Archive for March 2009
Got to Be a Song about This
Lorne has sung his last song. Andy Hallett was just 33.
Solved
German police have solved the mystery of the Phantom of Heilbronn, a female serial killer responsible for six murders as well as petty larcenies and break-ins. It was a cotton swab.
How the Media Works
The Washington Independent has a great piece on how poorly sourced half-truths and outright lies are laundered through the British press before appearing on Drudge and right-wing cable news programs. Via Attackerman.
Quoted for Truth (The Status Is Not Quo)
Three top blogs—Climate Progress, Glenn Greenwald, and Duke’s own American Stranger—separately highlight some inadvertently telling passages in the Newsweek profile on Paul Krugman.
By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking.
In American politics the establishment press is the problem, not the solution, which should mitigate all the late gnashing of teeth over “the death of newspapers.” For a lot of reasons, blogs are not the ideal format for public discourse, but they’ll have to do; the establishment press has blown the mission beyond all repair. Blogs are all we have left.
Advantage: Triangle
Raleigh is #1 and Durham #3 in Forbes‘s list of top cities for business and careers. Will Durham never climb out of Raleigh’s terrible shadow?
The Republican Road to Recovery
Scott Eric Kaufman has the world’s best post on the Republican Road to Recovery.
Steve Benen shoots fish in a barrel here and here, while Hilzoy has some more gems from the Fark thread.
Midyear Report on the 2008–09 MLA Job Information List
The MLA has released the Midyear Report on the 2008–09 MLA Job Information List.
Through 20 February, the English edition of the MLA Job Information List (JIL) has carried 322 (21.9%) fewer ads this year (2008–09) than last; the foreign language edition is down 270 ads (21.2%). On the basis of the number of jobs announced in the JIL through the April print issue, we project that this year’s totals will drop by 26.1%, to about 1,350 jobs, in the JIL’s English edition and by 27.4%, to about 1,220 jobs, in the foreign language edition. The declines follow a period when the number of jobs advertised in both English and foreign languages increased from fewer than 1,100 in the mid-1990s to 1,826 in English and 1,680 in foreign languages this past year, 2007–08. We are projecting an estimated 480 fewer jobs in English in 2008–09 than a year ago and 460 fewer in foreign languages. These declines mark the biggest one-year drops in the thirty-four-year history of the JIL, both numerically and in percentage terms. Even so, this year’s projected totals are still higher than the historic low numbers to date—1,075 jobs in English and 1,047 jobs in foreign languages—recorded in 1993–94.
Take that, early ’90s!
Those invested in my poor life choices may have particular interest in this chart:
It’s our own literature! It’s our own literature!
Thoughts on the Newspaper Apocalypse
Thoughts on the newspaper apocalypse from Wire creator David Simon.
“Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model,” says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. “To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It’s got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption.”
Like it or not—and Simon doesn’t just dislike it, he thinks it can’t work—this is what blogs are for now.
‘The Battlestar Ending You Didn’t See’
Another round of Battlestar endings you didn’t see.
“There was a point in the development process where we discussed the idea of the Galactica not being destroyed, but having somehow landed on the surface more or less intact, but unable to ever get into orbit again (the particulars here were never worked out, so don’t ask how she made it down without being torn apart). We talked about them basically abandoning the ship and moving out into the world.
“Cut to the present-day in Central America where there are these enormous mysterious mounds that archeologists have not been able to understand (it may have been South America, I can’t recall the exact location, but these mounds really do exist). Someone is doing a new kind of survey of the mounds with some kind of ground-penetrating radar or something and lo and behold, we see the outlines of the Galactica still buried under the surface.”
This version of the plot is pretty strongly suggested by what actually aired. When Galactica made its last jump and wound up crippled in orbit around the Moon, I thought this was exactly what we were going to get: Galactica crash-lands on primitive Earth while the rest of the fleet is just left out there, never to be heard from again. I was a little surprised when everyone else popped up.
Wound have made more sense, I think, than the version of the story where they just give up all technology voluntarily, with nary a dissenting voice…
Webb!
Sen. Jim Webb is tackling prison reform. I’ve very glad to see this, even if at this point the words “blue-ribbon commission” can trigger only an ironic response.
‘What I Wish I’d Known About Tenure’
What I wish I’d known about tenure. I don’t know why I read these articles at all; they’re just not good for me.
Bad News for Jaimees
American poetry is (still) dying.
The dismal poetry findings stand in sharp contrast not only to the rise in general fiction reading, but also to the efforts of the country’s many poetry-advocacy organizations, which for the past dozen years have been creating programs to attract larger audiences. These programs are at least in part a response to the growing sense that poetry is being forgotten in the U.S. They include National Poetry Month (April); readings, lectures and contests held across the country; initiatives to get poems into mainstream publications such as newspapers; and various efforts to boost poetry’s presence online (poets.org, the Web site of the Academy of American Poets, even launched a mobile version optimized for use on the iPhone). Yet according to the NEA report, in 2008, just 8.3 percent of adults had read any poetry in the preceding 12 months. That figure was 12.1 percent in 2002, and in 1992, it was 17.1 percent, meaning the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half over the past 16 years.
Gerry Canavan 