Timothy Lesle

Apologies to Joao Silva/New York Times for using their photo. But look: American soldiers walking past a
spray-painted blast wall in Al Awad, Iraq, yesterday.
The first time I voted in a presidential election was in the 2000 election. I was a senior in college in New Hampshire. I voted absentee in Alaska. Before election night, the [...]

When Ted Stevens was found guilty of all seven charges of failing to report gifts last week, the conventional wisdom, at least in the Lower 48, was that the Republicans had lost another Senate seat.
I’m inclined to agree. But with reservations. Because if there’s any place that will surprise you politically (other than Minnesota, maybe), [...]

The news these days is the sort that inspires a lot of confusion, and when there’s confusion, there is no shortage of arm-waving, all-of-a-sudden experts buzzing around. You know what I mean: the street-corner authority: the pedestrian who sees a house on fire or a car accident, and then when anyone asks, “Hey, what’s going [...]

The press is so totally in the tank for the Obama-Biden ticket. “My homeboy”?
What kind of an example does this set for young journalists?

Adorable. He did a good job. But I kept worrying that this would turn into a segment from a program called Wonder Showzen: Beat Kids.

A forward link landed in my e-mail yesterday. It led me to a 13-second lark trying to portray John McCain as Oswald C. Cobblepot, better known as the Penguin, from Batman. You can see it here:

The Penguin is surely one of the more entertaining Batman villains–my favorite, if we’re working from the 1960s television [...]

A few days ago, the Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed toward a brief CNN discussion on how best to call the candidates out. The reporter Candy Crowley prevaricates, pointing out that Obama’s side tells its share of the inaccurate statements about McCain. But Mark Halperin clarifies that McCain’s inaccurate statements are much more central to [...]

Chris Matthews recently interviewed a McCain representative named Nancy Pfotenhauer. He followed up on her answers, and had statistics in hand. He called her out.
If journalism, especially television journalism, was simply meant to provide an outlet for the various sides of a campaign to get their messages out, without any additional probing or challenges–well, [...]

When I was in high school, an especially talented teacher brought the hammer down on all of us idealistic almost-voters. Our votes for president, she told us, wouldn’t count.
Easy for her to say. And not necessarily wrong. We were living in Alaska, which holds a whopping three electoral votes. And those three electoral votes are [...]

Who says politics has devolved into a slideshow? Looks more like it’s the center ring. This was recorded for the WWE, broadcast last night. I guess they really are trying to get that working class white male vote. No more direct route than pro wrestling, right?
 
I like how McCain suggests that he’s “the man.” Hard [...]

The good folks at China Digital Times have pointed us to a documentary by Chen Weijun about an experiment in democracy in Chinese grade school. It’s an amazing piece. With all the electioneering and scheming, you eventually forget that you’re watching a bunch of eight-year-olds in a (nominally) Communist country.

Here’s the YouTube intro: 
In an elementary [...]

Wrote this on Tuesday:
John Peabody has a nice rundown of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s meeting on the surprise withdrawal of Dianne Lynch as incoming dean. She is, and will remain, dean of the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. To recap: Lynch was the favorite candidate among the finalists for [...]

My friend and former colleague Pat Joseph has an article in the latest Virginia Quarterly Review. It’s about the boom (and recent bust) in soy farming in the interior of Brazil.
Well written, all round, but one section I especially liked was about the Brazilian sense that the Americans need not tell them how to live, [...]