A Slight Delay

A brief post, albeit one I’d rather not have to write…

By now, a day after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake demolished what was left of already-demolished Port Au Prince, you’ve already seen the visuals, and heard the first faltering attempts at making sense of what’s happened in Haiti. A couple of times already, I’ve commiserated with friends who’ve still got friends and family there, as they try and try again to get word of who’s safe, and who’s lost.

If you’re of a mind to help, there are a number of organizations soliciting donations for disaster relief. While news reports focus on the lack of medical supplies and drinkable water, it should be emphasized that what’s needed most at the moment is cash. In the absence, at least for the short term, of means to distribute supplies, a check–even if only for five bucks–would likely go further than the donation of a case of water. This page on MSNBC.com provides links to a plethora of organizations, including the American Red Cross, UNICEF, and Doctors Without Borders that are on the ground in Haiti and offering assistance.

It’s official. Glenn Beck has lost it. There are splinters in the windmills of his mind. He is completely, utterly, batshit crazy. This, to far too many on the right, is what currently passes for discourse in civil society. Beck talks of “sav[ing] the Republic,” but one could be forgiven for wondering how, exactly, he plans to save himself. Here, courtesy of Daily Kos, is a distillation of a week’s worth of Beck marginalia.

If you believe NewsBusters (and I, for one, have difficulty putting stock in anything calling itself a news organization when its name conjures images of the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man), not only is “liberal bias” killing newspapers, but this is, somehow, a good thing. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that one should choose one’s news based on accuracy and thoroughness in reporting rather than on ideological grounds, the mass die-offs in our print media are cause for concern, not rejoicing.

I’ve written about this previously (you can read the original piece here, if you’d like), and rather than reiterate what I’ve said–to say nothing of what others have stated better, and at more length–I’d like to quote a bit from a study published by the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. It’s titled Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post. While anecdotal evidence (and recent surveys like this one from Pew) suggest that newspapers have become an increasingly marginal means of getting the news, study authors Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido argue that even with diminished circulation, newspapers have an impact far beyond their sales figures:
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A few years back, if you recall, you were Time’s Person of the Year. Because, y’know, you’d posted that thing about Mentos and Diet Coke on YouTube, or edited a Wikipedia post, or blogged, or something. In other words, Time realized that the internet was–belatedly–starting to deliver on some of the democratic promise of its early days.

More evidence can be found on Now Public, a news site that’s powered by the contributions of pretty much anyone who finds something that may be newsworthy and decides to write about it. Unlike Google News or Drew Curtis’s Fark, Now Public isn’t a news aggregator; the idea here is for you, the user, to get up off your ass and report something. Those somethings, when they’ve come, have been from all corners of the world, and have included subjects as diverse as Governor Rod Blagojevic and the Dalai Lama’s speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising.   (more…)

You wouldn’t think that the passing of a tabloid would have inspired so much press. But when the Weekly World News folded (pardon the pun) in 2007, sources as diverse as Wired and Reuters took notice.

For 28 years, the WWN was something of a high-camp version of the New York Daily News, or the National Enquirer crossed with The Onion.  The closing of the world’s most bizzare fishwrap left a void on newsstands, and in readers’ hearts, ever since. (more…)

Seven hundred billion for Wall Street? Check. Another twenty to thirty billion for the Big Three automakers? Well, maybe. A few billion for struggling newspaper and magazine publishers? Don’t hold your breath.

Running a newspaper used to be practically a license to print money; circulation and advertising dollars made it relatively easy for a newspaper or magazine, if well-managed, to stay in the black. These days, though, things are a bit different. The litany of troubled papers and magazines reads like a Who’s Who, or a series of items from a journalism geek’s version of the gossip page: The Miami Herald, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune Company, and others have all suffered, some forced to cut back, and others being put on the auction block. Granted, the failure of a paper—even The Gray Lady—wouldn’t have the same impact on the economy that the demise of the banking industry, or the automotive industry, would. But there’s still reason to pay attention, and to care. (more…)

Books on music are always a bit of a crapshoot. Even the best-intentioned authors can deliver works that sound flat and uninspired, struggling to bring to life on the page what would give you goosebumps if it came through a pair of halfway decent speakers. So it’s a pleasure reading New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.

It would be enough to read the writer’s lively warts-and-all portrayals of some of the giants of twentieth century music. Happily, Ross doesn’t take the Alka-Seltzer approach (”I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”), preferring instead to have a smallish handful of composers–the likes of Mahler, Strauss, Stravinsky, Sibelius, Cage, Glass, Reich, Britten, et al.–stand in for entire movements and scenes. It also helps that he doesn’t sketch the evolution of the century’s music as merely a sense of inevitabilities, where one thing follows from another as though it must. The parts are a mess, a set of accidents happy, unhappy, or contrived; the whole isn’t much tidier, and it’s to Ross’s credit that he doesn’t try to make it so. (more…)

Update: an article today (July 2) on the website of the Asbury Park Press reports that the suit against Wikimedia has been dismissed. A story hit the web last evening to that effect, but not having seen anything to corroborate it, I didn’t want to say as much last evening. Read on…

An article in yesterday’s Newark, NJ Star-Ledger highlights a series of lawsuits brought by Monmouth County literary agent Barbara Bauer against no fewer than nineteen websites and web companies. In the opposite corner are, among others, the Electronic Freedom Foundation and Wikimedia, the parent organization of the online open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia, which seek to have the case dismissed.

The crux of Bauer’s case is that criticism on a wide range of websites, some of which have taken on her practices as an agent and others of which have taken a decidedly more personal tack, have eroded both her reputation and her business. If it’s tried, the outcome of the case bids to have consequences far outside the Garden State. (more…)

 The Dada painters and poets aren’t exactly on the tip of people’s tongues these days. Styles and tastes change, and what seemed fresh and shocking in 1920 doesn’t have the same impact now that it did then. Hell, things done more recently than that don’t shock like they used to, either. Just ask Damien Hirst.

But as I was saying. John Heartfield (1891-1968) has faded into obscurity, known mostly to art history students, artists, and a handful of other people. It’s a shame, really, because Heartfield presaged some of the methods, and the esthetic, of Pop art, influenced his contemporaries, and helped–whether he either realized it, wanted it, or not–to usher in a breed of contemporary artists (Cindy Sherman comes to mind) who would mine the same vein that Heartfield did, but without his insight or mordant humor. (more…)

Nicholas Negroponte (MIT professor, Being Digital author) and his OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) organization have unveiled the XO2, their second-generation laptop, according to an article from the BBC’s website.

The Mac Book Air it ain’t. What it is, however, may prove more important to OLPC’s target “market”: classrooms and children in developing nations. Like the first-generation XO, which has shipped 600,000 units since it was unveiled late in 2005, the XO2 is intended as a low-cost learning tool for classrooms in locales as widespread as Brazil, Nigeria, and China. (more…)