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Michael Getler, the ombudsman for PBS, heard from viewers upset that the frauds and plagiarists Mike Barnicle and Doris Kearns Goodwin were presented as talking heads in the new installment of Ken Burns' baseball documentary. The ombudsman did not know what to think about this.
[T]his is, after all, baseball we are talking about. So as a viewer, the use of these two among many did not bother me.
Hey, it's only baseball. Plus, the viewers who complained were anonymous, and Burns and his co-producer/director Lynn Novick told Getler that they do not respond to anonymous complaints. They have principles. Still, the outrage of the viewers was enough to send Getler down the self-reflexive rabbithole of ombudsmanship:
But the likelihood that it would bother some, and the fact that there are other very expressive potential interviewees out there, is important because it is the body of work itself that is most important rather than personal ties and choices....
Does the use of Barnicle and Goodwin distract? Could others have been chosen? Should a director's choice be influenced by some would-be criticism? Those are hard calls. I have no idea if they were considered by Burns and Novick but they should have been.
Oh, the likeliness of the perception of a reason to be bothered! Should directors be influenced by the possibility that they could be criticized?
Let's strip away some of the ombud-layering here. Why was it possible that Burns and Novick could have been criticized? What was the action underlying all this reaction and preemptive meta-reaction?
Burns and Novick presented a fraudulent historian and a fraudulent journalist as a historian and a journalist.
It's not a question of the audience's feelings. It's a question of whether or not a nonfiction program should treat frauds and liars as reputable sources. Getler, who was the Washington Post ombudsman before going to PBS, and who was a journalist for decades before that, wrote that Barnicle and Goodwin "have been involved in literary controversy in earlier years."
"
Literary controversy"? That is like saying that Pretty Boy Floyd was involved in accounting fraud. Mike Barnicle is a serial plagiarist and fabricator. Doris Kearns Goodwin is a plagiarist. Each one grossly violated the basic standards of his or her profession. Why, as Boston.com blogger Mark Leccese asks, is the PBS ombudsman "brushing off plagiarism"?
Getler acknowledged that the two "faced charges." He did not acknowledge that the evidence behind those charges was overwhelming, or that Barnicle lied blatantly about his offense and Goodwin tried to cover up hers by paying off the victim. Getler:
We all, of course, make mistakes, and most of us, I think, believe in redemption and second chances.
Nice sermon, if you're a preacher, which you aren't. You want second chances? Go back and write another ombudsman's column. This time, try to act like you believe in journalistic standards.
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When it comes to the medical question of how much damage is caused by 300-pound men knocking their heads together, the NFL doesn't believe in drawing hasty conclusions. Uncertainty is part of the scientific process.
But the league doesn't mind staking out a firm position when a debate falls much further outside its expertise. All month, the players and coaches are wearing pink accessories—chinstraps, wristbands, sideline ball caps—in the name of breast cancer awareness.
For football fans curious about the pink gear, there's a page at NFL.com to explain it all. Breast-cancer awareness slogans cycle through the screen, in giant letters: BREAST CANCER IS THE MOST COMMON FORM OF CANCER AMONG WOMEN IN THE U.S. . . . RIGHT NOW THERE ARE MORE THAN 2.5 MILLION BREAST CANCER SURVIVORS IN THE UNITED STATES . . .
And then: WOMEN 40 OR OLDER SHOULD GET A MAMMOGRAM EVERY YEAR.
They should? Well, the American Cancer Society, the NFL's partner in the breast-cancer campaign does say so. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, on the other hand, says that most women should start mammograms at age 50 and should get them every other year.
Mammography for women under 50 seems to very slightly improve the chance of detecting cancer. It greatly increases the chance of false positives and unnecessary biopsies. The dispute has to do with how to weigh those two things against one another.
Last year, when the debate between the rival recommendations was at its most heated, Darshak Sanghavi wrote here on Slate about the underlying disagreement over theories of risk management:
There are two broad ways to handle mammography for women under 50 years old: to treat them as homogenous and statistically naive (the cookie-cutter approach, usually favored by policymakers) or to assume greater patient savvy (the personalized approach, increasingly favored by clinicians and patients).
Sanghavi suggested that the blanket recommendation of annual mammography for women over 40 underestimated the public's ability to handle the nuances of case-by-case statistical decision-making. Doctors and the press should consider the way that Americans discuss sports:
If the sports media have no problem filling newspapers and the airwaves with complex statistics—and often discussing them clearly—why do the health media treat the same consumers like innumerate dolts, especially when women's lives are at stake?
Instead, the NFL has gone the other way. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force isn't getting any colored chinstraps to put out its side of the debate. Mammograms for everyone over 40. The American Cancer Society is sure this is the whole answer, and millions of viewers are getting the message. Awareness trumps information.
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Every team in the NFL has lost at least one game this year. Most divisions don't have a clear favorite. Judy Battista of the New York Times is puzzled by "the 2010 version of parity":
But why? Several rebuilding teams — Tampa Bay (3-1) and the Chiefs (3-1) most notably — are farther along than expected thanks to an infusion of young talent, suggesting that recent draft classes might have been more talented and better prepared than we knew.But there must be something beyond Super Bowl hangovers (the Saints) and quarterback controversies (how does Arizona’s undrafted rookie quarterback Max Hall beat the Saints after replacing Derek Anderson as the starter?) to explain why so many teams are regressing and rising toward the mean.
Battista asked eternal NFL analyst Gil Brandt about it, and he suggested that the lack of any breakout teams could be due to structural changes in the way game plans are made—better coaching, instantaneous computer-assisted video breakdowns of opponents, more sophisticated players coming out of college.
Brandt and Battista do not, however, explain how these structural changes were able to rearrange the sport in less than 10 months. Last year, the Colts started off 14-0, the Saints started 13-0, and the Vikings started 10-1. The question then was how that batch of elite teams could have left the rest of the league so far behind.
Here's the reason for the huge difference between last season and the current partial season: dumb luck. Dumb luck by way of small sample size.
No NFL team has played more than 5 games so far. Nobody's undefeated, but with tonight's Jets game still to go, there are 8 teams that have only lost 1 game each. If they play 10 more games and still nobody has broken away from the pack, then it might be time to write a story. Even then, the story should be, "What a weird year this has been," not "What could possibly have transformed the sport of football?"
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In one part of America, the firefighters let somebody's house burn down for not paying the $75 fire-department fee. Here's a fire-safety problem from another part of America:
That's a "Rolls-Royce Beverly Hills" license-plate frame, though the car has New York plates (FCA-4379) and the hydrant at which it's parked is in the West 60s.
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It was Mean Ladies Sunday in the New York Times, as Metro and Styles each gave splashy, above-the-fold section-front coverage to a middle-aged, female right-wing publicity chaser.
Metro went with lots of screencaps of blogger Pamela Geller, who
habitually refers to herself as a “racist-Islamophobic-anti-Muslim-bigot” — all one word in her pronunciation — which hints at her sense of humor and her evident frustration at her public persona.
The humorous part is that Geller is in fact an anti-Muslim bigot, but that in her public persona—in which she rallies people in the name of anti-Muslim bigotry—she tries to seem brash and joyous, while actually being a sad and damaged person. Oh, maybe that wasn't the humorous part?
Well, Pamela Geller is famous. But what about Ann Coulter? Sunday Styles had a giant black-and-white picture and the latest word:
Now that members of the Tea Party movement have stolen much of her thunder, Ms. Coulter is taking some surprising new positions.
Such as? She opposes the way the current president, from the party she professionally opposes, is using military force in Afghanistan. She does not insist that the president is a foreign-born Muslim sleeper agent. And she is saying nice things to gay people. Such as this:
"Marriage is not a civil right."
And:
"[T]his is a point about society. People love gays, they don’t want gay marriage."
Hey, where Coulter's coming from, those are relatively nice things. Here, for comparison, is Carl Paladino, major-party candidate for the governorship of New York:
“I didn’t march in the gay parade this year — the gay pride parade this year. My opponent did, and that’s not the example we should be showing our children.”
But does Coulter's new semi-open-mindedness matter? Or is this the desperate minor re-branding of a has-been?
As of lunchtime Monday, on the Times' Most E-Mailed List, the Geller profile was at No. 16. The profile of Coulter was nowhere in the top 25.
Up at No. 4 was a story from inside Sunday Styles:
Mean-girl behavior, typically referred to by professionals as relational or social aggression and by terrified parents as bullying, has existed for as long as there have been ponytails to pull and notes to pass (today’s insults are texted instead). But while the calculated round of cliquishness and exclusion used to set in over fifth-grade sleepover parties, warfare increasingly permeates the early elementary school years.
[...]
Eileen O’Connor, a lawyer and mother of five girls in the Georgetown section of Washington, has also witnessed trickle-down meanness in her daughters’ classrooms. “To be honest with you, the parents not only enabled it, they engaged in it,” she said. “The parents of mean girls often think, Great, our daughter is so popular!”
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A writer doing a profile of Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton faces at least two built-in difficulties. The lesser is how to handle the subject of Denton's immense head. Having profiled Denton myself a few years ago, I didn't even realize I was waiting to see how the New Yorker's Ben McGrath would handle it till the moment arrived:
a famously large head that sits precariously on a thin neck and narrow shoulders.
Fair and accurate. Well handled.
The second problem is bigger and more ineffable. The New Yorker Denton profile is as good as they get. McGrath does some very funny close reading of Denton's utterances and his circumstances. But something remains missing from the narrative of the rise of Nick Denton and Gawker Media, even as Nick Denton quite helpfully constructs it for you. Even people who experienced the growth of Gawker from the inside can't quite express it.
It has to do with motivation. Denton says things about his motivation, and they almost sound as if they are describing his motivations, but at heart he seems completely alien to most writers and editors. It is as if everyone is telling the story of a famous restauranteur, when unknown to everyone—unknown even to himself—he suffers from undiagnosed anosmia. (Did the New Yorker write about a chef who couldn't taste food? It did. But it was acquired, and he knew he had it.)
Denton the hypothetical restauranteur talks quite sincerely about crispness and juiciness and saltiness, in a way that makes them sound like shared and complete food values. But he can't taste flavors! He is wealthy and successful in the food business, and people are lining up for his restaurants, but if you ask him, "What is the best appetizer here?" the answer is, "The critics gave us really helpful notices on the crab fritters, which was good for publicity, but the blooming onion alone accounts for 70 percent of revenue."
Then you ask, "What is really flavorful?" and the answer is, "The old chefs always complained about the blooming onion, because they think they're much better than the customer, and I don't like blooming onions myself, but the new chefs understand it much better."
Other, older kinds of restaurants are failing. It is Denton and his new chefs who will remake the restaurant business. Everyone agrees on this point.
And then Denton says, "I have always loved restaurants."
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The New York Times picks up local blog news that Scarsdale High School has gotten nowhere in its investigation into a brawl at a party that sent two teenagers to the hospital, because no one will say anything about what happened.
The median income in Scarsdale is three times the national average. Times writer Peter Applebome notes how the current situation recalls the widely deplored "anti-snitch culture of the urban poor," which in some respects it does. The local blog commentators are odd mirror image of the people lamenting the ghetto ways and broken family values of the American underclass:
complete lack of responsible parenting and accountibility
The parents who are adopting the code of silence are teaching their children that disrespect is OK, that their wrong-doings have no consequences and that the rules don't apply to them.
what should we expect these kids to do but this sort of thing? you can run around and punish whomever you like, but next year some other kids will do the same thing...you just can't treat human beings this way and expect them not to go over the edge.
It simply is a matter that parents have failed their children, again.
[W]e are raising hooligans that do not have accountability. It starts at home and it is apparent that parents are not setting the proper example.
There is at least one notable difference between Scarsdale's code of silence and the ghetto's, though. Applebome quotes the principal's letter to the parents:
"The school has therefore been placed in the uncomfortable position of having to report that, despite our thorough investigation, an unacceptable breach of civil behavior will go unresolved.”
If some teens around or below the poverty line beat up somebody badly enough to send the victim to the hospital, nobody calls it a "breach of civil behavior." It's called a criminal offense. And the investigation—when someone cares enough about the victim to investigate—isn't done by the school system. It's done by the police.
So: in the ghetto, people don't answer cops' questions. In Scarsdale, they don't even let the cops ask.
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Everyone is complaining about the Gap replacing its old logo. The newest logo is awful, sure. It looks like the emblem of some failed low-fare spinoff of a major airline. But that thing it replaced, the white letters on the blue square? That's not the old Gap logo.
This is the old Gap logo. (Thanks to Jordan Ellenberg for the reminder.)
Why are people nostalgic for the dull, totalitarian, khakis-will-conquer-the-world Gap emblem of the '90s? It's like being nostalgic for C+C Music Factory.
The new Helvetica look is boring and fake. It comes from the company's "1969 Jeans" branding, which—have another look at the picture of the original store: the Gap didn't even make jeans in 1969. It advertised itself as a Levi's retailer.
But the new logo is the spiritual heir of the earlier blue square. In 1969, the Gap wanted to look like it was in step with the times. Since then, its new logos have aimed to look timeless—that is, like they're in step with nothing at all.
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Former United States president George W. Bush—Phillips Andover '65, Yale '68, Skull and Bones, Harvard Business School '75; son of former United States president George H. W. Bush, Phillips Andover '42, Yale '47, Skull and Bones; grandson of United States Senator Prescott Bush, St. Georges '13, Yale '17, Skull and Bones—made a joke last night that the fact that he has written a book "will come as a shock to some of the elites."
The joke was made at a fundraising dinner costing $500 a plate.
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So the Nobel Committee is going to hand its Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, if it can find him, which it can't, because China has him locked away in a prison somewhere. Liu has been there since the end of 2008, when he and a group of others produced a petition titled Charter 08, calling for China to turn away from "an authoritarian political way of life" and to embrace democratic reforms and human rights.
China reportedly warned the Nobel Committee not to honor Liu. Part of the reason that people like Liu are in prison is China's growing sense of immunity to foreign criticism, even as it becomes more and more engaged with the rest of the world.
It's not surprising that the People's Republic would feel that way. Right before the Charter 08 movement, during the Beijing Olympics, the International Olympic Committee cheerfully acquiesced as China set up special Olympic protest zones and then arrested people who applied to use them.
China has encouraged the liberalized West to treat its internal affairs with caution and respect. China must be allowed to reform at its own natural pace, so as not to jeopardize its growth and security. The implicit message is that the harder outside reformers may push, the more defensive or repressive China's reaction may be.
But the Nobel Committee is declaring that sensitive approach to be a dead end. Liu is already in prison. What else can China do?
China's Foreign Ministry is furious about the committee's decision, the New York Times reports:
“The Nobel Committee giving the Peace Prize to such a person runs completely contrary to the aims of the prize,” Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman said in a statement posted on the ministry’s Web site. “Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law.”
This is the closed loop of China's logic on the subject of its would-be reformers. The Nobel Committee was already aware that peacefully criticizing the government of China was considered a violation of Chinese law. That's the reason it gave Liu the prize.
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Election Day is November 2. Today is October 7. Here in New York State, where Carl Paladino wants to be the next governor, the voter registration forms tell you to make sure to mail or deliver them at least 25 days before the election. That's tomorrow.
It's easy to have fallen behind on your paperwork, especially if you would prefer to see the incumbent party stay in power, and so weren't swept up in a bunch of exciting primary election campaigns. Whatever the real nature of the enthusiasm gap may be, the people who want the government to change hands already have their voter registrations squared away for the general election.
Probably you have a lot of other things on your mind. Like money. Me, I spent last year working on a piecework contract rather than for a salary. That meant I got stuck carrying a big credit-card balance for several months, while my payment was in a very slow pipeline. People were not very quick about paying money for things last year.
I bring this up because while I was carrying that balance, I mixed up my credit card with my ATM card one time, and so accidentally I took out a cash advance, which had a higher interest rate than the regular balance. When I called the credit-card company to tell them I wanted to pay off that high-interest balance first, they said I couldn't. They had buried it at the bottom of the whole stack of other money I owed them, and the only way to get to it was to shovel away the entire low-interest balance first.
So until I finally got enough cash to pay off the full balance, that cash advance just sat there, bleeding extra interest.
But afterward, Congress—this crappy, infuriating, do-nothing Congress, this Congress that every single American despises—outlawed that scam. Credit-card companies now are required to pay down your highest-interest balances first. Maybe this is because Congress is a bunch of socialists trying to murder our free-enterprise system. Go ahead and vote for your Tea Party if you feel that way.
Me, I wouldn't mind another term's worth of regulation of things like that.
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Did I miss some episode of Schoolhouse Rock about metallurgy when I was growing up? In the coverage of this week's Hungarian sludge disaster, reports keep saying that the caustic red material is waste from a plant refining "alumina."
And what is alumina? It is the stuff the plant was refining.
Far down in one of its mud-spill stories, the New York Times cited the Aluminum Association describing it as "the basic material for manufacturing aluminum." "Basic" here seems to mean "elementary," rather than "having a high pH," (though the sludge did have a scarily high pH). But what is more elementary than an element? Aluminum is aluminum, No. 13* on your periodic table.
Alumina, for a news audience that's not in the metals trade, is aluminum oxide. Here's a case where two words are less confusing than one. Two aluminum atoms, three oxygen atoms. In one of its crystalline forms, it makes rubies and sapphires. Or sandpaper. When refined from bauxite ore, according to Alcoa's website, it is "a white granular material, a little finer than table salt." That material can be smelted into metal.
But it can also be used for other things. The industry blog MetalMiner reports that the Hungarian plant was not producing raw materials for your soda can or iPad case, but alumina products that would be ingredients in other industrial chemical processes:
This is not, nowadays anyway, a plant for producing alumina for aluminum smelting.
MetalMiner also has a breakdown of the composition of a similar sludge from a Turkish plant*. Mostly it is iron oxide—hence the red color—aluminum oxide, and silica, but, despite its official nontoxic status, there are plenty of less pleasant chemicals in there:
More disturbingly the report goes on to say the waste can contain thorium and uranium and confirms it can be highly caustic. The majority of the constituents are relatively harmless, iron oxide, aluminum oxide, silica and sodium, titanium and calcium oxides. It’s the minor constituents and caustic ph of this sludge that could prove to be the most dangerous contaminants.
* Corrections: I initially wrote that the breakdown was of the Hungarian sludge, and put aluminum one box out of place on the periodic table.
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Cindy Adams, check your messages! Mere days after Tina Brown poached the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz for the Daily Beast, the New York Post announced that Richard Johnson, its Page Six gossip editor for almost a quarter century, is moving to News Corp.'s "new digital ventures."
Lloyd Grove, Johnson's Daily News rival earlier this decade, is already an editor at large for the Daily Beast.
There was always something a little bit virtual about Page Six, which did not run on the sixth page of the Post. Still, the Village Voice declared that the move means the page's reign is "categorically, finally finished." The Internet: refuge for the exhausted.
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Last month, contrarian academic Stanley Fish used his online New York Times opinion column to explain why he is against wind turbines, and why people are wrong to be mad at him for it. Inspired by a new anti-turbine documentary, and by readers' hostility the last time he wrote about the subject, Fish defended the people who don't want turbines around them:
These towering monsters are in their back yards, and in their front yards, and in their lines of vision and hearing no matter where they happen to be.
So the question is, why should they say yes to the destruction of everything they value about their way of life? Why should they submit to being beaten over the head with a moral club — “you are just selfish elitists” —that has behind it almost nothing at all? There’s no benefit to the individual, who often ends up paying higher energy bills; little benefit to the town besides (sometimes) an initial cash payment; a questionable benefit to the grid, especially when you calculate the energy costs of installing these behemoths and the necessity of fallback energy when the wind doesn’t blow; but lots of benefits to the developers who are described by voices in the film as carpetbaggers, pod people and traveling salesman for whom the only green that counts is the color of money.
Today, the Times has a report from Vinalhaven, Maine, about a disturbing trend, or a trending disturbance:
[T]he Lindgrens, along with a dozen or so neighbors living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility here, say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life in this otherwise tranquil corner of the island unbearable.They are among a small but growing number of families and homeowners across the country who say they have learned the hard way that wind power — a clean alternative to electricity from fossil fuels — is not without emissions of its own.
So they are petitioning the state to replace the windmills with a coal-fired power plant on the same site. Or a nuclear one. Right? Don't be silly. They just want the source of their electricity to be invisible and inaudible again. Not unreasonable, if you're them, and you aren't the people who are living where the other forms of energy production would happen.
Divisiveness, Fish wrote, is key to the wind-companies strategies. Owners of rural second homes, like Fish, are pitted against the full-time locals—the former's clean views and quiet against the latter's desire for new revenue. And today's report does find opinion in Maine divided about the turbines:
“The majority of us like them,” said Jeannie Conway, who works at the island’s ferry office.
But that is cold comfort for Mrs. Lindgren and her neighbors, who say their corner of the island will never be the same.
“I remember the sound of silence so palpable, so merciless in its depths, that you could almost feel your heart stop in sympathy,” she said. “Now we are prisoners of sonic effluence. I grieve for the past.”
(Copy-desk note: "said"? Orally? In those words? Doublecheck pls.)
Silence is wonderful. (Also darkness! I miss it.) Nor should people be pitted against one another in a race to the bottom, if it can be helped. Rich people's hoity-toity standards of living can be a force for real good, in a world where the prevailing pressures are to make everything as cheap, filthy, and exploitative as possible.
Still, what does Stanley Fish suppose the greedy, land-ruining power companies are going to do but go be greedy and ruin the land somewhere else? "No wind power in my back yard" is only half of a political position. The other half is to say what sort of power you do want, and in whose back yard it should go.
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Rarely has the New York Times' patented, evasive "Raises Questions" headline construction been more apt: airline policy makers are trying to decide whether unaccompanied children should be seated next to unfamiliar adults, who might molest them, or should be put next to empty seats, where they will be left alone and helpless in an emergency.
Really, which (very statistically unlikely) risk would you rather sign your child up for? This:
In one startling case, two children on a domestic Air France flight in February were unable to reach their oxygen masks that deployed when the plane abruptly lost cabin pressure.
The sobbing children — a boy and a girl aged 8 and 10 — were seated in separate window seats of the Embraer ERJ-145, with the aisle seats left empty. A flight attendant eventually helped them with their masks and the plane landed safely in Paris 30 minutes later.
Or this?
Mr. Tate said his most recent case, filed in state court in Fulton County, Georgia, involved a 13-year-old girl who was allegedly molested by a male passenger on a flight from Anchorage, Alaska, to Salt Lake City, Utah, last March. The girl, who is not identified in the lawsuit, said she fell asleep during the flight and awoke with the man’s hands inside her pants. A suspect was apprehended by the F.B.I. and was being prosecuted, Mr. Tate said.
All the people who wrote in and told Dear Prudence that a mother can't leave the house for 20 minutes while an infant is sleeping will presumably say that you would have to be criminally reckless to put your child on an airplane alone at all. Given that this is the airline industry, they might not be wrong:
“I had never anticipated that children would be out of sight, several rows away” from flight attendants, said Caroline Bourke, 45, whose 11-year-old son regularly flies alone on Air France.
Really? You think the flight attendants are watching the children? In five years, the flight attendants will be coin-operated snack dispensers. Everyone's on his or her own up there.
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Today in the Washington Post, reporter David Montgomery talks to NPR's Michele Norris about her new memoir, and how writing it led her into corners of her family's history in Birmingham that she had never known about. After talk of awful secrets and the necessity of protective silence, Montgomery follows Norris into a building in Birmingham called the Pythian Temple:
"You stand here and you imagine how loud a gunshot would be," she says. "His blood would have been on the floor."
She pauses a long minute. Dabs at the tears appearing on her cheek."Whatever happened here didn't define my dad," she says.
Mercy. Her father, before he moved north to Minnesota in the postwar migration of African Americans and became a postal worker, killed somebody? Or was her real father killed here, a secret kept from her by a loving stepfather?
Montgomery reconstructs the moment Norris got a message telling her the hidden truth about her family's life in Birmingham:
A researcher friend in Birmingham had uncovered a few details about what happened that night in the Pythian Temple.
The shock made Norris's knees buckle. She sank to the floor and sat with her back to the dishwasher for two hours, on the verge of throwing up.
"All I knew at that point is that the man that I so revered, the most important person in my life, wasn't who I thought he was," she says.
Was her father a secret informant for the FBI? Had he passed for white, joined the city's racist police force, and helped brutalize his own community?
Slowly—very slowly—Montgomery unveils the details. Norris' father was 20. He was out with his brothers and a friend. They went to the fateful Pythian Temple. And?
The trio was stepping toward the elevator when one of Bull Connor's policemen in the lobby thrust his billy club in front of them, blocking their path. Norris pushed the club away. There was a scuffle, an officer drew his gun, the gun went off and Norris was grazed in the leg. The brothers and their friend spent the night in jail. They were convicted the next day of resisting arrest and drunkenness, though Norris was never much of a drinker.
And then?
No, that was it.
In a city where the cops were the vanguard of a white-supremacist army, where black people were shot and bombed and attacked with dogs in the name of segregation, Michele Norris' father...got in a scuffle with a police officer once. He suffered a slight injury, and, though the police were perfectly willing to murder their prisoners if they wanted to, they rang him up on a couple of minor offenses and let him go. Then he got out of Birmingham.
This is the shattering truth that Michele Norris needed to write a whole memoir to grapple with. This is why she says her father wasn't who she thought he was.
Who did she think he was, then? He sounds like a normal, working-class black man who lived in a bad place at a bad time. Up north, he told his daughter to remember the Birmingham girls who were killed by racists with dynamite. He didn't tell her that 15 years before she was born, he had his own relatively minor run-in with the police. Maybe, as Norris tells Montgomery, this is because he suffered in silence, because he didn't want to burden his daughter with such terrifying knowledge.
Or maybe it's because he didn't think it was a big deal.
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High-profile job vacancy? Let's do some hiring—in our minds! Here's one short list of candidates who might be right as the next skipper of the New York Mets:
Bob Costas: famous name would impress players and press; knowledge of the game runs deep.
Lastings Milledge: familiar face could bring youthful energy to the clubhouse.
Joe Buck: plenty of October baseball wisdom for a team trying to find its way back to the playoffs.
Chipper Jones: could be just the mentor struggling young slugger David Wright needs.
Michael Wolff: not afraid to cause a stir, and able to hold his own against the hostile New York media.
Mike Francesa: passion would make it easy for him to connect with the fans.
The Philly Phanatic: insider from the Mets' toughest division rival could bring winning culture to Citi Field.
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Doesn't this read like a Thomas Friedman parable? If Thomas Friedman were in the business of giving tours of hell—or reality?
WASHINGTON — Drone aircraft operated by the Central Intelligence Agency killed several militants with German citizenship in the mountains of Pakistan on Monday, according to Pakistani and American officials.
Before everybody moves on to the news of tomorrow, I want to pause for a moment and admire the amount of information bundled up in that news lead, published inside the Tuesday New York Times. Nearly every clause of that sentence could be expanded into its own book, if anyone wanted to read it.
Set aside the anthropological, sociological, and epistemological wonders of the "several militants with German citizenship" part, which is the part that is in the foreground, as the news. Consider what is not even news. Background.
The Central Intelligence Agency—not the United States military—is using remote-controlled weapons to kill people on the territory of Pakistan, a country where we are not even officially at war.
You know this. Everyone knows this. It is a baseline fact: the Central Intelligence Agency is killing people, openly, in Pakistan.
And in some sense this is the better, more logical part of our military project. Suspending any disbelief about the drone cameras' ability to read the passports of the particular people being shot at, yes, this patch of Waziristan is closer to The Enemy (as best we understand it) than most of the places where our armed forces have been doing more orthodox warlike things over the past decade. It's not exactly like secretly bombing Cambodia to defeat Vietnam. We were attacked by a stateless organization, and that does mean that the more directly we fight that organization, the more unlikely the engagement is to neatly fit the existing rules of diplomacy and protocol, or the War Powers Act
Even so, with all that said: the Central Intelligence Agency is killing people in Pakistan.
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According to the Associated Press, scientists have found that the Great Lakes may not be able to support a feared invasion of bighead or silver carp, because invasive Ukrainian quagga mussels are already eating all the plankton there.
Mussels have "beaten the Asian carp to the buffet table," said Gary Fahnenstiel, senior ecologist with NOAA's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. "While the public has been worried about Asian carp and the Chicago canal, another invader has fundamentally changed the lake and made it inhospitable to the Asian carp."
Quagga mussels are closely related to a fellow invader, the zebra mussel. Even so, people concerned about ecological threats discuss the species by their individual names, rather than lumping them together as "European mussels," the way the carp are popularly referred to as "Asian carp."
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Neutral-perspective media critic and walking conflict of interest Howard Kurtz is going to be the Daily Beast's Washington bureau chief. This means he will quit one of his two existing jobs—the one where he wrote for the Washington Post about CNN, not the one where he talks on CNN about the Washington Post.
Daily Beast editor Tina Brown, whose business model is based on paying freelance writers so little that they are obligated to work for as many competing outlets as possible, praised Kurtz in a statement for his "understanding of media and politics as the story of our era."
Kurtz, in his part of the press release, was quoted as saying ""I’ve wanted to work with Tina Brown forever—well, for a long time." How long? Twenty-two months ago, when he wrote a piece for the Post (via Romenesko) about the launch of the Daily Beast, Kurtz found people to tell him the following things about Brown: "I'm dealing with a pitch-perfect editor who knew exactly what she was doing"...."Tina is always on. This is a medium made for her"...."I love Tina...She's totally open-minded"...."I knew with Tina at the helm it would be real journalism."
Erik Wemple of TBD.com asked Kurtz if the Post had made him a counteroffer. ""I'm not going to get into that," Kurtz replied.
