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'Framing' a Story: Journalism 101
Here's the headline on a Wall Street Journal story today about changes in American patterns of electricity demand:See if you can guess how the lead paragraph of the story ends. It begins this...
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Did Gasoline Cause a Crime Wave? Journalism 101, Cont.
A few minutes ago I mentioned a dicey example of journalism gone bad, or at least gone mushy, from one of our most respected mainstream-news publications.Here's an example of journalism from a...
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Greetings of 'the Festive Season'
So many things to catch up on. I'll start with an easy one, a linguistic point.I mentioned earlier that I dislike expressing generalized greetings for "the holidays" and prefer to mention each specific...
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Back to Guns: Kant vs. Saint Augustine
If you haven't seen it yet, you certainly should look through the exchange that the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates are having about Jeff Goldberg's "More Guns, Less Crime" story,...
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Today's Sobering Reading on the Afghanistan Disaster
Over the decades I've often quoted the analyses and judgments of Franklin "Chuck" Spinney. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was part of an influential group of defense analysts (along with John...
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Why I Get More Than One Newspaper
This morning's selection on our kitchen table. Note the headlines.This does reduce concerns about mainstream media group-think.Also, if you're reading today's WaPo, don't miss Steve Hendrix's very nice...
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Kant, Augustine, and the 'Skins
Over our front door today:Yes, I know that the flag is upside down, traditional signal of distress. That's how it came, which could have been the manufacturers' sign of solidarity with Washingtonians...
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The Hagel Choice: An 'Amish Give Up' Moment for Obama?
I've mentioned several times the greatest and most instructive Onion headline of all time:AMISH GIVE UP'This is bullshit,' Elders SayBack during the debt-ceiling follies of 2011, I hoped, wished, and...
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The Emergency Committee for Israel Goes All In
Well, a minute ago I was trying to remember exactly what Chuck Hagel's business background had been before he got into politics. Showing my sophisticated search skills, I typed "chuck hagel wikipedia"...
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Richard Ben Cramer
I am shocked by the news just now that Richard Ben Cramer has died at age 62, of lung cancer.His book What It Takes is the first book I tell anyone interested in American politics, American culture,...
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The 'Southern Weekend' Strike in China
This is a reading-guide and basic-context note about the fast-developing and potentially important (but also potentially-leading-nowhere) showdown underway in China now, between much of the staff of...
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Thanks to Robert Wright
Until I saw his gracious "Signing Off" message yesterday, I had not realized that Robert Wright was stopping his (almost) daily postings here, so that he could instead concentrate on finishing a book...
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Selamat Hari Natal dan Tahun Baru!
As I've explained most recently here and here, I draw my own holiday-greeting policy from my family's years of living in Malaysia. It's a country with a lot of ethnic groups and a lot of religions:...
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Why I Get More Than One Newspaper, Cont.
Last week I mentioned the striking difference in the way three major newspapers "framed" the latest employment data. The Washington Post's headline was "Jobs report builds hope," the WSJ's was "Tepid...
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Annals of the Security State, Glider Pilot Edition
I am mentioning this story precisely because it occurs in a little self-contained corner of American life that most people would never think of or hear about. But it illustrates some broader changes in...
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Reading Tip: 'The Twenty-Year Death'
I really should have mentioned this in time for the long, book-reading-friendly "festive" period stretching from Thanksgiving to the New Year holidays, but, hey, I was reading the book myself then. And...
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Aaron Swartz
From my friends in the tech world I have over the years heard about someone I hadn't ever met, Aaron Swartz. I feel as if I had been hearing about him forever, but it couldn't have been all that long,...
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The Two Sentences That Should Be Part of All Discussion of the Debt Ceiling
Here they are:1) Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize one single penny in additional public spending.2) For Congress to "decide whether" to raise the debt ceiling, for programs it has already...
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Today's Diverting Aerial-Undersea Footage
As a break from some dark-toned discussion, I give you the Italian skydiver, jumper, conservationist, and model Roberta Mancino -- in China, under the waves, and elsewhere. You may recognize some of...
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Unbelievable Found Art Dept: Firebombing as Mood Music
I've been watching lots of football this weekend -- yes, it's a violent and damaging sport maybe on its way out, but these games have been great -- and have been fascinated by a very arresting series...
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