tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32560896406221111682024-02-07T22:21:28.223-08:00AbetacularAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.comBlogger118125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-65310471208215763652015-01-29T07:36:00.001-08:002015-01-29T07:39:27.392-08:00What we talk about when we talk about Selma<p>I went through three stages of reaction to the debate surrounding LBJ’s portrayal in the otherwise-awesome <i>Selma</i>. First, before I’d even seen the movie, it seemed strange to be centering the discussion about the first civil rights-era movie made by black people on a minor white character. If there are inaccuracies, I figured, that’s because the movie is fictional and aiming at some larger truth, and it seemed petty to get so upset about the one white character in a film made by an industry overwhelmingly dominated by white people. Not to mention, the larger story of civil rights in America really is about the resistance of powerful white people to the emancipation of black people, so it’s hardly unreasonable to portray a President hesitantly embracing the movement.<br></p><p><br data-mce-bogus="1"></p><p>Then I saw the movie. During the Johnson scenes, I couldn’t help but think about the criticisms I’d read and, not being a Johnson scholar (or any kind of scholar, for that matter), I fixated on the moments that seemed to ring false. I wasn’t trying to, it just happened. The rest of the movie was great, but during the Johnson scenes I cringed. Afterward, as I thought about it, all manner of alternate approaches suggested themselves - Johnson’s hardly the only white foil in the movie, so it seemed gratuitous to me to take liberties with the historical record when the critiques of white society that any civil-rights movie has to make can easily rest on the truly loathsome figures of Gov. Wallace and Sheriff Clark.</p><p><br data-mce-bogus="1"></p><p>In the last day or two, though, I’ve started to reconsider. I’ve read and listened to a number of black critics discuss Johnson’s portrayal as rather moderate in their eyes. The white critics I’ve read have seen Johnson in the movie the same way I did - as pretty alarmingly racist. And that difference has been what’s caused me to rethink.</p><p><br data-mce-bogus="1"></p><p>If black people hear Johnson as a moderate, and white people hear him as a flaming racist, well, that says something pretty interesting about what we’re bringing to the film as individuals. It strikes me that for white people, this is a movie with relatively few figures to identify with - certainly there are the solidarity marchers who come to Selma, and martyrs like James Reeb who die there. But they’re not really individual characters in the movie; they’re more like a concept, a mass of people standing in for a mass of people.</p><p><br data-mce-bogus="1"></p><p>There are only a handful of white characters in the movie with enough screen time to subconsciously identify with. And they’re all awful, but Johnson is the least awful, and unlike all the rest, he’s not vilified today. So naturally, modern white people identify with him (at least on some level; I’ve never been a ridiculously tall Texan President, but I think you know what I mean). And when he then goes on to, in the movie, endorse really despicable acts like the FBI’s surveillance of King’s private life and their manipulation of his marriage; and when we learn, after the movie if we didn’t already know it, that LBJ (apparently) never actually did that, it feels a bit like a betrayal. Like an unnecessary savaging of an otherwise-ok white person who I had been identifying with subconsciously for a few hours.</p><p><br data-mce-bogus="1"></p><p>All of which is to say, it’s about time. American culture has been inaccurately and gratuitously misportraying non-white people for as long as there has been American culture. The sensation of, “There’s only one person in this movie I can relate to, and they kinda made him a jackass” is not a new sensation for black people, or asian people, or hispanic people, but it is for white people. So this is something we’ve just got to get used to.</p><p><br data-mce-bogus="1"></p><p>But there’s something else. This is a movie by a black woman, about one of the most important black figures of the 20th century. This is not a movie made by committee, or screen-tested to appeal to every demographic. This is a piece of art, made by a specific person with a specific vision. Like all art, liberties are taken in service of a larger truth, but more specifically, this is the world seen through a lens in which LBJ’s portrayal really is pretty accurate. Maybe there’s no tape of him endorsing Hoover’s ugly spying on King, and maybe he was marginally more sympathetic to civil rights for black people than it felt like the movie portrayed. But the movie is about King, and about the struggle for equality, and in the context of that struggle it is no inaccuracy at all to say that the white power structure was reticent to extend equal rights to black people.</p><p><br data-mce-bogus="1"></p><p>This is what happens when you let people who aren’t white men make movies: they tell stories from their point of view, and the whole point is that their view is different from mine. Why watch, otherwise?</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-75355773864897156012015-01-28T08:58:00.001-08:002015-01-28T09:05:57.885-08:00Walking<p>I walked to work today, about 7 miles. It took an hour and a half, roughly twice as long as it would take on the train or bike, but far more pleasureable (at least than the former). And I love trains, but being outside and seeing random beautiful things like a light snow dusting Oz Park or the sun catching some buildings (all things you can see on the train too, it should be said) are really nice rewards.</p><p><br data-mce-bogus="1"></p><p>I think just being outside is really what I love. Running around, walking, biking, strolling, listening to podcasts or music, whatever it is, it just feels good and breaks me out of my own head. I spend far too much time there.</p><p><br data-mce-bogus="1"></p><p>I find it to be a great reminder that I may have no idea what I’m going to do today, or I may be upset by some trivial bullshit, but none of that matters because the world is bigger than I could ever be, and it’s always interesting to just watch it. Life is better than any one person’s best or worst day.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-49334662587891165222015-01-26T10:30:00.001-08:002015-01-28T09:02:59.524-08:00The Infamous S-Curve<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">If you’ve lived or driven in Chicago, you’ve probably spent some time cruising down one of the country’s most beautiful roadways: Lake Shore Drive. If you’ve only done that driving in the last thirty years, however, you were fortunate enough to avoid one of the most notoriously dumb civil-engineering debacles of the American 20th Century: the S-Curve.<img data-position="3" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/abe.blog/5DB11DC1-9F88-43A5-A678-B0914BE0CAC5.png" style="max-height: none; max-width: 100%;" /><br />
To get a sense of how dumb this structure was, consider the nature of LSD, as we call it: a beautifully scenic lakefront expressway that runs most of the length of the city, often with relatively little traffic. These days, the speed limit is 45 miles per hour (40 during the winter), and the Illinois Department of Transportation <a href="http://chi.streetsblog.org/2014/04/14/tell-idot-to-rehab-lsd-as-a-complete-street-not-a-speedway/#more-92692">estimates</a> that 78-95% of drivers exceed it. It’s pretty hard not to; the Drive feels designed for moving at speed, and the buildings and parks and lakefront whipping by reward it.<br />
<br data-mce-bogus="1" /> So you’re going 50, 60, even 70 miles an hour (as nearly 10% of drivers do in one section) and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you hit a curve. But not just any curve. Look up above.<br />
<br data-mce-bogus="1" /> Immediately you have to turn 90 degrees, and then as soon as you’re done not-crashing and not-flying-off-the-side-of-the-highway, you have to do it again. Over a river, next to a lake, immediately before or after a drawbridge (depending on direction), all the while careering through a pair of turns with NASCAR-style raised outside edges.<br />
<br data-mce-bogus="1" /> Amazingly, the good citizens of Chicago almost never crashed their cars on this monstrosity.<br />
<br data-mce-bogus="1" /> Oh wait, they did, all the time. My uncle Jeff remembers crashing at night in the middle of an empty and deserted S-curve and having to walk back to Hyde Park, 8 miles south (some parts of this story might be apocryphal). Other friends and relatives who lived in the city at the time have their own stories of accidents, near-misses and impossibly slow traffic caused by people who didn’t want their own memorable stories to tell.<br />
<br data-mce-bogus="1" /> The S-Curve is gone now, demolished in 1985, but the legend lives on: poor public works planning isn’t an abstraction but an obstacle for the residents of a place to overcome, or suffer under. The lessons of the S-curve are with us in Chicago every time we pay a dumbly-privatized parking meter, drive on the dumbly-privatized Skyway, or attend a basketball game at the unnecessary and outrageously expensive Catholic-school basketball stadium our tax dollars are inexplicably paying for. Public policy matters.<br />
<div class="image-size mceNonEditable" contenteditable="false" data-mce-bogus="true" data-mce-style="display: block; -webkit-transform: translateZ(0); top: 190px; left: 5px;" data-size="713x458" id="plate" style="-webkit-transform: translateZ(0px); display: none; left: 5px; top: 190px;"></div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-66490775541930259172015-01-14T12:06:00.001-08:002015-01-14T12:06:47.012-08:00Everything looks different from the outside<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A depressed person can be depressed for reasons that don't make any sense to outside observers. A society can decide that stonewashed jeans and permed hair look really cool, for reasons that fail any rational test of logic. And an economist can look at a set of facts about a place and draw conclusions from them that are simultaneously correct and absurd.<br />
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Near the end of his discussion of the history of economic growth since the year 1700, in his so-far-excellent book <i>Capital in the 21st Century</i>, Thomas Piketty makes an observation based on data that made my jaw drop. In North America, apparently, "there is no nostalgia for the [post-World War II] period," because North America never saw levels of growth comparable to the miraculous expansions in postwar Europe, the so-called Trente Glorieuses. The graph at the top of the page illustrates the argument, and indeed, economic growth in North America post-World War II was dramatically lower than in Western Europe.<br />
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And yet. Anyone who's lived in the US at some point in the last twenty years and has watched our political debates unfurl would never for a second believe that we have "no nostalgia" for the most overly-hagiographized decades of the 20th century. The 1950s are an iconically great time in America's self-image, at least for straight white men, and an entire political party exists in order to return us to that era.<br />
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Piketty goes on to hedge this statement slightly, treating the malaise of the 1970s and the conservative renaissance in the 1980s as evidence that any expansion in the decades prior didn't go far enough towards increasing overall prosperity. But he doesn't back away from the central premise of that paragraph, and it's instructive to think about the broader significance of his...I don't want to call it an error, exactly, since I'm not interested in throwing down an econ debate against one of the most impressive economists writing in the 21st century. So let's say that it's interesting to discuss his mischaracterization of our national lack of nostalgia.<br />
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To begin with, it obviously demonstrates the limitations of statistical and economic analysis in understanding a society of complex human beings. He's not wrong about the numbers, but he is wrong about our collective societal memory of that era, and the latter really isn't reducible to any mathematical statement. As human beings existing in the physical world, our horizons are governed by math but our behavior is not predicted by it.<br />
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It's also worth thinking about what Piketty's mischaracterization tells us about our own powers of assessment. Americans, myself included, love to make judgements about other societies with relatively little information. A handful of terrorist attacks by a tiny number of individuals cause us to condemn broader aspects of "the Muslim world," whatever that is. We think we know something about Europe because they have strong social-welfare laws and charming old-world accents. Even at home, high crime rates in inner cities lead white people to condemn the societal dysfunctions of Black America.<br />
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In this case, a person with deep ties to the United States - Piketty was an assistant professor at MIT for a few years - and an overwhelming volume of econometric data, nevertheless drew a conclusion about what Americans think that is wildly different from what I think we commonly believe (or at least, what I think we commonly believe about what we commonly believe). It should give us pause before we rush off to condemn another society about which we know almost nothing beyond a single data point.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-21124663397074060232014-02-28T11:33:00.000-08:002014-02-28T11:33:19.069-08:00Following the wrong money<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I'm pretty proud of <a href="https://twitter.com/ILCampaignCash">the little Twitter bot</a> I wrote to auto-tweet large Illinois campaign contributions, but this morning I realized its true insignificance. Campaign finance is simply not where the story about money and politics really is, and all of the sound and fury over its minutiae signify nothing. In 2012, estimates vary but <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/10/2012-election-spending-will-reach-6.html">about $2.6 billion was spent on the Presidential race; around $6 billion was spent on all federal races</a> (including House and Senate elections).<br />
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In 2014, the White House budget <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2014/assets/tables.pdf">projects spending $3.78 trillion dollars</a>. In other words, the most expensive set of elections in American history - by far - accounts for about 0.16% of the federal budget for 2014. The government will spend the equivalent of one of the most expensive Presidential races America has ever seen in 4.5 hours. As a percentage of the federal budget, the 2012 Presidential election cost less than <a href="http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/02/28/the-huge-cost-of-male-genital-mutilation-ctd/">the percentage of health care spending we allot to circumcision</a>.<br />
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The question isn't, "Why is there so much money in American politics?" but rather, "Why is there so little?" And more importantly, "Where is the real money going, and where's the real quid-pro-quo?"<br />
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Those are tough questions to answer, so I won't. A lot of people are already working on them, and entire careers can be devoted to understanding where the federal dollar is spent. What's interesting to me is why campaign finance data gets so much more attention in journalismland.</div>
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I started wondering about this this morning at an overflowing <a href="http://ire.org/conferences/nicar-2014/">NICAR</a> <a href="http://ire.org/events-and-training/event/973/1128/">panel</a> on mining FEC data - one of about 4 explicitly devoted to campaign finance, with another half-dozen panels using campaign finance as one topic among others under discussion. Legions of nonprofits and open-source projects and websites are devoted to analyzing and dissecting campaign finance - <a href="http://followthemoney.org/">FollowTheMoney.org</a>, <a href="http://sunlightfoundation.com/">the Sunlight Foundation's</a> <a href="http://influenceexplorer.com/">Influence Explorer</a>, <a href="http://opensecrets.org/">OpenSecrets.org</a>, and pretty much every major and minor newspaper has some sort of campaign finance project.</div>
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There's nothing wrong with all this activity, to an extent - great, valuable, important stories remain to be found in campaign finance data, at both the state and federal level. But I think the real reasons for this surfeit of attention paid to such a tiny chunk of money are structural, and troubling.</div>
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<br />For one thing, it's just easier to analyze and write stories about this data. Disclosure laws are admirably firm(ish), so there's a ready source of easily-understood data about who's giving money to campaigns and who's getting money from them. Dates, contribution amounts, names, addresses, occupations - it's all there, it's all obvious and straightforward, and your only headaches are in parsing file formats and matching up misspelled names.</div>
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It's also much easier to make an assertion on the basis of this evidence alone. Did someone give $20,000 to a politician who then appointed them to an office? That's all you need to know in order to raise an eyebrow, and it's all public record, so it's totally defensible. Was a contract awarded to someone's brother, when another firm was better-equipped to do the job? That's vastly harder to prove, and a lot of that evidence isn't already public, requiring even more effort.</div>
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Ultimately, my fear is that campaign finance has had a spotlight trained on it for so long that the real malfeasance has migrated. If you're a shady character looking to exert undue influence on a system, or looking to profit from that system, are you going to commit your shady acts in the one place you know reporters are constantly looking for stories? The one place you know everything will be made public, scrutinized by bots and concerned citizens and hungry journalists looking to find you? Or are you going to start sleazing around the government contracts that are so much larger, and so much more opaque, and already so sleazy to begin with?</div>
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In short, if you're trying to exert undue influence or scrape some cash off the top of a fat government contract, are you going to go where the sunlight is, or where the money is?</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-20759748965493454432014-02-16T21:30:00.000-08:002014-02-17T08:35:14.097-08:00Midnight in the Mayor Bilandic Memorial Dibs Garden<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's the only memorial to Mike Bilandic I've ever seen, a festive celebration of two great Chicago traditions that nobody outside the city really understands, while those inside it only pretend to: Chicago celebrates its political corruption with a zeal normally reserved for the defense of parking spaces, and now some great genius has twinned the two.<br />
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In a side alley near 53rd and Woodlawn - those of you who know the city know instinctively where this is, another grand City tradition, marking territory and therefore the teller of a tale by implicit association with intersections - the memory of Chicago's snowed-in hopeless seat-warmer lives on, eternal flame tended by irony and nostalgia in unequal measure.<br />
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He let us drown in snow, the elders tell us, reminding us of a day when the provision (or lack thereof) of city services would drive even a Machine Mayor from office. Woe betide the public official who fails to salt the streets, a lesson burned into the memory of anyone who wants to see their name in Chicago's version of flashing lights, on thin cardboard placed just outside the statutorily-mandated 100 feet from a polling place.<br />
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The machine gave us Bilandic, just like it gave us Daley before him and Daley after him and on down through the generations, past Cermak and Kelly and Nash and Brennan - dig those first-generation names that adorn our street signs still - all the way back to Ogden. But the machine, back when it was the Machine, gave us Bilandic right out of the fingertips of Chicago's real first Black Mayor, Wilson Frost - now there's a name you don't see on street signs - when it decided that the city charter didn't really mean it when it said that the (black) President Pro Temp of the City Council became Mayor when the Mayor died.<br />
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So they locked him out of the office, because of course they did, "can't find the keys," they actually told poor Wilson. One of those conversations in which you imagine everyone knows what's really going on whether or not anybody says it out loud, speaking in a code so transparent it might as well not be a code at all but appearances, even in Chicago, must be kept.<br />
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So yeah, Acting Mayor Frost tried to park in that space. It was clear of snow, no obstacles in sight, but the rusted-out chair was merely invisible. Don't you know it, Bilandic had shoveled that space out this morning and it was really his after all. He just forgot to put the chair out, but it was there, don't you worry about that. They should have called him Mayor Dibs; I hope they did.<br />
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The snow did him in. That's the legend, anyway; I wasn't around, or born. He didn't get Snow Command out on the roads fast enough, I guess, though I'm not sure what he could have done. January 14th, 1979, left Chicago buried under a still-record 29 inches of snow. This has definitely been a historically brutal winter, but we've only seen 62.9" of snow so far; in 1978-79, they got 80.6", which remains the snowiest winter since records were kept in this city.<br />
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The other thing that happened in these early February weeks 35 years ago was, as Mayor Dibs' luck would have it, a mayoral primary, and grumpy Chicagoans expressed their displeasure by voting for Jane Byrne. She ran as a reformer but she was solidly of Machine stock. Byrne was appointed to Daley's cabinet and fired from Bilandic's, and would, as Mayor, replace the head of the most important Machine institution, the Cook County Democratic Party, with a guy nicknamed Fast Eddie who somehow managed to be an even sleazier character than you might expect. At one point, ostensibly to curb the violence in the neighborhood, she moved into the (now largely demolished) Cabrini-Green projects, planning to stay for "as long as it takes," according to her press secretary. She stayed for three weeks.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-43444644653263381482013-09-07T03:50:00.002-07:002013-09-07T03:54:44.062-07:00A night in Chicago<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In Wicker Park on this Friday night, lights flashed against the fieldhouse as police cars sat parked in unfamiliar positions, guarding the scene of a double shooting as a house party raged on and pockets of stylish young people walked past, bemused and intrigued. At one point, a Chief Keef song blasted out of the house party's speakers in what seemed like an ironic commentary on the rarity of the shooting that had taken place across the street - unless, as is equally possible, they had no idea anything bad had happened outside the flashing colored lights and sweaty gyrating youth ensconced in their hip, rich enclave.<br />
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Shootings happen in Wicker Park, just like they do all over Chicago, but they're different there - much less frequent, more unusual spectacle than depressing daily occurrence. Gangs fight in the park from time to time, but in Wicker Park it seems more like the exception than something common enough to warn your kids about. And the reaction of passers-by to the scene we saw tonight was emblematic of that difference: some gawking, some nervous laughter, some curiosity. But nothing like the tired anger in one woman's voice in Woodlawn, as she loudly railed against the police for just standing around, seeming to do nothing but draw paychecks and shoot the breeze.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-Hh5nJ5HtOghtvqti682IQqBJ-3rmE2RebOsDLqUPQaiTdnjFSUTnnBy7gULMvm7pjtDQ70krFXw_lzNcuFY2yHCmCf2K6wr9nD0bN3qQXPVyb64DrNEOJuz-PkwM_pFGHkMYn2pPLww/s1600/quote.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-Hh5nJ5HtOghtvqti682IQqBJ-3rmE2RebOsDLqUPQaiTdnjFSUTnnBy7gULMvm7pjtDQ70krFXw_lzNcuFY2yHCmCf2K6wr9nD0bN3qQXPVyb64DrNEOJuz-PkwM_pFGHkMYn2pPLww/s320/quote.jpg" width="320" /></a>She was angry for a lot of reasons, not least of which being that - unlike in Wicker Park - the shooter this time was a police officer. Justified or not, it's not for me to say, but she saw it as part of a pattern: "They're always shooting black people," she said, or something to that effect. She was mad at the police, for being ineffective, for being violent, for treating her neighborhood differently than they treated rich white neighborhoods.<br />
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The cops probably do treat her neighborhood very differently. At another scene on the West Side, a carful of police rolled past us and called out - seemingly to us, the only people in the vicinity and certainly the only white civilians - "Another day with the savages!" They don't say shit like that on the North Side, because they don't think like that about the populations they're policing.<br />
<br />
But the cops aren't the only ones who change their attitudes when they cross certain borders. I felt pretty ridiculous wearing a bulletproof vest in Wicker Park, a neighborhood I've hung out in hundreds of times with no armor, but I was glad to have the vest on the West Side. Nothing really happened - a bit of a public brawl, mostly verbal, in front of dozens of heavily-armed officers following a shooting - but the scene felt different and I felt different. The surprised curiosity of Wicker Park had given way, just a short trip down Western, to tension and provocation. Throngs of teenagers yelled and massed and stared each other down and scattered and regrouped, on the periphery of the police presence. For their part, the cops let them be, at one point encouraging them jokingly to take their fight across the street, where it would be in another district and another sergeant's problem.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHdQtTVHRPds2KgkAL6hOSByk2bZKKkYGyZS8Uyatf-b2VFSjj9ZD20U5aAcvei5GTc0FMJrp9TQ9aWSgJ6pqrhSF1b_7EML5buCMdq4JcvBEP8tdGE2FabupIcAJo71ZJECvkhA4yTps/s1600/pete.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHdQtTVHRPds2KgkAL6hOSByk2bZKKkYGyZS8Uyatf-b2VFSjj9ZD20U5aAcvei5GTc0FMJrp9TQ9aWSgJ6pqrhSF1b_7EML5buCMdq4JcvBEP8tdGE2FabupIcAJo71ZJECvkhA4yTps/s320/pete.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
I was spending the night riding along with Pete Nickeas, the Tribune's overnight crime reporter, as he headed from scene to scene, gathering details and color to run down the night's mayhem and tell some personal stories where he could. He's been doing it for long enough to know more than the cops do about their own crime scenes, at least sometimes - pointing out a flat tire on a squad car that nobody, including the officer sitting in the car, had noticed; filling an arriving sergeant in on what had happened and how things were going elsewhere in the district; even waking up the FOP representative after an officer-involved shooting, apparently before anyone else whose actual responsibility that was had gotten around to it.<br />
<br />
We saw a side of Chicago that is at once nationally-known and yet largely invisible to many residents of this city, particularly those who don't live in certain neighborhoods or stay up late. To focus on shootings is to miss the point, probably - the statistics tell the tale, crime is down. And yet. "Crime is down," joked the FOP rep once the cameras stopped rolling and all the nighthawks started filling each other in on stories, incidents, tragedies missed over the scanners while photographing another scene. "Crime is down...so they tell me, anyway."</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-68041100412114694782013-07-24T09:31:00.000-07:002013-07-24T09:31:10.322-07:00Capturing a morning<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This morning was one of the most spectacular I can remember in a long time, for no other reason than the temperature and the clarity of the air and sky were at some perfect harmonious synchronicity with each other. Like the strings on a viola that vibrate, at a certain frequency and only at that frequency - not a hair too high or too low, or the effect is ruined - in such a way as to sound utterly perfect, resonating with the wood and the air and the other strings and stroking the aural cortex of our brains so effortlessly and harmoniously that the sound is Angelic.<br />
<br />
The temperature was in the upper 60s, after a long hot spell, and something about everything felt like fall, but not just fall - fall pregnant with possibility, fall promising a future, the fall of a decade ago for me - getting on a bus to go to class in college, going to work on a campaign, going off to build something I didn't know the future of yet.<br />
<br />
The crisp air and the sun made me remember how fantastic it is to be alive.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-34203225055305301812013-07-03T22:02:00.002-07:002013-07-03T22:02:30.305-07:00RIP, Douglas Engelbart<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Watch this video of the aptly-named Mother of All Demos and see how clearly Doug Engelbart saw the future coming, and then went out and built it for us:<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-55639107705652137912013-03-17T15:25:00.003-07:002013-03-17T15:25:22.307-07:00Winning isn't everything<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Maybe Rick Reilly's right that <a href="http://espn.go.com/chicago/mlb/story/_/id/9047502/wrigley-ivy-choking-life-field">the Cubs haven't won a World Series in over a century because Wrigley Field is so great</a>. He's almost certainly wrong about that, but let's grant him the point. Does that mean the Cubs should allow billboards along the outer walls of the stadium, blocking the view from nearby rooftops?<br />
<br />
Hell the fuck no, Rick. That's a terrible idea. I'm a fair-weather Cubs fan, I'll admit, but I'd like to see them win a Series in my lifetime. But I don't give a damn about the profit margins the Ricketts family gets from owning the Cubs (and if my current employer, the Tribune, still owned them, I still wouldn't care), and I don't think being a Cubs fan obligates me to. And as a resident of the city of Chicago, I care a great deal about the beauty and, yes, horror of horrors, tradition of Wrigley.<br />
<br />
Look, it's a beautiful stadium and a great place to see a game, and the <strike>city</strike> north side entire benefits from that to some degree. It's not like I care about the rooftop owners either, but more billboards around the stadium - or anywhere else in the city - is hardly a desirable outcome.<br />
<br />
I'm sure the facilities could be upgraded, and that would be a worthwhile improvement. By all means, build a better clubhouse and weight room and all the rest, as Reilly recommends. But let the improvements stop at the invisible stuff that the players need and maybe makes the fan experience better - we don't need more ads anywhere, let alone in one of the last great public spaces in America uncluttered with advertising.<br />
<br />
The Ricketts family didn't buy any random baseball team with a generic corporately-named stadium. They knew what they were buying when they bought it, and they're extremely wealthy in spite of all the minor inconveniences leveled upon them by owning one of the greatest franchises in American sports. They can afford to pay players enough to win a World Series without making Wrigley just like every other ballpark in the country, so they should do it, and if they wanted a better deal on a stadium with no soul they should have bought the Sox.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-51041730415364220372013-02-22T07:25:00.003-08:002013-02-22T07:25:42.642-08:00Reggie Rose is right, kinda<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Having watched the Bulls <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/basketball/bulls/ct-spt-0222-bulls-heat-chicago--20130222,0,2569446.story">get destroyed by the Heat last night</a>, it's not hard to understand <a href="http://espn.go.com/chicago/nba/story/_/id/8971475/derrick-rose-brother-says-no-trades-big-factor-return">where Reggie Rose is coming from</a>: even with a healthy Derrick Rose in the lineup, these Bulls don't really seem like they can beat the Heat, and that won't change until Bulls management adds a couple more pieces, or one legitimate all-star, to the roster.<br />
<br />
It's not surprising, but it's still gratifying, to see some fire in the bellies of those closest to Chicago's most beloved athlete: Derrick Rose's window of greatness, like all superstars, is finite and closing, and wasting even a single season is tempting fate. So you want Derrick's older brother and manager to be itching for him to play, surrounded by the best lineup money can buy.<br />
<br />
But you've also got to look at the big picture, in order to understand how that lineup can possibly come together. And for that, there are two key pieces of data to observe: first, that Derrick Rose - his game, his story, his personality, everything about him - is a once-in-a-generation Chicagoan. Somebody like him may never come again to this city or this league, and that means that as important as it is to have a sense of urgency, it's equally important to think about the arc of his entire career. The Bulls franchise is now built exclusively around him, and if he's not going to be at full capacity, there's no point in trying to make a run for a title this season. So it made sense to trade Omer Asik, and to not make any rash decisions before the trade deadline, and every decision John Paxson and Gar Forman make should be oriented to building a long-term championship team around their superstar.<br />
<br />
The second interesting piece of data is the fact that the Bulls, for the first time in franchise history, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/basketball/bulls/ct-spt-0222-bits-bulls-heat-chicago--20130222,0,2128907.story">are going to pay the luxury tax this season</a>. Why now, why this lost season? I don't know quite what to make of this, though I suspect it's not entirely intentional - their biggest stars are playing on contracts probably too big to make them easily tradeable - but whatever the reason, if it indicates that the Bulls have gotten serious about paying for players, that plus the long view they're taking on Rose is ultimately a very good sign for the future. So calm down, Reggie.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-3700355791999745582012-12-13T09:20:00.004-08:002012-12-13T09:20:53.232-08:00A new mobile app that gets it right<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://sitegeist.sunlightfoundation.com/static/images/img_phones.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://sitegeist.sunlightfoundation.com/static/images/img_phones.png" width="186" /></a>Mobile apps should do one of two things: present a convenient interface to a certain service, or take advantage of supercomputing power inside a user's pocket. Most existing mobile apps - the ones that make sense, at least - do the former. But it wasn't until I installed the excellent new <a href="http://sitegeist.sunlightfoundation.com/">Sitegeist</a> app from the <a href="http://sunlightfoundation.com/">Sunlight Foundation</a> today that I realized how few succeed at the latter.<br />
<br />
The app shows you interesting data about whatever physical location you're in - age and demographic data, house price data, cool nearby places on Yelp, etc. Plenty of existing services do something like this, and this is hardly the first location-aware mobile info app (though it may be the most beautiful).<br />
<br />
But once you use it, you realize how few apps really get it right: this little piece of glass in your hand is telling about your physical surroundings in an utterly useful, simple, charming, pleasant way. It's incredibly powerful and sophisticated, but it conceals that power and sophistication effortlessly, only revealing to the user simple, interesting, contextually-relevant facts.<br />
<br />
I love that this came from the Sunlight Foundation, too, since they're all about government transparency. This app reveals that they're approaching the concept of transparency in a much more user-focused way than I realized: what's important for an individual person to know doesn't just come from a FOIA request. Walking around a neighborhood and effortlessly revealing how much the houses cost, how rich or young the people living around you are, tells you something civically-important. Democracy isn't just about government, it's about people.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-34288207947261342132012-11-14T18:48:00.002-08:002012-11-14T19:00:43.479-08:00Fracking geopolitical foundations<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02195/fracking_2195949b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="199" src="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02195/fracking_2195949b.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #999999; font-family: arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: 13.796875px; text-align: start;">Photo: REUTERS</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">What to make of the findings in </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/business/energy-environment/report-sees-us-as-top-oil-producer-in-5-years.html?pagewanted=all" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" target="_blank">the recent International Energy Agency report</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> that the US will become the largest energy producer in the world in 5 years? </span><a href="http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/11/13/kelly-mcparland-oil-report-suggests-an-earthquake-in-global-politics/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" target="_blank">As Kelly McParland suggests</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">, at once it completely rearranges the global power structure.</span><br />
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Leaving aside for others the fairly important question of "is it true?", since I'm ill-equipped to fact-check the IEA and NYT on this, I feel like this kind of solidifies the timeline we're working with before the planet becomes too disastrously hot. We don't have to worry about "peak oil" ever again, but <a href="http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/11/international-energy-agency-foresees-an-energy-independent-us-within-10-years/">thanks to</a> <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fracking-for-natural-gas-pollutes-water-wells">environmentally-problematic</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing">hydraulic fracturing</a>, we <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2012/nov/12/iea-report-peak-oil" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">now we have to worry</a> that "no more than one-third of already proven reserves of fossil fuels can be burned by 2050 if the world is to prevent global warming exceeding the danger point of 2C".</div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
So, ok, we have a target date about 40 years in the future - is that enough time to prevent the worst effects of global warming, and can we even do it? I'm inclined to believe we've passed a tipping point and the rise of the middle class in India, China and Brazil means we're going to have a really hard time stopping carbon emission increases for the foreseeable future - those nations are going to be legitimately angry to be denied the use of cheap fuel and plastics we've had for decades, because we used it all up - so we'd better get working on some good mitigation strategies.</div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
Ultimately, I'm not that confident we're going to be able to mitigate our way out of the coming climactic disaster, so we're going to just have to adapt and suffer. We as a society will have to come to terms with the guilt unleashed by watching millions of people around the world die from the effects of the pollution we released into the atmosphere. If history is any guide, the people who suffer the most will most likely be poor, since the rich can afford to move away from unsafe coastlines and ensure a steady supply of fresh water. And the karmic injustice will be doubled, as those who pay the highest price will have been those who used the fewest resources.</div>
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That will hopefully turn out to be overly pessimistic, and if we're lucky, we'll make enough progress on mitigation strategies fast enough to avert the worst catastrophes. But if Sandy is going to keep happening to coastline after coastline, and we have more droughts like we had this summer (<a href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/in-the-news/us-drought-2012-farm-and-food-impacts.aspx" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">the worst in 25 years!</a>), and the freaking <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/11/12/coffee_beans_at_risk_of_extinction/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">coffee bean is going to be extinct soon</a> - well, I don't know how much faith I have in engineers who aren't able to rely on the juice of nature's sweetest fruit.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-11724608741436589672012-06-01T09:03:00.002-07:002012-06-01T09:03:58.719-07:00Benton Harbor<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
It's a rainy morning in Benton Harbor, the city that Wikipedia tells us has the lowest per-capita income in the state of Michigan. I feel bad leading with that fact - I suspect that the narrative of a place like this is dominated by such ledes - but the boarded-up buildings in the gray rainy morning really are the most immediately-striking visual fact of this city.<br />
<br />
The signs on one building are a mixture of black-and-white stencils ("<b>city is</b> changing but ignoring <b>black men</b> invest in us" with the non-bolded words merely outlined in white pencil against the white sign, almost invisible) and a professionally-printed call for "honest investor(s)" willing to put money into the local black community. A magnificent church retains the stained-glass and announcement board outside, but looks abandoned from within - I can't tell if it's still in use or not.<br />
<br />
Young black men in black hoodies are the only signs of life outside. They're not, as far as I can tell, acting in solidarity with Trayvon Martin (though I certainly didn't ask, and can you imagine that conversation? "Why would you say you're wearing a hoodie today?" "Because it's 55 and raining!" "Sure, but why the specific choice of this politically-charged garment? You can be honest with me - I'm a well-meaning white guy with an audio recorder!") Inside the (good Yelp-reviewed, free-wifi-offering, Pride-flag-out-front) Phoenix cafe in the arts district downtown, the clientele and staff are almost exclusively white, all the more salient an observation in a town that (again, wikipedia) is 89% black. Really solid tracks from Mos Def and Lupe Fiasco play against a backdrop of beautiful black-and-white x-ray-looking images of plants hung on the wall, part of an exhibit called "Found Botany".<br />
<br />
Across the river from the poorest town in Michigan with an 89% black population is St. Joseph, 88% white with nearly 3 times the household income ($49,982 vs a staggering $17,301).<br />
<br />
We've only been in town since last night, a brief stay at the Red Roof Inn meant to keep us dry from the rain pelting the 94, sheets of water exploding out from beneath the wheels of semis that threaten to run us off the road every few minutes. It's hard to know what else to say about a place that surely hosts so many different storylines; but rather than let the moment go unrecorded (increasingly a rarity on this trip, and in our lives generally) I felt like pointing this out.<br />
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-80985112111232525772012-05-02T11:03:00.000-07:002012-05-02T13:11:10.513-07:00Reflections in the morning light<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBzssz_yLfh9ICOfI7f3Ef51B1PaJKmh-Ihk52lnh79twB-40W3y-2tVwwA1DI0_x-QFDK449NAsaJxytqSTQErGHIaI0w0O91l3FjRV-cdf3UZXw_s1bNvZzhyhChmpTNDoHXgwG96K8/s1600/IMG_0002.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBzssz_yLfh9ICOfI7f3Ef51B1PaJKmh-Ihk52lnh79twB-40W3y-2tVwwA1DI0_x-QFDK449NAsaJxytqSTQErGHIaI0w0O91l3FjRV-cdf3UZXw_s1bNvZzhyhChmpTNDoHXgwG96K8/s320/IMG_0002.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
The hot caffeine makes me feel better. More psychological than physical, it reassures me that things are OK and I'm able to do whatever my day will demand. It gives me energy to press forward; when I wake up, I'm awake and may even be brightly so, but almost always lack the extra reserves of energy that anything beyond reading require of me.<br />
<br />
Four years of Berkeley mornings have not warped me, but they have given me a glimpse of what tranquility can be: perfect sunshine, a gentle easy light that brings out the greens of leaves and grasses, the browns of wood fences and houses and treetrunks; a clearness to the air, lacking excessive heat or humidity; the fresh, clean, organic smells of plantlife awakening to the morning and disseminating their pollen for bees to find. Sure, there are cars and horns (though not too many of the latter); traffic and chores and strollers and people on phones. And of course it's easy to ignore the gentle pleasantness and focus on the podcast, or the day ahead, or a thousand other distractions. But Berkeley is always here, ready for the morning commuter to open his eyes and nose and perceive it.<br />
<br />
It's the light that really makes our kitchen something special - the sunlight as it rises, giving the surprisingly elegant linoleum tiles a character far outstripping their simple black-and-whiteness. The morning gray sky (though not today; perhaps that's a relic of the winter months; I certainly remember many brilliant blue mornings) filling in the gaps between the tops of houses, as different from each other as their collective whole is from the suburban sameness that shamefully dominates so much of this brilliantly beautiful country. The shabbily-pale green of the hills off to the right (East) and the much richer greens and browns and whites of the leaves that block us from the Bay to the West (left).<br />
<br />
Sunlight is not all the same. A clear February morning in Chicago, and a clear May morning in Berkeley: both are blue skies with a dominant sun just out of reach, but to look at them is to know instinctively the bitter cold or blissful warmth that awaits outside. How much of this is a trick of context, I'm not sure; I know that clear May mornings in Berkeley are typically not cold and so I see things that are not there, perhaps; indications of a temperature that isn't actually conveyed by anything more than the calendar. I know a clear February morning in Chicago is going to be ass-bitingly cold, and so I see that in the light on rooftops and sidewalks. Yet I feel certain that if I saw a photograph of a sunlit street in February and July, the light alone would help me know which was which.<br />
<br />
It's the everyday pleasantness of life in Berkeley that I worry about missing the most, and that I'm not sure Chicago will replace. Of course there are those glorious spring days, coming out of the cold, where the energy and optimism of the imminent summer infects every activity with joy. But the November afternoons - will enough of those be quietly pleasant enough to make up for the lack of the everyday niceness of Berkeley? I suppose I shouldn't worry; plenty of people even in my own family have left here for there and never looked back. They must have experienced this same general pleasantness (the weather is changing, but not by that much in the last 30 years that they wouldn't have had such days as these), so maybe I should just ask them.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-22717067272877248342012-05-01T21:35:00.001-07:002012-05-01T21:35:21.492-07:00A new kind of literacy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
Today I hacked my camera, taking it back from the limitations its programmers imposed on it out of a desire to sell more expensive models. I didn't write a single line of code, only used the command-line twice, and yet the process would have been bewildering for most computer users. I was able to do it because I've spent a short lifetime using tech and writing code; both the concepts and the computer-DIY skills I've picked up along the way helped me do something entirely outside my normal domain of experience.<br />
<br />
This, I think, is what constitutes the sort of fundamental technical building blocks we should be giving every citizen - though we need to come up with a better name than "technical building blocks", since that metaphor isn't really domain-appropriate. This is an important type of literacy, increasingly relevant in the 21st century and kind of nonexistent for most of human history into the 20th century. The language of computing devices requires some training to understand, and Turing machines being what they are, and their programmers being who they are, a lot of that knowledge is transferrable. I learned about partitioning disks when I was first trying to install Linux on my desktops in high school, and since I was already familiar with the concept, I found it easier to install a hack on my camera today.<br />
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So what kinds of things should we be teaching people, in order to give them this basic skillset? Here are a few proposals (that perhaps betray a mindset already a few years out of date):<br />
<br />
1. Scripting - most people don't really ever need to know how to program, but would benefit from knowing how to make a computer do something automatically. Both the process of learning how a computer thinks about things like "commands", and the actual ability to issue those commands in an automated way, are an important part of computer literacy.<br />
2. Assembling a desktop - this is increasingly an unnecessary skill for most people's lived experience - laptops and smartphones don't really permit any real kind of hardware hackery. But understanding how a computer's parts fit together, how to take them apart and assemble them, and what those basic parts even are, is as useful as knowing the basic geography of a car's hood.<br />
3. Using a command line - not only is it helpful for future job prospects (command-line familiarity, in my experience, is surprisingly rare outside of coders and sysadmins); learning how to phrase questions in a language a computer speaks teaches you a lot about how it thinks and what its capable of. In many ways, this is a skillset very similar to scripting, and a lot of what you learn on the command-line is helpful when programming (and vice-versa).<br />
4. Learning how to learn - the most important skill I ever learned in the Internet age was how to learn how to do something I don't already know. In my previous jobs, I've been the lone technical person on non-technical teams; and the questions I got asked were often not ones I knew the answers to. But I knew how to teach myself what our team needed in order to get the job done; and in my day-to-day life, I use these skills all the time. This goes far beyond just Googling a question (although that's very important, and there are subtle tricks to know); it's about how to approach a problem so as to make it comprehensible; how to break it down into component parts and solve those; knowing what types of things computers are good and bad at, and what places on the Internet are good gateways for the former.<br />
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-76347570490896662092012-04-26T16:09:00.001-07:002012-04-26T16:12:38.543-07:00Stop saying the Internet is making us more isolated<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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An <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html">article in the New York Times</a> last weekend argued that the Internet is replacing conversation with mere connection. It's the latest in a long line of articles decrying technology's impact on society (cf. the Atlantic's most recent cover story: <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/">"Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?"</a>), and they pretty much always look dumb in retrospect. Not always, but shockingly often, given how self-satisfied their authors tend to be.</div>
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So I was looking for a reason not to like Sherry Turkle's article, and I think it's this: she presents absolutely no data, zero, none, whatsoever. Fine, she's not obligated to, this is more of a polemic about a certain type of human interaction, and it's not clear exactly what data one would want to use to support this argument.</div>
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And yet, she's a researcher who mentions, repeatedly, that she's been studying this for 15 years. And here she has a couple hundred words in the NYT to make the case for what she does (not to mention flog her new book on the subject) and she doesn't reference a single study?</div>
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Ultimately, what evidence she does provide is beyond weak. People in meetings would rather pay attention to only the subjects they care about? A 16-year-old boy is socially awkward? People in offices see their younger coworkers listening to headphones while they work? Seems to me that people got bored in meetings, and were socially-awkward teenagers, long before the iPhone existed. She's clearly longing for an era that only ever existed in her mind.</div>
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She doesn't even really address any possible counterargument about why this shift in our social behavior might be a good thing. And yet, at least one stands out to me: we're social creatures, not really physical ones. We survive best when we work together, when we communicate. Ultimately, humans are basically brains tethered to fleshy appendages. The Internet has begun to break the link between our bodies and our brains, allowing our brains to communicate with each other easier and easier, faster and faster, more and more often.</div>
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People like Turkle lament an era when our lives were bound by our frail physical selves, but it doesn't seem to me that that's a good thing at all. Shy people, physically-challenged people, people physically separated from each other by great distances, are increasingly able to connect, deeply, with each other. We're not hostages to our biology anymore, which is probably both good and bad. But it's lazy nostalgia to automatically assume that our modes of interaction were somehow superior when we were held hostage to the weakest part of ourselves.</div>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-90497443006048598972012-03-25T13:42:00.001-07:002012-03-25T13:42:31.924-07:00Seizing power in Mali and Russia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Control is no longer as simple as pointing a gun at an uncooperative journalist. Power itself has changed phase and become fluid, leaking around the sites where force is applied: you can no more take over a country by occupying a handful of buildings than you can compress water by squeezing it with your hands. Recent events in two entirely separate countries beautifully illustrate this point.<br />
<br />
Last week, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/world/africa/mali-coup-france-calls-for-elections.html">a faction of the army in Mali overthrew one of the oldest democratic governments in West Africa</a> a month before their scheduled elections. Around the same time, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/world/europe/russian-show-besmirching-protesters-stirs-outrage.html">Russia's private NTV broadcast a takedown of recent demonstrations in Moscow called "Anatomy of a Protest,"</a> for which they've come under widespread criticism.<br />
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In Mali, the military coup has for the last week or so been something of a lazy affair: outside of the presidential palace and state TV station, it's not clear that the army controls anything of substance - though the President hasn't been seen since the uprising began and it's not clear who else is in charge. But what has struck me in reading reports out of Mali this week has been the tone - it's no longer simply assumed that taking power in a country is as simple as taking over the presidential headquarters and state broadcaster.<br />
<br />
It almost seems as though the coup plotters didn't really have a plan beyond "send a couple guys to the TV station and a couple guys to the palace, put out a press release, and … profit?" The <a href="http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/151040/the-underpants-business">Underpants Gnomes theory of military revolution</a>, perhaps.<br />
<br />
What's interesting to me is that this probably would have worked a few years ago. It's not like the army in a West African country has never taken power before, so the playbook may be dusty but it's certainly seen some use. What changed?<br />
<br />
Well, probably the same thing that changed in Russia. The demonstrations leading up to Vladimir Putin's re-coronating re-election appeared to have been a bit of a surprise (although Putin is far too sophisticated to have been caught off guard, and the deftness with which the Kremlin has handled the last several weeks is notable). The Russians have a playbook, too, however, and so a week ago, the private national television station NTV (whose director hilariously doesn't even attempt to conceal his collaboration with top officials: "we have very tight personal relations with the power holders, with the president and prime minister, because we have known each other for years") put out a hit job on the protest movement. An ominous voiceover introduced shady surveillance video and accusations of treachery and Western influence.<br />
<br />
The tactic was predictable, and in another context, so was the response. But this is a Russia still run from Red Square, and the general hostility NTV engendered, from Twitter hashtags to prominent pro-democracy scolds severing their ties to the station, to threats of resignations and angry talk-radio callers, feels like a new development.<br />
<br />
Of course, sardonic comments on Twitter and irate calls to talk radio hardly herald the imminent downfall of one of the craftiest world leaders in power today. The Kremlin has probably decided that allowing people to vent their frustrations publicly, for the moment, is a handy escape valve to prevent the buildup of more dangerous pro-democracy resentments. And even NTV is claiming that, for all the bluster from the commentariat and even their own employees, nobody has resigned since the program aired.<br />
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Which is why the Mali example is so interesting: there, too, the levers of power are being manipulated by familiar forces, while commentators bemoan the lack of democratic legitimacy; and yet, the bemoaners seem at least as significant as the lever-operators. Just because the latter group is nominally in charge today certainly doesn't mean they will be tomorrow.<br />
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-69990489841790282552012-03-20T10:06:00.001-07:002012-03-20T10:08:03.671-07:00Do the Right Thing, Jon Gruber<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">It's easy enough to blame Mike Daisey for making stuff up, and you're heroically up to the task in </span><a href="http://daringfireball.net/2012/03/baby_from_the_bath_water" style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">your most recent post</a><span style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">, among many others. But now would be a perfect time for you to also listen to the parts of <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/460/retraction">the last This American Life episode</a> that directly, legitimately criticized Apple: if Apple actually cared enough to end these abuses, they could, immediately. They play hardball with suppliers, give them razor-thin margins to profit off of, and then are shocked, shocked! that there are labor problems in Casablanca.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Come on. This is the wealthiest corporation in the world; conditions in their plants are awful (if not at Daisey levels of awfulness, or even if not as bad as practically any other factory in China); they could improve those conditions easily and immediately; and all that it would require is paying out slightly smaller dividends to relatively wealthy shareholders.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">You have a reputation as being an Apple water-carrier. You seem to think that's not accurate or fair. Giving Apple legit criticism right now, rather than piling on Daisey, would be a great way to prove your independence. Let's see if you do it.</span></div>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-6244346102720075402012-03-16T13:09:00.001-07:002012-03-16T13:12:59.531-07:00Prediction and suggestion<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Prediction: That This American Life will ultimately come out of <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/03/retracting-mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory">this Mike Daisey fiasco</a> looking better for having so seriously addressed a problem most media organizations sweep under the rug.<br />
<br />
Suggestion: Embracing the same logic that the public wants to support organizations that do the adult thing when confronted with a mistake, President Obama should take direct responsibility for high gas prices in 2012 - even though the responsibility isn't really (or even practically at all) his. By declaring that he's big enough and mature enough to accept responsibility for a bad thing, he'll look so vastly different, better, more elevated than whomever his GOP opponent will be - and especially in comparison to the spineless Mitt Romney. Congress is historically unpopular because of partisanship - this isn't just some Brooksian-centrist fantasy voter we're talking about, but one who, like most adults, thinks the worst of her elected officials these days.<br />
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And anyway, if you want to blame Obama for high gas prices, you're going to do it whether or not he accepts responsibility. It's not clear who he'd lose by saying "I take full responsibility for not keeping your gas prices as low as possible, because I believe we have more urgent priorities and we all have to confront challenges like this together." But I think there are people on the fence, part of the original Obama coalition who've been feeling disenchanted lately, who expected him to be the kind of West Wing President this would be typical of.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-66238544700847764722012-03-12T17:09:00.001-07:002012-03-12T17:11:54.640-07:00Let's thank the kids (and maybe pay em)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As March Madness gets ready to begin, let's just take a moment to reflect on two fundamental truths: this is the best month in sports, entirely because it's happening to young people who've done nothing more than work hard for years on something they believe in; and, for that reason, they deserve some compensation.<br />
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Maybe it cheapens the proceedings somehow, though I doubt it - but a whole lot of people are about to make a whole lot of money based on the hard work of a handful of hustling, talented teenagers and 20-year-olds in the next month and a half, so why shouldn't the kids get a piece? Isn't to do otherwise the very definition of exploitation (if not harsher terms I don't want to muddy the waters with)?<br />
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So thank you, Nation's Young People, for your imminent contribution to national happiness. Not just on the court, of course, but in your quantity of inappropriate celebrations of sporting prowess, however they manifest themselves over the next 40 days! Go forth, drain some 30-footers, be they with a basketball or beer bong, and let's all have a good March!</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-11623944030920991142012-03-09T12:04:00.002-08:002012-03-09T12:04:11.460-08:00The 11:10 Larkspur - San Francisco<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In a few moments, the commuter ferry will leave the coastal suburban haven of Larkspur and plow out into the cold blue San Francisco Bay. As it leaves Marin County, it passes within a few meters of the infamous San Quentin prison, recently the site of a day of action by local Occupy protesters, and daily the locus of uncountable acts of violence and humiliation. Drifting swiftly and comfortably by the floodlights, high stone walls, barbed wire fencing and barracks housing, how many of the passengers aboard this ferry are thinking about what separates them from their countrymen mere meters to port? How many have tried to connect to the (protected, naturally) SQSP wifi network that comes briefly into range? The few packets their device sends to a router somewhere on the outskirts of the prison are probably the most contact they'll ever have with the inside of one of the country's most notorious correctional facilities.<br />
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Like the Alcatraz prison island that our ferry passes to starboard a few minutes later, San Quentin represents both an uncomfortable reminder of the price society exacts for criminal behavior and an object of fascination on the horizon. Most communities keep their prisons far out of sight, the only glimpse of their existence a vaguely ridiculous highway sign encouraging drivers not to pick up hitchhikers. San Francisco, however, has two maximum-security prisons within an easy glance across the Bay; one has even become a tourist attraction, with hundreds of prisoners a day pretending to lock themselves behind bars that once held Al Capone captive.<br />
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How many people have ridden this ferry and later in life found themselves watching it through the narrow windows of San Quentin? There must have been at least one such person, but the demographics of Marin being what they are, this is unlikely to have described many people. What are their names? What did they do, or were accused of having done, that got them sent away? When they see the ferry, their regular seat filled by some blissfully-unaware 1%er listening to This American Life on his iPhone 4 headphones, does it inspire anger, sadness, regret, indifference?<br />
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-22508445247426411652012-02-26T12:44:00.002-08:002012-02-26T12:44:28.710-08:00{End,Beginning} of an Era<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">They've been five of the most fascinating years of my life, but on Friday, March 2nd I'll swipe my badge through Google's front doors for the last time. No more will I be privy to the deep, dark secrets of the Chocolate Factory; my inbox will be free of dogfood debugging statements, stack traces in place of hot new features and thousands of auto-generated emails letting me know at 3:35am that one of my logging jobs is failing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even the logging failure emails, I'll miss. Being connected to the beating heart of the technological now is thrilling, and no matter how religiously I read <a href="http://www.techmeme.com/">techmeme</a> and <a href="http://news.google.com/news/section?pz=1&cf=all&topic=tc&ict=ln">the Google News Technology section</a>, that zeitgeist will no longer be a part of my life.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Which is something I'm excited about, actually. Working for a technology-platform provider, while insanely interesting, keeps one necessarily at arm's-length from specific uses of that platform, which I'm keenly interested in exploring. Google News hosts thousands, millions of articles - I've spent the last five years obsessing over them in the aggregate, and now it's time to write a few of my own. To focus on the micro rather than the macro.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So for the next few months, before Irina and I leave for Belarus, my intention is to write as much as possible, in order to exercise the muscle that I'll rely on daily while abroad. I suppose I'll start running again - building one muscle is easier if others aren't atrophying - and maybe drop a few of the <a href="http://kottke.org/06/11/the-google-15-the-fifteen-pounds-that-new">Google Fifteen</a>. I don't quite know what I'll write about, but I need as much practice at finding the story in a single blade of grass as I do at writing five paragraphs on something fascinating. By finding subjects in familiar objects, the things I habitually ignore and gloss over in my now-daily life, I hope to develop some semblance of a reportorial instinct.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Are there any tricks or techniques you know of to help build reporting and writing muscles? Please leave them in the comments, or send me an email (if you have my email address :)</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-22664192588224765962011-11-04T22:13:00.000-07:002011-11-04T22:13:48.218-07:00On No-Brainers<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?" - Paul Krugman, <i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/opinion/oligarchy-american-style.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss">Oligarchy, American Style</a></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Most Americans agree we should tax the wealthy. The evidence from economics is overwhelming: they can afford it, we need the money, having such a distorted income distribution is bad for the democracy we say we care about. So why do the people who say otherwise get taken seriously without having any real evidence?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Laziness among reporters really can't be the explanation: most reporters work their asses off. They hustle getting stories, getting clicks, reading and writing about what's going on day in and day out. They're some of the most informed people I've ever met.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's not fear of controversy, either. The media loves controversy, because when people are talking about you they're <i>talking about you</i> which means reading you which means seeing the ads that pay your salary. FOX News has demonstrated pretty clearly that you make more money by taking a stand than you do by refusing to. And why would it be bad for business to take up with the more popular side of the debate?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I really don't believe it's fear of losing advertisers. Those folks want their ads to be seen, that's their entire occupation. They've never shied away from advertising heavily to conservatives, precisely because doing so makes them money. They'd make money from a well-run, popular liberal outlet; in fact, many probably already do.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Are businesses and advertisers afraid of what would happen if people were exposed to a default consensus that skewed to the left? Perhaps, but they don't seem thrilled with the direction a conservative consensus is taking us. These are (allegedly) pragmatic businesspeople, they know the costs of ignoring the environment and their bottom line is getting hammered by the recession. Granted they love their tax breaks, but their love for the GOP isn't infinite.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So why is the default consensus that raising taxes on the rich is, at best, controversial (instead of a no-brainer)? I think it's ultimately about a very human logical fallacy: if two people I know to be opposed to each other tell me something, I know that they both have an incentive to lie and so I'll just assume the truth lies somewhere in the middle. But that only helps me find the truth if both sides are wrong.</span><br />
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3256089640622111168.post-24666955869525495132011-11-04T00:11:00.001-07:002011-11-04T00:11:32.661-07:00Occupy Storify<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">#occupythenews - http://storify.com/storify/occupied-storified</span><div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Xavier Damman (<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/xdamman">@xdamman</a>), Storify Technology is not enough. People who can make sense of all these voices.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the house: <a href="http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&btnmeta_news_search=1&q=author%3A%22deborah+petersen%22#hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&q=author:%22Deborah+Petersen%22&sa=X&ei=4k6zTrOXE-ehiQLB9ORs&ved=0CCgQ1AcoADAA&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=b45258d81b306a19&biw=1280&bih=702">Deborah Petersen</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/deborapetersen">@DeboraPetersen</a>), SJ Mercury News/BA News Group How we use socme to deliver to our readers. Love Storify; also use FB but don't find it "as timely"; love tumblr. Trying to use G+, much better for biz reporters than general audience b/c of population of users on it.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&btnmeta_news_search=1&q=author%3A%22deborah+petersen%22#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&source=hp&q=author:%22tasneem+raja%22&pbx=1&oq=author:%22tasneem+raja%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=53087l54454l2l54613l12l8l0l0l0l3l210l1102l2.5.1l8l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=b45258d81b306a19&biw=1280&bih=702">Tasneem Raja</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/tasneemraja">@tasneemraja</a>), Mother Jones How mojo uses storify to cover #ows. "Game-changer" for us. Storify is like real-time notebook for reporters; what would have stayed in their pages is now available to anybody. Problem w/OWS: leaderless, planned/executed on the fly, independently, tons of cities in real-time, no pr flacks (ok not a problem), tons of journos on ground...storify helps you do journalism "asynchronously". Surprised how much I've been talking on the phone to our reporters.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&btnmeta_news_search=1&q=author%3A%22deborah+petersen%22#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&source=hp&q=author:%22angela+woodall%22&pbx=1&oq=author:%22angela+woodall%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=357553l359300l1l359494l14l9l0l0l0l4l199l1217l1.8l9l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=b45258d81b306a19&biw=1280&bih=702">Angela Woodall</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/angelawoodall">@angelawoodall</a>), Oakland Tribune Storify allows us to use their words (meaning subjects of reporting who previously saw bias in reporting). Standards are same for us in Storify as in print.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&btnmeta_news_search=1&q=author%3A%22ellen+cushing%22">Ellen Cushing</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/elcush">@elcush</a>), EBExpress</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&btnmeta_news_search=1&q=author%3A%22ellen+cushing%22#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&source=hp&q=author:%22susan+mernit%22&pbx=1&oq=author:%22susan+mernit%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=41546l42887l0l43322l12l10l0l0l0l6l197l1459l0.10l10l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=b45258d81b306a19&biw=1280&bih=702">Susan Mernit</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/susanmernit">@susanmernit</a>), Oakland Local Pros who publish 3-5 stories/day plus huge outpouring of community writers. Printed occupy page</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&btnmeta_news_search=1&q=author%3A%22ellen+cushing%22#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&source=hp&q=author:%22carly+schwartz%22&pbx=1&oq=author:%22carly+schwartz%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=102110l104480l1l105039l14l13l0l0l0l11l786l5211l1.3.0.2.3.2.2l13l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=b45258d81b306a19&biw=1280&bih=702">Carly Schwartz</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/carlicita">@carlicita</a>), HuffPo SF</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ian Hill (<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/ianhillmedia">@ianhillmedia</a>), KQED Why are you involved in socmed X? You just are, and can struggle to justify that to managers who don't get it. 18 newscasts a day! News orgs in this area? WORK WITH THESE STARTUPS! Nobody in the country has better access to cooler tech companies to partner with!</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">How do you verify? You just do, if something in the pit of your stomach feels wrong, don't do it. You have to do some; twitter is great but call the guy at the Port and ask him to confirm. There's no substitute for experience.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Hello, I'm Andrew Fitzgerald, from Twitter; quick question..."</span></div>
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</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310916260404292728noreply@blogger.com2