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JAY ROSEN: why I am not journalist, even though I wanted to be.
Look: I was young, I was ignorant, and I didn’t have anyone to consult who could warn me away from the mistake I made. You could say I had bad luck, but I have never seen it that way. I got out of Buffalo and made it to Manhattan. I now have a great job. I contribute to journalism in my own way. And the Church of the Savvy probably would have expelled me in due course.
September 2010 Archives
Worth multiple viewings...
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The Dutch have lower teen pregnancy & STD rates, "Dutch parents...downplay the dangerous and difficult sides of teenage sexuality, tending to normalize it. They speak of readiness (er aan toe zijn), a process of becoming physically and emotionally ready for sex that they believe young people can self-regulate, provided they've been encouraged to pace themselves and prepare adequately. Rather than emphasizing gender battles, Dutch parents talk about sexuality as emerging from relationships and are strikingly silent about gender conflicts. And unlike Americans who are often skeptical about teenagers' capacities to fall in love, they assume that even those in their early teens fall in love. They permit sleepovers, even if that requires an "adjustment" period to overcome their feelings of discomfort, because they feel obliged to stay connected and accepting as sex becomes part of their children's lives."
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Sex advice columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage has launched a YouTube channel called “It Gets Better.” He’s soliciting videos from fans who want to provide support and encouragement to gay teens who face adversity, discrimination and bullying in high school.
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Peter Goodman, until recently the paper's national economic correspondent and now a writer for the Sunday business section, has just signed the deal. And his reasoning helps explain why he would leave the high-profile platform of the Times.
"For me it's a chance to write with a point of view," Goodman says in an interview. "It's sort of the age of the columnist. With the dysfunctional political system, old conventional notions of fairness make it hard to tell readers directly what's going on. This is a chance for me to explore solutions in my economic reporting."
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The activities at the heart of what Wall Street does — selling and trading stocks and bonds, and advising on mergers — are running at levels well below where they were at this point last year, said Meredith Whitney, a bank analyst who was among the first to warn of the subprime mortgage disaster and its impact on big banks.
Worldwide, the number of stock offerings is down 15 percent from this time last year, while bond issuance is off 25 percent, according to Capital IQ, a research firm. Based on these trends, Ms. Whitney predicts that annual revenue from Wall Street’s main businesses will drop 25 percent, to around $42 billion in 2010, from $56 billion last year.
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People who illegally download music from the internet also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey, published today, found that those who admit illegally downloading music spent an average of £77 a year on music – £33 more than those who claim that they never download music dishonestly.
A 10 minute video made entirely of GIFs...
The Girl Talk soundtrack rules, too!
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$40 mos, no contract, "It creates a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot that, because it’s the size of a porky credit card, can go with you everywhere. The MiFi gets its Internet signal from a 3G cellphone network and converts it into a Wi-Fi signal that up to five people can share.
You can just leave the thing in your pocket, your laptop bag or your purse to pump out a fresh Internet signal to everyone within 30 feet, for four hours on a charge of the removable battery. You’re instantly online whenever you fire up your laptop, netbook, Wi-Fi camera, game gadget, iPhone or iPod Touch."
"Perhaps some dark corners of the soul arrive with the human condition; many others emerge in lives that have little in societies where others have lots. After a budget that made the poor poorer, it should be no surprise that some want to see that insight buried. Yet to emerge from stricken times without breaking Britain, The Spirit Level’s inconvenient truths must be faced."
The Spirit Level Review starts, "The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming."
both the Great Depression of the ’30s and the present crisis were immediately preceded by great buildups in inequality. When ordinary people lack the wealth to buy things– houses for example–the system crashes.There’s also a lot of data that show that economic equality conduces, quite literally, to the health of society. The correlation between equality and most measures of well-being is stronger than the correlation between wealth and well-being.
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[A] small but growing body of work [is] focused on the environment — including the physical, social, technological and economic conditions — in which successful innovation occurs. The premise here is that good ideas and their successful execution are a result of connections and existing knowledge embedded in a particular context. The individual, of course, plays an important role, but it is defined more by collaboration than by solitary brilliance.
Two new books, one from each of these two perspectives, take up the gauntlet of explaining successful innovation. In “Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation” (Riverhead, $26.95), Steven Johnson focuses on what he calls “the space of innovation.” Some environments, he writes, “squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly.”
That's almost the reverse of the conversation in Washington, where affluent people who like their jobs propose cutting benefits for the poor (which is, after all, what raising the retirement age would do) rather than lowering benefits or increasing the payroll tax on, well, themselves. Which is not to say that we should be raising taxes or cutting benefits on the better-off, either.
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For a book which concludes that either taxes must rise on the rich or their incomes must fall to increase equality, it was an astonishing level of cross-party support.
But this summer, something has snapped and if The Spirit Level were a punchbag, the stuffing would be coming out at the seams. A posse of rightwing institutes has laid into the work with a wave of brutal attacks.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, academic epidemiologists at Nottingham and York universities respectively, are authors of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.
There is no rightwing conspiracy – this research on inequality is undeniably flawed
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Analyst Michael Gartenberg sums it up nicely on Twitter: "Apple and Google taking two different approaches. Google wants input one. Will never get it. Apple wants input two and might." He's referring to the input jacks on your TV set. Google is trying to replace your cable box or satellite TV box as "input one." That's really ambitious, and a big risk. Apple wants "input two," where your DVD player is today, or your PlayStation. That seems more attainable.
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