Passing Comments

In a concise piece in The Nation online this week, journalism professor Eric Alterman, lists the series of mistakes some “clueless media moguls” are making that, rather than slowing the rapid slide of newspapers into extinction, are ensuring that the demise will happen (”I Read the News Today… Oh Boy” July 16, 2008).

Alterman names some of the bigger villains by name and itemizes errors.

Overall the picture Alterman paints isn’t pretty. Especially depressing is his conclusion that any good ideas to rescue newspapers so far haven’t appeared.

Sure makes me want to believe in that old saw, it’s always darkest before the dawn.

It’s far more than merely interesting to consider that while all the noisy, so often violent events of life are flooding our attention each day, also somewhere, somehow on this earth a person such as the poet Kay Ryan is quietly living her life, quietly, persistently, day by day by day achieving an enduring and nourishing creation to share with her fellow humans.

As a writer for Salon wrote in a review of her work: “With aplomb and wit, Ryan sallies forth against quandaries as immense as the nature of nothingness and as petite as the mechanics of dewdrops rolling off a leaf.”

In an interview in 2004 with The Christian Science Monitor, Ryan is quoted: “‘I’ve tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy,’ she says, explaining that the simpler her routine, the more complex her thinking can be.” (”Poet Kay Ryan: A profile” by Elizabeth Lund, August 25, 2004)

Here are the closing lines of her short poem “Paired Things”: (PoetryFoundation.org)

So many paired things seem odd.
Who ever would have dreamed
the broad winged raven of despair
would quit the air and go
bandylegged upon the ground,
a common crow?

Today Kay Ryan is being named as the new Poet Laureate of the U.S. You can read a sampling of her poems here (”Selected Poems by Kay Ryan” New York Times, July 17, 2008).

A short video here of Ryan reading and talking about her poems (from the Academy of American Poets):

Who’s running the campaign?

They’re helping Obama make the day-to-day decisions about his campaign, they’re the team known as his brain trust. They’re all profiled in another long, informative Rolling Stone article offering a close-up look inside the Democratic Party Presidential nominee’s campaign (”Obama’s Brain Trust” by Tim Dickinson, July 10, 2008)

Talking about Iran and a couple of other things

Last week when Iran officials sent out saber-rattling photos of test launches of their missiles, the U.S. media immediately asked Obama for his reaction. See summary and seven-minute video of Obama’s response here (”Obama’s Iran TV Show Tour: More Diplomacy” The Huffington Post, July 9, 2008).

What is “outrage activism” and why is it so popular now?

Activist and Presidential race blogger Al Giordano harshly criticizes the “outrage activism” now so popular in the U.S. (”The Sky Didn’t Fall” The Field, July 10, 2008).

Getting out of Iraq

In yesterday’s New York Times, Obama wrote an op-ed about his proposed timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq (”My Plan for Iraq” by Barack Obama, July 14, 2008).

You can please some of the people…*

In the past couple of weeks, Obama drew a lot of criticism from supporters and critics alike for some recent policy decisions. In this commentary piece from the Oxford University Press blog, a political science scholar offers his views on Obama’s new “flip flopping” (”The Anti-Intellectual Candidates” by Elvin Lim, July 14, 2008).

English only not a good thing

We should have every child speaking more than one language, Obama said during a campaign speech last week.

“It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here. They all speak English, they speak French, they speak German, and then we go over to Europe and all we can say is Merci beaucoup.”

The Democratic Party nominee won a laugh but he was serious. Watch short short video here.

“Yes We Can” global style

Featuring one hundred people, and twenty-three languages, this video below offers tribute to Obama’s famous Yes We Can speech and to the original, megahit tribute video by will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas:

A new citizen journalism website is now fully online, and it’s one of the most interesting and ambitious such ventures that I’ve seen. Allvoices.com describes itself as the “first true people’s media.”

Excerpt from its mission statement:

It’s a place where individuals from all over the world can share what is happening where they are (location) at a particular point in time. Allvoices then brings together multiple voices or points of view via news stories, videos, images and blogs from the Internet, to provide context and build momentum. The platform provides the community with the ability to search and navigate a news event by location and category, to share and to have a discussion around it, to emotionally connect with each other’s perspectives and complete the human story.

Especially fascinating and helpful, I think, is an interactive world map displayed across the top of the home page. Posted with hyperlinked circles and stars in various locations on the map, it allows the viewer, if interested, to click and easily review what’s currently being posted.

How does it work?

Allvoices is an open, unedited and unmediated site. Every voice (contribution) is automatically checked for spam and relevance to the news event. A contribution is not edited and is posted as is as long as it is relevant to the news event. The relevance is checked by our algorithms and technology - not humans.

The whole idea behind adding a voice to an existing news event is to get the discussion going. It can be as simple as sharing an emotion or a comment.

The team behind Allvoices is impressive. It includes business, communications and IT professionals, and also some Computer Science professors from Northwestern University.

Summing up its mission, the Allvoices website states:

Allvoices was started by passionate people who believe that everyone has a story worth telling, sharing that story can be the first step in changing lives. Allvoices redefines the voice of people through the global community for sharing current news events and issues from multiple points of view, providing an emotional connection to each other’s perspectives.

At it’s core, Allvoices is about democracy. About giving power to people. About their voices having the effect that makes a difference.

(I came across the link to Allvoices on the Editors Weblog site.)

This Allvoices video below powerfully demonstrates once again that a picture can be worth a thousand words:

Barack Obama continues to raise money for his U.S. Presidential campaign in ever-astounding, record-busting, supersized numbers. How exactly he does this and, just as important, how the techies and entrepreneurs of the Silicon Valley are playing the key role in helping him are topics explored in an article last month in The Atlantic magazine (”The Amazing Money Machine” by Joshua Green, June, 2008).

What is the exact amount of the money that Obama and his team of supporters are bringing in from donors? For the month of last February alone, the figure reached was “the staggering $55 million—nearly $2 million a day,” according to the article.

As is pointed out, however, in the last sentence of this paragraph from the report, another theme of Obama’s campaign is equally revolutionary:

In a sense, Obama represents a triumph of campaign-finance reform. He has not, of course, gotten the money out of politics, as many proponents of reform may have wished, and he will likely forgo public financing if he becomes the nominee. But he has realized the reformers’ other big goal of ending the system whereby a handful of rich donors control the political process. He has done this not by limiting money but by adding much, much more of it—democratizing the system by flooding it with so many new contributors that their combined effect dilutes the old guard to the point that it scarcely poses any threat. Goren­berg says he’s still often asked who the biggest fund-raisers are. He replies that it is no longer possible to tell. “Any one of them could wind up being huge,” he says, “because it no longer matters how big a check you can write; it matters how motivated you are to reach out to others.”

When it comes to non-verbal communication — in contrast to the verbal versions — it may be that nothing is lost in translation, according to a NewScientist online article about a recent study by linguists on how we use hand gestures (”Charades reveals a universal sentence structure” by Ewen Callaway, June 30, 2008).

• Audition

Michelle Obama debuts on popular US daytime talk show (”‘The View’: Michelle Obama on Hillary Clinton, sexism and the vice presidency” by Sheigh Crabtree,  Los Angeles Times,  June 18, 2008).

Full 24-minute version here.

• Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes*

Brief analysis of some recent policy choices by Obama (”Will ‘Experience’ Hurt Obama?” by Jay Newton-Small, TIME magazine, June 24, 2008).

• Cover story

Q&A and 97 photos (”A Conversation With Barack Obama” by Jann S. Wenner, Rolling Stone, July 10, 2008).

• A rose by any other name…*

New ways against old smears (”Obama Supporters Take His Middle Name as Their Own”by Jodi Kantor, New York Times, June 29, 2008).

It’s not difficult to find a lot of discussion online and elsewhere these days about the current rapid decline of newspapers in the U.S. and elsewhere. It’s also not too difficult to find a lot of blame being tossed around at times in those discussions about who or what is at fault.

Writing recently in his regular column for L’espresso, however, Umberto Eco says it’s not anyone’s fault, no more than the hole in the ozone is. The decline of newspapers is a result of our technological development, according to Eco, and it’s just a fact. But, he adds, it’s an embarrassing one (”Parlare in ritardo” La Bustina di Minerva, April 17, 2008). Note - in Italian only.

Describing what the newspaper has become these days, Eco writes:

Così il giornale diventa come una serata in famiglia, dove il nonno ripete per la milionesima volta la storia di quando aveva subito i bombardamenti, il babbo snocciola i suoi luoghi comuni sulla situazione economica, poi si parla un po’ male del vicino notoriamente cornuto, o si commenta la trasmissione televisiva appena vista. Niente di male, anzi bellissima situazione di socializzazione, ma non era questa, all’inizio degli inizi, la funzione delle gazzette, finestre che di colpo e inopinatamente si spalancavano ogni mattina sull’imprevisto.

(Translation, roughly: Just so the newspaper becomes like spending an evening with the family, where the grandfather repeats for the umpteenth time the story of when he was caught under a bombing attack, the father rattles off his usual opinions on the economic situation, then there is some mildly unkind talk about a neighbor who is notoriously being cheated on, or comments about a television program that was just watched. Nothing bad, on the contrary, a wonderful social situation but this wasn’t, at the very beginning, the function of the newspapers (which were) windows suddenly and unexpectedly thrown open each morning on the unforeseen.)

If this excerpt whets your appetite to read more Eco, I also found this reprint of an interview (in English) he gave to a reporter in New York last December (Interview with Umberto Eco, “The Armani of Italian literature,” Umberto Eco talks to Ben Naparstek, Dec 8, 2007, The Sydney Morning Herald).

• Smackdown?

One day after becoming the Democratic Party’s nominee, Senator Obama reportedly read the riot act (wild applause!) to one wayward Senator in particular (”Obama Confronts Lieberman On McCain Advocacy, Tone, on Senate Floor” ABC News, June 05, 2008), read here:

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the self-described “Independent Democrat” who caucuses with the Democratic party in the Senate even though he has endorsed Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, got some tough talk from Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, yesterday…

More on this, plus some, from DailyKos here.

• Losing the press

Article about how Senator Obama and Senator Clinton eluded press corps and photographers in getting together for their first, post-primaries meeting (”Two Rivals Sneak Away to Meet, and the Hunt Is On” The New York Times, June 7, 2008). As a first, major indicator of changin’ times, note the beginning words of the third line of this paragraph:

Finally, as Mr. Obama was headed back to Chicago on a private plane and Mrs. Clinton had returned to her home, another rarity took place. A joint statement was issued by representatives of the two senators, but sent out by Mr. Obama’s staff. Those words, perhaps, were the first cooperative undertaking since the presidential race began six seasons ago.

• How she lost it
  

A fascinating 10-minute video report looking back at “the Democratic primary battle and what went wrong for Hillary Rodham Clinton” from two staffers at The New York Times here (June 4, 2008).

• Obama behind the scenes

A video (below) giving an inside look at a relaxed Senator Obama talking to campaign staffers when he returned home to Chicago on Friday after clinching the nomination.

With a nod to the lyric in an old Carpenters song , yes, it’s a fine, fun thing linkin’ to myself, my own article, for a change. It’s in yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor (Artichokes transformed” by Rebecca Helm-Ropelato, June 4, 2008).

My intro:

Ladispoli, Italy - Until recently, artichokes as a vegetable had been a great disappointment to me.

Even has photos and recipes.

One of the most witty, interesting, and accurate of the political blogs tracking the U.S. Presidential race this year is The Field by political organizer and reporter Al Giordano.

Yesterday,  as Senator Barack Obama was crossing the finish line to become the Democratic Party’s nominee, Giordano particularly enjoyed celebrating the triumph. He posted a variety of entertaining commentary and music videos.

One of the posts, “Live Blogging the Clinch,” features a video of Maria Callas singing versions of Carmen´s Habanera:

It’s a rare and up close look at the Congo and its people and their struggles today in the aftermath of the numerous wars there. It was broadcast in early April on the equally rare and remarkable American television program, “Bill Moyers Journal.”

Intro to the two part series:

THE JOURNAL takes viewers on the ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to follow aid workers and local relief efforts that are bringing hope to a forgotten land. “The aid agencies are almost substituting for a social welfare system that hasn’t operated in these areas for decades,” says Dominic MacSorley, Emergency Director for Concern Worldwide, an international aid organization.

Part I, above (25:30). Part two (18:17) is here.

A full transcript in English of the documentary series accompanies the videos.

The major Internet portal in China, SINA, announced yesterday that its English news site is now online. The recent massive earthquake in the country determined the timing, according to the press release:

It was truly a massive tragedy. We have chosen to launch our English news site now as we would like to provide up-to-minute coverage of the earthquake for overseas people who are concerned about the tragedy and easy access for those who wish to show their love and care or make their contributions.” said Charles Chao, President and CEO of SINA. “Over the longer term, we intend to make this site a window for international communities to have an easy access to China related information and to have better understanding about modern China.

Content on the SINA site is similar in format to that of Western online newspapers, including video and photos. Read the Guardian story here (”Chinese news site launches in English” by Jemima Kiss, May 19, 2008).

I found the link to this article at The Editors Weblog.org.

Yesterday’s Boston Globe had an article reviewing some new scholarly studies and opinion about why women seem to be avoiding en masse certain science and engineering careers (”The freedom to say ‘no” by Elaine McArdle, May 18, 2008).

Anyone who’s curious about this particular situation probably will find this article of interest. I was especially struck by a finding described in this paragraph midway or so in this longish piece:

Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don’t do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts. They can become scientists, but can succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can.

Read the whole piece here. I found the link to this article at the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) website.

The researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science want a whole bunch of Good Samaritan type game players to log on to a new website they’ve created so as to give a little assist to their computers. I found out about this free fun zone at Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type blog from a post last week (”Von Ahn’s Gwap” May 16, 2008):

The site, called Gwap (an acronym for “games with a purpose”), is the brainchild of computer scientist Luis von Ahn (who also cofathered the Captcha). “We have games that can help improve Internet image and audio searches, enhance artificial intelligence and teach computers to see,” he explains. “But that shouldn’t matter to the players because it turns out these games are super fun.”

I clicked on to the Gwap site with the firm intention of spending five minutes checking out what was what. An hour and a half later, I broke away. Word to the wise, that’s all.

The Rough Type post has the breakdown of the various games here.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) founder Nicholas Negroponte is taking some heat from critics who are accusing him of selling out his principles in making a deal with Microsoft, according to an ars technica article yesterday (”Former security director blasts OLPC, suggests new strategy” by Ryan Paul, May 15, 2008).

The deal, described in an article today in the New York Times, was announced yesterday and provides for Microsoft’s Windows to be offered on all OLPC’s low low cost computers (”Microsoft Joins Effort for Laptops for Children” by Steve Lohr, May 16, 2008). In reference to the agreement with Microsoft, Negroponte said, according to the article, that the government officials of the countries whose poor children OLPC is trying to reach “are much more comfortable with Windows” (as an operating system for the computers).

In another piece in ars technica, also today, Negroponte is also speaking for himself about what his primary motive was in forming the alliance with Microsoft (”OLPC and Microsoft will make Windows available on XO” by Ryan Paul, May 16, 2008):

“From the beginning, the goal of OLPC has been to use technology to transform education by bringing connectivity and constructionist learning to the poorest children throughout the world,” said OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte in a statement. “Today’s announcement, coupled with future plans for a dual boot version of the XO laptop, enhances our ability to deliver on this vision.

So another way (in my opinion) of looking at Negroponte’s decision to go with Microsoft could be that he simply is keeping his eye on the ball — meaning his goal of getting computers into the hands of the millions and millions of poor children across the globe as soon as possible. Whatever it takes.

The inventor of the Internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, wants to help its users protect themselves from the lowlifes online who are trying to hide who they really are and what they’re really up to.

To fund this project, he plans to use the money coming to him as one of 16 winners named yesterday of the Knight News Challenge award, according to an article in InformationWeek (”Sir Tim Berners-Lee To Track Origins Of Digital Content” by K.C. Jones, May 14, 2008).

Jones’ intro:

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has received a grant to create a technology that will give users more information about the origins and sources of digital content.

As Jones notes, this is one of the biggest challenges of the moment in relation to the Internet. Read more here.

Last month, in an article in the Telegraph on the same subject, Berners-Lee discussed various aspects of the problem of “cyber imposters,” and his hope to find a solution (”Technology could be used to protect youngsters from internet predators,” by Tom Peterkin, April 30, 2008).

Zucchero — from Daily Motion:

A justifiable rage:

You don’t have to be cynical to do foreign policy, but it helps. A sigh of relief rose over the west’s chancelleries on Monday as it became clear that the Chinese earthquake was big - big enough to trump Burma’s cyclone.

Read more here (”As Burma dies, our macho invaders sit on their hands” by Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, May 14, 2008).

Kosmopolit is “a blog about politics and culture from a European perspective.” Last week the website posted the trailer for a new TV documentary about the Balkans. (”Return to Europe - A journey of discovery” May 5, 2008).

The documentary takes a look at how the Balkan people are recovering from the recent wars there, and how this European area is becoming a “region of hope.”

Read more about the documentary here.

That this so-named, younger generation has the potential and some very good reasons to solve a lot of problems now ongoing in the U.S. is the possibility posed and discussed by Bob Herbert in his column today in the New York Times (”Here Come the Millennials” by Bob Herbert, May 13, 2008).

Which segment of the American population are they, precisely? As Herbert writes:

The number of young people in the millennial generation (loosely defined as those born in the 1980s and 90s) is somewhere between 80 million and 95 million.

Reading these stats piqued my curiosity about the size of that other humongous segment of Americans, the baby boomers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, we amount to 78.2 million (as of July 2005).

From Slow Food, a short film — “We are what we lost” (Srdan Mitrovic):

In his keynote speech opening ROFLCon, held late last month at MIT, David Weinberger talks about fame. (For background on ROFLCon, see Guardian article here)

Teaser quotes from video:

Blogging is all about taking off the make-up… perfection is now the enemy of credibility… we are ceasing to believe that which is too perfect…

On a list of best website ideas of all time, I would be surprised if the Internet Archive didn’t rank right up there near the top. It describes itself so:

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

The website is particularly wellknown for its feature, The Wayback Machine. It archives versions of websites, thus allowing viewers to see old presentations of sites as well as the current ones. This last week, the website also was in the news after it won a major battle with the FBI over a privacy issue, as reported in The Washington Post here.

Helpful hint: Exploring Internet Archive can take a while. Since its launch in 1996, it already has archived 85 billion web pages (see here).

So an entry into this website can turn quickly into a gargantuan, kaleidoscopic treasure hunt. An example, as I was noodling around through the site, I came across what I consider to be a golden nugget, Fred Astaire’s Royal Wedding. The website allows you to view the classic, old movie online, or download it. You also can embed it in a website (see below).

Royal Wedding (1951) starring Fred Astaire and Jane Powell (1 hour, 31 minutes)

The missing ingredient in European culture is risk-taking, according to a post yesterday in the InformationWeek blog (”Where Is Europe’s Google?” by Andrew Conry-Murray, May 8, 2008).

The post focuses on a recently published book by Hervé Lebret, “Start-Up: What We Can Learn from Silicon Valley” (Nov 2007).

Summarizing the issue, Conry-Murray writes:

London may be eclipsing Wall Street as the world financial capital, and the euro is trouncing the dollar, but Europe has yet to prove the equal of the United States in technological innovation.

Author and engineer Hervé Lebret thinks he knows why. “There is a risk culture that’s missing. We don’t have an environment to be more ambitious and risk-taking.”

Another place where you can read a discussion with Lebret about his ideas on innovation, and about his book and its primary purpose, is a recent Q&A interview, “Entrepreneurship in Europe: Alumnus brings Silicon Valley culture across the Atlantic,” on Stanford University’s School of Engineering website (April 24, 2008).

Certainly should be, according to the Guardian’s political columnist Polly Toynbee. With its new constitution, to be ratified later this year, Europe is about to get its first-ever fulltime president.

Writing about the prospect this month in E Sharp, Toynbee runs through the short list of names up for the job (after first dismissing the chances of Tony Blair), and then poses the forgotten question (”Another Angle” by Polly Toynbee, May-June, 2008):

So what of the other runners and riders most often touted for the job? A trawl through names mentioned most frequently throws up these: Jean-Claude Juncker (Luxembourg), Anders Fogh Rasmussen (Denmark), José Manuel Barroso (Portugal), Aleksander Kwasniewski (Poland), Guy Verhofstadt (Belgium), Carl Bildt (Sweden) and Bertie Ahern (Ireland), whose resignation may now have ruled him out. But have you spotted the one overwhelming disqualification they all have? They are all men, every one of them. No doubt when Henry Kissinger famously asked, “Who do I call when I call Europe?” he assumed he’d be calling a man. But of course the new president must be a woman. No doubt about it — and here’s why.

After explaining her rationale, Toynbee then names the woman she considers the best candidate. That choice is Sweden’s Margot Wallstrom, currently vice-president of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. Here’s why, she says:

She (Wallstrom) knows the EU institutions inside out, so is already better qualified for the job than most of the men on the list above. She wants the job, she deserves the job and has the nerve to step forward and say so.

Read more here (PDF file).

Here’s a video of Wallstrom being interviewed last fall from the European Union channel on YouTube:

The blog post is aptly titled “Why The ‘Right’ Gets Net Neutrality Wrong,” and it reviews this individual freedom issue both from an historical perspective and as it is today (Art Brodsky, May 2, 2008, Public Knowledge).

The info couldn’t be more timely. Tomorrow, a House subcommittee is scheduled to begin a hearing on Net Neutrality legislation.

An excerpt from Brodsky’s blog:

Perhaps the worst argument from conservatives about Net Neutrality is that “pervasive regulation,” as former FCC Commissioner Rachelle Chong called it, would somehow be such a burden to the poor, deprived telephone and cable companies that their incentives to invest and to innovate would just dry up. Opponents of an open Internet conjure up images of parents unable to protect their children, of government setting up business models, of companies unable to manage their networks.

Those tired-winged canards don’t quack here. Net Neutrality is neither pervasive nor burdensome. It allows for innovation and investment. It allows for telephone companies to sell different levels of service to different customers. Parents can still protect their children. What it doesn’t allow is discrimination. That’s why Michele Combs from the Christian Coalition supports an open Internet, and she is brave and correct to do so in the face of uninformed criticism of her fellow “conservatives.”

Read more here.

(I found the link to the article on The Huffington Post)

Linux, the superstar of open source software, “has shifted from being a volunteer effort to being a corporate initiative,” writes Nicholas Carr in his blog ROUGH TYPE (”Open source as corporate joint venture” April 21, 2008).

Quoting from a recent Linux Foundation report, Carr reports:

Of the many thousands of changes that have been made to the Linux kernel over the past three years, fully 73.2% came from employees working on behalf of their companies. (Three companies - Red Hat, Novell, and IBM - accounted for 28.4% of all the changes.) Only 13.9% of the changes came from volunteers without a corporate affiliation, and the remaining 12.9% of changes came from developers whose affiliation is unknown.

Read all about it here.

In the Financial Times this week, writer Pico Iyer uses words to create an unusually close-up and revealing picture of the human being who is the Dalai Lama (”The ascent of a man” by Pico Iyer, May 1 2008).

Iyer’s article is based on some rare perspectives, the most prominent being, as he writes, that he has been “talking to the Dalai Lama and visiting him in his home-in-exile in the British-built hill station of Dharamsala, northern India, for 33 years now.”

Two paragraphs from the piece:

I am surprised to find him much more realistic and persuasive than almost all the politicians I’ve met, some of whom stress the future, some of whom speak for the past. “Dream – nothing!” the Dalai Lama said when I was with him in Hiroshima 18 months ago. Do not wait or pray for a miracle; do something that might make your life and the lives of others a little better right now.

The world wants, at times, to place the Dalai Lama on a mountain top, but he has never had such a luxury and seems always in our midst, trying to remind us that we change the world by changing how we look at it. And to point out that suffering (the day-to-day reality of the world) is not unhappiness (the way we choose to respond to it).

Read more here.

I’m reaching back into March for this essay by Jonathan Raban in the London Review of Books, but it’s a retrieval well worth the doing (”Diary” March 20, 2008). Here, the extraordinary Raban captures Obama and his appeal as no one else has, that I’ve read:

As an example, two paragraphs:

Those who hear only empty optimism in Obama aren’t listening. His routine stump speech is built on the premise that America has become estranged from its own essential character; a country unhinged from its constitution, feared and disliked across the globe, engaged in a dumb and unjust war, its tax system skewed to help the rich get richer and the poor grow poorer, its economy in ‘shambles’, its politics ‘broken’. ‘Lonely’ is a favourite word, as he conjures a people grown lonely in themselves and lonely as a nation in the larger society of the world. (Obama himself is clearly on intimate terms with loneliness: Dreams from My Father is the story of a born outsider negotiating a succession of social and cultural frontiers; it takes the form of a lifelong quest for family and community, and ends, like a Victorian novel, with a wedding.)

The light in Obama’s rhetoric – the chants of ‘Yes, we can’ or his woo-woo line, lifted from Maria Shriver’s endorsement speech, ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’ – is in direct proportion to the darkness, and he paints a blacker picture of America than any Democratic presidential candidate in living memory has dared to do. He courts his listeners, not as legions of the blissful, but as legions of the alienated, adrift in a country no longer recognisable as their own, and challenges them to emulate slaves in their struggle for emancipation, impoverished European immigrants seeking a new life on a far continent, and soldiers of the ‘greatest generation’ who volunteered to fight Fascism and Nazism. The extravagance of these similes is jarring – especially when they’re spoken by a writer as subtle and careful as Obama is on the printed page – but they serve to make the double point that America is in a desperate predicament and that only a great wave of communitarian action can salvage it.

Read more here.

Lyrics here.

Yesterday, Germany’s Der Spiegel (SPIEGEL ONLINE International) ran a fascinating piece about the hows and whys, and what’s yet to come in the ongoing, lopsided relationship between the dollar and the euro.

Writing about the Federal Reserve in the U.S. and the European Central Bank, Christian Reiermann offers a snapshot comparison of the two men in charge of them, and a history of how the contrasting philosophies of the two institutions came to be (”KEEP CALM AND DON’T PANIC” April 29,2008).

The article’s intro:

Never before have the central banks of the United States and Europe pursued such divergent strategies when it comes to dealing with a financial crisis. The increased value of the euro against the dollar reveals which strategy is working.

Reiermann writes in clear, straightforward prose that illuminates a subject that’s often presented — at least for mere mortals –as if it’s organic chemistry poorly translated from the original Swahili. Grazie!

Read more here.

An article last week in InformationWeek online highlights some gloomy numbers for recent sales of Microsoft’s Windows operating system (”Microsoft Windows Sales Plunge 24% Amid Rising Competition” by Paul McDougall, April 25, 2008):

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) on Thursday revealed that sales of licenses for its desktop Windows operating systems fell 24% in the company’s fiscal third quarter, a sign that the Redmond’s stranglehold on the PC market is weakening as new competitors emerge.

Microsoft posted revenue from all desktop versions of Windows of $4 billion for the three months ended March 31, compared with Windows sales of $5.3 billion during the same period a year earlier.

Read more here.

Today the blogger writing as Hunter on DailyKos offers an acerbic and (painfully) funny list of “Lessons Learned” from the U.S. Presidential primary campaign that is now well into its third millennium.

A sample:

In a race that includes a former First Lady of the United States and a multimillionaire Republican senator rumored to share up to eight residences with his wife, the black guy from Chicago is unforgivably elitist.

Racism in America is caused primarily by black Chicago preachers.

Complete list here.

Last week, Beacon Broadside website printed an excerpt from the essay “My Green Manifesto” by David Gessner. Below I’ve excerpted from Beacon’s excerpt. If you want to read Gassner’s full essay, you can find it here.

In Manifesto, Gessner himself excerpts one of his earlier essays:

The essay came about when, after throwing a book against a wall in which the author had droned on serenely about “being the present moment” and “living in the natural woods,” I went for a walk on my unnatural beach carrying my unnatural micro-cassette recorder, into which I spoke the beginnings of an essay. When the essay was later published it began exactly the way I spoke it that day as I tramped along the beach:

I am sick of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean.

Of course I wasn’t really sick of the natural world, just of the way some writers chose to portray it. I was sick of the hushed voice, sick of the saintliness, sick of the easy notions of the perfectibility of man, sick of the apocalyptic robes, sick of the scolding. But most of all I was sick of the certainty that seemed to ooze out of the words. Writers certain that they knew what would happen in the world and certain that they knew how to be in that world and certain that they should tell us these things. The odd thing was that, for all their certainty, the world they described didn’t sound much at all like the world I happened to live in.

A team of scientists studying the barks of dogs have concluded that when a dog is barking because it’s lonely versus barking when a stranger wanders along, other dogs can tell the difference, according to a story today in New Scientist (”Dog’s bark means more than its bite” by Ewen Callaway, April 2008).

Okay. (But any dog owner could have told them that, if they’d just asked). Good they’re finally catching on, though.

EIAA (European Interactive Advertising Association) reported this month that adults living with children spend more time online than adults in households without minors. The findings about online trends in Europe are from EIAA’s first ever “Digital Families” report, according to the media trade organization.

“Almost three-quarters (73%) of people living with children are logging on to the internet each week, compared with only half (52%) of those without,” the EIAA report reveals.

Overall, digital parents are ramping up their web time, spending 11.6 hours online each week (up 36% since 2004) and over a quarter are heavy users of the internet (27%). Digital families are also more likely than those households without children to use the internet at the weekends (58% vs. 40%).

This online activity has meant that digital families are consuming other media less as a result of the internet – 44% of digital parents are watching less TV, almost a third read fewer magazines and newspapers (31% and 30% respectively) and almost a quarter (24%) listen to the radio less.

Read more about the study here.

Weep, probably, judging by some conclusions in a series of articles beginning today in Advertising Age. Taking a look at the ongoing decline of newspapers, the report focuses on what’s being done to forestall collapse (”The Newspaper Death Watch” by Nat Ives, April 28, 2008).

One expert quoted in the article predicts that newspapers will survive only about 20 to 25 more years:

Of course, newspaper owners aren’t going to just give up and wait — and that’s why Ad Age is launching this series about the 1,437 dailies still working hard in the U.S. It’ll look at the thought leaders in the industry, their attempts to leave the past — and even formats — behind and their strategies for finding new business models.

(Link to this story came from mediabistro.com).

Each month, TateShots posts some videos online focusing on modern and contemporary art exhibitions at The Tate in London. Last month, artists Paul Harrison and John Wood were featured talking about the ideas behind some of their works. The duo are described by TateShots as “an art-world equivalent to Laurel and Hardy.”

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s recently-released, first solo album “Gurrumul” has shot to the top of mainstream music charts in Australia. The 37-year-old musician, who was born blind, is now outselling major stars such as Mariah Carey, according to the International Herald Tribune (”Aboriginal musician astonishes Australian audiences” by Tim Johnston, April 22, 2008).

This video featuring Yunupingu is from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica (Italian text, in translation, paraphrased):

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu sings in the language of his native Aboriginal tribe, Yolngu, and recounts the difficulties of his people.