By Edward Wasserman
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

I’m sure that since Tim Page is a music critic for The Washington Post and won a Pulitzer Prize, he’s a fine journalist. But he did something stupid recently when he sent an aide to Washington’s ex-mayor Marion Barry an angry e-mail demanding to be taken off the solicitation list for some cultural initiative that Barry was pitching.

“Must we hear about it every time this crack addict attempts to rehabilitate himself with some new - and typically half-witted - political grandstanding?” Page asked. (Barry, you’ll recall, served six months after he was videotaped in an FBI drug sting in 1990.)

The Post was embarrassed when Page’s e-mail came to light and apologized profusely to Barry. Then the paper’s executives did something astonishing: They did not fire Page.

Why is that astonishing? Because no matter where else you look, in today’s newsroom environment, just about everybody who screws up, regardless of how serious the offense or how forgivable the sin, gets fired. Almost invariably, the firing is justified in the language of ethics.

Well, not everybody’s fired. The Los Angeles Times reporter who was posting comments under a pseudonym on various Web sites was only demoted and stripped of his column. (So pseudonyms are unethical? Somebody tell George Orwell and Mark Twain.)

He got off easy.

(continue...)

New Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as Boy Journalist Tintin. Cartoon by Bill Leak

Australian Prime Minister John Howard was defeated in the federal election on Saturday and also seems set to lose his own seat of Bennelong, on Sydney’s North Shore, to former Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Maxine McKew. She was an articulate and respected print and television journalist, working with the television news analysis programs Lateline and the 7.30 Report. She also had a column for the news magazine, The Bulletin, called “Lunch With Maxine McKew”. “With her uncanny ability to prise secrets out of people, Maxine McKew is that rare person in Australian life: a public figure who can redraw the political map in a single lunch,” wrote Sydney Morning Herald Journalist, Margaret Simons in 2003.

In an interview with 7 News during the election McKew was asked who she admires, and why:

(Burmese Resistance Leader) Aung San Suu Kyi was spectacularly impressive. Because, I suppose, of the moral leadership she provides. And the extraordinary continuity of her stance against the Burmese tyranny. (Former US Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright. And closer to home, Susan Ryan. When she became Education Minister in the Hawke government in 1983 only one third of Australian teenagers had a Year 12 qualification. And under her stewardship, during the Hawke years, that figure more than doubled. Susan Ryan fought the good fight. The tragedy now is that that figure has been flat lining. And here we are in 2007 and we need to be the smart country and we still have one in five teenagers not finishing Year 12. Among the dead, Jessie Street has always been a great hero of mine. She was talking about equal pay for women in the 1930s. She put equal pay on the map.

Climate Change was the major issue in the Australian election. I live in the Sydney electorate of Wentworth, which has been retained by John Howard’s former Minister for the Environment, Malcolm Turnbull. John Howard refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol. The candidate for Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party in Wentworth, George Newhouse, had his campaign team hand out postcards at the Kings Cross Farmers Market with a drawing of coal smokestacks belching out smoke, with two words written under it: Ratify Kyoto. This seems likely to be Kevin Rudd’s first act as Prime Minister. The Age today reports on a phone call Rudd received from British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has personally congratulated Kevin Rudd on Labor’s federal election victory and welcomed his plan to quickly ratify the Kyoto protocol.

Mr Brown telephoned Mr Rudd from the Ugandan capital of Kampala, where he is attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), shortly after outgoing prime minister John Howard conceded defeat on Saturday night.

“I have talked to Kevin Rudd ... and congratulated him on his election and talked to him about some of the issues, including climate change, that we are discussing here today,” Mr Brown told reporters.

“Kevin Rudd has told me he will immediately sign the Kyoto agreement and he is proposing these binding agreements in the post-Kyoto talks that start in Bali in a few days’ time.”

Former SBS television journalist Patrice Newell has operated a biodynamic farm in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales for the last twenty years and created a coalition of independent candidates around the issue of climate change. She and Australian Broadcasting Corporation science commentator Dr. Karl Kruzelnicki ran for the senate, unsuccessfully it seems. But the Greens Party gathered more votes. “Tonight we have seen Australians vote for a greener, more compassionate Australian Parliament,” Greens Senator Bob Brown told ABC News. “Right across the country, seats are changing hands from the [Liberal / National Party] Coalition to the Labor Party on Greens preferences. Welcome, Kevin Rudd, new prime minister of Australia. This is a remarkable vote by the Australian people for a new era for this country to tackle climate change, to tackle inequality.”

Still from Kundun, Martin Scorsese’s movie of the childhood of the Dalai Lama

In an interview with the Japanese newspaper the Sankei Shimbun, the Dalai Lama said that he and his aides are considering replacing the tradition of searching for a reincarnation of the Dalai Lama among Tibetan boys born around the time of the previous Dalai Lama’s death.

“If the Tibetan people want to keep the Dalai Lama system, one of the possibilities I have been considering with my aides is to select the next Dalai Lama while I’m alive,” he told the Sankei Shimbun in an interview published November 21st. That could mean either some kind of democratic election among senior Buddhist monks or a personal selection by the current Dalai Lama himself, who is the 14th of the line. For 13 successive incarnations, monks have fanned out across Tibet with relics of the deceased Dalai Lama to try and find his next incarnation - a boy who recognized the objects and thus signaled that the Dalai’s soul had passed into a new earthly envelope. It is a ritual that both affirms and reflects the basic foundations of Tibetan Buddhism, reincarnation and the rule of a revered group of repeatedly reborn monks. That the protector of Tibetan culture would consider scrapping a core tenet of Tibetan tradition and possibly undermining his own legitimacy are sure signs that China is solidifying its dominant position in the decades-long standoff.

The boy the Dalai Lama recognised in 1995 as the reincarnation of the second highest lama, the Panchen Lama, mysteriously disappeared shortly after and the Chinese government named its own Panchen Lama.

To counter this, the Dalai Lama appears to have set on finding a suitable successor himself, one whose legitimacy is unsullied by unseemly squabbles over ritual with China and who has been handpicked to take up the advocacy work on behalf of his people once he dies. Making his succession an issue at this time may also be an attempt to tweak the Chinese - sensitive about their reputation in the walk-up to the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 - into taking a more accommodating position regarding the Tibet issue. Unlike more radical Tibetans, the Dalai Lama has always advocated autonomy, not independence, from China; and he has always said that he admired Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic. Beijing, however, has consistently lumped the Dalai Lama with the rest of what it calls the “splittists,” or those who would break up China.

The New York Times today reviews the novel A Free Life by Chinese novelist Ha Jin, who left China for America after the Tiananmen Square uprising.

Nan and Pingping Wu, a husband and wife, are the sort of persevering newcomers, firmly set on a legal path to citizenship by way of unremitting thrift and toil, whom presidents like to point to from the podium during major addresses on the economy. Much as Jin himself did, the Wus came from China to study, not to stay, but they realized after the Tiananmen Square massacre (as Jin did too, he’s said in interviews) that they couldn’t go home again and be themselves, since both their selves and their native land had changed. “A Free Life” is the story of their family’s naturalization — bank deposit by bank deposit, dental appointment by dental appointment, appliance purchase by appliance purchase — and like most novels of what professors call “The American Immigrant Experience,” it’s chiefly a tale of trial and error. The trials provide the drama, the errors the comedy, and their overlap the pathos. It’s an orthodox format, hard to reinvent, mostly because reinvention is its theme.

Walter Kirn. The New York Times. November 25, 2007

In 2000, The New York Times published a long profile of Ha Jin, focusing on his powerful eye for the details of everyday life observed close up while other writers of his generation quote life refracted through the media.

If the lucidity and focus of ‘’Waiting’’ puts you in mind of Russian masters like Gogol and Chekhov, that’s no accident. Jin reads and rereads these writers, he says, to remind him of what fiction is supposed to be. ‘’You read so many novels these days by young writers and they feel so ephemeral,’’ he says. ‘’They are full of references to TV shows and movies. What’s important is to get human feeling onto paper. That’s what is timeless, and that’s what you get from Tolstoy and from Gogol and from Chekhov.’’

In a funny way, says the Chinese-American novelist Gish Jen, the timeless quality of Jin’s writing may be among the few really new things happening in American fiction right now. ‘’The whole idea of looking to masters instead of overturning something is very Chinese,’’ she says. ‘’On some level, Ha Jin has chosen mastery over genius. It’s as if he said, ‘I am going to make something like that.’ This never happens with American writers. We are too beset with the anxiety of influence. What he’s doing is very challenging, and I am interested to see how the American literati pick it up and deal with it.’’

Dwight Garner. “Ha Jin’s Cultural Revolution.” The New York Times. February 6, 2000.

In 2006 Indian journalist Pankaj Mishra visited China. The liberal Chinese intellectual Zhu Xueqin told Mishra that he’d come to admire Gandhi after reading a book on him by Chester Bowles, who had been America’s ambassador to India in the 1950’s and 1960’s. “Gandhi and Nehru were greater men than Mao, Zhu had said, and I briefly wondered if this was meant as a gesture to me, his first Indian visitor,” wrote Mishra in the London Review of Books in November of 2006. “But such comparisons were once part of everyday conversation for many Chinese and Indians. In recent years, the two countries have increasingly starred in a triumphalist narrative: essentially, of Western capitalist modernity showing non-Western peoples the path to progress and development. Yet for many Indians and Chinese, their national experience and identity were shaped by the struggle for freedom from Western military and economic domination.”

Indian politicians and businessmen, and their supporters in the English-language media watched with envy the flow of capital into China – ten times the total foreign investment in India – and the rapid transformation of its coastal cities. These new Indian elites, impatient with Nehru’s vision of economic equality and social justice, pointed to Deng Xiaoping’s reforms as evidence that the creation of wealth must precede the eradication of poverty, disease and illiteracy. At the same time, many Chinese intellectuals had watched closely as India’s granting of universal suffrage at a stroke ensured a much greater degree of public accountability than exists in China. But many privileged Indians increasingly see representative politics as a nuisance – one of the reasons, they say, that India has not received as much foreign investment as China. For what China proves (though this is left unsaid) is that an authoritarian system helps rather than hinders economic growth on the neo-liberal model, by ensuring that labour laws, trade unions, the legislature, the judiciary and the fear of environmental destruction do not impede the privatisation of state assets, the appropriation of agricultural land, the provision of subsidies and tax cuts to businessmen, or the concentration of wealth in fewer hands.

Pankaj Mishra. London Review of Books. 30 November, 2006

Pankaj Mishra talked to novelists, film-makers and journalists who report on the lives of everyday Chinese people.

One of the best-known literary novelists, Yu Hua, told me that he had started out as a formally experimental writer in the 1980s, looking up to Borges, García Márquez and Robbe-Grillet in conscious reaction to the official norms of socialist realism. But as the 1980s wore on, he felt less and less need to challenge state propaganda, and instead chose to portray the experiences of ordinary rural and small-town people in such straightforward narratives as To Live (1992) and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (1995).

When I met Yu in Shanghai he appeared to be enjoying the success of his latest novel, Brothers (2006). It describes how two siblings, orphaned during the violence of the Cultural Revolution, fare in the aggressively materialistic China of the 1980s and 1990s. The younger brother sets up a beauty contest for virgins, while the elder has a breast implant in order to peddle a line of breast enlargement gels in the countryside. With its explicit, and often exaggerated, violence and sex, the novel must have tested the censors. But Yu insisted that he had only described a commonplace reality. ‘Things were bad during the Cultural Revolution,’ he said, ‘but what we are seeing now is total moral breakdown.’

Pankaj Mishra. London Review of Books.

THE NATURE OF AN ALGORITHM: THE AUTOMATION OF JUDGEMENT

Algorithms, as closely guarded as state secrets, buy and sell stocks and mortgage-backed securities, sometimes with a dispassionate zeal that crashes markets. Algorithms promise to find the news that fits you, and even your perfect mate. You can’t visit Amazon.com without being confronted with a list of books and other products that the Great Algoritmi recommends. Its intuitions, of course, are just calculations — given enough time they could be carried out with stones. But when so much data is processed so rapidly, the effect is oracular and almost opaque. Even with a peek at the cybernetic trade secrets, you probably couldn’t unwind the computations. As you sit with your eHarmony spouse watching the movies Netflix prescribes, you might as well be an avatar in Second Life. You have been absorbed into the operating system.

George Johnson. “An Oracle for Our Time. Part Man, Part Machine.” The New York Times September 23, 2007.

frame grab from the film “Powers of Ten” by Charles and Ray Eames

“If it’s out there, it’s in here” Outside.in claims in a paragraph describing refinements to its service. If I were to make a bold “I have seen the future of the media ... “ claim, I’d direct readers to Outside.in. The year old website hits every mark: It’s conceptually profound, based on co-founder Steven Johnson’s concept of “the long zoom”, taking the Google maps ability to be in a frame of mind, event or place that can be tagged with its geographic location and then “zoom” out to connect this dot to the rest of the world, and (in time, perhaps) the universe. The design is a timelessly sharp expression of form uniting with function that’s of the tradition that Charles and Ray Eames brought to the link between science, art and design. (Steven Johnson was inspired by the “zooming out” effect of their “Powers of Ten” movie.) The advertising has been rolled out slowly and in a way that doesn’t leave the deep fang marks of predatory marketing tactics seen on other news sites. It elegantly and clearly aligns all scales of information, from local bloggers to global news organizations. And it comes with an unofficial “media critic in residence”.

To mark the first anniversary of Outside.in Steven Johnson has published an essay called “The Pothole Paradox: Why Building The Geographic Web Is Hard, and Why It’s Worth Doing” on his blog. 

At outside.in, we believe the answer is to build an information system modeled not after traditional newspapers or search engines, but rather the way that people intuitively think about the communities they live in. First, people have an extraordinary innate capacity for organizing their world spatially, which is precisely why pothole repair five blocks away is not interesting to us. And part of that spatial organization involves anchoring people and events in specific places. Think about the people you know socially, and the implicit place-based social networks that you carry around in your head: these are the folks I know from the local school, and these are the ones I know from the coffee shop, and these are the ones from my office…

I started writing this little essay in Brooklyn, but I’m finishing it in Barcelona. The day I arrived I wandered out into the Born neighborhood, a kind of Soho grafted onto a medieval street layout. There’s a distinctive feeling you get walking around a new city on your own—the guide books and review sites can tell you where the best restaurants and bars are, and give you the architectural history. But there’s always a feeling that you’re missing something, that the neighborhood is filled with another kind of data: all the debates and rumors and breaking news that make up the real social information of a community, from the true experts. Right now that layer is almost inaccessible to us—assuming we can’t always sit down and talk to an actual neighborhood maven. We can search a million servers scattered across the globe for a specific text string and get results within seconds. But we can’t do a search that tells us what people are saying about the street we’re currently standing on. It’s about time we changed that.

Steven Johnson

EMULATION PROVES SUCCESS

A new service called Your Street strips the functional components from Outside.in and wraps regular opportunistic word-association Google ads around the content. The difference is in character and depth of community. Readers and writers provide and burnish the links to stories through Outside.in and Your Street compiles the stories through RSS feeds.

CEO and founder James Nicholson says that what sets YourStreet apart is its extensive news service: the site collects 30,000 to 40,000 articles a day from more than 10,000 RSS feeds, mostly from community newspapers and blogs. “We’re not relying on the users to provide us with articles,” Nicholson says. The stories featured on the site aren’t of a specific type, and users will find the locations of murders marked alongside the locations of upcoming music shows. Stories featured on the site are teasers, and, if a user clicks to read further, she will be directed back to the source of the information.

Erica Naone. MIT Technology Review. November 9, 2007

Outside.in co-founder John Geraci is quoted in the Technology Review story. He says that Outside.in is focused on information and not maps because maps are interesting to people after information has drawn them in. Outside.in has the complex jumble of information that gives life its context. A life lived in search of meaning, not “meaning” as a definition that can be effectively pinned to an advertising category. The reliance on human input, not algorithms is what sets it apart from other local news portals.

Geraci says that Outside.in is built to rely heavily on human intervention, rather than on natural-language search algorithms, because, in his opinion, the algorithms don’t work well enough at this phase, and, with this type of service, stories are only useful if mapped accurately. “When you’re talking about location, there’s a low tolerance for noise,” Geraci says. “We believe you need people, that you always need that discernment.”

Technology Review

Your Street is underpinned by powerful algorithms.

The site’s main technological advance lies in its ability to mine geographical information from news stories. Using natural-language-processing algorithms developed in-house, as well as supplementary algorithms provided by the company MetaCarta, the site searches the text of regular news stories for clues about associated locations. The system searches particularly for entities within cities such as hospitals, schools, and sports stadiums, Nicholson says, relying on databases of entities created by the U.S. Geological Survey. YourStreet is currently working on some improvements to the system’s ability to recognize nicknames; for example, it should be able to interpret “GG Bridge,” as many bloggers refer to it, as the Golden Gate Bridge.

Technology Review

Buzztracker.org map showing news stories clustering around a place.

Buzztracker is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations appearing in global news coverage. Buzztracker tries to show you how interconnected the world is: big events in one area ripple to other areas across the globe. Connections between cities thousands of miles apart become apparent at a glance. Buzztracker currently only tracks English-language news sources.

Buzztracker.org website

Buzztracker.org is software that’s a version of land art on the internet. The founders describe it as an art project. “Buzztracker is our attempt at adding some depth and beauty to the experience of engaging the news.”

Outside.in buzzmap

Eames poster for IBM. 1966. Photograph by fourflatfive at Flickr.

Way, way back in 2004 searchenginewatch.com reported on Yahoo!s news search setting itself up to compete with Google’s news search, and in a report a year later noted that the difference between the service is Google’s reliance on algorithms: Google says in its news blog, that it directs “...readers to the professionally-written articles and news sources our algorithms have determined are relevant for a topic.” On September 28 the Google news blog reported that media organizations already tied into Google News can augment the algorithms and submit news articles directly “...via News sitemaps in all the languages we support. You can also specify keywords for each article to tell us more about them so we can better place them in the appropriate news section.”

The Google News homepage is fusty. It looks like it was designed by algorithms to appeal to algorithms. Yahoo!s news page has a vaguely retro newspaper front page design with big images running alongside story excerpts and soft features—photo of the day, cartoons—running down the side, while Google has a list style design separating the news into categories and listing them with thumbnail images. The battle for the news search engines reminds me of the battle between Apple and Microsoft / IBM at the dawn of the computer age. Once computers were machines designed by machines to appeal to the logic and operating needs of machines. Microsoft and IBM took the high ground and their machines and software implied that the logic of machines and the needs of machines were paramount and design was irrelevant. It was a long way from IBM’s glory days of linking design and science. Apple was smart, sexy and human focused. We know how this story ended.

Yahoo! appeared to be sinking fast a few months ago, forcing founder Jerry Yang to come back to take control of the company. In September Yahoo! bought Buzztracker (which seems to have no connection with Buzztracker.org): In the “About” section on Buzztracker’s home page it says: “Our goal has been to launch a news site that leverages the power of the “head of the long tail” of the blogosphere to automatically generate news pages for a multitude of topics, both broad and narrow. We currently are tracking 1,000 topics and 90,000 blogs.”

Considering the froth, general factoids and celebrity gossip published below the toolbar (the online equivalent of “above the fold") on Yahoo!s home page, the solid and serious tone of the Yahoo! News page is a pleasant surprise. The news is broken into categories, but there are tabs listing stories grouped by the media source from the Associated Press, Reuters, the Christian Science Monitor, McClatchy newspapers and NPR, among others. The OP-ED section links to The Nation, The Huffington Post and The Weekly Standard. 

Yahoo executives told The Associated Press that The Columbus Dispatch and 16 regional newspapers owned by The New York Times Co. have joined the consortium, bringing its total number to about 415 dailies and another 140 weeklies. The New York Times itself, however, hasn’t joined. Lem Lloyd, who runs the consortium for Yahoo, said the partnership has already been bearing fruit both for newspaper publishers as well as Yahoo, but he declined to provide specific dollar figures.

Seth Sutel. Associated Press. 17 November, 2007.

While this sounds like a step forward for the year-old local news ad sharing project, it comes in the wake of wider disarray. Newspapers are based on an ethic of competition: competition for readers, for stories, and for advertising revenue. This competitive spirit was encouraged to drive papers to spend money on the improvement of content, to produce news most pertinent to its readers, and to keep newsstand prices as low as possible. In an era when the medium must integrate into the “new media” paradigm, the competition that once drove newspapers to improvement is only driving their integration projects into the ground.

Tim Conneally. Associated Press. November 19, 2007.

I suspect that the Yahoo! News homepage is the ground that the New York Times ceded while it was hiding its premium content behind a subscription wall. I still go to The New York Times homepage but I suspect that’s mostly because I’m sentimental about newspapers. If The New York Times and International Herald Tribune were a part of Yahoo!’s news service I’d probably go to their stories through the portal. Right now I can only select The New York Times as one of “My Sources” if the stories fall into the Yahoo! News categories. So now The New York Times faces a new conundrum, does it protect its brand by holding out? Or does it isolate itself further? The motto on the print edition of The New York Times is “all the news that’s fit to print.” On the website it’s “all the news that’s fit to remix.” The World Wide Web can sometimes seem like a massive covalent bond, held together by permalinks to New York Times articles posted in blogs and stories from other news organizations. The bringing down of the subscription wall also opened up the archive to The New York Times and provided permalinks for stories going back a couple of decades for stories that previously needed to be purchased. It’s a phenomenal resource.

YAHOO!S TREASURES

It’s self-evident that all successful online media businesses grow by acquiring companies as well as developing their own innovations. Yahoo! purchased two services I can no longer work without: the bookmarking site, de.licio.us, and the photo sharing website, Flickr. De.licio.us is now four years old. In 2004 Steven Johnson wrote a story about emerging web services for Discover magazine. Using an example of a poodle breeder being alerted to a new book, by Amazon.com, and posting a review on her blog, Steven Johnson follows a chain of information to de.licio.us.

Del.icio.us’s creators call the program a social bookmarking service, and one of its key functions is to connect people as readily as it connects data. When our poodle lover checks in on the dog-breeding tag, she notices that another del.icio.us user has been adding interesting links to the category over the past few months. She drops him an e-mail and invites him to join a small community of poodle lovers using Yahoo’s My Web service. From that point on, anytime she discovers a new poodle-related page, he’ll immediately receive a notification about it, along with the rest of her poodle community, either via e-mail or instant message.

Now stop and think about how different this chain of events is from the traditional Web mode of following simple links between static pages. One small piece of new information—a review of a book about poodles—flows through an entire system of reuse and appropriation within hours. The initial information value of the review remains: It’s an assessment of a new book, no different from the reviews that appear in traditional publications. But as it ventures through the food chain of the new Web, it takes on new forms of value: One service uses it to help evaluate the books with the most buzz; another uses it to build a classification schema for the entire Web; another uses it as a way of forming new communities of like-minded people. Some of this information exchange happens on traditional Web pages, but it also leaks out into other applications: e-mail clients, instant-messenger programs.

Steven Johnson. 10.24.2005. Discover.

It’s rare to find a story published online by a major media organization these days that doesn’t have a de.licio.us tag button in its “share this story” menu. And during the fire in Griffith Park that started on May 8 this year the Los Angeles Times ran links to photographs of the fire taken by residents and posted on Flickr. Citizen journalism is a great, ancillary resource but it doesn’t replace traditional journalism. On October 10 last year The Los Angeles Times ran an opinion piece by Susan D. Moeller, director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at The University of Maryland, and Moises Main, the Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy Magazine.

OVER THE WEEKEND, at almost the same time that the world was informed that Google was vying to pay $1.65 billion for YouTube, a 2-year-old video-sharing website, famed Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in Moscow. Politkovskaya covered human rights abuses in Chechnya. She was also a vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, and Russian authorities consider her death a political assassination.

YouTube’s acquisition and Politkovskaya’s killing are unrelated events. Yet both offer powerful clues about the forces shaping the way information is produced, distributed and consumed in today’s world. YouTube epitomizes “new media” — their immense potential and surprising effects. Politkovskaya represents “old media” — their literal struggle for survival and also their historical, indeed indispensable, value....

YouTube, Google, Flickr and many other websites offer valuable tools for keeping the world informed. But they are not a substitute for Politkovskaya and her colleagues. Societies are judged on how they treat their most vulnerable citizens. We suggest that added to that calculation should be whether journalists have been threatened, assaulted and killed. Tell us how many journalists were assassinated in your country last year, and we will tell you what kind of society you have.

Susan D. Moeller. Moises Naim. Los Angeles Times. 10 October, 2006.

Flickr and de.licio.us haven’t been integrated into the Yahoo! News website but it would be a bold and profound editorial decision to find some way of making them part of the reader’s experience and toolkit alongside the solid news resources they already have.

Tahmima Anam

“As a Bangladeshi, it’s often difficult to know where to point one’s concern for the country,” Tahmima Anam wrote when the recent cyclone hit Bangladesh:

The truth is that nature itself is not just to blame. A natural disaster is only as much of a disaster as we allow it to become, and in the case of Bangladesh, far more needs to be done to ensure that fate’s twists and turns do not devastate the country and set it further back on its path to development. Storms kill people in Bangladesh because their homes are not sturdily built, because they live on sandbanks, and because rescue operations fail to reach remote areas.

It is also not just a question of local priorities, but of international environmental policies that urgently need to be addressed. The rising sea levels caused by global warming will plunge much of Bangladesh’s low-lying delta underwater. Without a consensus on climate change, Bangladesh will always be in the path of the storm.

Tahmima Anam. Comment is Free. The Guardian. November 17, 2007

Tahmima Anam was born in Bangladesh and grew up in Paris, New York and Bangkok, and now lives in London. Her father is Mahfuz Anam, editor of The Daily Star, Bangladesh’s largest circulating English-language newspaper. Her novel, A Golden Age, is set at the time of the declaration of Bangladesh’s independence, and Pankaj Mishra wrote: “Tahmima Anam’s startlingly accomplished and gripping novel describes not only the tumult of a great historical event… but also the small but heroic struggles of individuals living in the shadow of revolution and war.”

On August 15 she wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian on the social divisions Bangladesh’s independence brought.

“Throughout the Bangladesh war, Pakistani soldiers repeatedly asked Bengali freedom fighters if they were Bengali or Muslim, as though the cultural identity could not coexist with the religious identity. The Bengalis of East Pakistan were Bengali and Muslim; they fought a war of independence so that they could have a country in which these two identities could be integrated. But sadly, the fight that led to the legitimisation of this identity did not lay the groundwork for pluralism, nor indeed did it result in a final resolution of the tension between cultural and religious identity. People are still wondering whether they are Bengali or Muslim, and in the wake of this great anxiety, a sinister and violent form of identity politics has taken root that has left many Bangladeshi citizens behind. For East Pakistan, and East Bengal before it, was not only made up of Bengalis and Muslims. It also included Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Jains, and the indigenous peoples - Chakmas, Santals, and Garos. These people are neither Bengali nor Muslim, and this debate has not only disenfranchised them from the major questions of identity that grip modern-day Bangladesh, but has distracted us from the slow and steady colonisation of their lands, cultures, and habitats.”

And globalization has made people more vulnerable. “Creating poverty is not something that’s an unfortunate side effect of globalization,” Pankaj Mishra told The Brooklyn Rail Magazine in September. “It’s almost an essential part of much of the process. So it’s not as if we create wealth and then we take care of the needy and the poor. You need the poor. In his new book Planet of Slums, Mike Davis makes this very clear. Whether it’s India, Brazil or Bangladesh, slums are necessary for the development of these economies and for the type of economic growth they are seeking. You cannot do away with them. Making British Petroleum or Shell more environmentally conscious—these types of fine tunings that are constantly being attempted—are all admirable in their own ways. But I don’t know whether they can actually affect large-scale change.”

CONTINUING STORMS IN NEW ORLEANS

Every news cycle brings a fresh disaster, a new storm, and media organizations reconsider the disasters, like birthdays, on only the significant anniversaries: a year, two years, then ten, fifty, a hundred years. Recording Katrina keeps the spotlight on New Orleans. It takes an excerpt from a special Bill Moyers aired in August. He’s talking to a Princeton University Professor, Melissa Harris-Lacewell:

BILL MOYERS: I’ve kept in my files something written one week after the disaster. Listen to this. “What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequence of the welfare state. 75 percent of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane. And of those who remained, a large number were from the city’s public housing projects.” What does that say to you?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, it’s bizarre and inaccurate empirically. Because in fact, the public housing projects were on high ground. They experienced very little water damage. And most of the residents there who have been shut out by their government, by their city and by our national housing office, is not because of any destruction that occurred because of Katrina but because of the required evacuation that occurred.They were mostly safe.

The people whose homes were destroyed were mostly home owners. But they were poor people. And this is what we can’t deal with in America. They worked jobs every day. Most of them stayed because they needed to go to work in the morning. Most of them had to go to work in the morning in the hotels, in the tourist industries, in the restaurants that served to make New Orleans the fun place that the rest of us liked to visit. So they were homeowners who were poor. They were working people who were poor. Because we live in a country where we allow people to work every day and still be poor. To still have the inadequate capacity to leave.

And the third reason why many people didn’t leave are very thick social networks. So part of the question you asked is, why didn’t people think, oh, this disaster is coming? Well, Betsy, Hurricane Betsy was in living memory in New Orleans. And Hurricane Betsy was a terrible storm that many people had survived. If you had an aunt or an uncle or a grandmother who had survived Hurricane Betsy, she or he refused often to leave.

Bill Moyers Journal. PBS.

Recording Katrina links to the New Orleans journal that Harry Shearer has kept on the Huffington Post since the hurricane hit. I’ve set an e-mail alert to let me know every time he posts a story, and it’s at least once, maybe twice a week, and the majority of those posts relate to the rebuilding of New Orleans.

Robin Pogrebin, in Tuesday’s NYT, took a look at one of the tangible faces of that recovery, the design and construction of the new vintage of houses and public buildings. Of course, there actually are new, and restored, houses going up, while the public buildings remain concepts, if not whims and fancies. But the piece, which is heavy on quotes from architects and planners, revisits once more the fantasy that post-K New Orleans was a “clean slate” that planners should have seized to write a new chapter in the history of urbanism, and that those who resist are “historicists” in sentimental thrall to a past that’s not coming back.

To most of us who live in the city and love it, the clean slate theory ignores some basic truths: old houses, the ones we’re in hock to maintain, were built the way they were (despite some airs and pretensions in design) because it made sense for the area and climate. Big high windows and front porches weren’t only sensible for a time before air conditioning; like office-tower windows that can actually open, they make sense in times of emergency when the first thing to go out is the electricity. And houses were built using cypress because that local wood is the best adapted to the high humidity conditions of the area. That’s why old houses, gutted to the studs, are still habitable. There are splendid examples—not all that many, to be sure—of indisputably new architecture taking its place gracefully among the old. I’d point to the “Fred and Ginger Building” by Frank Gehry, nestling comfortably amid 19th century buildings on a prominent corner in Prague. But that kind of respectful contemporary addition to a historical tapestry doesn’t follow from viewing the place as an empty tablet upon which the architect and planner can be freed from all constraints of time and place. Planners already so freed in certain New Orleans areas--like “renewed” old public housing tracts—have ignored one of the basic parts of that city’s life, the street grid that makes possible corner groceries, corner bars, corner everything. Superblocks may look nice on a clean slate, but the New Orleanians who ache to return want to come back to someplace that looks, and feels, like the city they have missed for so long.

Harry Shearer. The Huffington Post. November 7, 2007

THE FOUNDER OF FRIENDSTER COMMENTS ON “FRIEND SPAM”

Five years ago, I imagined a website that would show how people were connected to each other in real life, so I built a prototype called ­Friendster. I decided that one of its central features would be a friend confirmation process. When you wanted to add someone as your friend, an e‑mail notification was sent with your request. If--and only if--the person approved your request, you were both listed as each other’s friends. Five years later, I am paying the price for this innovation as I face an avalanche of friend spam. I get several friend requests per day from Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook, and also from social-media services such as Yelp, Flickr, and Pownce…

The press, bloggers, and the investment community are excitedly following every shift in buzz, from Dodgeball to Twitter to ­Pownce, or from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook. Since the launch of the Facebook Platform in May, the press and many so-called experts have finally begun recognizing the value of Facebook’s “social graph"--the map of connections between real friends. But ironically, as the tech elite have begun to deride MySpace’s seizure-inducing page designs and promiscuous friend seekers, Facebook’s clean user interface and focus on real friends faces an onslaught of new users and pointless applications where tattooed zombies buy drinks for your top friends....

So what advice do I have for dealing with the friend spam and keeping on top of all these new services? Every once in a while, turn off your computer and go hang out with your friends. 

Jonathan Abrams. Technology Review. November / December 2007

CLIMATE, CHANGED

Secretary General Ban Ki Moon of the United Nations called climate change “the defining challenge of our age” Saturday and called on the United States and China, the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases, to be “playing a more constructive role” in coming negotiations for a new global climate treaty....

“Today the world’s scientists have spoken, clearly and in one voice,” Ban said as he released the final report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

International Herald Tribune. November 17, 2007

Humanity is rapidly turning the seas acid through the same pollution that causes global warming, the world’s governments and top scientists agreed yesterday. The process – thought to be the most profound change in the chemistry of the oceans for 20 million years – is expected both to disrupt the entire web of life of the oceans and to make climate change worse.

The warning is just one of a whole series of alarming conclusions in a new report published by the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which last month shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore.

Geoffrey Lean. A World, Dying. But Can We Unite to Save It? The Independent. November 18, 2007

WILLIAM GIBSON RECOMMENDS AN AUTHOR

William Gibson told Web Watch magazine that his most recent novels have been openly set in the present because he can’t imagine a wild enough future to fictionalize.

The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can’t convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years. I think we’ve been in a very long, century-long period of increasingly exponential technologically-driven change.

We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it’s going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that - we have no idea at all now where we are going.

Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilisation collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That’s a possibility too.

You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it - it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.

A website called Tyee in William Gibson’s hometown, Vancouver, concluded an interview with him by asking him whether he’s hopeful. “The present zeitgeist, now, is only one news cycle long,” he replied. “Something could happen tomorrow that would throw everything into a cocked hat.” On his own website he talked about a novelist writing books set in Victorian England that he sees as allegories for our own time.

Three of my favorite novels of the past four years are John MacLachlan Gray’s The Fiend In Human (2003), White Stone Day (2005), and the very recently published Not Quite Dead , all of which might be described as Victorian thrillers, but all which are something else as well, though it’s difficult to put a handle on just what that might be.

Perhaps what I find most magical about them isn’t Gray’s ability to shrug himself so snugly into their era, an act requiring more imaginative muscle than the creation of any wholesale fantasy-world, but rather his gorgeously subtle recursion of what we as a culture think we understand about the Victorians. To step into the rancid fog of Seven Dials with Edmund Whitty, polypharmically-challenged correspondent for The Falcon, is to enter a most satisfyingly strange universe, yet one based firmly (however wonderfully peculiarly) in that fundamentally speculative discipline that is history.

Through Gray’s fine optics, we observe phenomena that echo powerfully for us today: serial killings in The Fiend In Human, child pornography in White Stone Day, and ethno-secular terrorism (and that singular horror, my friends, that is the *book tour*) in Not Quite Dead.

William Gibson, from his blog.

Angelina Jolie talks to displaced girls in Darfur. October 2004

ANGELINA JOLIE REFLECTS ON JUSTICE IN AN OPINION PIECE FOR THE ECONOMIST

On August 22 The Economist published a “global peace index”. Norway, New Zealand and Denmark were the countries judged most at peace and the Sudan, Iraq and Isreal the least peaceful. The Economist claims the Dalai Lama’s support for the rankings. “Compiling and maintaining an Index of which countries are the most peaceful and publishing the results, will undoubtedly make the factors and qualities that contribute to that status better known and will encourage people to foster them in their own countries,” the Dalai Lama is reported as saying. “The project’s ambition is to go beyond a crude measure of wars – and systematically explore the dynamics of peace” the Economist said. “It provides a quantitative measure of peacefulness, comparable over time and its founders hope it will inspire and influence world leaders and governments to further action.”

Angelina Jolie closed an opinion piece that she wrote for The Washington Post with a statement that people whose countries are torn apart by war seek peace-of-mind through justice. “What the worst people in the world fear most is justice. That’s what we should deliver.” She reprised the article for The Economist.

On a recent mission for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, I had the opportunity to visit a refugee camp in Chad just across the border with Sudan. Sitting with a group of refugees, I asked them what they needed. These were people who had seen family members killed, neighbours raped, their villages burned and looted, their entire communities driven from their land. So it was no surprise when people began listing the things that could improve their lives just a little bit. Better tents, said one; better access to medical facilities, said another. But then a teenage boy raised his hand and said, with powerful simplicity, “Nous voulons un procès.” We want a trial.

A trial might seem a distant and abstract notion to a young man for whom the inside of a courtroom is worlds away from the inside of a refugee camp. But his statement showed a recognition of something elemental: that accountability is perhaps the only force powerful enough to break the cycle of violence and retribution that marks so many conflicts.

Angelina Jolie. The World in 2008. The Economist.

Palagummi Sainath

WATCHING THE WORLD BURN

Framework is a magazine supported by the Finnish Ministry of Culture, to expand the reach of local works and report on culture internationally. The June 2005 issue concentrated on the issue of truthfulness. “Events in the world at large are having an increasing influence on what people experience in their personal life-worlds,” Marketta Seppälä wrote in the editorial. “Information that is firmly rooted in reality is becoming increasingly valuable, but there are no firm criteria, let alone proof, that would allow us to draw the essential distinctions. We need to be able to question our own prejudices in order to discover new approaches and solutions to social, often increasingly global problems. We need to have the right to be ‘unrealistic’ and to dream of alternatives, to have utopias. The more our reality shrinks into a space in which truth and our own prejudices start to merge, the fewer opportunities there are for identifying the critical challenges presented by today’s world.”

Iikka Vehkalahti’s article borrows the title, ”What the Heart Does Not Feel” from a story by Indian journalist, Palagummi Sainath, who bears witness to the despair of Indian farmers, giving identities to people who are most often grouped together as statistics. “Something very fundamental is happening,” Sainath reported in that story. “The central, driving factors behind the suicides remain the same. Rising debt, soaring input costs, plummeting output prices, a credit crunch and so on. But the outcome now adds up to more than just the sum total of these factors. After 15 years of a battering from hostile policies and governments, the world of the peasant has turned highly fragile. Problems that would not have driven many to suicide a decade ago do so now. It takes less to push farmers over the edge because their resistance is down. So fragile is their economy and equilibrium. The studies and surveys seldom account for one vital actor — the worldview of peasants. How that is changing as their links to the land erode. How their hopes of what’s possible are constantly dashed. How, losing their anchor, they drift to a frightening future. How it feels to watch your child drop out of school or college because education has become too expensive. Even as your daughter’s marriage is off, because you cannot afford it. You fail to get your ailing mother to a hospital because health is the most costly thing in your world. All this while agriculture itself is tanking. And there’s less food on the table. For too many, pessimism soaks the worldview this shapes. And despair gains ground as the coming deity.”

So how do we distinguish the essential through all the information flooding in? Hollywood’s answer is to “trust your feelings”, rendering the individual’s subjective experience the foremost guideline. “I feel what I feel and it’s true and you can’t deny it because it’s my feeling.” Though hardly a matter of dispute, the statement holds within an internalized conception of the existence of an ultimate truth.

To perceive the world through subjective experience is of course not enough either, but present reality does offer more and more opportunities to live (and seek refuge) in different fragmented realities. Prominent Indian journalist, Palagummi Sainath, has stated that “the assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries and their 600 million people together or that every year, Europeans and Americans spend between $ 36-40 billion on cosmetics, ice cream and pet food alone”. The subjective realities of the Asian slums and the poorest fifth of the world’s population are quite different from those of the European middle class, or of an art critic representing the intellectual elite, or of a documentary maker.

Sainath, whose articles on the poverty in rural India bind small events into global contexts, has taken upon himself to tell “the beautiful people” – the elite of his society – how the poor people in his country live, experience life and feel. He doesn’t pretend to be part of the poor or even to be able to see the world through their perspective, but his personal outlook, professional talent and studious interest in the matter enable him to describe the reality of poor people’s lives in an exceptionally holistic manner ( P. Sainath, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, Penguin Books, 1996, New Delhi).

As an example of the truthfulness of history and weight of value perspective, Sainath uses the story of Nero and the fire that consumed Rome. According to Tacitus, Nero never started the fire or played the fiddle while watching it. Instead, he gave a party to all the high-ups in Rome to discredit this rumor. Serving as torches at the outdoor feast were prisoners burning on stakes. History has recorded countless stories of Nero’s cruelness, but very few of Nero’s guests: the artists, the philosophers, the politicians, the businessmen. What was it like to savor wine and grapes in the light of a human torch? Who are today’s guests of Nero?

Iikka Vehkalahti. Framework. The Finnish Art Review.

—Jillian Burt 8:23 pm | Permalink | Comments (0)