A great bit of public radio.
My sister and I went out for a drive along the sunny East Bay ridge that is the topological essence of what I call home. The flowers were sparse but still everywhere and bright, and I was very happy not to be having a white Christmas.

And there was public radio, just like old times when we used to drive up and down that ridge several times a day, sometimes. First 'Another Lousy Day', about two pairs of diaries found in a Chicago thrift store.

Then a half hour of segments about Charity: Detroit gives more per capita than other people, an interview with Amanda Gebhardt, the new 26-yeard old director of a family foundation created by her aunt's will, a profile of a Bay Area fundraiser, and of the founder of a charity-watchdog group.

This made me think of Bowling Alone, a book I've left in New York. I was surprised by the sunny tone of the NPR pieces. Friends have told me that the non-profit sector is an increasingly depressing area to work in, where more time has to be spent raising less money to help now needier people. Another book I bought several years ago, Civil Society, opens with a reminiscence by the author, Brian O'Connell:

"I hadn't realized that there was a sprawling and deeply layered web of voluntary associations and institutions, that religions did more than preach their gospels, that people are often ahead of their leaders, and that democracy really rests on the underpinnings of citizen participation and influence."

Economic indicators like consumer confidence, job growth, unemployment, etc., are all easily bandied about. Indicators like absolute amount of charitable donation seem easily skewed by anomolies, like tycoons setting up business schools and gallery wings. (See Slate's biggest donor list from last year.) In general it seems like the nonprofit sector isn't reported upon often enough, and that most people (myself included) don't have much of a grasp on the role it plays in keeping our social engine going. This is particularly unfair because, as I've learned this last fall in Journalism school, the nonprofit sector--with its advocacy groups, research institutions, and street-credibility--is often a journalist's best friend.

Home, sweet home. The piano is tuned, my sister is playing it, and my mother has laid delightful little treasures and art all over the house for me to find and marvel at. She made me a lovely dinner of nice, warm, mommy-food. Can you hear me purr?
A very happy holiday season, everyone! Be well and safe.

Blog This! Is not working so well.
Anyway, Doublethink has a very comprehensive discussion of the Strom Thurmond's daughter story.

Another great Slate article, this one about the American painter James Whistler, accompanied by some lovely paintings. I'll have to look for a book on the man, and remember to check out the Freer Gallery when I finally get to visit Washington D. C.. I'm not usually a fan of abstract art, but Nocturn in Black and Gold is really elegant.

A Long Post on Strom Thurmond's Daughter

The New York Times article which prompted this.
This Thurmond New York Times article by Jeffrey Gettleman, about the reactions of Strom Thurmond's legitimate family's reaction to Essie Mae Washington-Williams revealing that he was her father is interesting. All of the quotes that The Times got directly (as opposed to the attorney-crafted statement released by Strom Thurmand Jr., the Senator's oldest son and "heir") are at least border-line negative and somewhat self-centered. They're all from neices and nephews and one grand neice, reflecting on the difficulty they have dealing with this news. The kindest one is from one neice, Ellen Senter:


"Ellen Senter, a niece of Mr. Thurmond, also praised Ms. Washington-Williams' handling of her announcement after remaining silent for so long.

"Essie Mae Washington-Williams's humble spirit and kind nature has made it easier for us to bear this news," said Ms. Senter, 58, a teacher in Columbia. "But it was hard when I first heard it because it was surprising to me that my uncle had any sort of illegitimate child, black or white." "

Another neice, Mary Freeman, admits that her cousin being black is an issue, while a nephew, James Bishop, says "I don't why this lady is doing this" and his daughter, Robyn Bishop, says, "I just hope this woman is coming out for the right reasons." The piece ends with Mary Freeman saying:

"Ms. Freeman said she was not sure if she was ready to meet Ms. Washington-Williams, who has said she wants to connect with as many members of the family as possible.

"If I do, I'm not going to go with open arms," Ms. Freeman said. "It's too much to accept right now." "

Gettleman describes the reaction of Thurmond's son so:

"On Monday, two days after the news broke about Ms. Washington-Williams, Mr. Thurmond issued a statement for the family acknowledging her "claim to her heritage" and indicating he would like to meet her."

Gettleman immediately follows it with quotes implying that it's the only thing the man (a 31 year-old U.S. attorney) could have said, and that the lawyer-crafted statement is not as candid as the kinds of quotes Gettleman got from the other branches of the family.


---
My musings on the article.
What I find interesting about all this is that none of these relatives reflected on what it must be like to be in your seventies before you can freely state who your father is. None of them make any statement of compassion or sympathy to a woman who is the oldest child of one the last century's most towering political figures, but who lived her live without the family atmosphere--or instantaneous networking benefits--that graced them as neices and nephews. By all accounts Mr. Thurmond supported his daughter, and perhaps he pulled a few strings for her over the years. Nonetheless, she hardly had the benefits of being raised by her father, a value that his party and his people have trumpeted endlessly. Mary Freeman seems openly hostile in the article, and James Bishop and his daughter Robyn Bishop's use of the adjective "this" is symptomatic of their chilly tone. Where is the famous Southern graciousness now?

I am hoping that Gettleman's spin on Strom Thurmond Jr.'s spin is overly cynical, and that despite the fact that the heir to the Thurmond mantle is a lawyer who used another lawyer to release his statement, he might still be sincere. On one hand, this whole matter is somewhat trivial; the Senator is finally dead, and this is simply one of many cases of illegitimacy and racial double standards. On the other hand it has some disproportionate symbolic significance, the reason, I think, it was fronted on the The Old Gray Lady. In a January, 2001 NYT article about his then unannounced but still impending appointment as U.S. Attorney, David Firestone wrote of Strom Thurmond Jr.: "Friends described him as a moderate conservative who enjoyed prosecution more than private practice and was undefeated in the five or six felony trials he prosecuted." An editorial from the same time was headlined "Thurmonds Forever."

Barring the hand of bizarre fate, it seems inevitable that Thurmond Jr. will have a long and influential political career. He has a task before him now: through his actions and future policies, he must prove that families, opinions, and cultures do in fact change and evolve over time and over generations. If his actions show that his "white" Southern family is truly able to embrace the black blood which has watered the success of their family tree for centuries, and which is inextricably mixed with their own, he will be an accomplished man. The embrace has to be egalitarian and uncondescending. If instead he provides yet another example of a stagnant family culture, he will help extend the shadows of racism far into the new century.

---
Some other links on the topic.

I first read about Essie Mae Washington-Williams in a Slate article by Diane McWhorter, and found this New York Times article through Slate's Today's Papers feature on Saturday. A Slate Frayster posted an interesting reminscence on interracial dating. My own Fray post overlaps with this one, but not completely. It's also pretty long.


The deepest--and interestingly, apparently frankest--coverage I've found so far comes from South Carolina's paper, The State:

"Thurmond's Past Invites New Scrutiny"

"Critics of Thurmond's Daughter Change Tune"

"Dad walked the walk"--a retrospective on his childhood by Thurmond Jr., written for the Senator's 100th birthday. A quote:
"He taught me, as a boy, how to ride a bike, and I'll never forget that day now more than 25 years ago that he did away with the training wheels, gave me a big push, and sent me pedaling unsteadily through our neighborhood, running behind me, cheering, his arms raised over his head.

This rite of passage has been repeated between many a father and his children, and it did not matter that mine just happened to be a United States senator; he was always just Dad to us." --Probably more notable at the time written because it is describing a 70-something year-old man, it is also notable as an example of what Essie Mae Washington-Williams did not get as a child.

This International-Herald Tribune article discusses this as an example of the usual dismissiveness faced by black oral history, as well as the intricacies of the one drop rule. I got it from Gavin's Blog.

And I've got to wonder why Boondocks hasn't said a word. . .

Update:
I fixed a few more typos and set the quotes in italics to make them more clear.

What a great lede.

I just discovered the online Comic PvPonline.com , courtesy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light blog.

Some random googling led me to Edge, an online journal that seems almost excessively brainy. While the site organization is a little mindboggling and cramped, it seems to have some really substantial and intelligent content. It also had a link to Seed Magazine, which I'll have to go look for now. Who said surfing doesn't get you anywhere?

I'm working on my master's project on Hepatitis C in New York. If you are involved with this disease in anyway, please contact me. I especially need to talk to patients--they have to volunteer to talk to me, as their doctors cannot tell me about them, because of stringent new privacy regulations. It's been difficult reporting this because I didn't have my voice for all of last week. While it's back now, I still have a reflexive cough, which makes interviewing rather unpleasant.

A great little story about how the digital soldiers in the Lord of the Rings were made a little too intelligent, courtesy of my friend Andrew.

This Making Light post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden pointed me to a New York Times article uniting two of my favorite college subjects: classics and combinatorics.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend's roommate at Harvard over Thanksgiving break. He's studying East Asian Studies now, and majored in Classics for his undergrad. We were talking about how Classics can be very useful, but it's not always obvious what those uses are--or well publicised or well exploited either. As a result, it always seems like a closed field, with not much hope for aspiring young classicists. This is an example of new stuff going on.

But like Nielsen Hayden says, it's all a little suspicious.

They say they've captured Hussein. I'm waiting for the DNA test, since he has so many look alikes. But, yeah, they probably have. People are probably going to forget that we didn't go in there to capture Saddam, we went in there to find weapons of mass destruction.

Bah Humbug. It's snowing. Big, big white flakes.

What San Francisco worms have in common with most of the journalism school today.

Suellentrop's book review of John Edwards' memoir of Four Trials in his previous career as a trial lawyer is a little odd--after a damning-with-faint-praise opening:

"On the plus side, it's affecting if a little bit corny, and in parts it's enthralling. But it's also thin on policy, focused on a past that bears little relation to the candidate's merits, and filled with eye-rolling paeans to the virtues and dignity of "regular people." And like the Edwards campaign, it's headed for the remainder bin before you know it."

Suellentrop summarizes the News in the book, which is that Edwards finally, if briefly, talks about the death of his 16-year old son Wade 7 years ago. (He would have been my age, the same as many of my friends.) I had never even heard of this before, so perhaps it was the surprise factor, but I found the rest of the review moving and enticing. It seems obvious that this tragedy helped propel Edwards into public life, and at the same time admirable that he has not milked it. I have to wonder if the top of the review was a mild and political example of what Heidi Julavits calls Snark, or at least a weak cousin of it--dissing for the sake of dissing.

Oh my. I don't ever want to cover a war, but if I end up in one, I hope my companions are this brave and smart. I had just decided that my Speakers Committee goal for next semester is recruiting the legendary war photographer James Nachtwey to come speak to us next spring. Now I just hope he makes it home alright, wherever home is.

I'm assuming Weisskopf is right-handed, and I can't even imagine what it must be like for a writer to lose his writing hand. Time Warner better take good are of him.

13 journalists have been killed in Iraq this year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. These aren't guys who were trained as soldiers and who signed up to defend their country and die if necessary. They have the luxury of going home, but they choose to stay so that the rest of us can know what it is we do to our young men and women, and other people's children.

Plaudits for some California Representatives asking a very logical question of National Security Advisor Condi Rice---why are we spending so much money on looking for WMD without spending money making sure smart Iraqi scientists don't sell their expertise elsewhere? From Talking Points Memo.

Allow me a sentimental moment as a I reminisce over the old days when George Miller was my representative. As my sister wanted to tell him when we got redistricted out of his constitutency, "I never needed to write to you before because you always voted the way I wanted you to."

This Slate cover article by Steve Chapman, about the taxpayer burdens of supporting the elderly, is astonishing. While it makes a lot of logical points, its tone is so blatantly callous I have to wonder what the author's intention was.

If you're offended, you're probably not remotely interested in agreeing with him. But if you can laugh at his chutzpah, are you really going to take his arguments seriously? On the other hand, he makes a memorable case. While this article pretends to be addressed to Chapman's fellow baby boomers, it's real audience should probably be the "luckless 25-year-old, [who] by contrast, can count on paying $322,000 more in payroll taxes than he will ever get back in benefits." Just the audience most likely to have their eyes gaze over from yet another article on social security, and to be too worried about securing that entry level job to be hooked by a lede mentioning their own retirement. But also an audience that gets much of its news from The Daily Show and The Onion.


It reminds me of one of the only good scenes from the movie Boys and Girls, set in Berkeley. This scene was shot in Blake's, and the Freddie Prinze Jr. character's best friend/side kick, played by Jason Biggs, has finally acceped Freddie's admonishment to "just be himself." So on a double date with the heroine and a community service loving beauty, he goes on and on about how "old people are annoying and gross and freeloaders." (paraphrase, not exact quote) It's funny because while it's patently absurd, we all know that at least someone out there actually thinks it. Apparently Chapman is that person.

I disagree with his philosophy if not with his numbers. What's the point of civilization if people can't enjoy retirment after a long life of working hard? And what's the point of medical advancement if only rich people can use it to soothe the pain of old age, while the poor are left to suffer? It's cruel to just let someone rot away and die from high cholesterol, when we have the power to keep them healthy. There's nothing wrong with our cultural impulse to protect and care for the elderly.

There is something wrong with several our relatively new cultural impulse to do it out of sight, and out of mind. We all know that two can live almost as cheaply as one, but by relegating our elderly to retirement homes and home nurse checks, we increase the cost of their care. There was a set of Salon articles not so long about having children, or rather not having them, as several childless staffers explained their choice. Laura Miller's column had the tagline:"News flash: Having children won't save you from a lonely old age." Cary Tennis wrote,

"My dad always said, Be independent, do your own thing. I took him at his word and put 3,000 miles between us. And now that he is 80 the terms of our pact of protection have been reversed. It is my turn to look after him. But from this distance I cannot look after him. That makes it all the more troubling that I may have let him down by doing what he suggested."

Why do these authors just take it for granted that that's the way it will be, or should be? I find it rather appalling. It's one thing not to take care of a parent that you're simply not able to take care of, lacking the medical expertise. But it's quite another to shrug of responsibility altogether. The cultural impulse that pushes all children out of the nest and frowns upon their "needing" their parents past the age of 22 is the flip side of this coin. Children who grow up believing that they must form their lives completely independantly of their parents in order to be "healthy" human beings
are not going to have room for them when their parents need them. I'm not advocating parents who inculcate neediness and dependency in their children as a means of insuring their retirement homes. But I think American society has too much of the other extreme--adults who have no real relationship with their parents, to whom the people who first passionately loved them have now become strangers or mere aquaintances.

I feel somewhat chastened by this Slate article praising the book of literary criticism, Mimesis. I've been meaning to read it for over a year now. Just think, if I had only read it before, I would be ahead of the curve! Now, I'm just one of the pack.

This Slate article on this years flu strain mentions how avian flu--flu passed directly from birds to humans without a porcine intermediary--are particularly dangerous, and says,

"While one bird flu incident might have been interpreted as an isolated occurrence, multiple bird flu incidents increase odds that eventually an outbreak of a newly mutated strain will not be contained. The risk is exacerbated by the ever growing sizes of flocks kept in factory farming production. Dr. Robert Webster of St. Jude Hospital, an expert on influenza ecology, flatly predicts, "We will have a pandemic sometime in the next 10 years. The clock is ticking.""

I resent this. I'm a vegetarian, yet because of other people's demands for chicken, and the meat industries willingness to profit of feeding that demand cheaply, I'm going to be at greater risk to catch some awful flu.

Update: Perhaps I should disclose that I'm really quite sick right now. Might explain the depthy of my irritation.

My beloved older sister is now a Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics, obtained at the University of California, Berkeley.
Fiat Lux and Go Bears! Three Cheers for Doctor Datta!

Journalists need to explain these things better. I got this link from Talking Points Memo, and what I can't understand is how exactly this is an offer India can't refuse. Why on earth should India, or any country, for that matter,
particularly forgive $ 2 billion of debt? Out of some goodness of heart, maybe, as Bono would have developed countries forgive African debt. But James Baker is no charismatic rockstar. What kind of pressure or incentive is he bringing to bear as a counterbalancing force against the very real and concretely explained bonds being payed for by Indian taxpayers? How does this work in the rest of the world?

Whoah. And yes, it's apparently actually happened. That was not something I was expecting.

Scott just sent me this Christian Science Monitor online exploration of terrorism. It's really interesting both in content and presentation, an example of the power of new media to communicate complex ideas. The only thing I'd want more of is a newsy edge and more concrete, statistical kinds of information on the subject.

It's either entirely too early to be at the Journalism School, or entirely too late. I haven't quite decided which it is.

The snow was starting to get to me, but hot chocolate is making it better. I like the picture on the J-school's front page. Outside there are still people frolicing the snow (more like tackling each other into it), despite the cold and the darkness. Ah, to be so athletic and playful. Inside mostly fellow classmates working on their final projects for Reporting and Writing I.

This Wired news report, India Fires Supercool-Fuel Rocket, is a little bittersweet. My first thought was: Cool! Cryogenic rockets just sound amazing.

Diversity in research is a good thing, and if we want to keep space exploration and satellite development going strong, the more players, the better. But of course everyone ends up having to worry about nuclear weapons. While I think most Western commentators can be rather one-sided in their analysis of India's nuclear program, I do hope that the rapidly multiplying hosts of Indian technologists will be able to think of exciting and peaceful things to do with this.

Don't these MSN filler writers know what they're doing? Women all over the world who have have consoled their egos by saying, "well, they don't notice me because I'm the smart one," will now have to face up to the fact that they might be dumb too.

I love the headline that pops up with msn: "Do men prefer brains?"
On toast? In their skull? Instead of computers?

And you can't beat the scienthe scientific sound of " We took a survey of single guys who date online, and they say it ain't so. The results weren't iffy, either: The guys said by a nearly two-to-one margin that if asked to choose between beauty and brains in the perfect long-term partner, they would choose brains"--as in, the two guys down the cubicle alley to the left chose brains, but the guy behind me chose body?

I shouldn't be making fun of Hecht (any relation to the famous optics guy, I wonder. . .). I will probably be doing this job in six months.

Rum and Monkey figures out which historical lunatic you are.

It's snowing.

It's pretty, but I'm not really ready for this.

For a few months now, I've had a perverse interest in the ostensibly boring policy ruckus about steel tarriffs. The effects of obscure policy on the Electoral College can elicit a greater thrill this election season, after we all breathlessly watched the wavering reds and blues in the map of the last presidential election. From this NYT article by David Sanger:

"Having seen the brutal politics of steel up close, Mr. Baily wonders now whether Al Gore would have won West Virginia and thus the presidency three years ago if the Clinton administration had acted more vigorously to protect the American steel producers. "We resisted the pressure on economic grounds, and it's possible that Al Gore paid for that," he said."

The thrust of the article seems to be that the WTO has seen how to exploit Bush's sensititivies to that wavering red and blue map. In Slate's Today's Papers, summarizes the article:

"The New York Times, meanwhile, takes a moment to appreciate the Karl Rove-like moves of the World Trade Organization and the European Union, which determined that the best way to beat back the tariffs would be to go after American exports from states deemed more crucial to Bush's re-election efforts, such as Florida citrus and Michigan's automobiles."

How is the map going to be tugged and pulled this season?

An interesting story about White House officials changing their story yet again.

Salon.com's article on The real fellowship of the ring is an example of how friendships and personal relationships have a lasting impact on significant ideas and events in the wider world. How is it that smart people like Tolkien and Lewis manage to find each other? I suppose hanging out at Oxford would be a start, but the pool of people at Universities--even good Universities--is pretty wide and deep. Can one deliberately construct a truly helpful salon?

Why I wanted to work for Wired magazine. Where else would I be able to ponder what kind of video games Jesus might play?

John Updike, Anti-Semite? - Don't be ridiculous. By Timothy Noah is an excellent use of Amazon's search inside, points out my sister.

This makes me feel like going back to physics.

The fourth one is the best; save it for last.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Cooperation.
We can all get along: BBC NEWS | South Asia | Hindu helps faithful Muslims fast

A note from Gaiman's Blog: Comic Relief asks for your support
If anyone feels like buying me some issues of kitchen sink magazine, or Global Frequency or Optic Nerve or Too Much Coffee Man or Sandmans or 1602, go for it.

GO BEARS!

I spoke with Professor Isaacs about the Reuters wire. He pointed out that news services won't run a wire report if they don't believe it. If, say, the New York Times, wanted to pick up this Reuters wire, they might have tried to check it out themselves first. Newspapers don't usually run articles debunking a wire report they couldn't check out. I can see why this would make sense from the newspaper's point of view--what's the point? A report debunking such a report would look kind of weird in a newspaper that never ran the article in the first place.

But in the age of the web and google, and on the birthday of the most compelling family of conspiracy theories, we might want to reflect on that convention. How is a wire report reading public supposed to discern the difference between what's news that can't be checked out and what's news that major news companies don't want us to read?

I updated my original post about the Reuter's piece on American soldiers taping an Iraqi's mouth for critiquing them.

When I was talking to Hertzberg on Tuesday night, he mentioned the lack of pickup stories in connection with some important pieces of news. The pickup is something I'm fascinated with, since it's what turns a simple piece into "the news." Project Censored, for example, is not about stories that were actually censored by the state but about important stories that weren't picked up by major news organizations--effectively censored.

Prague Revisited - The evidence of an Iraq/al-Qaida connection hasn't gone away. By Edward Jay Epstein is a great piece, because it doesn't try to over state the case, and explains both sourcing and procedure very clearly.

Clearly we need to know why the FBI isn't cooperating with the BIS. Wouldn't the administration be ecstatic if it could be proven Atta did indeed meet with Al-Ani? It would really help to know where Atta was when.

Besides the April 8 2001 date, the crucial item seems to be Atta's weird visit to the transit lounge on May 30, 2001. (The Fray remarks regarding this one* are particularly bad, and emblematic of the kind of thinking Jack Schafer's "accompanying" piece excoriates.) But the opening paragraphs of Epstein's piece seem to imply that BIS surveillance of al-Ani was so good that the meeting on April 8 was enough of an anomaly to upset the foreign minister into deporting al-Ani. So, unless explicitly told otherwise, can we assume that al-Ani did not meet with Atta on May 30? Let's say we do.

If I was a foreign reporter in Prague right now I'd like to know what other Iraqi agents could have been meeting with Atta. Or what other Arab/Egyptian/Yemeni/Pakistani/Sudanese/Afghani/AQ types etc., agents might have been meeting with Atta. Maybe he was just getting his orders from OBL? Regardless, it seems like there's a story in that airport lounge.



*Frayster ejk_ :"Furthermore since the Czech airport cameras were not comprehensive in the their coverage of the airport, and he did not show up on any of the cameras, then he must have been avoiding the cameras when he was there. Since he was avoiding the cameras at that time, then he must have been in the airport, since he could not have been avoiding the cameras if he wasn't in the airport."

I realize that I mostly post links to other people's journalism, and my thoughts thereof. I thought I'd do a little update on where I am in the semester, since this thing was also meant to keep my friends and family informed about me without deluging them in email.

We're essentially in a protracted period of finals now, where finals in Journalism school is not so much about exams as about spending time on longer, more enterprising pieces. This is good because it's the really interesting stuff, but it's bad because it means juggling a lot of deadlines and nebulous projects in a suddenly unstructured schedule.

Because of some snafoos, I've switched my master's project from national security and science, and am now working on Hepatitis C, with a focus on the New York area. If you know anyone who knows anything about this topic--liver specialists, public health people, transplant workers, charity workers, activists, etc.--or anyone who has this disease or has lost someone to this disease, who would also be willing to talk to a journalist, please put them in touch with me.



I'm working on and finishing up some stories that have to do with City government--institutions and people, how they work, what they do, where they came from, and starting an investigative piece. For perhaps obvious reasons, I'm not going to trumpet here what the investigative piece is about.

I've been having a really great time meeting some fascinating people; half the benefits of going to a school like Columbia. A few weeks ago I met Christiane Amanpour at the Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism, and got to talk to one of the recipients, Dr. Asha Krishnakumar, a journalist with India's Frontline Magazine. Two weeks ago I was at the New York Times main office in Times Square, and last week I got a tour of NYTimes.com 6 blocks south, which was a lot of fun.

The highlight of the semester so far, however, was last monday's visit to the Times Square offices of The New Yorker. It was just as cool as I expected it to be, if a little corporate. (Their owner, Conde Nast, made them move to the Conde Nast building a few years ago.) We got to spend two hours talking to Hendrik Hertzberg, and he was every bit as interesting, insightful, intelligent, clever, articulate, [insert favorite writerly adjective here], etc., as I had hoped--while also managing to be totally nice. I hounded him some more yesterday after a forum we had on Shattered Glass. I think working at the New Yorker would rock, if for no other reason one might get to have have great conversations with people like him. We also got to meet David Remnick and Judith Thurman, and talk to David Denby for a bit, who's a J-school alumnus. They have a gigantic pile of free books in their editorial lounge, and it was all I could not to go rooting through it.

Today I met S. Mitra Kalita, who's just come out with a book, Suburban Sahibs, following around three Indian families and telling the story of their settling down in America. She's also the president of the South Asian Journalism Association. She struck me as a lovely, charismatic woman with an endearing combination of self-asssertive flare and self-deprecation.

Alright, back to work.

This Reuters piece caught my eye in a broken MSNBC link on Patrick Nielsen Hayden's Electrolite blog; Googling for the exact quote,

"American soldiers handcuffed and firmly wrapped masking tape around an Iraqi man's mouth as they arrested him on Tuesday for speaking out against occupation troops"

gets you four pages of links in alternative, activist, blogosphere, and Middle Eastern media--but the only instance of "the mainstream press" buying the article I see is some kind of newservice called RocketNews that I haven't seen before.

Update: My sister correctly pointed out that by mainstream, I really meant mainstream Ango-American, because The New Zealand Herald seems to have run the wire story. There's also the fact that Reuters itself is mainstream.

Googling it again today (11/20/03) still yields about four pages of links, and on the first page there's a link on Yahoo! UK. The second page seems to be this journal's first real google appearance. :-). I've also fixed some of the links in this post. See today's post.

Brad DeLong posts one of my favorite Berkeley stories: Professor Paul Licht's account of saving the hyena colony during the Oakland fire. It helps if you remember that hyenas can bite through bone and sprint very quickly.

You can donate to the March of Dimes fund for studying preterm births by buying a Prematurity Band.

I was born three months premature, and while I was fine, most early babies aren't so lucky.

"This happy breed of men, this little world/
This precious stone set in the silver sea/
. . .
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England."

Take a moment to read this: BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China's forgotten Aids victims.

"The village of Shuang Miao in the far northeast corner of Henan is an unremarkable place.


Many local children have become orphans

Its tightly packed brick courtyard houses just like thousands of others across this vast plain. But Shuang Miao is stalked by death.

The "strange disease" is what the villagers call it.

No-one's bothered to tell them what it really is that's killing them - Aids. "

Amy Tan has had a crazy life. Spare me a life of interesting events . . .I certainly hope my fiction ends up being more exciting than my nonfiction.

I'm finishing up my take-home law exam, and I have to say, it's a class that gives one very mixed, very strong feelings about being a journalist. I mean, on one hand we have Justice Louis Brandeis:

"But [those who won our independence] knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones."

and Justice Black on the Pentagon Papers:

"And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."


and on the other hand we have the case of Sidis vs. F-R Pub. Corp. Legal considerations aside, we read how
"But the article is merciless in its dissection of intimate details of its subject's personal life, and this in company with elaborate accounts of Sidis' passion for privacy and the pitiable lengths to which he has gone in order to avoid public scrutiny."

Journalists can be really horrible. I guess the thing to do is a) not to be evil and b) take full advantage of the freedoms we have and do something worthwhile with them.

I guess it's also the responsibility of the readers to spend more of their reading time and money on things having to do with foreign shot and shell and less with dissection the private lives of sad and unimportant people.

This Slate article on puppets possibly being banned in Miami protests is interesting because on one hand it seems ridiculous to be afraid of puppets, and on the other hand one realizes that puppets are actually incredibly powerful tools of free speech.

Ah ha! I found a piece of my fiction, and plugged into the gender-genie algorithm.

Words: 1426
Female Score: 1667
Male Score: 1309
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!
Yay!!

Combined with my scores for nonfiction, I'm not quite sure what this says about the fact that I'm in journalism school now.

This piece of news, "Moscow reportedly considers kissing ban", is pretty frightening. So much for freedom in Russia. I'm not exactly a huge proponent of public displays of affection, but Orwellian does seem like the appropriate term.

I like this bit:
"It's not uncommon for couples to kiss on the long, slow escalators leading down to Moscow's subway platforms -- the steps allow people of different heights to gaze directly into each other's faces, and it beats looking at advertisements during the ride. But the embraces are mostly reserved and few people seem to object -- at least until now. "

Almost a bit of poetry coming down the AP Wire. . .you can just see a pretty Russian girl, rosy cheeked and all bundled up with a jaunty woolen hat. She happily leans down instead of up to plant a kiss on her lover's cold nose. It's certainly the most romantic image I've had of Moscow in a long time.

Then again, subversion is itself rather romantic: "According to Stolichnaya Vechernyaya Gazeta, fines for breaking the rules, if they are adopted, would range from 300 to 500 rubles ($10 to $17). And if the kissing couples didn't have the money, the paper reported, police could hold them at the precinct house until somebody paid." Does the young couple get held together? A dreamy afternoon spent in jail. You can envision a musical comedy where the hero and heroine smooch madly while the hero tosses rubles at the angry police.

Wow. I guess all of Britain has gone mad. Prince Charles Denies a Rumor, but Won't Say What It's About

whoah. CNN.com - Palace: Charles claims 'ludicrous' - Nov. 7, 2003
Has CNN gone out of it's mind?

Last night I saw Matrix: Revolutions, and was thoroughly disappointed. I actually rather liked Reloaded, and would have happily eaten up some more of the same. Not this. I wasn't as disappointed as I could have been, though, because I had been warned.

The Meatrix, on the other hand, is just fabulous.

I can't decide if this Washington Post story about a Canadian citizen who was detained at JFK and secretly "returned" to Syria, the land of his birth, to be tortured is more or less disturbing because he's Canadian. The principle--that naturalization counts for nothing--would be pretty horrible if applied to naturalized American citizens by America. But that America feels it has the right to manhandle a Canadian citizen--remember, folks, this is the country that so graciously took all our planes during the Sept. 11 attacks--speaks volumes about our new sense of isolationism. We did something similar with Berna Cruz at Chicago's airport. If we can't deal honorably with Canada, who can we deal with?

I find it rather amusing that this MSN.com celeb photo from the Matrix Revolutions Premiere of Lambert Wilson, who plays the Merovingian in the Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions, doesn't even name him in the caption but names Sharon Stone standing in front of him. Yeah, Sharon Stone is more famous, but this is perhaps only becaue of shenanigans like this one. Sharon Stone's last big appearance was in a tacky commercial for AOL of all things, while Wilson was in THE MATRIX. Hello.

She's filming Catwoman, and I have to say that I think it's terrible that it's Michelle Pfeiffer's blondeness and not her brilliance which has appropriated the role. Obviously, I'm a little biased here, but catwoman should have dark hair unless overridden by extreme talent. Why has everyone forgotten Eartha Kitt?

I redid the About Saheli part of my homepage, including a version of my biography written by Mr. Andrew Franck.

Picked up this link to polydactyl cats from Neil Gaiman's blog, and now my whole vision of what makes us human has been shifted upside down. I really thought opposable thumbs was a big bit of it. Man.

Strada strangely makes it into the top AP photos on Yahoo! Ah, for a Mocha Bianca. . .

Wow, I'm not usually confused about my gender, but apparently my writing is. Or maybe society is confused about my writing. Well, this algorithm is certainly confused about my writing.

On a 630 Word Blog Entry
Female Score: 814
Male Score: 1486


On a 2710 Word Nonfiction Entry
Female Score: 2346
Male Score: 3189


And I don't have any of my fiction in cut and pastable form right now, so we'll have to wait on that one. Wiggy.

Use the Political Compass to figure out your political cartesian coordinates. Lots of fun.

Kids Play: An Electronic Gaming Monthly article where they took some old school games and tried them out on tweens. Really, really funny.

A New York Times article, "Microsoft and Google: Partners or Rivals?" that I found disturbing. Google would be so less wonderful if it was part of Microsoft. It's not just a knee jerk "I think Microsoft makes bad software so I hate them so I think they'd ruin Google" argument. I'm actually not a Microsoft hater at all; one of my best friends works there and is happy there, and I'm more comfortable with Windows than with any other system. But a big part of Google's appeal is about branding and trust. We trust them not to be evil, and we feel a comfort and aesthetic pleasure in using their very well branded and designed tools. That pleasure is not incidental. When you spend hours searching for things and people online, as I do both professionally and as a means of wasting time, that mild pleasure helps keep anxiety and ocular stress down. We are charmed by their antics because we know they are a real company of actually interesting people started by two guys. That joy will dissipate significantly if we think they've plugged into Microsofts PR machine and are utilizing the efforts of people who studied advertising in school.


That kind of sentimentality may seem functionally unimportant, but I think in the search engine world loyalty is key. If someone shows up and builds a better search engine tomorrow, I may not use it for a while because of loyalty to Google. Not very long, but a little while. But that little while might be enough time for Google to bring theirs up to par. Merge with Microsoft and they lose that buffer zone.

The other thing which is depressing about that story is the realization that when it goes public it's immediately going to become corporate. I think it would be really cool if private individuals had the savvy and resources to buy Google stock. There's a company that I'd want to invest in for good old fashioned reasons--not because I think it'll make me rich really quickly (and unfortunately, it would, which is why corporations are going to lunge after all the shares) but because I want it to succeed.

Nick points out that Microsoft is forming a search engine division, so Google might be thinking they better join up or be run out of business. With any other company I'd agree that this is the case completely. But I know really smart people who I am certain would, if given the choice between a very high paying job with Microsoft in Palo Alto and only a high paying job with Google in Palo Alto, would immediately and absolutely choose Google.

Oh man, if only I'd done this as my adventure story. Emily Yoffe as a Street Performer.

Dark Matter Flowchart: The world I decided not to join.

Wow. A letter to Romanesko on Poynter.org from a former producer for Fox detailing exactly how that "fair and balanced" reporting gets shaped. I'm just amazed.

Not sure what I think of Salon.com Technology: Twilight of the dorks? , but this quote made me think of ubercool Mr. Roberto: "If it weren't for dorks, America would look like Chile. "

A note about some clouds from my friend Brian. I was talking to him on the phone last night, and was surprised to learn that that much of the fog that rolls into the bay at night is in fact low cloud cover and part of a large cloud body hanging over the Pacific.

Published! An article I wrote over the summer in the newly printed issue of the Berkeley Science Review.

Full disclosure: Lior Pachter is a very good friend and former teacher of mine, and academically connected to other good friends of mine and to my sister Ruchira because of this. But I wrote it before Columbia professors began shrieking at me about how having friends is bad, and it's mainly explanatory. I'm quite sure that if I didn't have a strong and long-standing interest in Lior's work, and an easy habit from my student days of bugging him to explain things to me over and over again until I understood them, I wouldn't have been able to understand the science nearly as well. Perhaps somebody entirely disconnected from the research team would have been able to do an even better job somehow, but I think there's too much science that doesn't get conveyed to the public to absolutely cut out explainers with any connection to the subject.

This is so cute!

Okay, so I've been gone for a while, even though I now have a computer. I promise I'll fix that soon.

My Homepage

I think a lot of my philosophy on civil disobedience was formed during my undergraduate years at Berkeley.

And not the way you might think.

This article, from the Daily Cal, sent to me by Nick, reminds me of the Ethnic Studies Protests. I don't know the facts of this particular case, but in the Ethnic Studies Protests of '99, students ended up protesting being arrested for illegal actions done while protesting.

The whole point of civil disobedience is making a statement out of your willingness to take it on the chin in the pursuit of your cause. This is something I found lacking in many of the radical student groups at Berkeley.

Another lesson I learned in my youth was in seventh grade during the first gulf war. Students wanted to walk out of classes at our grassy Pasadena girls school in protest of the war. Problem was, all of the teachers were opposed to the war too. Our English teacher pointed this out to us, and it made a very big impression on me. People should choose the buildings the take over and picket carefully, if they're going to go throug the trouble of getting into trouble.

Check out this Slate piece on the Israeli Pilots who are refusing to to fly missions in the West Bank and Gaza. Regardless of whether one agrees with Avishai (I'm not sure I finally do), anyone can find his writing and reasoning highly impressive: he moves through the issues quickly without oversimplifying them, looks at several different ethical principles at once instead of overcondensing the problem to just one, cites some hard numbers and history, and still manages to work in some moving and telling rhetorical flourishes.

I think he gets to the crux of the matter, and the nut of that principle which most people working towards a social reform against the majority will of their society must hold dear. More than nonviolence, it's what I think is truly essential to Gandhi's philosophy. The individual always has the ability to oppose society's dictates, and if their conscience impells them to defy society--even a democratically, legally organized society--the individual is sacrificing their status as a law-abiding citizen for their conscience and the principle they are taking a stand on. That sacrifice will ring out and make a statement to a society which is prepared to listen. Nonviolent sacrifice in the face of violent oppression is often capable of making a statement to a society even when it isn't prepared to listen. But a real democracy should always be prepared to listen.

It's true that oftentimes protesters will generically defy society without much thought or care, and their loss of law-abiding status isn't really a sacrifice at all. That might be called arrogant. But I think it's important to recognize those who are in fact giving up something significant, and making difficult decisions, and to then recognize the weight that difficulty gives to their opinions. Instead of deeming them arrogant, I remember the over-quoted words of Mario Savio's famous speech outside my alma mater. They may be over quoted, but they're still true:

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! "

Oh, btw, today is Columbia's 250 anniversary celebration and the 100th birthday of Alma Mater, the big statue who sits on the steps of Lowe Library. I watched the president of the University, Lee Bollinger, climb on top of a gigantic cake to cut it.

It's been pointed out to me that my posting on a WSJ article by Jeanne Cummings about Howard Dean's Internet campaign now refers to a link inaccessible to nonsubscribers. So, hoping I fall under fair use clauses, I'm posting a few quotes:

*****

"About half of the campaign's $25 million take so far was raised over the Web, mostly in small donations -- a funding base the Democratic Party all but abandoned in recent decades."

"Mr. Dean's Internet donations have propelled him way ahead of his rivals; in all, he has collected about $5 million more than the second-place Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, whose fund-raising pace slowed as Mr. Dean's accelerated. Everyone else is $10 million or more behind."

"Mr. Dean understood the concept, but the details escaped him. "What's a blog?" he asked."


"On March 5, the campaign held its first official meetup in New York. The Essex Restaurant was told to prepare for 200 people, but 500 mobbed it, with more in a line outside. Mr. Dean emerged from his taxi and froze. "I was just shocked, stunned," he recalls. "I didn't understand the implications of [the meetups]. Trippi understood it immediately."
"The campaign still lacked money or manpower and had only one Internet expert. But virtual-world supporters soon showed up on the campaign's real-world doorstep."

*****

I just have to share my amusement at the little connections in the universe. I wanted to point a class mate to The Algebra Project, an organization that promotes mathematical literacy among poor and minority students, founded by Civil Rights Movement leaders. I went back to their website to check I still had the correct link, and guess where they're based? Bishop Allen Road, the same street in Cambridge where Christian Rudder and Justin Rice used to live and named their band after. Appropriate for the Algebra Project b/c Bishop Allen was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and appropriate for Rudder because he was a math major at Harvard.

Last night I saw Bishop Allen play at the Mercury Lounge. I've been listening to (legally!) downloaded Bishop Allen Mp3s, occaisionally checking out their website and press, and procrastinating on buying their CD Charm School for about as long as they've been around, mainly b/c I was sad their lyricist and guitarist Christian Rudder had stopped writing for the now somewhat defunct TheSpark.com. TheSpark was one of my favorite websites in college, back when the Internet was like burning. I hope Rudder takes up writing again, but in the mean time Bishop Allen is pretty good, and a really fun live act.

I think the lead singer, Justin Rice, has a little more of the rock-star carriage down than Rudder, who rather endearingly thanked the audience for skipping the pennant game in small voice before singing. The two of them twirled around each other while playing guitar, sometimes seeming a little confused about what their dance routine would be or needing to somehow consult with each other, but their oomph and gusto and just plain joy in singing was plain to behold. Bassist Bonnie Karin also did some keyboard and sometimes switched around with Rudder, and her vocals on Ghosts are Good Company were really nice, kind of bell like almost. I'm not sure who their new percussionist C.O. is, since she wasn't listed in the Charm School reviews, but besides having a good stage presence and flare with a xylophone she had some nice breathy backup vocals. Their second song was brand new, something along the lines of "making friends is easy, you do it so well, no one can tell, you're going to hell. . . " and while they were slightly self concious I really liked the arrangement.

The act before them, Cordero, was impressive and loud and almost brassy, though I can't figure out where the "brass" would have been coming from. I can't say why, but I can really dig a band that has two drummers, especially when one also happens to be the female lead singer and the other one sometimes takes to manically jumping up and down with maracas. The lead singer, Ani Cordero, seemed a little stiff in carriage when she was singing and playing guitar, but when she was drumming and singing the room rocked.

A conversation I just had with a classmate I ran into in front of ---, a well known restaurant in the Columbia Morningside Heights area.

Him: I can't decide what to eat. I need something cheap.
Me: Sorry, don't have any ideas. . .
Him: I f***in' hate ---.
Me: (laughing) Yeah. . .actually, the last time I ate there I felt pretty sick . ..though I can't really blame them.
Him: You should! They f***in' suck!
Me: Well, actually, it was a milkshake, so. .
Him: Good idea. (turning to go into ---) I'll have a milkshake.

the end.

Roberto's Family Won Their Court Case!!!
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/7020290.htm
Three Cheers for the Cabellos sticking it through and fighting for justice! They've made history.

Yesterday there was a pretty good article on Dean's internet campaigning in the Wall Street Journal.

In the mind-boggling game of guessing who could possibly win the Democratic Nomination, who could possibly win the General Presidental Election, or who would make the best president. I'm still willing to only clear out less than half the field. Any one of Clark, Dean, Edwards, Gephardt, or Kerry could carry the day. At first glance this article seemed like a ringing endorsement for Dean--the numbers crunch for his campaign enormously better than any of the other established ones and Clark's very novelty may be held against him. But no actual mention of Dean in the article is obviously flattering---it does not emphasize his being web-saavy, but that of his accolytes and followers. Indeed, Dean is most often quoted or described being flustered, surprised, slightly inept, maybe even a little clueless at times. The brilliant, branding ideas all seem to come from his deputies.

Let us remember that this is not 1996 nor even 2000---geeks as gods are almost taken for granted, and a "huh?" factor that might have been endearing in Clinton could be off-putting now. The Democratic policy-wonks out there trying to decide whom to support might cringe at the notion of a president who lets his deputies tell him what to do, or voting for a man based on the quality of the hired-help. That was, after all, a big argument against Mr. Bush--it was not reassuring to tell them that he would surround himself with "smart people."

But let us also remember that the dubiousness of Dean's smarts is not quite at the same scale as that of Dubya's. For all that Dean might have a father who worked for Dean-Witter, he has not inherited his deputies from the family stables--they came to him, and he seems to still issue their basic marching orders. So despite the flustered quotes, I think he still gets points for powers of delegation from this article.

Dudes. If you know anything about drug statistics, specifically rates of arrests in narcotics possession, please let me know.

To aid my search my friend Nick, who by blood (as opposed to by marriage) is probably the best connected to purveyors of such stats, pointed me to the blog of UCLA Policy Prof Mark Kleiman, which I find very interesting if not immediately illuminating upon my particular quandary. I thought this bit ,about soldiers being told to write letters to newspapers about how dandy the nonwar in Iraq is going, curious. Latest outrage, an example of how-rumors-get-started, or (most likely) something else entirely? I'll try to check it out after the all-class lecture/debate on nonpartisan city elections.

Yeah, so it's been a while. Well, when I get my new computer in about a week, I should be better.
Yesterday Ben and Eduardo came over for a visit from Boston. They had a traumatic time getting here and a more traumatic but luckily brief stay at a "hotel" which shall not be named here, but if you ask me I'll tell you. Ask me before you come here.
They did manage to get a room at the good ole' Hotel Newton, though. And then we had a marvelous breakfast at Caffe Con Leche and wandered around Times Square before I bid them farewell at the door to Urinetown, the musical. Ben tells me the CD is wonderful. I think I might want to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Asheley Judd or The Boy from Oz with Hugh Jackman. Ha, like I can afford the tickets. ..

But afterward going down into the subway I had one of those, wow, this really is New York moments. A crowd had filled about a 1/3 of the concourse, at least a 100 strong, to gather around 5 of the most amazing drummers I have ever seen perform on the street. These guys were *good*. Three bongo drummers, one with a shaker of some kind, and two bucket-stick drummers. They got a paint bucket filled with cash and whooping applause from the crowd which I think was not purely tourists. I haven't been able to figure out who they are exactly. I saw that their CD said something like I&I on it. Any ideas?

I did my police ride a-long this week, and I can't publish what happened, but if you know me, ask me the next time we talk, b/c a couple of amusing and interesting things did happen. Suffice it to say that I now have a big interest in the current state of the "Drug Epidemic" in New York.

While looking for a release I remembered reading I came across this two month old Berkeley press release.

Kenneth Weisinger was one of the first professors I had at Berkeley, and one of the best. No literature class since has measured up to German Literature 39D.

A nice Scott Rosenberg rumination on how "facts" work in journalism and the blogosphere.

Just saw a special screening of a Frontline documentary--Failure to Protect: The Taking of Logan Marr--that's up for a duPont award. Afterwards we met with the producers and talked to them about what it's like to be so involved with people. . .like a woman you know has killed a child. I believe this is going to air again soon. Check your local PBS website.

Last week I mentioned an article by Will Saletan that characterized a lot of Wesley Clark's ideas as stolen from John Kerry; my friend Scott just wrote to me that to "consider ideas to be 'owned' by a candidate" is terrible for a democracy--public officials should feel free to champion the best ideas out there. I agree. It's a sign of the cult of personality and superimportance of branding that the candidates define the set of ideas instead of the candidates being defined by the set of ideas they subscribe to--or better yet, being defined by the wisdom they use in subscribing and efficiency and ethics they use in implementing.

I never thought I'd see the day when I found myself agreeing with a defense of Rush Limbaugh. But there it is. Anyone want to persuade me back??

A picture of Asad from the castle.

My legs are killing me, but what a great day! It started off promising to be awful. Our assignment was to get a crime story that hadn't yet been covered by the papers, chasing down the miniscule press releases sent out by the Police. A pretty typical one:

ON THURSDAY 10/2/03 AT 0815 HRS IN THE CONFINES OF THE 1__ PCT. THE
VICTIM, A F/W/14 STATES THAT WHILE BOARDING A BUS NEAR THE __
TRAIN STATION AT __ AVE, SHE WAS SEXUALLY ABUSE BY A
M/H/25-30. SUSPECT FLED THE SCENE ON FOOT IN UNKNOWN DIRECTION. NO
ARRESTS, INVESTIGATION CONTINUING.

SUSPECT: M/H/25-30 WEARING LIGHT COLORED BLUE JEANS, DARK SWEATSHIRT
WITH STRIPES.


First we went to the scene of a Tuesday fire in Harlem that killed one man and sent his roommate to the hospital. We talked to the Super who said he'd never seen the guys before as they were illegally subletting the apartment for about two weeks. The super only knew that the apartment had the most minimal of damage and he theorized that the men had been drinking in bed. Nobody knew them or anything about the fire, and the entire local ladder had been emptied out for some huge fire somewhere. . .the firefighter tending the station claimed cluelessness. After my partner dragged me away from gawking at firehouse pole (wow! they really have those things!) we tried to find witnesses to a robbery in the very southern part of Harlem, where a girl exited a Deli holding $40 in her hand when some guy snatched it. Reports say that she and passersby chased him, but he boarded a bus and forced the driver to take him a few blocks away, where he escaped by foot. But no one at the deli knew anything except that the police had come in looking for the security tape; their colleagues from the previous shift didn't even mention it. Had a fun time trying my french out for kicks on the deli worker who's from Rabat, Morocco (told him all about Dave McCormick, and he and the Yemeni manager said that was the best way to learn Arabic and seemed suitably impressed). But no leads. We noticed another guy in a leather jacket asking questions along with a photographer, and after calling our Professor to see if it was okay to talk to them we did. Jackpot!

The photographer was Angel Franco, a Pulitzer Prize winning staff photographer with the New York Times. I cannot adequately describe how incredibly nice and helpful and cool he was. Well, I can, but that's due at 9am on Monday and will require more style than I can muster right now. He let us tag along as he drove the city hunting photographs, and we tried working on a couple shootings and reported on an attempted suicide with his help. This was particularly fun because yesterday I got to hear from another NYT staff photographer and Pulitzer winner, Vincent LaForet, tell us about his job.

Harlem has some amazingly beautiful housing stock, big brick and stone townhouses with elegant yet massive gables and porches. Along the northern shore of Manhattan leading up to the George Washington Bridge is a sloping field of green green grass sitting right on the water, just a few boulders above lapping waves. So pretty it made me a little homesick.

I just had to turn in a horrible assignment where we went through Friday's New York Times and listed the sources for every article in the front three pages. It was frustrating because I should have done a great job but just got bogged down in other stuff and not having a computer. I think the aim of the exercise was to make us see the reliance of the press on PR people and overemphasis on Government type stories, but neither of those things really surprised me. What did surprise me was the extent to which things were reported as matters of fact without attribution, even when it seemed dubious they came from observation.

I thought this article was kind of silly: it quotes a bunch of guys from a newly assembled advisory panel talking about how great the people on the panel are. It did cite some interesting research about the use of Oxygen isotope signatures to identify the origin of anthrax-like bugs, but I can't tell if the scientists involved are on the panel.

I'm on a quest to find out about the war photographer Nachtwey. . .

It's been a while. Got a brief weekend visit from my friend Asad, and we spent a good chunk of Saturday wandering around Central Park--all the way from 110th street to 63rd, in a fairly rambling path. I'd say my favorite bit was Belvedere Castle just because I like castles, and because it had a view of Turtle Pond. . ."turtles all the way down," quoth Asad. We saw some people filming a guy hamming it up in one of the turrets, and randomly both commented on the sorrow of his tracksuit. Asad asked one of the crew what they were filming for, and when she told us he was a subject of TLC's What Not To Wear I blurted out, "So is he before or after?". After, I'm afraid.

We have an exercise for our critical issues class which is annoying and enlightening at the same time. We have to go through last Friday's New York Times and list the sources for each and every article in sections A, B, and C. (Front, Metro, Business.) The story about an engineer who (sorta) tried to do something to prevent the Columbia Shuttle disaster was pretty depressing. I just have a vision of a bunch of sad, sad geeks who don't know how to fight for their convictions because no one ever taught them to.

I've been a member of NYTimes.com about 8 years, or as long as I've been on the Internet, and their search engine never quite keeps up with current technology to satisfy me. I think Google's convention that all search terms entered into the query field are assumed to be connected by a logical AND unless otherwise specified should be considered a standard by now. It's silly to have to put an AND in between each search term, and in this Google-era, highly counterintuitive.

I've been reading the trial summaries published by the Center for Justice and Accountability in the Estate of Winston Cabello, et al. vs Armando Fernandez-Larios, a case going on now in Miami. No, not a totally neutral account, but I don't claim to be neutral on this one. Winston Cabello was my friend Roberto's uncle, murdered during the Pinochet coup. Roberto's parents and Cabello worked for Allende.

A J-school alumnus, David Makali, the class President from 2001, has been arrested in Kenya after publishing an article about the possibility the ruling party had ordered a recent killing. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, this year at least 24 journalists have been killed in the line of duty, so to speak.

I covered my first court case today, a day in the retrial of Christopher Prince, 23, of Elmont, New York. Barely older than me, this man is accused of shooting into a crowd of St. Johns University students on the night of March 11, 2001 after a confrontation between them and a smaller group, including some of his friends. The shooting wounded today's main witness, Reshawn Fray, in the leg. He was a 17-year old visiting the campus and his cousin who was a student there, now he's a senior there himself. It made a paraplegic of Corey Mitchell, who had been a star linebacker for the school. Both of them positively identified Prince as the shooter in the last trial. In the last trial a guy named Stanley Heriveaux had testified that he was at the shooting (something confirmed by the records kept by a campus guard box) but that Prince wasn't there and that he had never met Prince; since last year's hung jury he has pled guilty to perjury and is expected to testify that he in fact drove Prince to and from the scene of the crime but lied under oath under at Prince's insistence. The bulk of the defense's argument is still supposed to be a case of mistaken identity, but I don't know of any other expected substantial rebuttals to the prosecution's 8 eyewitnesses. At least one of them, Prince's former friend Eric Mateo, could be considered a suspect himself, and therefore dubious. Apparently the prosecution's previous argument had been that the eyewitnesses were confused between Mateo and Prince, particularly because both men had had long braids on the night of the shooting, but Mateo cut his the next morning.

The gun was never recovered nor tied to Prince, who had an armed robbery and criminal posession of a gun on his juvenile record. The motive mystifies me regardless of who the shooter is. Apparently there was some kind of shoving incident earlier in the evening at Traditions, a local bar where Mitchell and his friends worked as bouncers. They calmed the parties down, but Mateo's group felt offended and found Mitchell and his friends on the University campus later, allegedly looking for a fight. Fray's description of the confrontation seems rather bizarre and mundane, though also fairly self-consistent and consistent with that of the other witness we saw. He said somebody (presumably Mateo, though he wasn't asked to make that identification during the trial) told him and his cousins and their fellow students "I'll fight anyone who wants to fight me," several times in a loud but still normal tone of voice. After Mateo stopped that, Fray claims Prince said something like, "This shit is case," and some kind of similar comments before pulling out a gun. Seeing Prince sit expressionlessly and calmly, it was hard to imagine him doing such a bizarre thing. But he's also been indicted for shooting the father of his girlfriend's baby, a man named Orville Mongol, in a separate trial. Motives and means are apparently not issues though, according to both sides.

The judge was unexpectedly helpful in explaining the workings of the court to us, though he was ethically forbidden from giving us his opinions on the case. His daughter went to Columbia J-school and he seemed to be in favor of Bollinger and Lemann's plan to increase the length of the program to two years, citing our obvious oblviousness of New York criminal law.
When I got back Columbia was teeming with crowds, big dark SUVs, police cars and Men in Black: Putin and Karzai were on campus. Sitting in the 6th floor computer lab some of us noticed snipers on the rooftop across. We climbed onto the wide windowsill to watch Putin emerge from Lowe Library with giant flanks of body guards, to enormous applause from the gathered crowd. There was some kind of weird photo op involving Little League players, and then he stalked off and we went back to writing about a little Queens trial.

Well, I saw General Wesley Clark give a speech this morning in the East River Park, a fairly ordinary expanse of grass and groundcover and muddy baseball fields. That's probably as close as I've ever gotten to someone as famous as him, unless you think Oscar the Grouch is more famous. Hmm, I think Oscar the Grouch is more famous. Okay, as politically famous.

It was a well-written speech, and he didn't stumble the way I was expecting based on others' reports. I still have to figure out how to crunch the numbers on his job creation plan, but basically it sounds like instead of diverting "Bush's tax cut" into health insurance like Gephardt, he wants to divert it into job creation programs, 40% of which will be creating Homeland Security type jobs. Even though that was the nominal reason for the speech, and the reason for the setting (across the river from a recently closed sugar factory), the real focus was his "New Patriotism." Slate's Will Saletan lists this as one of several stolen Kerry issues, but I think Clark makes a good and specific claim to his version of it. He's not just espousing Kennedyesque (and now generic) ideals of service, he's specifically calling for the appreciation of dissent.

His supporters are certainly enthusiastic, though I can't compare them for number or intensity to, say, Dean supporters, since this is my first direct look at the campaign. One woman came from Queens:
"I said God, I gotta get there, I'm so crazy about that man. He's marvelous, he's our hope--[seeing me writing her words down]--glowing terms, anything you can say about him, I'll subscribe to."
The park was difficult to get to, the crowd of supporters was not obviously thick (you'd never know it from the photographs, and then again, I don't have direct experience to compare), Clark was positioned facing away from the morning sun, and no one knew if he had named a campaign manager yet. These could be troubling signs of disorganization or endearing signs of a campaign that really was drafted. We shall see.

A moment I would dearly have loved to have been fast enough to photograph, since my view from the side of all the action (as opposed to in it on one or another side) was probably the best:
As General Clark entered the park, the greeting press rushed backwards to film and photograph him, unwary of the mud behind them. Clark lurched forward, crying out, "Watch out for the mud!" just as a TV cameraman stepped ankle deep into an oozing ochre puddle.


George Stephanopoulos was there with a giant red DKNY bag, apparently as a member of the press, and he seemed annoyed with me for taking his picture. Speaking of Stephanopoulous, I'll have to look up his and others' accounts of the early days of the Clinton presidency. I asked one of the Clark representatives, a woman named Beatrice, about his opinion on gays in the military, and she said that he favored a British style policy of acceptance, but implemented in cooperation with the military leadership. While today's Joint Chiefs of Staff are very different from those of 10 years ago, it might be instructive to review the mechanics of Clinton's attempts in that arena, and see if time and experience can be on Clark's side in a similar situation.

I was up at a (for me) ungodly hour to make it to the computer lab and the drug store before catching Wesley Clark supporters outside of the Today Show studio. It's interesting how dark and cold and empty the streets are. In New York, is 5 am the new midnight? Well, new may not be the right word since it's probably been this way for decades.

noted in slate's today's papers: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49361-2003Sep22.html
as today's paper's eric umansky calls it, check out the compare and contrast at the end.

Some thoughts on my long day in class:
We were talking about our police ride-along assignment (which I will not be able to write about here or on any other public forum) and our professor was (as usual) inundating us with amazing and clever examples from her own students. (One of the nice things about having such a veteran professor is that she can cite her own accomplished students and you realize that there is hope.) A former student of hers had encountered a corpse on his ride-along, and his piece was full of the grim and seemingly insensitive humor that the cops employed while dealing with the decayig body. At the end of the story the student noted that all such humor evaporated when the police contemplated facing the dead boy's family.
I was thinking about that in light of my weekend encounters with Neil Gaiman, who, as I said, is a charming and pleasant gentleman in person and on his blog. But his fictional work is full of very dark and often gory scenes, and has a very dark humor; lots of people find it really disturbing and weird. Yet I know there is a value in being able to laugh at your own worst experiences. On the second night that I saw Gaiman, he was in conversation with Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman came to fame writing Maus, a comic featuring himself as a mouse and memorializing his parents' experience in the Holocaust. What I think is important to remember is that such humor and laughter is not a way of tying up and throwing away the grief, but simply a way swabbing at it when necessary. Just because someone is laughing at their own experience doesn't mean they have to stop grieving over it.
The question is: how does this work when we're tossing and rechewing and reformulating experience between ourselves in society in the forms of journalism and art? How much and when can we laugh at someone else's experience as a way of staving off our own nightmares? I know we can't be purists and ascetics, maintaining absolute and sober respect for any experience not our own. For example, I'm sure someone somewhere has been injured by wolves. They might be offended at Gaiman's newest children's book, The Wolves in the Walls, which apparently portrays them playing video games and eating jam. But his daughter had a nightmare about wolves as a child, and he spun tales to comfort her. Dreams and archetypes and stories, whether fictional or real, once cannibalized by culture (the newspaper, the movies) have a ghostly impact on all of us, and we might all have to deal with them.
If the intent of classical tragedy was to provide catharsis for the audience, the Elizabethan improvement* of injecting comic relief into even Hamlet's tale must have only improved that process. The cops aren't going to laugh in the face of the family, whose share of the experience is heavier than their own, but they can laugh in front of the student reporter, who only has to see this kind of thing once and not every few days. The reporter can have more grim laughter than the reader, who didn't have to see the decay. The reader can smile at the joke more than someone being told about the article, who would probably be offended at being asked to laugh at such a subject. Experience spreads out in concentric circles like waves from a dropped stone, transmitted through briefly touching lives and then art and journalism. If we can be sophisticated enough to analyze our reactions with weights and densities, shades of gray instead of black and white, then we can afford to profit from the spreading without become completely numb or completely sensitive.


*Somebody with some scholarly knowledge let me know if I'm correct in guessing that comic relief is a fairly modern addition to tragedies? I can't remember much humor in the Oresteia or Sophocles, but then there's the Bacchae. . .and who knows about the Romans. Obviously I'm taking a Eurocentric viewpoint here.

I'm sitting in my new media class right now, and I walk over to ask the professor a question, and then I go back to my chair to email him something and as I turn to go back I pass in front of the projector and as I'm standing in front of the projector I hear this awful cross between a pop and a
Boom.
Smoke.
The projector bulb exploded. I guess the lens cap saved me. There are still little bits of glass and plastic sitting on the table underneath a newspaper the professor put there in case one of us accidentally leaned on it.

This is my first attempt at using Blogger. I just got off the subway, achy and smiley from having a book signed (again) by my favorite Blogger, Mr. Neil Gaiman. He was, today as yesterday, as charming and amusing as you'd think he'd be. I told him I wanted to be a writer too, and he told me best of luck, and I'll take that as about as luck inducing an encounter with fame as a writer can hope for.
Oddly, I'm starting this blog on the day that I have no computer. It coughed and sputtered and claimed to have no operating system today. I blame Henrietta at Belkin, who I'm sure is not actually named that, for insisting that I hotswap the Belkin card. I am very sad without my computer. I have been pondering freedom of the press and the duty of the journalist and civil disobedience and the importance of choice in heroism. I would also like to write stories, and I wish that there were more hours in the day and active cells in my brain. I also wish I had a working computer all my own, warm and waiting for me at home.

Saheli S. R. Datta