Cool on the web, er, the Times

June 6, 2009 Leave a comment

I rarely get to spend as much time as I would like on the web these days, which is why I find myself, after a week of field reporting for my summer reporting fellowship, doing just that on a Friday night. Here are some interesting things I just might have missed if I had better things to do right now. Come to think of it, everything here is from the Times.

  • The New York Times’ photojournalism blog “Lens” has some great photos up right now. There is one of costumed mermaids that is particularly cool. There is something fun about looking at photos from all over  in the same place. It definitely conveys how wild this world is. I used to enjoy looking at photo books from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s when I would stay at my aunt’s when I was younger. Unlike looking at contemporary photos, it all seemed to have the overarching theme of “This was the ’70s. Look how out there people were.” Wonder how the aughts will seem in future photobooks…
  • David Brooks has an article about Barack Obama’s Cairo speech that says its themes are Chicago in nature. “Chicagoans like to see themselves as pragmatists, not ideologues,” he says. “That means they contain both sides of The Great Tension. In Chicago, there is a tension between the lakefront and the neighborhoods inland. The lakefront tends to be idealistic, earnest and liberal. The neighborhoods are clever, cautious and Machiavellian.” There’s some truth to this generalization–and how Chicago of me to call it that. I think Obama’s rhetoric is so soaring not because it is idealistic, but because it isn’t. How often does a politician get as real with us, as Obama often does? One of his most popular lines of a speech, from the Democratic Convention in 2004, “We worship an ‘awesome God’ in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States” amounts to a statement of reality, not aspiration. Oftentimes, I feel Obama is reminding people how the world is, not how it should be. If this makes him Chicago, and if I, by virtue of being a Chicagoan can identify with this at all, then that’s cool with me.
  • The New York Times could have had the scoop on Watergate, according to a former reporter and an editor from the paper. Instead, the Grey Lady let it slip to the Washington Post. This story made me feel better as a new journalist who often wonders when to pursue stories: even the best paper doesn’t follow up on every worthwhile lead. Lesson: it’s worth it to do so, if you can. But it’s good enough that Woodward and Bernstein broke the news.
  • $125,000 for teachers? Check it out.
  • Why blogs go defunct. I love the lead of this article. And I’m proud to say I have pretty regularly-updated this blog since I began it in March of 2004.

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Da Vinci procrastinated, and it was no sin: For those that want to feel better about themselves

February 17, 2009 1 Comment

Says the Chronicle for Higher Education:

Leonardo rarely completed any of the great projects that he sketched in his notebooks. His groundbreaking research in human anatomy resulted in no publications — at least not in his lifetime. Not only did Leonardo fail to realize his potential as an engineer and a scientist, but he also spent his career hounded by creditors to whom he owed paintings and sculptures for which he had accepted payment but — for some reason — could not deliver, even when his deadline was extended by years.

[...] Leonardo was the kind of person we have come to call a “genius.” But he had trouble focusing for long periods on a single project. After he solved its conceptual problems, Leonardo lost interest until someone forced his hand. Even then, Leonardo often became a perfectionist about details that no one else could see, and the job just didn’t get done.

Plus, when Da Vinci was procrastinating, it was not associated with sin, as it is now, according to the writer, English professor, W.A. Pannapacker.

Leonardo is just one example of an individual whose meaning has been constructed, in part, to combat the vice of procrastination; namely, the natural desire to pursue what one finds most interesting and enjoyable rather than what one finds boring and repellent, simply because one’s life must be at the service of some compelling interest — some established institutional practice — that is never clearly explained, lest it be challenged and rejected.

My question is, isn’t “what one finds more interesting” always what one is not working on?  I think this is the tension experienced by those of us who try to do what we love or at least like a lot: accepting the drudgery that comes with any job, even a job that is associated with a passion.  For this reason, we should maintain our leisure time as well.  It is important–and a personal goal of mine–to have hobbies that are passions, without pressure to feel productive.  (I won’t wish for too much leisure time though, in this economy!)

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Fortune cookie wisdom

February 13, 2009 1 Comment

I recently found a fortune in my wallet that said “Face facts with dignity.”  I like that.

I also made up a fortune, which is: “Cynicism is buying insurance against disappointment.” (And, no, that is not an endorsement of cynicism.  I’m more saying that it is a way for the risk-averse to prevent themselves against disappointment).

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Our culture of blame

January 31, 2009 Leave a comment

As I have been looking into education for my Covering Education class this semester, I notice that a lot of the controversies over policies that demand “accountability,” like No Child Left Behind, seem premised on a suspicion that teachers are not doing their job.

Accountability has long been associated with expectations of a government.  John Stuart Mill was the first one to make as direct a use of this word when he said in 1859: “Pushing to its utmost extent the accountability of governments to the people” (from the Oxford English Dictionary).  It would be interesting if the OED followed the word’s use in modern times as a demand on business performance and perhaps more recently, on performance of social welfare programs and social services.

I do not know what other nations are like, but the culture in this country for as long as I can remember has been obsessed with who to blame for a problem, who to “hold accountable.”  It has become such a part of our conversation and our psyche that I have only recently stepped outside of myself enough to realize how I am so used to blaming someone or something when a problem arises.  Is this American?  Is this a part of the ascent of conservatism in the latter quarter of our last century and the first decade of this one?  If so, it may be worth re-thinking when our culture of blame, which I think is so laced in with the way public officials demands accountability today–such as increase in test performance in No Child Left Behind or a school loses money or closes–makes knee-jerk presumptions.  There is a sense that “everyone else is to blame but me” to it, and I know from my own internal struggles that this is never true.

As more people get laid off for reasons so beyond their own doing, I wonder if this country will shed the “blame game” mentality, as we see that it is not necessarily someone’s fault if s/he is unemployed, an assumption opposite those that underlay welfare reform in the 1990s and No Child Left Behind in the 2000s.  It might be one positive consequence of this difficult economic crisis.

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