‘Very few have balls’: How American news lost its nerve
This is so goddamn true.
I myself am afraid to pursue my dream career — independent freelance journalist — for fear of libel lawsuits. A mere threat of a lawsuit can bankrupt a small news venture, let alone a single journalist.
How can you speak truth to power if you fear losing everything?
The Prophets | Marshall McLuhan
McLuhan anticipated that the electronic age would be one of constant change, such that nobody could adapt quickly enough. As a result, people would be plunged into nostalgia, and yearn for their old, solid identities.
Laurel & Hardy, Hepburn & Spencer, Han & Chewie, Krulwich & Abumrad.
You can’t put a price on chemistry.
Tumblr is downscaling after failing to ‘turn around’ the site
What a day for online media.
Turns out running a social network is expensive.
A friend recently asked about my media diet. What are the ten-ish sources of news that I go to consistently (and obsessively)?
I’ll share them here.
I thought to compare the text on the page to the text on my screen. Word for word, they were exactly the same. I was shocked. What happened? Why did a text that read so well in galleys read so shambolically online?
The uniquely powerful insight of the 20th-century discipline of cultural anthropology as formulated by the great French thinker Claude Levi-Straus was that culture is a closed system. A tribal mask hanging on the wall of a hut in Africa or New Guinea has meaning within the culture of the tribe that produced it, which is bound up with their social structures and cosmology. Hang the same mask next to a Picasso in a white-walled room in MOMA, and it becomes a different object, embedded within the cultural system that contains 20th-century Western art. Culturally speaking, the two masks are wildly and indeed irreconcilably different from each other—even if, physically speaking, they are the same mask.
So too with the act of reading. Like every other human activity, reading is a culturally bound activity, whose meaning is determined by its relation to the larger cultural system in which it occurs.
Working in both online and print journalism, this resonates.
The former always feels tinny and thin given its context in the sheer enormity of the internet. Text on a screen is always merely text on a screen. Ephemeral.
Print, though merely ink on a page, holds up.
What Does Destroying Gaza Solve?
The jingoism of some Americans isn’t helping. “Level the place,” advised Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. That “place” has more than two million inhabitants, including about one million children, and I shouldn’t have to remind a senator that when you care about some humans but not others, you’ve lost your humanity.
“If you fire missiles at densely populated areas, you will kill children, and that is what the Israeli military has been doing,” Sari Bashi of Human Rights Watch told me. War crimes shouldn’t be avenged by more war crimes.
Many Israelis aren’t in the mood to hear this. They have suffered a shattering blow, among the worst massacres of Jews since the Holocaust. The refrain from Israel is an anguished: But what do you expect us to do?
Fair enough. Everyone expects Israel to hit back. The practical question is how far to go: In the bluntest terms, for Israel, how many dead Gazan children are too many?
Nicholas Kristof.
He shouldn’t have to remind a senator that the murder of children, be they our own or not, is unforgivable. But Americans have all largely fallen prey to aggression toward the ‘other,’ no matter who that might be. Left hates Right. Right hates Left. When compassion for others isn’t practiced, like anything else, it becomes harder, less intuitive, more elusive.
Americans have long been a hateful bunch, tempered by strains of remarkable tolerance and an even more remarkable indifference. But if my own experience is anything, the invective that long festered on the Right has taken root in the Left. We are largely a rudderless people, guided only by the fire of the latest outrage enflamed by the gasoline of social media, not by strong moral convictions or, gods forbid, logic and reason.
Something wicked this way comes.
So delete social media. All of it — Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, the insipid platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter.
All of it.
No excuses.
You know better.
You deserve better.
Go outside. Say hello to your neighbors. Buy someone a drink. Go for a walk in the woods.
Do not let this infection spread.
Participation Inequality: The 90–9–1 Rule
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.