On The Moth storytelling podcast, the great Lewis Lapham reminisces about his first job, covering Oakland City Hall for the San Francisco Examiner in an era when reporters wore hats. Featuring The Horny Photographer, The One-Legged Woman, and The Unencumbered Widow. Hat tip: Silas....
Writing on the US website The Daily Beast, Ottawa patent consultant and occasional Globe and Mail columnist Sheema Khan condemns Quebec Premier Jean Charest's bill to ban the traditional Muslim niqab. In a stand reminiscent of Maurice Duplessis's Grande Noirceur, Charest would ban religious veils on grounds they "subjugate" women. Khan, who holds a PhD in physics from Harvard, nails the double-standard at play: The most vehement reactions against face-veiling have come from women, who have projected their own fears, assumptions, and judgments onto attire worn by a minority within a minority. They think of the bad old...
Former reporters turn up in the darndest places. Alan Jeffers, erstwhile ink-stained wretch for the Chronicle-Herald and Canadian Press, turned up this week on the website of Mother Jones, the "smart, fearless" left-wing American magazine once edited by Michael Moore. Jeffers was defending his current employer, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, from claims in both MoJo and Forbes Magazine, a rather more conservative journal, that it paid no US income tax in 2009 despite earnings of *cough* US$19.3 billion. And a fine job he did. In case you were wondering, $19.3 billion is enough to put a new Cadillac...
The appalling Wikileaks video showing a US helicopter gunship mowing down a group of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, two children, and a pair of Good Samaritans whose only offense was to come to the aid of a badly injured man, continues to provoke reaction. Reader Cliff White writes: You can't help wondering after watching that terrible video if killing has just become a game to those soldiers in the helicopter. It's both terribly disturbing and dismaying to listen to their casual banter as they go about their "work". Even when they learn that children have been injured it's no big...
Complex systems, writes Clay Shirky, have a habit of collapsing catastrophically, and that, he says, is the best way to understand what's happened to big media since the arrival of the Internet. About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now. To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the...
Yale University has banned all sexual relationships between faculty and students. According to the Yale Alumni Magazine, the new rule extends a previous ban that applied only when the faculty member had "direct pedagogical or supervisory responsibilities" over the student. Now all undergrads are off limits. Yale is a bit slow clambering aboard the sex panic bandwagon. When Dean Henry Rosovsky sought to impose a similar rule at Harvard in 1983, Prof. John Kenneth Galbraith reacted with a confession: [caption id="attachment_4928" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Kitty and Ken Galbraith, wayward couple"][/caption] Just over forty-five years ago, already a well-fledged member of the...
The New York Times has an excellent interactive graphic showing the underground layout of the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia, where at least 25 miners died in a methane explosion Monday. The Times also detailed the Massey Energy Company's dismal safety record: In 2008, one of its subsidiaries paid what federal prosecutors called the largest settlement in the history of the coal industry after pleading guilty to safety violations that contributed to the deaths of two miners in a fire in one of its mines. That year, Massey also paid a $20 million fine — the largest of its...
Received a note this morning from Colin Doyle in Osaka saying Contrarian was working just fine in Japan. Alas, within hours, an even more severe breakdown set in. Hostpapa's own systems were down throughout the day, so beleaguered help desk agents couldn't even get in to see what might be wrong with the servers that run Contrarian and CBFilm.ca. This is one of North America's biggest (and, I say again, normally most reliable) hosting companies, so the Oakville offices must have been going nuts. Service came back early this evening, and seems to be brisk once again. Let's hope the...
Some reaction to yesterday's Wikileak disclosure of horrific footage from an American helicopter gunship mowing down unarmed* civilians, as crewmen gloated over the killings. James Fallows: I can't pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again...
Over the last two days, Contrarian readers in Halifax, Sydney, and England have reported that the website is loading slowly or not at all. HostPapa, my normally reliable hosting service, confirmed tonight that the server is responding slowly. The customer service rep has escalated the problem to the technicians who work on Hostpapa's servers. I hope they fix it soon. Apologies for the inconvenience. In most cases, apparently, if you are patient, the page will eventually load. The strange thing is, it works perfectly here at Kempt Head. (And yes, I appreciate the fecklessness of using a website people can't load...