There are few facts in Dickinson’s well-reported pile that I’d take issue with—Ailes has worked hard to establish his credentials as a malicious man, absent of scruples. But I draw the line at “fearing” Ailes or being daunted by his Fox News “power,” the two searing take-home messages in Dickinson’s piece. Ailes can’t be a very fearsome or powerful media monster if he failed to prevent the election of a freshman senator—a black, liberal freshman senator with an, um, exotic name—to the White House!
Zeynep Tufekci has written an extraordinary piece in response to Bill Keller’s op-ed about what Twitter costs us. It is so good that I am compelled to write a piece synthesizing this with some other stuff that’s been brewing in the back of my mind.
Adam Sternbergh, on how Judd Apatow and Todd Phillips have inaugurated the reign of the jokeless comedy (via Heather):
[T]hese movies are often enjoyable. If you were to list your favorite comedies of the last five years, I bet at least three of either Apatow’s or Phillips’s films would make the list. Yet can you recall a single famous gag from any of these movies? What was the absolute most hilarious joke in “The Hangover”? (My informal straw poll suggests that it was Galifianakis’s mispronouncing “retard.”) Tellingly, the most quotable sequence from any Apatow movie is the “You know how I know you’re gay?” exchange between Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” which was improvised on the sidelines, then stuck into the film, and which, trust me, does not benefit from being reproduced for posterity in print. Surely there must be at least one indelible gag, line, or scene from just one of these films? If there is, I can’t identify it, and don’t call me Shirley.
Today I had the opportunity to witness many of my colleagues and classmates graduate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Since I’m a part-time student, I won’t graduate for another six months. For those who aren’t familiar, Harvard holds several different ceremonies. At the beginning of the day, they do school-wide commencement exercises. Then each different school splits off to do its own, individual ceremony.
These are my photographs from both the Harvard school-wide commencement (which was impossible to get a seat for, and thus, which resulted in a fairly short, lackluster photo set), and the Harvard Graduate School of Education commencement. Note that unlike with most of my photo sets, I tried to emphasize people I knew, since they might find the photos valuable later.
TV producer Shawn Ryan has mastered the art of the end-of-season montage. Last week’s season finale for The Chicago Code continued to demonstrate this, as The Parlours “I Dream of Chicago” played over the show’s final images.
A haunting, beautiful song that’s made even better when you know the backstory.
The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that’s not yet complete? Strunk and White—who must always be mentioned in articles such as this one—counsel against overusing the dash as well: “Use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate.” Who are we, we modern writers, to pass judgment—and with such shocking frequency—on these more simple forms of punctuation—the workmanlike comma, the stalwart colon, the taken-for-granted period? (One colleague—arguing strenuously that certain occasions call for the dash instead of other punctuation, for purposes of tone—told me he thinks of the parenthesis as a whisper, and the dash as a way of calling attention to a phrase. As for what I think of his observation—well, consider how I have chosen to offset it.)
The mere act of taking a photograph means the photographer holds the copyright for that picture. Sharing it on a social media site does nothing to limit or reduce that fundamental right, according to digital rights expert Mary Luria. “Unless (you) post the photo with a message that says, ‘please copy this and pass it along,’ the photographer holds the copyright,” said Luria, a partner in Davis & Gilbert in New York.
Misuse of content isn’t new, she points out — famous photos have been copied without credit for 150 years — but the Internet has made it easy and, in some circles, normal. “The culture of the Internet is this concept of sharing everything. That things belong to us, not to a person,” she said. “And they are surprised when someone says, ‘You’ve taken this, it’s mine.”
May 21st has come and gone, and I’m experiencing a mix of different emotions towards those believers who thought that the end would arrive this past Saturday. As a Christian, I admire their conviction and willingness to surrender all earthly things in the pursuit of something better. But as a regular human being, I’m horrified by their recklessness and general inability to conceive of alternative viewpoints.
This brief, unplanned discussion with my brother about the topic helps to sum up some of my viewpoints:
I’ve been reading a lot of stories about the rapture that never was. The NYTimes has a nice catch-all piece about those whose lives have been affected by years of false prophesying. New York magazine has a heartbreaking story about a marriage on the rocks due to the end times that never came. Many pieces also dealt with the aftermath, such as the LATimes, which wrote about a rapture-believer named Keith Bauer:
Keith Bauer, a 38-year-old tractor-trailer driver from Westminster, Md., took last week off from work, packed his wife, young son and a relative in their SUV and crossed the country. If it was his last week on Earth, he wanted to see parts of it he’d always heard about but missed, such as the Grand Canyon. With maxed-out credit cards and a growing mountain of bills, he said, the rapture would have been a relief.
Slate wrote about what happens to doomsday cults when the world doesn’t end. Answer: they slightly modify their beliefs to overcome the cognitive dissonance of having devoted their lives to spreading the word about one rapture end-date. And sure enough, rapture-proponent Harold Camping has since come out and said that his original prediction was off by six months, and that the rapture will in fact be happening on November 21, 2011.
Perhaps my favorite piece about the whole topic is this letter to Harold Camping’s followers, about what to do now that Judgment Day missed its mark. It addresses those who were wrong with grace, forgiveness, and encouragement:
When you want to believe something, and someone you respect tells you to believe something, and everyone around you also believes and wants to believe the same thing, those are extraordinarily powerful forces. I wish that you had not believed in the May 21st prediction, because I fear that it damaged the credibility of Christians in the eyes of some. But I see no reason now to belabor that point. Rather, I hope you have grace with yourselves.