By Sheila
Lennon
Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
February 11, 2005, 2:29 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Arthur
Miller, literary giant, Marilyn Monroe's ex: Arthur Miller, author
of Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, The Misfits, After the Fall and
much more, died
last night at his home in Roxbury, Conn., of heart failure at 89.
At right, Miller kisses his fiancee, Marilyn Monroe, at her New York apartment
house June 22, 1956. They married June 29 of that year and divorced Jan. 24,
1961.
In his 1987 autobiography, Timebends,
Miller wrote of Monroe, "To have survived, she would have had to be either
more cynical or even further from reality than she was," he wrote. "Instead,
she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her
clothes."
Blogger Clifford Garstang (Perpetual
Folly) of Staunton, Va. has the current issue of Harper's on his desk,
which contains a new Miller short story, Beavers. Garstang writes,
...I liked it because it is, nominally, about a man who feels guilty for
having to kill the beavers who are threatening to devastate a wooded slope.
It struck me because I have from time to time had the same problem, and felt
bad about killing the beavers. But what are the options.
But of course that isn't really what the story is about.
"Or was it all much simpler: did he simply wake one morning and with
infinite pleasure start swimming through the clear water when, quite by chance,
he heard the trickling of the overflow and, steering himself over to it,
was filled with desire to capture the lovely wet sound, for he adored water
above all things and wished somehow to become part of it, if only by capturing
its tinkle? And the rest, as it turned out, was unforeseen death. He had
not believed in his death. The shots fired into the water had not caused
him to flee but merely to dive and surface again a couple of minutes later.
He was young and immortal to himself."
About Miller:
The Arthur Miller
Society
Miller's
American Masters page at PBS
Miller
at Wikipedia
By
Miller and online:
A
Line To Walk On: The art of a graceful exit, originally from Harper's,
December 2000, republished today.
'The Chelsea
Affect' in Granta:
The author's memoir of life at the Chelsea Hotel in the 1960's.
Interview on Morality:
Miller talks with with William R. Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment
for the Humanities, about morality and the public role of the artist.From the
March-April 2001 issue of Humanities magazine.
Blacklisting: Excerpts
from Miller's autobiography (Timebends) dealing
with his investigation by the Committee on Un-American Activities.
"Are
You Now Or Were You Ever?" from The Guardian/The Observer (on line),
Saturday, June 17, 2000. "The McCarthy era's anti-communist trials destroyed
lives and friendships. Arthur Miller describes the paranoia that swept America
- and the moment his then wife Marilyn Monroe became a bargaining chip in
his own prosecution"
A
Visit With Castro. The Nation, December 24, 2003.
Memorable
quotations: This leads with Miller saying, "A good newspaper, I
suppose, is a nation talking to itself."
Link
to this item | Comment
February 10, 2005, 3:31 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Why
Carly's Exit Is No Feminist Issue: Sylvia
Paull, pictured at right -- high-tech publicist and founder of Gracenet,
a group that promotes "the contribution of women in technology" --
has interesting thoughts on the ouster of Hewlitt-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina:
She came, she conquered, and couldn't control the consequences. All the
while, Carly Fiorina was just another CEO driven by the greed of her board
and shareholders, all dedicated to the proposition of improving the bottom
line. A hired hand, she failed at the very game she sought to master.
Fiorina's
gender was irrelevant to her performance, although some would have held her
to a higher, gentler standard because she has ovaries. But one of her first
acts was to eliminate flextime at Hewlett-Packard, thus forcing many single
mothers to quit their jobs in order to take care of their children. She destroyed
many of the caring, "paternalistic" practices instigated by founders
Hewlett and Packard, both men who cared not only about business but also
about the welfare and happiness of their employees....
Sounds like bad karma to me -- what goes around comes around. Paull continues,
It just goes to show that some men are more like the way we think of
women, and vice versa. Lawrence Summers notwithstanding, nurture can
be a more powerful
influence on behavior than nature.
(Summers is the president of Harvard who recently sugggested, “innate
differences between the sexes help explain why fewer women succeed in math
and science careers” -- and then backpedaled quickly.)
Some
background links on Fiorina's fall from fortune:
Why
Carly's Big Bet Is Failing -- The Fortune cover story by Carol J. Loomis
that begins,
It has been just over six years since Carleton S. Fiorina, now 50, burst
upon the national stage—and we will acknowledge straight out that
FORTUNE played a role in putting her name in lights.
The
Inside Story of Carly's Ouster: Business Week.
Sylvia Paull's blog -- My
Weblog -- began only yesterday, and this is her second blog posting.
I learned of her from Scripting
News. I'm looking forward to more of her voice.
Gracenet,
by the way, is named after Grace Hopper, a 1928 Vassar graduate with a Yale
PhD in math. She taught at Vassar, worked as a senior mathematician with Sperry
Rand on the first commercial computer and retired from the Navy Reserve at
80 as a rear admiral. From a bio
of Hopper at UC San Diego,
Perhaps her best-known contribution to computing was the invention of the
compiler, the intermediate program that translates English language instructions
into the language of the target computer. She did this, she said, because
she was lazy and hoped that "the programmer may return to being a mathematician." Her
work embodied or foreshadowed enormous numbers of developments that are now
the bones of digital computing: subroutines, formula translation, relative
addressing, the linking loader, code optimization, and even symbolic manipulation
of the kind embodied in Mathematica and Maple.
Born December 9, 1906, she died on January 1, 1992; she was widowed in 1945
when her husband, Vincent Foster Hopper, died in the war. They had no children.
Here's another
bio, and some "wit
and wisdom." More
Hopper links are gathered on this page, source of the photo of Hopper
at right.
Link
to this item | Comment
February 9, 2005, 7:03 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Goodbye,
Romeo, good luck: New Cleveland Browns coach Romeo Crennel leads
Cleveland.com's homepage today, moving rapidly into his future by skipping
yesterday's Pats victory parade in Boston for a press conference in
his new hometown.
Crennel
era begins
Excited and optimistic, Browns new coach promises a hard-working
team next season
• PD's
Shaw: Crennel brings skills
• Decision
on Garcia coming soon
• Unhappy
players change tune
• Talk in Browns Forum | More
Link
to this item | Comment
Get
your brain out of the way: Malcolm Gladwell on football: Jeff
Merron of ESPN's Page 2 spoke before the Super Bowl with the 135-pound
author of The
Tipping Point and the current best-seller Blink:
The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (which argues for instinctual
judgments). Ironically, he recommends the one thing Philly didn't do:
...Andy Reid has to know that Belichick has an edge when he can calmly and
deliberately plot his next move. But does he still have an advantage when
he and his players have to make decisions on the spur of the moment? I'd
tell Andy Reid to go no-huddle at random, unpredictable points during the
game -- to throw Belichick out of his comfort zone....
He also points out something we instinctively know:
What people in the classical music world discovered was that when they couldn't
see the person auditioning, they made very different and much better hiring
decisions than when they could see the auditioner. With a screen up, for
instance, they began to hire women for the first time, which suggests that
before that their judgment had been impaired by all kinds of biases they
were unaware of. What they saw with their eyes had interfered with what they
heard with their ears. Billy Beane makes the same argument about scouting
prospects: that sometimes what you see -- whether a player is short or tall,
thin or heavy -- corrupts your assessment of what really matters, which is
whether a guy can hit.
This is a variation on what Gladwell calls the "Warren Harding error,"
...in
honor of our best-looking president ever -- a man so handsome and distinguished
and with such a barrel chest and broad shoulders and commanding voice that
people would just look at him and be convinced that that he would make a
wonderful leader. Unfortunately, Harding turned out to be our stupidest and
most incompetent president ever. (And there is some stiff competition for
that title). The Warren Harding Error is what happens when our first impressions
are so powerful that they cloud our better judgment.
(Harding
once said, "I am not fit for this office and should never have been
here" -- showing he was at least, at some point, humble.)
Link
to this item | Comment
793 informed musical opinions: The
Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop
issue includes a wrapup of the nation's
rock critics' picks of the best music of 2004:
The poll combines ballots from 793 critics, who divided 100 points among
10 2004 albums. (Every individual ballot is available online.) Maximum per
album: 30. Minimum: 5. Points determined placement, with total mentions (included
in parentheses) used for tiebreaking.
Here's
the list. The top five albums are,
1 Kanye
West, The College Dropout
2 Brian
Wilson, SMiLE
3 Loretta
Lynn, Van Lear Rose
4 Franz
Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand
5 Green
Day, American Idiot
Individual
critics' lists are all over the lot. Here's Voice critic Robert Christgau's Dean's
List. (Christgau, who's
been writing about pop and rock since 1967, is called the Dean of American
Rock Critics, hence the title.)
Here are the picks
of Rick Massimo of the Journal. And those of Jim
Macnie and Evelyn
McDonnell, both of whom wrote for the NewPaper back when (it's now the
Providence Phoenix); Evelyn worked on the features desk at the Journal for
a while, too. She's now writing about music at the Miami Herald and syndicated
by Knight Ridder.
Link
to this item | Comment
Napster rentals: Pay forever or lose your music. You
may recall seeing a Super
Bowl ad for the Napster To Go music service during the Super Bowl touting
its rentals -- the pitch was that it would cost $10,000 to fill a 10,000-tune
iPod from Apple's iTunes, but Napster To Go is only $15 a month for your choices
of a million songs.
The catch? At Napster.com, along the bottom are the words, "*It is necessary
to maintain a Napster subscription in order to continue access to songs downloaded
through the Napster service."
More from John Gruber at Daring
Fireball (Mac nerdery, etc.):
So, for example, you could join Napster To Go tomorrow, pay $180 to maintain
your subscription during the next year, and during that time, download tens
of thousands of music tracks. But if you cancel your subscription next year,
all of that music will stop working. It will stop working on your computer,
and it will stop working on your little Napster-compatible
portable player. (And thus even while you are subscribed, you need to
frequently re-sync your player to your network-connected PC, even if you
haven’t downloaded more music, just so your player’s DRM software
can check the status of your subscription.)...
...And if you want to use your music in a non-DRM context, like by creating
a standard audio CD, you still need to pay $.99 per track, which is in addition
to your regular subscription fees. The music you download via subscription
can only be used in a DRM context.
The Register does the math a few years down the line (Why
Napster will be a fully-integrated flop), noting,
...The big difference here is that after the three years are up, Consumer
B has something to show for his investment. He still owns the music. If the
Napster customer stops paying for the service, his music is all gone. He's
paying $179 per year to rent music. This isn't high quality stuff either.
It's DRM (digital rights management)-laced, low bitrate slop.
You could once buy a CD and then play that music on your computer or in
your car at will. Hell, you still can. You own it. You can burn an extra
copy of the disc in case it gets scratched or pass along the disc to a friend
to see if they like it - just like you would with a good book. Five years
from now, you will still own the CD. No one can tell you where and when you
can play it.
This is not the case in the Napster subscription world. After six years,
you've tossed away $1,076 for something that barely exists. Forget to pay
for a month and watch your music collection disappear. (Not to mention, you're
betting on the fact that Napster will even exist two years from now. At least
you know that a year's subscription to the Wall Street Journal will still
work in 12 months time.)
That
ad ranked
dead last among viewer's favorite Super Bowl ads. That's not Sean Shawn
Fanning's upstart Napster. That's a
pretender. (Thanks to the Internet
Archive Wayback Machine for that Oct. 8, 1999 page.)
Related: At How
Stuff Works, How
the Old Napster Worked.
Link
to this item | Comment
Garret
the copyright propagandist: J.D. Lasica, senior editor of Online
Journalism Review, sounds an alarm about a p.r. campaign by the Business
Software Alliance -- whose mascot is a ferret -- calling it "sort
of a Reefer Madness for the digital age, no?"
It's intended to become part of school curriculums.
The
uncuddly critter, in a comic book panels, tells a tired child who's about to
copy his friend Erika's graphics program, "you have the right to use the
software created by the programmer, but you cannot make a copy. that includes
installing it on your computer. If you make a copy, it’s the same thing
as stealing the programmer’s work."
We "criminals" have been known to read newspapers left at lunch
counters, make music cassettes and CDs for our friends and read books we did
not ourselves buy!
Writes J.D.,
Somebody -- the EFF? Creative Commons? -- needs to step up, set the record
straight, and add some nuance to this discussion. Will the words "fair
use" ever pass the lips of the instructors in this program? Will kids
be taught that sharing music with a friend is perfectly legal? Not by the
look of things.
In an email, Cory Doctorow of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation writes,
...If you need to understand copyright to engage in activities associated
with simple use and enjoyment of creative works, then copyright has failed
and it's time to tear it up and write a new one. Imagine if the big banks
started pushing for education campaigns on securities regulations so that
people know what they're doing when they loan one another ten bucks for lunch.
Long before we get to the content of Garret the Ferret and his ilk, their
mere existence tells us that there's something rotten going on.
Children are being used here to increase corporate profits. A side effect
is to make little ones afraid to share.
Congress created copyright law to encourage the creation of a public culture.
Writers in the East found that scalawags were buying their work, taking it
out West and publishing it with a new cover under their own names. It was then
up to the actual author to prove he or she created it first. (Consequently,
new literature was being circulated privately among small circles, which
had ominous implications for public culture.) By registering the work,
authorship
was made official, and the thieves could be stopped (or sued enough that the
practice become unprofitable. Glory wasn't usually the point.).
Copyright was meant to stop wholesale profiting off another's work -- commercial
distribution -- not to discourage children from passing on a computer game
to a friend.
J.D. has more on "this one-sided, misleading propagandist claptrap" at
the headline link above, with links to the materials being distributed, including
the teacher's guide.
I hope teachers take it on themselves to use this as a lesson in discretion
and critical thinking.
Link
to this item | Comment
Photo by Ken Pinkham
H.G.
Hartman's Rock Garden in Springfield, Ohio: From the Springfield
Art Network,
Yes, this is actually someone's backyard. It was created in the 1930s by
H.G. Hartman who died in 1944. Ben Hartman, who is the youngest son of H.G.
Hartman, is currently residing at this property. According to a June 4th
News-Sun story By Andrew McGinn, Ben Hartman is finding it hard to maintain
the property, and he is interested in selling to someone who is willing to
preserve the deteriorating works of art.
More photos at the link.
Link
to this item | Comment
Reuters
CEO Tom Glocer wants to build an online broadcast network: John
Battelle's latest Business
2.0 column:
...Here's
the interesting economic question. There's no question Fox and others are
brilliant at what they do. Fox understands that basically people want to
watch news a bit like they do sport: We want to root for the home team. It's
war as a grown-up sport, and Fox has always been good at sport. But there
is a disaffected, smaller group who don't want that. Now, if I have to pay
the cable networks for carriage ...
Those costs won't allow you to serve the niche.
Right. But online, if I can pick off 10 percent of the Americans who are
disaffected and the Germans who I guarantee you don't even watch CNN, and
aggregate an international audience serving up what only Reuters can provide
...
If this new Reuters offering doesn't look like CNN or Fox, what does
it look like?
What you might have is something like "Inside the Reuters Newsroom." Every
morning there are editors meeting in each bureau. Why can't we bring that
experience to programming? We have 2,300 journalists around the world, and
we need them just to support our wholesale media and financial services business.
We have pretty much all the raw content, not the packaging skill and on-air
talent. But you have to start and you have to experiment. I don't want my
successor looking back in 10 years and saying, "What an idiot that Glocer
guy was. He talked to people about how we missed CNN, but then, right under
his eyes, a new paradigm was forming."...
Link
to this item | Comment
The original Baghdad Blogger: Salam Pax -- we still
don't know his real name -- is
making movies.
Link
to this item | Comment
February 8, 2005, 7:57 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
I'm mostly wearing my producer hat today, pulling together the
page that will build till Valentine's Day.
'Deep
Throat' Mania Strikes: Cast Your Vote for a Candidate Here. Editor & Publisher:
So here at E&P we thought we'd join in the fun, since Deep Throat, whoever
or whatever it is, is the most famous journalistic source in history. Send
us your pick (to: letters@editorandpublisher.com)
for the most likely candidate and we will tabulate the results. We will also
award a free subscription to whoever is first to submit the correct name
-- assuming, that is, we ever learn who he/she/it is.
Note: Contest rules specify that Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee are not
eligible to enter.
Link
to this item | Comment
Crowds
Sparse at Mardi Gras Celebration: The Guardian blames the weather,
and the early start of Lent.
When I was a kid, I used to ask the nuns why Easter kept changing, and they
wouldn't tell me -- too pagan, maybe.
This year, it's the first Sunday (March 27) after the first full moon (March
25) after the spring equinox (March 20).
Link
to this item | Comment
Lady
Black blames biz backlash for hubby's troubles: From my Canadian
correspondent, Eric Lilius, comes this link with a slightly misleading
headline. It's not inaccurate, but Joan Crockatt and Arlene Bynon of the
New York Post deliver a larger profile of Barbara Amiel -- Mrs. Conrad
Black -- as a complex person who probably wishes she could have a do-over.
...While Lord Black revels in this fight for corporate redemption, she's
exorcising her own demons using her pen as her sword. She's crafting a book
that she hopes will leave a lasting mark.
In fact, her lack of a legacy consumes her thoughts these days as the childless
64-year-old beauty rethinks the meaning of life and has had a harsh epiphany.
"Influence, it's illusionary; you think you're having an effect," she
said.
SHE has traveled in the most intellectual circles with the likes of former
U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, Zbignew Brezinsky, Margaret
Thatcher, Valery Giscard d'Estaing and William F. Buckley on the Hollinger
advisory board. But her heart and mind are coming to grips with the truth
that she may be leaving a mark more for her plumage than for her penmanship.
"What does one leave behind? Some newspaper clippings, some pages in
W — is that success?"
Remember, this is the woman whose $42,870 60th birthday party and $2,463 handbags,
allegedly charged to Hollinger, had stockholders revolting against their own
Marie Antoinette. Now, at 64 and childless,
Lady
Black considers the blame falling on her for Conrad's woes at Hollinger a
low blow. But she does question whether the alchemy that kept her pictures
in the papers might have caused her failure to achieve any Orwellian height
in writing.
"Clothes and decent looks are a handicap because they don't co-exist
well with the life of a writer. Perhaps it's an excuse because I just never
had enough talent to be what I wanted to be. They co-exist with journalism
but not with the life of a writer. I wanted to write something genuinely
original. I wanted to write in a way that I've never been able to write.
I'm trying now [but] it's very, very hard.
"I think I've said before that I always felt like Salieri, cursed.
I could recognize genius in other people, but I knew enough to know I didn't
have it."
She is feverishly writing, spurred on by the baying hounds of her critics
and time. ...
Choices. We all make choices. And in a world where high cheekbones go a long,
long way, Amiel's coming to grips with what's important at last, perhaps too
late.
Link
to this item | Comment
Notes
On The Beatles - From Alan W. Pollack. Incredible stuff.
Link
to this item | Comment
via j-walk
February 7, 2005, 5:15 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
To Eagles fans, our sympathy: The Patriots return
from the Super Bowl triumphant again, one or another of them gracing the cover
of most news and sports sites today.
The
dejected Philadelphia Eagles are frozen in a photo, getting off the plane after
the ride home from Jacksonville, quarterback Donovan McNabb in mourning white.
We Pats
fans
live
in fear
of feeling
what Philly feels today. It's enough to
make
you
want
to
tiptoe away and let them sob in private. Neither Eagles
Nest nor Super
Scene (the Philadelphia Inquirer's Eagles blog and Super Bowl blog)
have been updated since before the game.
But talking about it helps, they say. So here we go:
Super
Bawl: We lose. We get back up. An editorial by the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Sure, it hurts.
Sure, when the gun sounded last night, you wanted to go outside and punch
your fist through the moon....
We've been there: In
the end, just a glum walk home
DIE
NASTY: Les Bowen at phillynews.com
JACKSONVILLE - The feeling in the Eagles' locker room afterward wasn't desolate.
Somber, certainly, but not desolate.
Certainly not "we-lost-another-NFC-Championship-Game" desolate.
Maybe in the coming days and weeks, the Eagles will look at the tape and
realize how close they were to something unbelievable, something that would
have changed the whole sports dialogue in Philadelphia. A little less time
frittered away on their final scoring drive could have made the difference.
A better bounce on David Akers' onside kick could have made the difference.
If Donovan McNabb had been a little less off-balance early, opportunities
were there to grab a bigger lead.
But the second-guessing will flourish only once the sharp edges of this
game get a little blurrier, because last night, the Eagles realized they
lost to a better team....
"I bet you everyone was on the edge of their seats when we went back
out there with 50-some seconds left," McNabb said wistfully, after completing
30 of 51 passes for three touchdowns, but also three interceptions. "We
possibly could have won that game."
As poignant rallying cries go, it lacked a little something. And so did
the Eagles, who came close to completing the quest that began when veterans
reported to Lehigh 190 days earlier, but never seemed really ready to win
this game...
Vent
in the Phillies forum: You know if they'd won that would have read "Celebrate
in the Phillies forum." (You may read the posts -- but not write one
-- without registering.)
Part of this venting is voting in polls.
Should
we be looking to blame somebody today? At 3:33 p.m., 18335 people have
voted so far, and here's the verdict:
Yes, and it's Donovan McNabb - 6282 votes (34%)
Yes, it's the defense (hold Pats to 17, we win) - 310 votes (2%)
Yes, (coach) Andy Reid (clock management?) - 5794 votes (32%)
No, it was a great season and we lost to great team - 5949 votes (32%)
Other, probably later, polls have only a few hundred votes, but they ask Do
you expect the Eagles to be in Super Bowl again next year? (72% say
yes) and What
do the Eagles need to do to improve? (48% say "Add a strong runner.")
More Philly
News Super Bowl coverage.
In Pitttsburgh, home of the Steelers -- the team the Patriots beat to get
to the Super Bowl -- the wounds have already healed. Detachment reigns in today's Post-Gazette coverage.
At the Eagles' official site, Coach
Andy Reid non-answered
the question about his time-management at the end of the game -- no hurry-up
offense, long huddles, Donovan McNabb's pass to Brian Westbrook in the center
of the field, rather than near the sideline so he could have gone out of bounds
and stopped the clock -- with,
"We did try to get it going. I can't tell you the details, the circumstances,
on why it didn't work as well as it should have."
At ESPN, John Clayton picks
up from there:
...Reid's apparent plan was to save two timeouts for the final two minutes
with the hopes of stopping the Patriots if they failed to get the onside
kick, which was a poor effort by David Akers, floating the ball directly
to Patriots tight end Christian Fauria. But Josh Miller killed any chance
of a Philly comeback by punting the ball to the Eagles 4-yard line with 46
seconds left. They had no shot.
The beleaguered Eagles coach took even more criticism at the end of the
first half. The Eagles, with the scored tied 7-7, had the ball at their 19-yard
line with 1:10 left. Donovan McNabb completed a 10-yard pass to Todd Pinkston,
but Reid didn't call a timeout. The clocked went from 43 seconds to 17. McNabb
hit Pinkston for a 15-yard completion, and Reid called his first timeout
of the half.
Suddenly, the Eagles were at their 41-yard line when maybe they could have
gotten in range for a David Akers field goal. Instead, they ended up having
two unused timeouts and had to answer questions from the media.
"I don't remember that at all, to be honest with you," Reid said
of the halftime question....
We're so glad that he's not ours, and we aren't you today, Eagles fans.
No rest for the weary: At SI.com,
The Drive For Four: Can the Patriots make it four Super Bowl titles
in five years? New England undoubtedly will be the early '05 favorite, but
SI.com's Don Banks says it still faces
five critical offseason issues.
Link
to this item | Comment
