Maud’s blog has an amusing entry about a guy who lied his way into the editorship of a gay-porn mag. Maud’s excerpt: There was the flamboyant gay editor who could barely speak English?let alone use grammar correctly; the standard office…
Month: April 2004
Making sense of Columbine
Dave Cullen deflates the popular myths about the high school massacre. The first steps to understanding Columbine, they say, are to forget the popular narrative about the jocks, Goths, and Trenchcoat Mafia and to abandon the core idea that Columbine…
Taking the morning off
Not much happening anyway.
Scanning brains for evidence of politics
From the New York Times: He lay inside an M.R.I. machine, watching commercials playing on the inside of his goggles as neuroscientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, measured the blood flow in his brain. Instead of asking the…
Outsourcing and brain drain
It’s OK when we lure the best and the brightest away from their homelands, but it sucks when their homelands lure them back. The problem is not the inevitable transfer of certain business functions to where they can most efficiently…
Why we do this, part #134
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who says there’s never been a famine in a country with a free press, describes the connections between a free press and a just society. The first – and perhaps the most elementary – connection concerns…
USA Today discovers Iraqi bloggers
Here’s the scoop. What’s interesting to me about the Iraqi bloggers is not their actions, but their audience — judging from the comments at the blogs I’ve seen, the readers are mostly Americans desperate to be told what they want…
Required reading for newsies
William Greider on our inability to remember. The war in Iraq is different from Vietnam in one fundamental respect: A substantial portion of Americans (and others around the world) were in the streets protesting this venture before the shooting started.…
When pictures become news
Newsdesigner shows the Seattle Times Sunday front page. I’m guessing it took the editors at the Times about three thousandths of a second to decide on their lead art. The objective description: some people in an airplane’s cargo hold tend…
Tim Porter posts, at long last
He’s been away for a few weeks … today he weighed in on why management is so crappy at so many newspapers. I have become increasingly convinced in the last few months, however – persuaded by interviews with dozens of…