-
INSIDE ART: The War Photographer
INSIDE ART: The War Photographer, Way Back in 1666
For decades now we have relied on news photography to capture the horrors of war. But some 350 years ago there were artists risking their lives, sketching away as soldiers and sailors fell and guns blazed.
An unusual canvas by Willem van de Velde the Elder and Younger, depicting a 1666 British naval defeat, is being offered at Sotheby’s.
... -
Superhero journalists ethical breaches (for fun)
“Journalists have an almost superhuman ability to hold forth on the ethics of our own profession. And yet, despite endless talk about “self-plagiarism” or some such, we have been wilfully blind to the more grievous ethical breaches carried out by revered reporters who cover the so-called “superhero beat”. Perhaps we are unwilling to admit that those who write about truth and justice are the least likely to champion transparency and proper attribution. Here are some examples of the most severe offenders”:
... -
“The Newsroom” on HBO
“Much of McAvoy’s diatribe is bona-fide baloney—false nostalgia for an America that never existed—but it is exciting to watch. And if you enjoyed “The West Wing,” Sorkin’s helpful counterprogramming to the Bush Administration, your ears will prick up. The pilot of “The Newsroom” is full of yelling and self-righteousness, but it’s got energy, just like “The West Wing,” Sorkin’s “Sports Night,” and his hit movie “The Social Network.” The second episode is more obviously stuffed with piety and syrup, although there’s one amusing segment, when McAvoy mocks some right-wing idiots. After that, “The Newsroom” gets so bad so quickly that I found my jaw dropping. The third episode is lousy (and devolves into lectures that are chopped into montages). The fourth episode is the worst. There are six to go.”
... -
Who Influenced Tunisian Author Habib Selmi?
Early stories he remembers are those of Kamel al-Kilani (the Egyptian pioneer of modern children’s literature) but Selmi attributes his love of stories less to his early consumption of the written word and more to oral stories shared “beneath the olive tree known as ‘The Dog.’”
“In the beginning, they would not allow youngesters to approach the place, particularly because the men occasionally told risque stories and discussed topics they considered unsuitable for the minds of young people like us.”
... -
Websites Illuminate Unknown Artists
ArtistsWanted.org is not a charity but a business, one that hopes to make a profit identifying artistic talent and connecting it to an audience.
... -
Aaron Sorkin on The Newsroom , Sorkinism, and Sounding Smart
On June 24, HBO will air the debut of The Newsroom, the first cable series from Aaron Sorkin, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning creator of The West Wing and writer of The Social Network. The show is not just a return to television but a series about television — in particular, television news and its squandered powers.
... -
Who jumped first from the newspaper sinking ship?
When did the ripe, bulbous, and gibbous newspaper bubble pop?
It was probably in the 1990s, when the business better resembled a cruising blimp than it did the dotcoms like Pets.com, Boo.com, and TheGlobe.com, which all went kerblewy around the turn of the century. Unlike the bombing dotcoms, the high valuation of newspapers was based on real, not imaginary profits, and the belief that the profits from these deals would extend for years, if not decades, into the future.
... -
The Kenyon Review
The International Journal of Culture and the Arts. Read good literary selections, learn more about writing workshops and more…
...
Read more -
Saudi Arabian women defy ban on driving
“Women in Saudi Arabia have been arrested and jailed for defying a ban on driving. Now they want men to join them in the passenger seat as they get behind the wheel.”
... -
Literature and Revolution in Contemporary Cairo
An Excerpt from Youssef Rakha’s “In Extremis: Literature and Revolution in Contemporary Cairo
“The point of this story is to illustrate faith in the mystery of God’s omnipotence. But in a way it also says a lot about politics, language, and context: the relation of the observant to the enlightened, the cynical to the visionary, and appearance to substance.”
... -
Amid Iraq violence, journalists struggle government control
Car-bomb attacks killed dozens in Iraq today, a reminder of the dangers that continue to lurk in the country. Local journalists are struggling with government restrictions on covering their country.
...
By Scott Peterson -
In New Libya, Lots Of Guns & Calls For Shariah
Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep is taking a Revolutionary Road Trip across North Africa to see how the countries that staged revolutions last year are remaking themselves. Steve and his team are traveling some 2,000 miles from Tunisia’s ancient city of Carthage, across the deserts of Libya and on to Egypt’s megacity of Cairo. In the Libyan towns of Benghazi and Derna, he talks to Islamists about their desire to see a new Libya ruled by Shariah law.
... -
Russian Official’s Death Threat, in Bold Type
The editor of Novaya Gazeta, a prominent newspaper, wrote an open letter accusing Russia’s chief federal investigator of threatening to kill a deputy editor.
... -
The Sound of a Sentence
OPINIONATOR | DRAFT: The Sound of a Sentence Language can be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody.
... -
Apple Updates Laptops and Mobile Software
Apple Updates Laptops and Mobile Software The company’s high-end laptop computer, the MacBook Pro, will have a high-resolution “retina display” like the one on the screens of new iPads and iPhones.
... -
MOVIE REVIEW: A Chronicle of Cairo Protests
“Tahrir: Liberation Square” plunges into the crowds of demonstrators in Cairo in January 2011 during the days leading up to the fall of Hosni Mubarak.
... -
Forty years after Watergate, investigative journalism is at risk
Investigative reporting in America did not begin with Watergate . But it became entrenched in American journalism — and has been steadily spreading around the world — largely because of Watergate.
Now, 40 years after Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote their first stories about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate office building, the future of investigative reporting is at risk in the chaotic digital reconstruction of journalism in the United States. Resource-intensive investigative reporting has become a burden for shrunken newspapers struggling to reinvent themselves and survive. Nonprofit start-ups seeking to fill the gap are financially fragile themselves, with their sustainability uncertain.
... -
Real Reporters on the Screen? Get Me Rewrite!
All the News That’s Fit to Screen is a film series about journalism at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
BACK when paper and ink still mattered, I fell into a job as a nightside reporter at The Providence Journal, in the habitually newsworthy state of Rhode Island. This was many years ago, before exercise, sobriety and good hygiene had ruined the misanthropic bonhomie of the typical newsroom — or so the romanticizing journalist in me likes to think.
... -
Technology in Our Lives, and How to Make It Work Better
Technology is supposed to make life easier, but it often comes with layers of jargon, settings and hardware adjustments. Here are answers to some tech questions.
... -
The Deported
If you find your way through the door of the Juan Bosco Shelter in Nogales, just across the border in Sonora, Mexico, it’s because you’ve got nowhere else to go. You’ll find a bed here, your own slot in one of the 30 trilevel wooden frames that line the walls. Chances are, you need the rest. And Juan Bosco provides. You can sleep now and figure things out in the morning.
The shelter has three cardinal rules: (1) Keep it clean. (2) Care for others. (3) “You can’t talk about polleros here,” says a young man named José, using slang for guides who for a few thousand dollars bring immigrants over the border. “There are cameras and they hear the sounds.” Most of the people settling into the bunks tonight were just deported. They aren’t talking much, anyway.
José once slept at this shelter when he had nowhere else to go. He was one of the nearly 55,000 people a year, 150 a day, that the Mexican government says are pushed off buses into Nogales by American authorities. Now José sleeps here every night because its owners have allowed him free board in exchange for work. “The shelter is like a family,” he tells the new arrivals. “There are 3,000 people who come through here a month and we’re all equal.”
... -
“Processing Delay” by Elliott Abrams
Summer 2012. Israel’s elections have been delayed until late next year by the formation of a new coalition government. The “Arab Spring” is producing Muslim Brotherhood victories, Salafi gains, chaos in Syria, disorder in Egypt, tremors in Jordan. Iran’s nuclear program moves steadily forward despite tougher sanctions and ongoing negotiations between Iran and the world’s major powers. In the United States, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney begin to face off in the upcoming presidential election.
Amid these developments, the so-called “peace process” will enter its 46th year on June 10. For it was on that day in 1967 that a cease-fire in the Six-Day War was declared, leaving Israel in possession of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, the Golan Heights, and Jerusalem but divided over what to do with its newfound gains.
... -
Egypt “Brother Number One”
“Egypt is on the cusp of its first real experiment in Islamist governance. If the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi comes out on top in the upcoming presidential runoff election, scheduled for June 16 and 17, the venerable Islamist movement will have won control of both Egypt’s presidency and its parliament, and it will have a very real chance to implement its agenda of market-driven economic recovery, gradual Islamization, and the reassertion of Egypt’s regional role.”
... -
“Terrorists? Us?” Owen Bennett-Jones
“The story of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, also known as the Mujahedin e Khalq (MEK), is all about the way image management can enable a diehard enemy to become a cherished ally. The MEK is currently campaigning to be officially delisted in the US as a terrorist organisation. Once off the list it will be free to make use of its support on Capitol Hill in order to become America’s most favoured, and no doubt best funded, Iranian opposition group.”
... -
Turkey Diary Elif Batuman
“In 2010, I moved from California, where I had lived for 11 years, to Turkey, where I had never stayed longer than a month or two. I had been offered a job as writer in residence at a private university in the forest on the northern edge of Istanbul. When I got there, I found out that the university had no writer in residence programme. It didn’t even have a writing programme. There was just me. The two living beings I saw with the most regularity were a campus groundsman, who always seemed to be standing in the bushes when I left the house, and an obese one-eyed black cat, who used to come in through my bedroom window. It had one green eye and one empty socket, and the minute it saw me with its single eye, it would start running from room to room, uttering piercing meows and crashing into the furniture. There was a lot of furniture, which had come with the apartment.”
... -
“Issues for His Prose Style” by Andrew O’Hagan
“Good reporters go hunting for nouns. They want the odd verb too, but the main thing is the nouns, especially the proper ones, the who, what and where. The thing British schoolchildren call a ‘naming word’ was, for Hemingway, a chance to reveal what he knew, an opportunity to be experienced, to discriminate, and his style depends on engorged nouns, not absent adjectives. But at times it strikes you that the cult of specificity in Hemingway is a drug you take in a cheap arcade: lights flash on the old machines and a piano plinks overhead. One evening it came to me as a small revelation that he takes too much pride in the nouns. (And pride ruined him.) He never takes nouns for granted. He invests his whole personality in them, because nouns are the part of speech where a person gets to show off. Papa gets busted on the nouns because he can’t place them on the page without ego. Too often they are there to attract attention. To cause a sensation. To make a blaze. Hemingway will never say someone had a drink when he can say they had a vermouth.”
...