For once, it seems that journalists are bristling on behalf of Haiti, a place usually painted by wariness and fear and resigned pity. Haitians themselves may be getting something like good press, no small development for the most maligned people in the hemisphere. The urgent sympathy of the news coverage helps. This disaster is different: It’s the worst yet in a country used to defining “worse” for the rest of the Americas. —“The Undercovered Country: Haiti as journalists have known it,” Sam Eifling, Columbia Journalism Review
Steve Coll on earthquakes and journalism;
the problems
of aiding Haiti;
age-enhanced bin Laden;
related: Taliban Jewish?
Google is also good for history in that it challenges age-old assumptions about the way we have done history. Before the dawn of massive digitization projects and their equally important indices, we necessarily had to pick and choose from a sea of analog documents. All of that searching and sifting we did, and the particular documents and evidence we chose to write on, were—let’s admit it—prone to many errors. Read it all, we were told in graduate school. But who ever does? We sift through large archives based on intuition; occasionally we even find important evidence by sheer luck. We have sometimes made mountains out of molehills because, well, we only have time to sift through molehills, not mountains. Regardless of our technique, we always leave something out; in an analog world we have rarely been comprehensive. —Dan Cohen, “Is Google Good for History,” DanCohen.org
Posting calories in restaurants outweighed by holiday gluttony;
obesity rates have plateaued;
the rich die in greater numbers before estate taxes rise;
letters from early Joan Didion-haters
The problem is not the humanities as a discipline (who can blame a discipline?), the problem is its members. We are insufferable. We do not want change. We do not want centrality. We do not want to speak to nor interact with the world. We mistake the tiny pastures of private ideals with the megalopolis of real lives. We spin from our mouths retrograde dreams of the second coming of the nineteenth century whilst simultaneously dismissing out of our sphincters the far more earnest ambitions of the public at large—religion, economy, family, craft, science. —“The Turtlenecked Hairshirt: Fetid and fragrant futures for the humanities,” Ian Bogost, Bogost.com
The point of ancient Egyptian make-up;
computer networks speeding up outside the U.S.;
Army court-martialing single mom;
Jay Reatard dies;
Dan Savage’s drag name was Helvetica Bold; when he had black hair, it was Futura Bold-Oblique