• Unlocking Literary Horizons: Navigating the Craft of Writing Books and Essays

    Unveiling the Art of Writing

    Embarking on the journey of literary creation is akin to navigating uncharted waters. The art of writing is a multifaceted tapestry, weaving together threads of creativity, passion, and discipline. Whether crafting a compelling book or a thought-provoking essay, the process involves a delicate dance between inspiration and perspiration.

    Crafting Worlds with Words

    In the realm of book authorship, writers become architects of imaginary realms. Each chapter unfolds like a carefully constructed building, and characters breathe life into the narrative. However, the process demands more than mere storytelling; it requires the mastery of language, the ability to convey emotions, and the skill to transport readers to alternate realities.

    Similarly, the world of essay writing is an intellectual battlefield where ideas clash and synthesize. Essays are the vessels of thought, offering readers a guided tour through the author’s mind. Whether dissecting complex concepts or advocating for a particular perspective, essayists must wield words with precision to engage and persuade.

    The Symbiosis of Ideas and Structure

    At the crossroads of book and essay writing lies the symbiosis of ideas and structure. Crafting a book necessitates a sprawling canvas, allowing for intricate plots and character development. On the other hand, essays thrive on clarity and conciseness, demanding a structured approach to convey arguments persuasively.

    A well-structured essay or book is a testament to the writer’s ability to organize thoughts effectively. Each paragraph serves as a building block, contributing to the overall coherence of the piece. This shared emphasis on structure highlights the foundational role it plays in transforming ideas into compelling narratives, be they fictional or analytical.

    The Role of “Write My Essays For Me” Services

    In the labyrinth of literary creation, the demand for expertise often leads writers to seek external support. “Write my essays for me” services emerge as guiding beacons, offering a helping hand to those navigating the intricate web of words. These services cater to the diverse needs of writers, providing not only technical assistance in essay composition but also serving as invaluable collaborators in the book-writing process.

    For essayists, these services offer a lifeline, helping to refine arguments, enhance clarity, and ensure adherence to academic standards. On the other front, authors crafting books find solace in the proficiency of these services, relying on skilled editors to polish their manuscripts. The collaboration between writers and essay services underscores the shared commitment to excellence in written expression.

    In conclusion, the realms of book and essay writing converge in their dedication to articulate ideas and narratives. Whether embarking on the odyssey of a novel or the exploration of intellectual discourse, the craft of writing demands a unique blend of creativity, structure, and expertise. In this journey, “write my essays for me” services emerge as trusted allies, facilitating the transformation of raw ideas into eloquent prose.

    ...

  • ‘Times’ Deputy Counsel On Fighting For Press Freedom In The Trump Era

    TERRY GROSS, HOST:

    This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. You probably know my guest, the New York Times deputy general counsel David McCraw, from a letter he wrote that went viral. It was in response to a letter from Donald Trump’s lawyer threatening to sue the Times for libel. McCraw will read that letter in a minute.

    Read more. 

    ...

  • The Fresno Bee and the War on Local News

    Local newspapers like The Fresno Bee have long been an endangered institution in America, and that was before California Rep. Devin Nunes began waging a public campaign against his hometown paper. Zach Baron spent time with the reporters fighting to keep news alive in an age when the forces they cover are working equally hard to destroy them.

     Read more. 

    ...

  • BuzzFeed and the digital media meltdown

    IN RETROSPECT, BUZZFEED CEO JONAH PERETTI’S March 2014 memo to staff, titled “Is History Repeating Itself?” reads like an extended challenge to the rule that every headline ending with a question mark can be answered with a “no.” Peretti told his LOLing troops that “we’re at the start of a new golden age of media” and compared their digital outfit
    to an early-stage Time Inc.

    So much can change in five years. “There were times when people would overhype digital media and be irrationally bullish about it,” Peretti tells me, not mentioning that he was one of those people. “And there are times when people are irrationally bearish about it. We’re probably at a moment where people are being more pessimistic than they should be.

    Read more. 

    ...

  • The Truth Is Hard. But for a New York Times Lawyer, Defending It Is Fun.

    For many Americans, the greatest reason to cheer during the sleepy, low-scoring game that was Super Bowl LIII was not the Patriots’ victory. In certain circles, it was the highly anticipated, multimillion-dollar commercial produced by the Washington Post, featuring the voice of Tom Hanks and heroic footage of journalists from various outlets that proclaimed, over a soaring score, these simple truths: “Knowing empowers us, knowing helps us decide, knowing keeps us free.”

    It was a good ad, inspiring even. Who doesn’t love Tom Hanks? But you could find The Washington Post commercial uplifting and also saddening, insofar as it was deemed necessary.

    Read more. 

    ...

  • A new journalism podcast looks to history to counter ‘objectivity’

    THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM COMMUNITY fancies itself a completely neutral estate, the poster child for objectivity. But this conceit is, at best, ahistorical. Like all things, the modern press corps was born into an inequitable society, and its strictures show up in the industry everywhere from hiring practices to how certain communities are covered, if they get coverage at all.

    Read more. 

    ...

  • How Esquire lost the Bryan Singer story

    ON FEBRUARY 11, NEWS BROKE that Millennium Films was delaying Bryan Singer’s Red Sonja, which was to begin production this year. This was, on the face of it, a remarkable turn of events. Singer’s Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, had just been nominated for five Oscars. It performed exceedingly well at the box office, as is usually the case with Singer’s movies; all told, they’ve grossed more than a billion dollars.

    Read more

    ...

  • A duty to inform, as well as Entertain: The BBC on the Edge of an Abyss

    There were promising signs at the beginning of this year that BBC News and Current Affairs were preparing to rescue their reputation after a torrid time during the EU referendum. Their coverage in 2016 was widely panned by senior insiders like John Simpson and Justin Webb for not checking the factual claims made during Brexit debates, and putting too much weight on ‘balancing’ opinions rather than some more objective test of accuracy and truth.

    But behind the scenes something big was stirring. For nearly two months in early 2018 BBC One’s flagship documentary programme, Panorama, was looking at a stunning set of revelations from two whistle-blowers.

    There were promising signs at the beginning of this year that the BBC News and Current Affairs were preparing to rescue their reputation.
    The first was the testimony of Chris Wylie, the former head of research at Cambridge Analytica. Founded by Alexander Nix, Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon in 2013, the data-based electioneering company would deploy military-grade propaganda tools and weaponise the hacked information of 170 million Facebook users, both in the 2016 UK EU referendum and the US presidential election of Donald Trump.

    Read more 

    ...

  • The digital winter turns apocalyptic

    THIS WEEK, AS A LONG-PREDICTED collapse seemed to hit digital media, we saw a few of the tried-and-true ways managers use to explain to employees why they’re laying them off.

    BuzzFeed chose the language of corporation-as-family, with founder Jonah Peretti telling staff that making the decision was “upsetting and disappointing.” Verizon went with meaningless corporate-speak. “Today marks a strategic step toward better execution of our plans for growth and innovation into the future,” a spokesperson said.

    The results looked the same in the end: a 15 percent reduction in headcount at BuzzFeed, resulting in the layoffs of more than 200 people, and 800 cuts at Verizon Media Group, which includes HuffPost and Yahoo News.

    Read More

    ...

  • The Deep Pathology at the Heart of a Scandal at Der Spiegel

    On the morning of December 19th, the editors of Der Spiegel called a staff meeting in the lobby of its headquarters, in Hamburg. The magazine’s offices occupy an immense but elegant building, with rows of windows tinged by the emerald color of the city’s waterways. An inscription on the wall near the entrance offers an imploring quote from the magazine’s founder, Rudolf Augstein: “Sagen, was ist”—Say what is. At the meeting, the editors told the staff that Claas Relotius, one of the publication’s star reporters, had invented characters, conversations, and other details in many of the dozens of stories he published in the magazine in the past seven years. The weekly production of a magazine is intensively collaborative and necessarily collective. The reputation of Der Spiegel, perhaps the most prestigious magazine in Europe, rests in no small part on the esteem of its fact-checking department, which employs at least sixty people full time. Many of the staff members at the meeting, one Spiegel reporter told me later, were close to tears. “We were all shocked and sad,” the reporter said. “It went to the core of how we understood our work. How could one single person be so harmful to all that we have been working on and pride ourselves on?”

    A month earlier, Relotius had e-mailed Juan Moreno, a freelancer he was working with on a story about immigration at the U.S. border. Relotius complained that Moreno’s sections of the piece, which followed a twenty-five year-old Honduran woman travelling to the U.S. with her daughter, sounded like a “bad movie.” Relotius’s contributions, on the other hand, were the stuff of Tarantino; he’d embedded with a group of vigilante patrollers from Arizona, who went by the aliases Pain, Luger, and Ghost, and who waited for migrants on the American side of the border, outfitted with bulletproof vests and night-vision devices. Moreno, for his part, thought that Relotius’s sections were “too shiny,” and noticed that certain facts seemed off-kilter.

    Read More. 

    ...

  • Khashoggi case could complicate U.S.-Saudi relations

    The disappearance and alleged killing last week of dissident Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi while he was visiting the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul is only the latest challenge to a U.S.-Saudi relationship that both governments have diligently cultivated.

    The Trump administration has said little beyond expressing public concern over Khashoggi’s fate, and the kingdom has sharply denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. In private, officials from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on down have been frustrated with the lack of a substantive response to direct high-level queries, according to administration officials.

    Confirmation that Khashoggi was killed — as some senior Turkish officials have charged — or even his disappearance at Saudi hands is likely to spark a new round of congressional pressure to reassess the relationship with Riyadh.

    Read more.

    ...

  • 41 Must Read websites & newsletters

    As part of my Social Media for Journalists class in London this summer, students are required to come to the first meeting of the week with two stories charting recent developments in the social field.

    This could be:

    •New products (e.g. the launch of IGTV )

    •Organization Analysis (e.g. How Vogue diversified away from Facebook by Max Willens in Digiday)

    •User data/insights (e.g. this piece in recode on the growth of Instagram and Snapchat)

    •New research (Misinformation and biases infect social media, both intentionally and accidentally by Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Indiana University and Filippo Menczer, Indiana University

    They then share one of these stories / developments with the class in a rapid roundtable.

    Read more.

    ...

  • Glenn Greenwald, the Bane of Their Resistance

    Like a man in the first draft of a limerick, Tennys Sandgren is a tennis player from Tennessee. Last winter, after scraping his way onto the list of the top hundred professional players, he secured a spot at the Australian Open. He advanced to the quarter-finals. At a press conference, he responded happily to questions about his unexpected achievement. Then someone asked him about his Twitter feed. Sandgren had tweeted, retweeted, or “liked” disparaging remarks about Muslims and gays; he had highlighted an article suggesting that recent migration into Europe could be described as “Operation European Population Replacement”; he had called Marx’s ideas worse than Hitler’s. He had also promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which accuses Hillary Clinton of human trafficking. Sandgren told reporters that, though he didn’t support the alt-right, he did find “some of the content interesting.”

    This became a small news story. Sandgren then lost his quarter-final, and, at the subsequent press conference, he read a statement condemning the media’s willingness to “turn neighbor against neighbor.” Later that day, he was surprised to receive a supportive message from Glenn Greenwald, the journalist, whom he followed on Twitter. (Sandgren also followed Roger Federer, Peter Thiel, and Paul Joseph Watson, of Infowars.)

    Greenwald, a former lawyer who, in 2013, was one of the reporters for a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Guardian on Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency, is a longtime critic, from the left, of centrist and liberal policymakers and pundits. During the past two years, he has further exiled himself from the mainstream American left by responding with skepticism and disdain to reports of Russian government interference in the 2016 Presidential election. On Twitter, where he has nearly a million followers, and at the Intercept, the news Web site that he co-founded five years ago, and as a frequent guest on “Democracy Now!,” the daily progressive radio and TV broadcast, Greenwald has argued that the available evidence concerning Russian activity has indicated nothing especially untoward; he has declared that those who claim otherwise are in denial about the ineptitude of the Democrats and of Hillary Clinton, and are sometimes prone to McCarthyite hysteria. These arguments, underpinned by a distaste for banal political opinions and a profound distrust of American institutions—including the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and Rachel Maddow—have put an end to his appearances on MSNBC, where he considers himself now banned, but they have given him a place on Tucker Carlson’s show, on Fox News, and in Tennys Sandgren’s Twitter feed. Greenwald is also a tennis fan—and a regular, sweary player. He recently began working on a documentary about his adolescent fascination with Martina Navratilova.

    Read more.

    ...

  • 41 Must Read websites and newsletters

    As part of my Social Media for Journalists class in London this summer, students are required to come to the first meeting of the week with two stories charting recent developments in the social field.

    This could be:

    • New products (e.g. the launch of IGTV )
    • Organization Analysis (e.g. How Vogue diversified away from Facebook by Max Willens in Digiday)
    • User data/insights (e.g. this piece in recode on the growth of Instagram and Snapchat)
    • New research (Misinformation and biases infect social media, both intentionally and accidentally by Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Indiana University and Filippo Menczer, Indiana University

    Read more.

    ...

  • 40 Years of Chronicling the Unnoticed

    My article this week on Brooklyn Housing Court stands as the final story I wrote as a staff reporter for The Times. It’s been 40 years since the first one. The decades zoomed by, a blink in time.

    Working for The Times gets you places. I once spent nearly a month at a toxic Superfund site in Seymour, Ind. It was suggested I go to Columbus, Ohio, for a week to eat an outlandish amount of fast food, some of which was O.K. I filled agreeable days in Omaha scribbling down insights from telephone repairmen.

    Best of all, though, were trips drifting through Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. While The Times has bureaus sprinkled around the globe, I spent 40 years in the New York office. Openings sprouted elsewhere. Did I want to go? No, but thanks. Mostly, I was assigned to the Metro staff, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The Times explains the world, but I always felt that Metro qualified as its pulse. Covering the billowing activity across the miscellaneity of the five boroughs was never tiresome, never trite. Some reporters relish traveling to Novosibirsk or Malacca. I liked Canarsie. I liked Bayside. They were local. I liked being local.

    Read more.

    ...

  • Tom Wolfe’s School of New Journalism

    There’s an essay by Zadie Smith called “Dead Men Talking,” in which she suggests that every writer has an ideal reader. Smith, to her embarrassment, identifies herself as the ideal reader of E. M. Forster. “I would much prefer to be Gustave Flaubert’s or William Gaddis’s or Franz Kafka’s or Borges’,” she writes. Every reader, she continues, will have “three or four writers like this in your life, and likely as not you’ll meet them when you’re very young.”

    I saw Smith read this essay as a lecture in 2003, in Central Park, in the summer. She wore a flower in her hair. I was twenty-two. I found the writing for which I was the ideal reader a few months later, when my roommate lent me a copy of Tom Wolfe’s 1973 anthology, “The New Journalism.” Can you be the ideal reader of an anthology? I was.

    “The New Journalism” was edited by Wolfe, who included an excerpt from “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and his essay “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.” He also wrote a polemical and hubristic three-part introduction and an appendix. Wolfe made fun of contemporary novelists and made fun of newspaper writing and then described the development, starting around 1960, of a group of people who were writing journalism—fact-based reportage—that read like novels, journalists who, in Wolfe’s words, “wanted to dress up like novelists.”

    These journalists, Wolfe wrote, used four devices: scene-by-scene construction, realistic dialogue, a third-person point of view (where the reader feels as if he or she is inside a character’s mind), and then, in contrast to traditional newspaper journalism, a descriptive eye, in which a subject’s clothing, manners, eating, and living room are as important for the writer to document as the subject’s words. “The basic reporting unit is no longer the datum, the piece of information, but the scene, since most of the sophisticated strategies of prose depend upon scenes,” he wrote. He called the process Saturation Reporting: “Often you feel as if you’ve put your whole central nervous system on red alert and turned it into a receiving set with your head panning the molten tableau like a radar dish, with you saying, ‘Come in, world,’ since you only want . . . all of it . . . ”

    Read more.

    ...

  • Dacre: Fleet Street’s last silverback gorilla

    When I worked at the Daily Mail, I began to think of it like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. It wasn’t exactly that “nobody ever goes in and nobody ever comes out” – after all, there was a steady stream of workers on the escalators up to the airy atrium above Whole Foods in Kensington, west London – but the whole operation felt so hermetic.Outsiders saw it as a strange citadel, where political reputations were created and destroyed, and where our national conversation was greatly enlivened or maliciously poisoned (depending on your point of view). But its workings were hardly ever exposed to outside scrutiny, even by the cloistered standards of the press. Every day, the Daily Mail casts its eye over the world, and usually finds it wanting; the world hardly ever gets to gaze back.

    As with so many elements of the Mail, this secrecy springs directly from its editor’s psyche. That is why, when news broke that Paul Dacre was stepping down after 26 years, so many commentators hailed it as the end of an era.

    The Daily Mail is the most influential newspaper in Britain, and its editor has the purest power of any person in Britain. His successor, the Mail on Sunday’s Geordie Greig, has a close relationship with the group’s proprietor Lord Rothermere, but it is inconceivable that he will preside over a paper that reflects so precisely his own enthusiasms, hang-ups, obsessions, and vendettas. Dacre was Fleet Street’s last silverback gorilla.

    Read more.

    ...

  • The Smartphone War

    Every few seconds my iPhone lights up with new posts on a WhatsApp group linking doctors in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta to journalists in the outside world. News of Russian and Syrian government bombardment comes more or less in real time: “Before three hours in Ghouta, Russian plane tracked ambulances and hit both ambulances and hospitals.” “Dr Hamza: I have treated twenty-nine cases so far, the majority are children.” Visuals are captioned in Arabic and English: “Photos of shelters that local residents dug under their homes.” The journalists, who include correspondents from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other international newspapers, use the group to clarify the numbers of casualties and check locations of attacks, while broadcast media request Skype interviews from inside the war zone.

    A meticulous sifting of testimony, videos, and photographs conveyed by social media, to be cross-checked with government propaganda, satellite imagery, and whatever other sources are available, is a crucial part of twenty-first-century conflict reporting. It feels very far from William Howard Russell, usually considered the first modern war correspondent, who famously covered the Charge of the Light Brigade, describing the British cavalry in Crimea as “glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war.”

    Russell saw himself as “the miserable parent of a luckless tribe,” and those correspondents chained to computers in Beirut, Istanbul, or London feel luckless indeed. In Libya in 2011, you could drive to the war in the morning and return to your hotel in Benghazi at night because much of the fighting occurred, conveniently enough, on the main coast road. In Iraq in 2003, you could embed with invading Western troops or stay in Baghdad as Saddam Hussein launched his doomed resistance. You were always an eyewitness to something, while relying on the accounts of others to fill in the bigger picture. One might look back with even more nostalgia to a late summer day in 1939, when the young Clare Hollingworth, in her first week as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, borrowed the car of the British consul in the Polish town of Katowice, talked her way past the guards at the German frontier post, and happened to be driving along the right road when a gust of wind lifted burlap curtains the Germans had strung up, revealing ten Panzer divisions ready to roll across the border.

    Read more.

    ...

  • What Bullets Do To Bodies

    The first thing Dr. Amy Goldberg told me is that this article would be pointless. She said this on a phone call last summer, well before the election, before a tangible sensation that facts were futile became a broader American phenomenon. I was interested in Goldberg because she has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, almost all of that at the same hospital, Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia, which treats more gunshot victims than any other in the state and is located in what was, according to one analysis, the deadliest of the 10 largest cities in the country until last year, with a homicide rate of 17.8 murders per 100,000 residents in 2015. Over my years of reporting here, I had heard stories about Temple’s trauma team. A city prosecutor who handled shooting investigations once told me that the surgeons were able to piece people back together after the most horrific acts of violence. People went into the hospital damaged beyond belief and came walking out.

    That stuck with me. I wondered what surgeons know about gun violence that the rest of us don’t. We are inundated with news about shootings. Fourteen dead in San Bernardino, six in Michigan, 11 over one weekend in Chicago. We get names, places, anguished Facebook posts, wonky articles full of statistics on crime rates and risk, Twitter arguments about the Second Amendment—everything except the blood, the pictures of bodies torn by bullets. That part is concealed, sanitized. More than 30,000 people die of gunshot wounds each year in America, around 75,000 more are injured, and we have no visceral sense of what physically happens inside a person when he’s shot. Goldberg does.

    Read more.

    ...

  • The Final, Terrible Voyage of the Nautilus

    On August 10, a Thursday, Wall and Stobbe were preparing to throw a goodbye party. In the late afternoon, just as they were setting up for a barbecue on the quay along the water in Refshaleøen, Wall got the text she had been waiting for: Madsen was inviting her for tea at his workshop. Madsen’s hangar was not far, so she set off. About half an hour later, she returned to let Stobbe know that Madsen had offered to take her out on his submarine. She decided to forgo her own goodbye party for the interview. She asked Stobbe if he wanted to come. Stobbe was “insanely close to saying yes,” he told me, had it not been for the group he had assembled. Because she was going out to sea, Stobbe gave Wall a bigger kiss than he would have had she gone out for, say, ice or lemons. Wall promised to be back in a few hours.

    Just before boarding the submarine around 7 pm, Wall texted Stobbe a photo of the Nautilus. A little later, she sent a photo of windmills in the water, and then another of herself at the steering wheel. A while later, Stobbe was tending to a quayside fire when a friend told him to look up. He saw the setting sun and Wall aboard the submarine in the distance, waving toward him.

    By most public accounts, Madsen was a charismatic rebel. He had a weathered face with the prominent features of a toy troll. His habitual uniform was coveralls and hiking boots. Fox, the filmmaker, calls him a “modern-day Clumsy Hans,” for the seemingly dimwitted suitor in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale who wins the princess’s favor over his more intelligent brothers. Wall was in the early stages of her reporting, and she would not have known much more about Madsen than what had already been published. It was only later, after everything that happened, that the details of his private life would become important.

    Read more.

    ...

  • Losing Female Reporters

    It is a truth increasingly acknowledged that many men are paid more than their female counterparts. How much more?

    About 50 percent, in the BBC journalist Carrie Gracie’s case. Over the weekend, Ms. Gracie quit as the broadcaster’s China editor and announced she was returning to London. “Enough is enough,” she wrote, in an astringent open letter, describing how she discovered last year that the BBC paid two of its four international editors — men, of course — 50 percent more than the female editors.

    At least she knows. Ms. Gracie discovered this gross inequality only because in 2017 the British government forced the BBC, which it partly funds, to disclose salaries of top on-air talent. The figures showed a gender and ethnic pay gap, with male anchors making in some cases twice as much as their female co-anchors.

    It says something when it’s considered an advancement for women just to get to the bargaining table and ask for equal pay. Many of us never even get that far.

    Read more.

    ...

  • The quitting economy

    In the early 1990s, career advice in the United States changed. A new social philosophy, neoliberalism, was transforming society, including the nature of employment, and career counsellors and business writers had to respond. The Soviet Union had recently collapsed, and much as communist thinkers had tried to apply Marxist ideas to every aspect of life, triumphant US economic intellectuals raced to implement the ultra-individualist ideals of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and other members of the Mont Pelerin Society, far and wide. In doing so for work, they developed a metaphor – that every person should think of herself as a business, the CEO of Me, Inc. The metaphor took off, and has had profound implications for how workplaces are run, how people understand their jobs, and how they plan careers, which increasingly revolve around quitting.

    Hayek (1899­-1992) was an influential Austrian economist who operated from the core conviction that markets provided the best means to order the world. Today, many people share this conviction, and that is in part because of the influence of Hayek and his cohort. At the time that Hayek and his circle began making their arguments, it was an eccentric and minority position. For Hayek and the Mount Pelerin group, the centralised economic planning that characterised both communism and fascism was a recipe for disaster. Hayek held that humans are too flawed to successfully undertake the planning of a complex modern economy. A single human being, or even group of human beings, could never competently handle the informational complexities of modern economic systems. Given humans’ limitations in the face of modern economic complexity, freeing the market to organise large-scale production and distribution was the best possible course.

    Hayek understood that markets do not emerge naturally, that traders, consumers and laws construct markets. Once established, markets have tendencies towards monopoly and other business practices that could undercut forming an even playing field. So markets can’t be entirely left to self-regulate; laws and governments are necessary. Indeed, this is the primary reason why governments should exist – to ensure that markets function well. Governments should not be providing services to its citizenry such as public transportation or a postal service – Hayek believed that private interests most efficiently manage these services. Also governments should not be providing forms of welfare to its citizens, since welfare undercuts how the market allocates value and introduces too much centralised planning. Instead, what governments should focus upon is organising markets well, keeping them functioning to promote competition, and thus also promoting innovation. Because market competition is the goal, arbitrarily curtailing this competition through tariffs or other nationalist strategies for undercutting a global market was also deeply undesirable. Hayek wanted a global market.

    Read more.

    ...

  • The Desirability of Storytellers

    Once upon a time, the sun and moon argued about who would light up the sky. They fought, as anthropomorphic celestial bodies are meant to do, but after the moon proves to be as strong as the sun, they decide to take shifts. The sun would brighten the day, while the moon would illuminate the night.

    This is one of several stories told by the Agta, a group of hunter-gatherers from the Philippines. They spend a lot of time spinning yarns to each other, and like their account of the sun and moon, many of these tales are infused with themes of cooperation and equality. That’s no coincidence, says Andrea Migliano, an anthropologist at University College London.

    Storytelling is a universal human trait. It emerges spontaneously in childhood, and exists in all cultures thus far studied. It’s also ancient: Some specific stories have roots that stretch back for around 6,000 years. As I’ve written before, these tales aren’t quite as old as time, but perhaps as old as wheels and writing. Because of its antiquity and ubiquity, some scholars have portrayed storytelling as an important human adaptation—and that’s certainly how Migliano sees it. Among the Agta, her team found evidence that stories—and the very act of storytelling—arose partly as a way of cementing social bonds, and instilling an ethic of cooperation.

    Read more.

    ...

  • Will Steacy – Blood and Ink

    On a warm Friday evening in the newsroom of The Philadelphia Inquirer, national/foreign editor Tom Steacy was asked to leave his desk. He was led to a conference room, where he found the paper’s executive editor waiting.

    “The realisation began to dawn as I made that walk,” the 66-year-old says in a slow, halting voice from his home in Philadelphia. “Everyone was nervous. We all knew there was a great shining axe hovering in the sky somewhere. There had been for quite a while.”

    The editor, Stan Wischnowski, told Steacy that after 29 years on staff the paper was letting him go. “I kept shouting to myself: ‘Silence, silence. Gosh, please don’t let me hear what I’m about to hear,’” Steacy says. “Stan gave me his 10-minute spiel about why it was necessary and why I had been chosen. Then I made him repeat the whole thing. I was in so much shock. When it was over, I left the building and went home,” he continues. “I went back to the newsroom once to sign papers – that newsroom was my life for 30 years.”

    Read more.

    ...

  • The decimation of local news in NYC

    A month ago, I surprised a lot of people by announcing that I was making an unusual career move: After a lifetime in the journalistic trenches—including as a consistent writer for three publications that had scaled back or killed their print editions or both—I was running for a State Senate seat in the Brooklyn district where I grew up.

    I launched the campaign for a variety of reasons, many of them having to do with my own frustrations with the political class. I’m not writing and reporting like I used to, but I’m trying to hold bad actors accountable in a new way. I don’t know if, 30 years ago, a more robust news landscape would’ve kept me firmly in the reporter camp, but I do know it can be a disillusioning time to be a reporter, particularly in local news and especially in New York City.

    On Thursday, the latest gut punch arrived: DNAInfo, which for a time had served up admirable granular coverage of New York and other cities, was shut down by its billionaire owner, who blamed the bad economics of local news for the decision, though DNAInfo reporters are convinced a recent, successful union drive at the outlet was the real culprit.

    The frightening decline of the newspaper industry has hit all cities and towns hard. No one has been spared. Digital advertising cannot make up for what print once paid for. Google and Facebook gobble up what little ad revenue exists in the digital space. In the past 15 years, more than half the jobs in the news industry have disappeared, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released in April. In January 2001, the industry employed 411,800 people. In September 2016, that number plummeted to 173,709.

    Read more.

    ...