternative.
Tanner points out how the term “yarn” is often used by journalists here to describe the sort of stories they love to cover, as in: “it’s a good yarn.” A yarn used to refer to stories that were semi-fictionalized to make them more entertaining. That echo is still there, but Australian journalists don’t seem to realize this when they use the term to describe their work.
Politics presented as entertainment charges the press with a failure to treat the serious stuff seriously. And that is a valid critique. But here’s a trickier problem: even when the press is trying to be serious, to provide, say, “analysis” instead of a good yarn, it increasingly relies on an impoverished notion of politics, a cluster of bad ideas that together form the common sense of the craft in the United States, and in Australia.
I was here during the election campaign last year, and saw enough to see strong similarities between my country’s press and yours on most of the points I will raise. If I get something wrong, if I over-draw the comparison, I’m sure someone will tell me during the question period.
I’m going to concentrate on three impoverished and interrelated ideas that (I say) have too much influence in political coverage. Then I will present an alternative scheme that might improve the situation.
Three impoverished ideas:
1. Politics as an inside game.
2. The cult of savviness.
3. The production of innocence.
Politics as an inside game.
The first idea we could do without is the one I presented to Leigh Sales. When journalists define politics as a game played by the insiders, their job description becomes: find out what the insiders are doing to “win.” Reveal those tactics to the public because then the public can… well, this is where it gets dodgy. As my friend Todd Gitlin once wrote, news coverage that treats politics as an insiders’ game invites the public to become “cognoscenti of their own bamboozlement,” which is strange. Or it lavishes attention on media performances, because the insiders are supposed to be good at that: manipulating the media.
Purists Gone Wild
by Timothy Egan
I reached for an Irish whiskey — two fingers, neat, as my uncle used to say in trying to teach me how to drink — just after finishing “Last Call,” Daniel Okrent’s haunting and entertaining book on Prohibition. The drink was necessary, in part, because his gallop through one of the most otherworldly episodes in American history made me shudder at the parallels to this age.
We are about to get a full immersion in that great moralistic experiment from 1919 to 1933, a generator of crime not just vast and organized, but vertically integrated from street thugs to judges. “Prohibition,” the latest story from the history factory of filmmaker Ken Burns, is set to run on PBS stations in October. It was co-directed by Lynn Novick and is a “first cousin” to the book, in Okrent’s words.
The obvious echo will be about drugs. You will hear “if only” in many variants this fall — as in, if only the most popular of illicit substances were brought out of criminal shadows to be legalized and taxed.
But the film and book are much more instructive on the political fevers of the early 21st century, particularly those aroused by monomaniacal anti-tax pressure groups and their foot soldiers, the increasingly unpopular Tea Party.
Burns has made that general comparison. “This is a story about a single-issue campaign that metastasized,” he said, when I first heard him talk about “Prohibition” last year. Initially, I didn’t see it that way. Still, after finishing Okrent’s book during a summer of insanity in Congress, I found his conclusion less of a reach.
Consider how a country with such an appetite for drink could arrive at the point where it would amend the Constitution to outlaw daily private behavior. A hundred years ago, as Okrent notes, average consumption of alcohol per adult was about 32 fifths of 80-proof liquor a year, or 520 12-ounce bottles of beer. (It is less today by about 15 percent.)
Okrent asks the obvious question a modern reader brings when trying to understand this social engineering nightmare: “How did a freedom-loving people decide to give up a private right that had been freely exercised by millions upon millions since the first European colonists arrived in the New World?”
Read more:
I reached for an Irish whiskey — two fingers, neat, as my uncle used to say in trying to teach me how to drink — just after finishing “Last Call,” Daniel Okrent’s haunting and entertaining book on Prohibition. The drink was necessary, in part, because his gallop through one of the most otherworldly episodes in American history made me shudder at the parallels to this age.
We are about to get a full immersion in that great moralistic experiment from 1919 to 1933, a generator of crime not just vast and organized, but vertically integrated from street thugs to judges. “Prohibition,” the latest story from the history factory of filmmaker Ken Burns, is set to run on PBS stations in October. It was co-directed by Lynn Novick and is a “first cousin” to the book, in Okrent’s words.
The obvious echo will be about drugs. You will hear “if only” in many variants this fall — as in, if only the most popular of illicit substances were brought out of criminal shadows to be legalized and taxed.
But the film and book are much more instructive on the political fevers of the early 21st century, particularly those aroused by monomaniacal anti-tax pressure groups and their foot soldiers, the increasingly unpopular Tea Party.
Burns has made that general comparison. “This is a story about a single-issue campaign that metastasized,” he said, when I first heard him talk about “Prohibition” last year. Initially, I didn’t see it that way. Still, after finishing Okrent’s book during a summer of insanity in Congress, I found his conclusion less of a reach.
Consider how a country with such an appetite for drink could arrive at the point where it would amend the Constitution to outlaw daily private behavior. A hundred years ago, as Okrent notes, average consumption of alcohol per adult was about 32 fifths of 80-proof liquor a year, or 520 12-ounce bottles of beer. (It is less today by about 15 percent.)
Okrent asks the obvious question a modern reader brings when trying to understand this social engineering nightmare: “How did a freedom-loving people decide to give up a private right that had been freely exercised by millions upon millions since the first European colonists arrived in the New World?”
Read more:
From Scroll to Screen
by Lev Grossman
The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was circa 1450, when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type. But if you go back further there’s a more helpful precedent for what’s going on. Starting in the first century A.D., Western readers discarded the scroll in favor of the codex — the bound book as we know it today.
In the classical world, the scroll was the book format of choice and the state of the art in information technology. Essentially it was a long, rolled-up piece of paper or parchment. To read a scroll you gradually unrolled it, exposing a bit of the text at a time; when you were done you had to roll it back up the right way, not unlike that other obsolete medium, the VHS tape. English is still littered with words left over from the scroll age. The first page of a scroll, which listed information about where it was made, was called the “protocol.” The reason books are sometimes called volumes is that the root of “volume” is volvere, to roll: to read a scroll, you revolved it.
Scrolls were the prestige format, used for important works only: sacred texts, legal documents, history, literature. To compile a shopping list or do their algebra, citizens of the ancient world wrote on wax-covered wooden tablets using the pointy end of a stick called a stylus. Tablets were for disposable text — the stylus also had a flat end, which you used to squash and scrape the wax flat when you were done. At some point someone had the very clever idea of stringing a few tablets together in a bundle. Eventually the bundled tablets were replaced with leaves of parchment and thus, probably, was born the codex. But nobody realized what a good idea it was until a very interesting group of people with some very radical ideas adopted it for their own purposes. Nowadays those people are known as Christians, and they used the codex as a way of distributing the Bible.
-----
Right now we’re avidly road-testing a new format for the book, just as the early Christians did. Over the first quarter of this year e-book sales were up 160 percent. Print sales — codex sales — were down 9 percent. Those are big numbers. But unlike last time it’s not a clear-cut case of a superior technology displacing an inferior one. It’s more complex than that. It’s more about trade-offs.
Read more:
Friday, September 2, 2011
Jackson Browne, David Lindley
[ed. Not sure who the studio musicians are in the second video but they kill.]
Friday Book Club - A Visit From the Goon Squad
[ed. This book by Jennifer Egan won the 2011 Pulitzer prize for fiction.]
by Ron Charles
If Jennifer Egan is our reward for living through the self-conscious gimmicks and ironic claptrap of postmodernism, then it was all worthwhile. Her new novel, "A Visit From the Goon Squad," is a medley of voices -- in first, second and third person -- scrambled through time and across the globe with a 70-page PowerPoint presentation reproduced toward the end.by Ron Charles
I know that sounds like the headache-inducing, aren't-I-brilliant tedium that sends readers running to nonfiction, but Egan uses all these stylistic and formal shenanigans to produce a deeply humane story about growing up and growing old in a culture corroded by technology and marketing. And what's best, every movement of this symphony of boomer life plays out through the modern music scene, a white-knuckle trajectory of cool, from punk to junk to whatever might lie beyond. My only complaint is that "A Visit From the Goon Squad" doesn't come with a CD.The novel is really a collection of de-linked short stories, almost all of them triumphs of technical bravado and tender sympathy. Each relates in some way to Bennie Salazar, a teenage bass player in San Francisco who falls hard for punk groups like the Dead Kennedys and the Sleepers. He's not a particularly talented musician, but he has the passion, and he holds together a ragtag band of desperate friends who run through names: "the Crabs, the Croks, the Crimps, the Crunch, the Scrunch, the Gawks, the Gobs." They play for drinks in underground bars where the patrons throw garbage at them before storming the stage. No matter the injuries and destruction, afterward "everyone agrees the gig went well."
One of the most heartbreaking stories, "Ask Me If I Care," is told by a homely girl who hangs out with the band, adoring Bennie but settling for his pimply friend. "I understand how this is supposed to work," she says. "I'm the dog, so I get Marty." Egan's fidelity to the raw longing of adolescence scrapes away any romanticism about the ease of youth. These kids are hopelessly adrift, convinced that everyone else around them can hear the beat they can't.
A scarifying story called "Out of Body" may be the only really successful piece I've read in the second person. Tragic and headlong, this chapter about a young man who's tired of pretending accelerates like a falling weight, and the garbage dump he dives into along the East River is a graphic symbol of the putrid moral waste these kids swim through.
The book's mixed structure is a challenge but a profitable one that repeatedly places the kids' hopes and fears in ironic juxtaposition with their adult selves. It's nothing so simple as the cool kids turning into dumpy adults while the dweebs win the yuppie rat race, but as you may have noticed at the last college reunion, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Again and again in these stories, characters wonder and ask one another, What happened? How did time, that punishing goon squad, creep over us and leave us with these flabby bodies, these remote spouses, these children we love but can't reach? And why, among everything we've lost -- talent, potency, hair -- do we still retain that desperate thirst for belonging?
Read more:
Power Play
by Matt Taibbi
A power play is underway in the foreclosure arena, according to the New York Times.
On the one side is Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, who is conducting his own investigation into the era of securitizations – the practice of chopping up assets like mortgages and converting them into saleable securities – that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
On the other side is the Obama administration, the banks, and all the other state attorneys general.
This second camp has cooked up a deal that would allow the banks to walk away with just a seriously discounted fine from a generation of fraud that led to millions of people losing their homes.
The idea behind this federally-guided “settlement” is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space.
This is all about protecting the banks from future enforcement actions on both the civil and criminal sides. The plan is to provide year-after-year, repeat-offending banks like Bank of America with cost certainty, so that they know exactly how much they’ll have to pay in fines (trust me, it will end up being a tiny fraction of what they made off the fraudulent practices) and will also get to know for sure that there are no more criminal investigations in the pipeline.
This deal will also submarine efforts by both defrauded investors in MBS and unfairly foreclosed-upon homeowners and borrowers to obtain any kind of relief in the civil court system. The AGs initially talked about $20 billion as a settlement number, money that would “toward loan modifications and possibly counseling for homeowners,” as Gretchen Morgenson reported the other day.
The banks, however, apparently “balked” at paying that sum, and no doubt it will end up being a lesser amount when the deal is finally done.
To give you an indication of how absurdly small a number even $20 billion is relative to the sums of money the banks made unloading worthless crap subprime assets on foreigners, pension funds and other unsuspecting suckers around the world, consider this: in 2008 alone, the state pension fund of Florida, all by itself, lost more than three times that amount ($62 billion) thanks in significant part to investments in these deadly MBS.
So this deal being cooked up is the ultimate Papal indulgence. By the time that $20 billion (if it even ends up being that high) gets divvied up between all the major players, the broadest and most destructive fraud scheme in American history, one that makes the S&L crisis look like a cheap liquor store holdup, will be safely reduced to a single painful but eminently survivable one-time line item for all the major perpetrators.
But Schneiderman, who earlier this year launched an investigation into the securitization practices of Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and other companies, is screwing up this whole arrangement. Until he lies down, the banks don’t have a deal. They need the certainty of having all 50 states and the federal government on board, or else it’s not worth paying anybody off. To quote the immortal Tony Montana, “How do I know you’re the last cop I’m gonna have to grease?” They need all the dirty cops on board, or else the whole enterprise is FUBAR.
Read more:
A power play is underway in the foreclosure arena, according to the New York Times.
On the one side is Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, who is conducting his own investigation into the era of securitizations – the practice of chopping up assets like mortgages and converting them into saleable securities – that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
On the other side is the Obama administration, the banks, and all the other state attorneys general.
This second camp has cooked up a deal that would allow the banks to walk away with just a seriously discounted fine from a generation of fraud that led to millions of people losing their homes.
The idea behind this federally-guided “settlement” is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space.
This is all about protecting the banks from future enforcement actions on both the civil and criminal sides. The plan is to provide year-after-year, repeat-offending banks like Bank of America with cost certainty, so that they know exactly how much they’ll have to pay in fines (trust me, it will end up being a tiny fraction of what they made off the fraudulent practices) and will also get to know for sure that there are no more criminal investigations in the pipeline.
This deal will also submarine efforts by both defrauded investors in MBS and unfairly foreclosed-upon homeowners and borrowers to obtain any kind of relief in the civil court system. The AGs initially talked about $20 billion as a settlement number, money that would “toward loan modifications and possibly counseling for homeowners,” as Gretchen Morgenson reported the other day.
The banks, however, apparently “balked” at paying that sum, and no doubt it will end up being a lesser amount when the deal is finally done.
To give you an indication of how absurdly small a number even $20 billion is relative to the sums of money the banks made unloading worthless crap subprime assets on foreigners, pension funds and other unsuspecting suckers around the world, consider this: in 2008 alone, the state pension fund of Florida, all by itself, lost more than three times that amount ($62 billion) thanks in significant part to investments in these deadly MBS.
So this deal being cooked up is the ultimate Papal indulgence. By the time that $20 billion (if it even ends up being that high) gets divvied up between all the major players, the broadest and most destructive fraud scheme in American history, one that makes the S&L crisis look like a cheap liquor store holdup, will be safely reduced to a single painful but eminently survivable one-time line item for all the major perpetrators.
But Schneiderman, who earlier this year launched an investigation into the securitization practices of Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and other companies, is screwing up this whole arrangement. Until he lies down, the banks don’t have a deal. They need the certainty of having all 50 states and the federal government on board, or else it’s not worth paying anybody off. To quote the immortal Tony Montana, “How do I know you’re the last cop I’m gonna have to grease?” They need all the dirty cops on board, or else the whole enterprise is FUBAR.
Read more:
Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?
Welcome and congratulations: Getting to the first day of college is a major achievement. You’re to be commended, and not just you, but the parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts who helped get you here.
It’s been said that raising a child effectively takes a village: Well, as you may have noticed, our American village is not in very good shape. We’ve got guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical religions, a slime-based popular culture, and some politicians who—a little restraint here—aren’t what they might be. To merely survive in this American village and to win a place in the entering class has taken a lot of grit on your part. So, yes, congratulations to all.
You now may think that you’ve about got it made. Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: Work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman. Ready for life.
Do not believe it. It is not true. If you want to get a real education in America you’re going to have to fight—and I don’t mean just fight against the drugs and the violence and against the slime-based culture that is still going to surround you. I mean something a little more disturbing. To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.) You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed. To get it, you’ll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people.
“Take ’em later,” he said, “you never know.”
Read more:
It’s been said that raising a child effectively takes a village: Well, as you may have noticed, our American village is not in very good shape. We’ve got guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical religions, a slime-based popular culture, and some politicians who—a little restraint here—aren’t what they might be. To merely survive in this American village and to win a place in the entering class has taken a lot of grit on your part. So, yes, congratulations to all.You now may think that you’ve about got it made. Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: Work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman. Ready for life.
Do not believe it. It is not true. If you want to get a real education in America you’re going to have to fight—and I don’t mean just fight against the drugs and the violence and against the slime-based culture that is still going to surround you. I mean something a little more disturbing. To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.) You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed. To get it, you’ll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people.
I came to college with few resources, but one of them was an understanding, however crude, of how I might use my opportunities there. This I began to develop because of my father, who had never been to college—in fact, he’d barely gotten out of high school. One night after dinner, he and I were sitting in our kitchen at 58 Clewley Road in Medford, Massachusetts, hatching plans about the rest of my life. I was about to go off to college, a feat no one in my family had accomplished in living memory. “I think I might want to be pre-law,” I told my father. I had no idea what being pre-law was. My father compressed his brow and blew twin streams of smoke, dragon-like, from his magnificent nose. “Do you want to be a lawyer?” he asked. My father had some experience with lawyers, and with policemen, too; he was not well-disposed toward either. “I’m not really sure,” I told him, “but lawyers make pretty good money, right?”
My father detonated. (That was not uncommon. My father detonated a lot.) He told me that I was going to go to college only once, and that while I was there I had better study what I wanted. He said that when rich kids went to school, they majored in the subjects that interested them, and that my younger brother Philip and I were as good as any rich kids. (We were rich kids minus the money.) Wasn’t I interested in literature? I confessed that I was. Then I had better study literature, unless I had inside information to the effect that reincarnation wasn’t just hype, and I’d be able to attend college thirty or forty times. If I had such info, pre-law would be fine, and maybe even a tour through invertebrate biology could also be tossed in. But until I had the reincarnation stuff from a solid source, I better get to work and pick out some English classes from the course catalog. “How about the science requirements?”
Read more:
The Trophy Wife
by Deanna Fei
One balmy evening in Shanghai, my boyfriend and I were strolling home from dinner when two boozy blond men called to us. Expecting a plea for directions, we stopped. The men leered at me and grinned at my boyfriend.“Where’s the party?” they asked jovially. “You know, Chinese girls. Where can we get one of these?”
They meant me.My boyfriend cursed at them and held me close as we crossed the street, but I dropped his hand. For the six months we’d been together, we had endured more than our share of stares, from curious to smug to hostile, from Chinese and Westerners and everyone in between. But nothing had been as flagrant as this. Suddenly, I felt as if those men had seen the truth, while what we knew of ourselves was a sham.
He was no longer the boyfriend whose home I shared, the journalist whose dedication and drive kept me inspired, the man who scratched my back through entire seasons of “The Sopranos.” In that moment, he was just a laowai, another foreigner in China taking home an Asian woman like a souvenir.
And I was no longer the girlfriend he loved, the native New Yorker like him, the Chinese-American who had moved to Shanghai on a Fulbright to research a novel, the woman who challenged him on a daily (he’d say hourly) basis. I was just another local naïf, maybe a gold digger, possibly a prostitute.
My boyfriend tried to reason with me. Those men were bumbling tourists. The truth of our relationship was in the life we shared. He said, “All we can do is be who we are.”
But that was part of the problem. He was a successful white man ensconced in cushy expatriate life. I was a young Asian female who had somehow ended up living off him.
Read more:
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Elizabeth Warren
[ed. This woman should be President. There is no smarter or more persistent advocate for the middle class. In this nearly hour long lecture, Ms. Warren explains in detail and with precision why the middle class is threatened, how this threat affects individuals and what it means to our society.]
Distinguished law scholar Elizabeth Warren teaches contract law, bankruptcy, and commercial law at Harvard Law School. She is an outspoken critic of America's credit economy, which she has linked to the continuing rise in bankruptcy among the middle-class. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures" [6/2007] [Public Affairs] [Business] [Show ID: 12620]
Distinguished law scholar Elizabeth Warren teaches contract law, bankruptcy, and commercial law at Harvard Law School. She is an outspoken critic of America's credit economy, which she has linked to the continuing rise in bankruptcy among the middle-class. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures" [6/2007] [Public Affairs] [Business] [Show ID: 12620]
The Internet: Everything You Need to Know
[ed. A sharp, concise primer for understanding the internet, in nine big themes.]
by John Naughton
A funny thing happened to us on the way to the future. The internet went from being something exotic to being boring utility, like mains electricity or running water – and we never really noticed. So we wound up being totally dependent on a system about which we are terminally incurious. You think I exaggerate about the dependence? Well, just ask Estonia, one of the most internet-dependent countries on the planet, which in 2007 was more or less shut down for two weeks by a sustained attack on its network infrastructure. Or imagine what it would be like if, one day, you suddenly found yourself unable to book flights, transfer funds from your bank account, check bus timetables, send email, search Google, call your family using Skype, buy music from Apple or books from Amazon, buy or sell stuff on eBay, watch clips on YouTube or BBC programmes on the iPlayer – or do the 1,001 other things that have become as natural as breathing.
The internet has quietly infiltrated our lives, and yet we seem to be remarkably unreflective about it. That's not because we're short of information about the network; on the contrary, we're awash with the stuff. It's just that we don't know what it all means. We're in the state once described by that great scholar of cyberspace, Manuel Castells, as "informed bewilderment".
Mainstream media don't exactly help here, because much – if not most – media coverage of the net is negative. It may be essential for our kids' education, they concede, but it's riddled with online predators, seeking children to "groom" for abuse. Google is supposedly "making us stupid" and shattering our concentration into the bargain. It's also allegedly leading to an epidemic of plagiarism. File sharing is destroying music, online news is killing newspapers, and Amazon is killing bookshops. The network is making a mockery of legal injunctions and the web is full of lies, distortions and half-truths. Social networking fuels the growth of vindictive "flash mobs" which ambush innocent columnists such as Jan Moir. And so on.
All of which might lead a detached observer to ask: if the internet is such a disaster, how come 27% of the world's population (or about 1.8 billion people) use it happily every day, while billions more are desperate to get access to it?
So how might we go about getting a more balanced view of the net ? What would you really need to know to understand the internet phenomenon? Having thought about it for a while, my conclusion is that all you need is a smallish number of big ideas, which, taken together, sharply reduce the bewilderment of which Castells writes so eloquently.
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The most common — and still surprisingly widespread — misconception is that the internet and the web are the same thing. They're not. A good way to understand this is via a railway analogy. Think of the internet as the tracks and signalling, the infrastructure on which everything runs. In a railway network, different kinds of traffic run on the infrastructure — high-speed express trains, slow stopping trains, commuter trains, freight trains and (sometimes) specialist maintenance and repair trains.
On the internet, web pages are only one of the many kinds of traffic that run on its virtual tracks. Other types of traffic include music files being exchanged via peer-to-peer networking, or from the iTunes store; movie files travelling via BitTorrent; software updates; email; instant messages; phone conversations via Skype and other VoIP (internet telephony) services; streaming video and audio; and other stuff too arcane to mention.
And (here's the important bit) there will undoubtedly be other kinds of traffic, stuff we can't possibly have dreamed of yet, running on the internet in 10 years' time.
So the thing to remember is this: the web is huge and very important, but it's just one of the many things that run on the internet. The net is much bigger and far more important than anything that travels on it.
Understand this simple distinction and you're halfway to wisdom.
Read more:
by John Naughton
A funny thing happened to us on the way to the future. The internet went from being something exotic to being boring utility, like mains electricity or running water – and we never really noticed. So we wound up being totally dependent on a system about which we are terminally incurious. You think I exaggerate about the dependence? Well, just ask Estonia, one of the most internet-dependent countries on the planet, which in 2007 was more or less shut down for two weeks by a sustained attack on its network infrastructure. Or imagine what it would be like if, one day, you suddenly found yourself unable to book flights, transfer funds from your bank account, check bus timetables, send email, search Google, call your family using Skype, buy music from Apple or books from Amazon, buy or sell stuff on eBay, watch clips on YouTube or BBC programmes on the iPlayer – or do the 1,001 other things that have become as natural as breathing.The internet has quietly infiltrated our lives, and yet we seem to be remarkably unreflective about it. That's not because we're short of information about the network; on the contrary, we're awash with the stuff. It's just that we don't know what it all means. We're in the state once described by that great scholar of cyberspace, Manuel Castells, as "informed bewilderment".
Mainstream media don't exactly help here, because much – if not most – media coverage of the net is negative. It may be essential for our kids' education, they concede, but it's riddled with online predators, seeking children to "groom" for abuse. Google is supposedly "making us stupid" and shattering our concentration into the bargain. It's also allegedly leading to an epidemic of plagiarism. File sharing is destroying music, online news is killing newspapers, and Amazon is killing bookshops. The network is making a mockery of legal injunctions and the web is full of lies, distortions and half-truths. Social networking fuels the growth of vindictive "flash mobs" which ambush innocent columnists such as Jan Moir. And so on.
All of which might lead a detached observer to ask: if the internet is such a disaster, how come 27% of the world's population (or about 1.8 billion people) use it happily every day, while billions more are desperate to get access to it?
So how might we go about getting a more balanced view of the net ? What would you really need to know to understand the internet phenomenon? Having thought about it for a while, my conclusion is that all you need is a smallish number of big ideas, which, taken together, sharply reduce the bewilderment of which Castells writes so eloquently.
-----
The most common — and still surprisingly widespread — misconception is that the internet and the web are the same thing. They're not. A good way to understand this is via a railway analogy. Think of the internet as the tracks and signalling, the infrastructure on which everything runs. In a railway network, different kinds of traffic run on the infrastructure — high-speed express trains, slow stopping trains, commuter trains, freight trains and (sometimes) specialist maintenance and repair trains.
On the internet, web pages are only one of the many kinds of traffic that run on its virtual tracks. Other types of traffic include music files being exchanged via peer-to-peer networking, or from the iTunes store; movie files travelling via BitTorrent; software updates; email; instant messages; phone conversations via Skype and other VoIP (internet telephony) services; streaming video and audio; and other stuff too arcane to mention.
And (here's the important bit) there will undoubtedly be other kinds of traffic, stuff we can't possibly have dreamed of yet, running on the internet in 10 years' time.
So the thing to remember is this: the web is huge and very important, but it's just one of the many things that run on the internet. The net is much bigger and far more important than anything that travels on it.
Understand this simple distinction and you're halfway to wisdom.
Read more:
Radioactive Control
For their latest intervention titled “Radioactive Control” Spanish performance collective Luzinterruptus created a mysterious army of 100 illuminated radioactive figures advancing threateningly upon their natural surroundings. The installation was created for the Dockville Festival in de Hamburg which tried to demonstrate, in a humorous tone, the paranoia that we are suffering from since the escape of radioactive material in Japan, has brought into question the safety systems at the nuclear power plants.
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More about the installation here.
Max Roach
by Chris Higgins
Surely you’re familiar with Max Roach, the fantastic jazz drummer. Oh, you’re not?
Hi-Hat
Using just two sticks and a hi-hat, Roach demonstrates the versatility of his craft. Keep your eyes peeled for the section near the end, when he turns a stick around and uses the reverse end.
More here: snare with brushes, full kit solo, Max Roach vs. Buddy Rich.
Surely you’re familiar with Max Roach, the fantastic jazz drummer. Oh, you’re not?
Hi-Hat
Using just two sticks and a hi-hat, Roach demonstrates the versatility of his craft. Keep your eyes peeled for the section near the end, when he turns a stick around and uses the reverse end.
More here: snare with brushes, full kit solo, Max Roach vs. Buddy Rich.
You’re Not a Stranger When You Leave
by Jed Lipinski
Daniel Ruf and Patrick Palme, budget-minded students from Hanover, Germany, drove across the United States this spring without paying for nearly any of their accommodations. During the trip, they stayed overnight in 20 cities with people they met through CouchSurfing, a social networking Web site whose members make their homes available to travelers free of charge.
Stephanie Muise, in her Toronto home, with her guest Ricardo Neumann from Berlin. “When I come home, I take off my shoes, feed my cats and get naked,” she said.
But after sending dozens of requests to New Yorkers, the only response they got was from Robert Redmond, a 48-year-old retired New York City parks department employee, whose online profile shows him crawling naked into a kayak on the Delaware River.
Mr. Redmond, it turned out, was a member of the site’s Clothing Optional group and has been a nudist since the age of 23, when he first skinny-dipped in Lake Michigan. For the last year, he has been hosting travelers in his three-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, most of the time wearing nothing but a Swiss Army watch and a weathered pair of Tevas.
“I’ll always slip on some shorts if my guests are uncomfortable,” he said recently, as he served bagels and lox to Mr. Ruf and Mr. Palme, who were fully clothed but appeared perfectly at ease with Mr. Redmond, who was not.
“It’s Bob’s home,” said Mr. Palme, 20. “He can do whatever he wants.”
Mr. Ruf, 21, added: “We’re just happy to have a place to stay.”
As membership in CouchSurfing’s seven-year-old global community has soared to more than 2.8 million from around 4,000 in 2004, so has the number of its online groups, through which members share their interests. There are now more than 36,000, including straightforward categories like “Piano Players” and “Libertarians” and more existential ones like “What Am I Doing With My Life?”
Those looking for a nudist-friendly environment have a variety of groups from which to choose — not just Clothing Optional, but also Naked at Home, Freedom for Nudity, Nudist Lifestyle and nakedveganpotsmokingcyclists, among others. By designating their homes as nudist-friendly spaces, members of these groups provide travelers with temporary havens from the tyranny of fabric and public nudity laws. More important, perhaps, from the hosts’ viewpoint, they are taking the intimacy of couch surfing to an extreme, bringing the unguarded ethos of the nudist camp into their homes.
Read more:
Daniel Ruf and Patrick Palme, budget-minded students from Hanover, Germany, drove across the United States this spring without paying for nearly any of their accommodations. During the trip, they stayed overnight in 20 cities with people they met through CouchSurfing, a social networking Web site whose members make their homes available to travelers free of charge.
Stephanie Muise, in her Toronto home, with her guest Ricardo Neumann from Berlin. “When I come home, I take off my shoes, feed my cats and get naked,” she said. But after sending dozens of requests to New Yorkers, the only response they got was from Robert Redmond, a 48-year-old retired New York City parks department employee, whose online profile shows him crawling naked into a kayak on the Delaware River.
Mr. Redmond, it turned out, was a member of the site’s Clothing Optional group and has been a nudist since the age of 23, when he first skinny-dipped in Lake Michigan. For the last year, he has been hosting travelers in his three-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, most of the time wearing nothing but a Swiss Army watch and a weathered pair of Tevas.
“I’ll always slip on some shorts if my guests are uncomfortable,” he said recently, as he served bagels and lox to Mr. Ruf and Mr. Palme, who were fully clothed but appeared perfectly at ease with Mr. Redmond, who was not.
“It’s Bob’s home,” said Mr. Palme, 20. “He can do whatever he wants.”
Mr. Ruf, 21, added: “We’re just happy to have a place to stay.”
As membership in CouchSurfing’s seven-year-old global community has soared to more than 2.8 million from around 4,000 in 2004, so has the number of its online groups, through which members share their interests. There are now more than 36,000, including straightforward categories like “Piano Players” and “Libertarians” and more existential ones like “What Am I Doing With My Life?”
Those looking for a nudist-friendly environment have a variety of groups from which to choose — not just Clothing Optional, but also Naked at Home, Freedom for Nudity, Nudist Lifestyle and nakedveganpotsmokingcyclists, among others. By designating their homes as nudist-friendly spaces, members of these groups provide travelers with temporary havens from the tyranny of fabric and public nudity laws. More important, perhaps, from the hosts’ viewpoint, they are taking the intimacy of couch surfing to an extreme, bringing the unguarded ethos of the nudist camp into their homes.
Read more:
Pill Mills
by Lizette Alvarez
Florida has long been the nation’s center of the illegal sale of prescription drugs: Doctors here bought 89 percent of all the Oxycodone sold in the country last year. At its peak, so many out-of-staters flocked to Florida to buy drugs at more than 1,000 pain clinics that the state earned the nickname “Oxy Express.”Related
But with the help of tougher laws, officials have moved aggressively this year to shut down so-called pill mills and disrupt the pipeline that moves the drugs north. In the past year, more than 400 clinics were either shut down or closed their doors.
Prosecutors have indicted dozens of pill mill operators, and nearly 80 doctors have seen their licenses suspended for prescribing mass quantities of pills without clear medical need.
New laws are also cutting off distribution. As of July, Florida doctors are barred, with a few exceptions, from dispensing narcotics and addictive medicines in their offices or clinics. As a result, doctors’ purchases of Oxycodone, which reached 32.2 million doses in the first six months of 2010, fell by 97 percent in the same period this year. The ban was phased in beginning last October, with a limit on the number of pills a doctor could dispense.
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