We never even noticed the demise of the glossy magazine. One day they were just gone, missing from waiting room tables everywhere as though they’d never been, with only empty racks and dusty outlines to mark their passing.
By and large they’re quite unmourned, it’s sad to say. It’s tough to miss the sort of writing one only reads while killing time waiting for a haircut, articles you can put down unfinished without regret.
(more…)A while ago, I decided that continuing to talk about Donald Trump would only keep giving him free press. I find him odious enough that the last thing I want to do is give him anything for free, so I simply stopped.
However, it’s now election time, and enough people have asked me that, finally, I figure it’s both safe and useful to provide the best information I can about what’s going to happen, in as unbiased a fashion as practicable, and without saying “I don’t know” too much.
(more…)“People these days are either completely apathetic or they’re so full of rage that they can’t think!”
You say this like it’s a bad thing. If you make people think, that’s uncomfortable. When you ask questions, you make them reconsider their hard-won certainties. Which in academia or politics is a good thing.
In life, it’s not.
(more…)It’s become a ritual: Someone’s rampage shooting hits the news, the Left screams “AR-15!”, the Right sends “Thoughts and Prayers”, and nothing changes.
This time, like all the others, it turns out it was a mentally ill person who was nursing a grudge.
(more…)Some of the most inane fake news I’ve ever seen has been coming from pro-Russian media.
Bear in mind, both sides of the war are quite capable of propagandizing; in fact, Zelensky’s shown himself to have a natural talent. The more official Russian outlets have, by all reports, been quite competent at keeping their own nation focused on Putin’s talking points, and the formal separation of East from West information feeds, be they television or internet, have made this much easier. If it’s moderately difficult for citizens of the western world to get the official Russian party line, it’s harder by far for most Russians to access, for example, CNN.
(more…)There’s an old tale of a newsroom editor educating a copy boy thus: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” Another, pithier version runs as follows: “You never read about a plane that didn’t crash.”
The average reader of modern news would be stunned to realize just how rare it is that planes actually do crash, or that the world is about to end, or even that people get killed by rogue policemen. That last is actually quite a remarkable statistic: The odds of someone’s (more…)
I’ve got upwards of 37,000 words assembled thus far and there’s an end in sight. So far so good, right? Time to take a quick step back from the task and survey the whole, to see if there’s any major adjustments that ought to be made before it goes too far to recover. On any other project I might instead be looking to see if it’s worth finishing, but this one’s gone too far for that. It’s got momentum of its own, and I wouldn’t dare try to stop; the book would devour me.
Which is a problem, because I’m thinking book, and events are going too fast (more…)
Don’t panic, loyal readers: I haven’t been indicted. (Yet.) This isn’t about that. (more…)
It used to be that our exposure to the horrible things in the world was limited to the paper in the morning and Uncle Walter’s broadcast in the evening. Now that we’ve got 24-hour news channels, though, we’re inundated. Awful things are happening all the time and the whole universe is eager to tell us. It’s coming from our speakers, our car radio, even social media. There’s fear and terror and horror everywhere, and there’s no escape. (more…)
I’ve just read a CNN news story that’s miles away from objective journalism. It’s the top-trending article, above the Tunisian bombing, above what seems to be World War Three starting in Turkey. And it’s not even news.
So a year and more ago, Chicago cops apparently (more…)
The Not Fake News 