Williams Shirer on editing his college newspaper. We’re still experiencing the same stuff today.
Category: News Media
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Movie Night: Born Yesterday
"Born Yesterday is pretty fabulous. At least until it sinks in that it's just as applicable today (especially today!) as it was in 1950. In that year, it could have been warning against the House Un-American Activities Committee, which ultimately wrecked lives, but failed. But today, the movie is depressing when you realize that Broderick Crawford's Harry Brock is in charge of the country, the Senate and the judiciary and is sitting in the White House tweeting."
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What We Hath Wrought
RIP Amara Renas and all the other unknown women and men and children. May you haunt our collective memory forever.
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Movie Night: The Big Clock
"Regardless of whether you saw it then as scandalous that such perversions were being exhibited in public theaters or whether you see it now as being stereotypical, offensive and overly focused on white, male, straight actors and queer panics and Italian stereotypes, to wit ... offensive!! ... there is much to actually be loved here."
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Movie Night: Desk Set
"Not only is it hilarious, it has fabulous midcentury (ugh, that word) interiors, jokes only librarian/book/research nerds understand, an awesome supporting cast including EMERAC and Kate gets to get blotto and talk about the "Mexican Avenue Bus" (the Lexington Avenue Bus, that is)."
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Corporate Power
"Many states whose sovereignty is threatened are now finally waking up to the danger. But is it perhaps already too late to do anything about the seemingly over-mighty corporations?"
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New York City Municipal Archives
The city of New York photographed every building in the five boroughs for property tax assessment purposes. The city's photographers took more than 700,000 pics as a result.
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Every Building
"On this page you will find maps showing almost every building in the United States. Why did we make such a thing? We did it as an opportunity for you to connect with the country’s cities and explore them in detail."
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Squeezed to Death
"On every airline flight, a crew member talks to passengers in the exit rows to see whether they can, as Federal Aviation Administration regulations specify, “pass expeditiously through the emergency exit” if needed. Given how passengers have grown in inverse proportion to the spaciousness of airliner seats, anything like “expeditious” evacuation of an entire airliner seems doubtful."
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The Conscience Stirs
I pretty much wish I had remained disconnected from FB while also being innovative enough to stay connected to the real people in my life without Facebook's corrupting middle man kleptocracy. I sense that there is another housecleaning coming; my involvement will need to be further curtailed. I'm thinking of what we can do next ... there are far better possibilities, surely, than this unholy mess of greed and venality.
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A Final “Hangin’ Out the Warsh”
«This is Bill’s final column» out of countless ones he wrote over 71 years for the Falls City Journal. With this column, he said farewell; the Journal has been sold and moved to a much smaller space in downtown Falls City which it had occupied until 1950. It’s all extremely symbolic of the state of...
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Shuttling Between Failures
The story is sordid and long, but the details were made clear by Matt Viser's excellent Globe piece. To wit: Lorenzo sold the Donald the Eastern Shuttle for an overvalued $365 million (if DT had created a brand-new shuttle from the ground up with brand-new planes, not old worn-out 727s, estimates were that he could have done it for $300 million.) Of course, the money was all borrowed. It was 1989; Eastern (and Continental) were already almost dead from Lorenzo's sledgehammer and the economy was tanking. Pan Am 103 was bombed, the first Gulf War was about to begin. It was incredibly bad judgement to overpay a bunch of other peoples' money for something that was guaranteed to tank.
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They Don’t Like the New ‘America First’ As Much As They Did the Lindbergh Version
So let's see if I've got this. Germany, a country in which there are still many women alive who were raped by invading Russian Red Army soldiers and in which the human products of those rapes are still living, now trust … Russia more than the United States.
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American Carnage: 3-Dec-17
Nazis are just "the normal people next door" and nothing bad should happen to either them or the New York Times for pointing this out, says The New York Times.
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American Carnage: 17-Nov-17
The Diddler’s Club What we learned this week: • Al Franken is the latest member of the “People Who Diddled People Who Didn’t Want to be Diddled” Club. This Diddlers Club, of which we’re all so very proud, officially now consists of the nation’s President; at least two former presidents; two or three sitting United...
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To the Editor (2017)
In which we in the future answer “Letters to the Editor” of the Chicago Tribune written during the past that was called World War Two. “Globaloney Stamps. “Chicago, June 1. — Today I received the shock of my life when I went to mail a package to my boy in service. I needed 20 cents...
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To the Editor
In which we in the future answer “Letters to the Editor” of the Chicago Tribune written during the past that was called World War Two. “Globaloney Stamps. “Chicago, June 1. — Today I received the shock of my life when I went to mail a package to my boy in service. I needed 20 cents...
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The Final Passing of American Journalism
“And that’s the way it is …” Walter Cronkite It feels as if the last bit of actual journalism in America is now dead. In «What We Lose With Cronkite’s Death», Bruce Maiman sums it up pretty well: “… it’s a reminder, too, that the broadcasting style and journalistic credibility that Cronkite represents also seems...
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The Mark Morford and The Morning Fix Saga (2001)
1-Apr-01 (but no, it’s no April Fool’s joke) The Article That Set Me Off: « SFGate.com Suspends Three Staffers Over Column » My E-Mail to the offender and many other Bay Area Media staffers: An open letter: “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say...