One of the interesting results of the retraction of This American Life’s Mike Daisey monologue on the Foxconn factory in China is the shoulda/coulda/woulda-ing of the press corps, particularly those who have some experience covering tech, China, and/or Mike Daisey. After hearing the original broadcast, Marketplace’s China correspondent thought some of the details were odd, [...]
I’ve been reading a lot of good things about Jack Shafer. Most, it seems, can be written in fewer than 140 characters. Nothing wrong with that! Among the people I follow on Twitter, a perhaps unsurprising number of accomplished journalists have worked with—and owe significant aspects of their career to— Jack. I haven’t worked with [...]
Why? Because he wrote a very similar piece a while back. You can read it here: The Toiletization of the West Both Shane Bauer’s and today’s piece by Daniel Lametti in Slate share many of the same ideas: the Sikirov research, the first-world/third-world toilet divide, the physiological contortions spurred by modern toiletry, and of course [...]
I suspect not. Lynn Hirschberg’s final celebrity profile for the NYT Magazine knocks the musician M.I.A. down a notch or two on the credibility scale. M.I.A., aka Maya Arulpragasam, comes across as possibly well-meaning, but also self-righteous and misguided. (And reminds us of how much we love the term “radical chic.”) Hirschberg includes little observations [...]
When trains cross certain borders—entering China from Mongolia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, for example—they have to stop and change wheels. The wheel assemblies, called trucks or bogies, used on trains in Mongolia (and Belarus and Kazakhstan and pretty much all of the old Russian Empire) won’t work in China. These two countries have different rail [...]
Last week, with June 4 marking the 20th anniversary of the crackdown on the student protests in Tiananmen Square, Chinese officials blocked filming around Tiananmen by physically blocking shots. Below, the experience of BBC’s Beijing correspondent. Umbrellas are one of the things I remember from Korea, Japan and China. As a boy, I think I [...]
Inevitably, I will post at least one of the seemingly numerous videos available of Ira Glass telling people how to tell stories. But until then, I’ll stick with the video below. It’s a clip from a Woody Allen film. If you haven’t seen his Hannah and Her Sisters, I’m spoiling things a bit by putting [...]
Freeman Dyson is a global warming skeptic. This should not come as a surprise. Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine featured a profile of the physicist, now in his 80s, as its cover story. He’s been ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Study for the last several decades. I liked the piece. There are [...]
On Monday morning, I got to see a glimmer of Bloomberg’s San Francisco office. The office, on the second floor of a converted pier on the Embarcadero, was highlighted in August 2007 as the largest leasing deal to come along in San Francisco since the dot-com boom eight years earlier. At the time, the media [...]
This little news piece from 1981 is making the rounds. As the reporter notes, “this is only the first step in newspapers by computer”: So many things to love here: the “estimated two to three thousand home computer owners in the Bay Area” the newspaper guy saying “and we’re not in it to make money. [...]
A few days ago, the AP’s Daisy Nguyen published a report on the trend of building suburban-style developments around the world. Developers in China and India and Africa are looking to Southern California (pictured above, partially) for a growth model. While this should be alarming to anyone concerned about resources and climate change (and willing, [...]
Television news tends to hide the credits for stories. Take this little report from Coney Island: Although the story is dominated by the so-called “talent,” the story was pitched, shot, and structured by Sonia Narang, who has a year-long fellowship at NBC. She produced it. (If you want to hear funny stories about your favorite [...]
No problem. Let me know if you have any questions. 
