That's not my headline. It's the hed on the New York Times' hilarious obituary of the founder of Screw magazine. Long before the internet brought newspapers to their knees, the industry suffered plenty of self-inflicted damage. Among the unnecessary wounds I would place the decision by big newspaper chains to turn obituaries into paid advertisements. The result has been a stream of unctuous prose authored by funeral directors and family members rendered inarticulate by grief. One of the glories of the New York Times is the standard it continues to uphold in this magnificent genre. Witness today's delicious piece on Goldstein: Mr. Goldstein did...

19 December, 2013

As recounted here last August, John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, bought another great Boston institution, the Boston Globe, for just $70 million. That's $1.13 billion less than the New York Times paid for it 20 years ago. The Times retained the paper's $110 million in pension liabilities, so you could say the price was negative $40 million. So grim are the economics of newspapering in the 21st Century, lots of industry watchers thought Henry was nuts. Late last month, he took to the paper's editorial page to explain what motivated him. I have been asked repeatedly in recent weeks why...

12 November, 2013

Please read journalist Peter Maass's spellbinding account of how reporter/polemicist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras collaborated in bringing to light NSA leaker Edward J. Snowden's disclosures about massive illegal spying by the US Government. Seriously, if you read nothing else this week, do read this richly detailed, 10,000-word account of how Snowden made contact with Poitras, how Poitras roped Greenwald into the project, and how they communicate privately when all three are targeted by the most sophisticated electronic spying in the world. It reads alternately like a novel, a spy thriller, a quirky travelog, and most importantly, like detailed expose of...

14 August, 2013

Snap quiz:  What do the following verses have in common? And that's how it went all afternoon, one lizard after another It made me wonder if snow leopards have a taste for joggers as well As is typical, the Pope stayed above the fray and did not comment. Whether such tactics will have a chilling effect remains to be seen. Answer: All four are inadvertent haikus, composed by humans but discovered by machines. The first two come from a Tumblr blog created by New York Times editor Jacob Harris, who adapted some open-source compter code to scan the homepage of the New York Times, looking for snippets of text that conform to the Haiku...

14 April, 2013

With so many real and pressing environmental crises threatening to harm Planet Earth, why are so many well-meaning environmentalists so easily diverted into foolhardy projects like the campaign to ban plastic water bottles? On January 1, the Town of Concord, Massachusetts, prohibited the sale of "non-sparkling, unflavored drinking water in single-serving polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles of 1 liter (34 ounces) or less." To be clear, it's still OK to sell small, plastic bottles of Coke, Red Bull, colored sugar-water, and carbonated water, and it's OK to sell Just Plain Water in 40-oz plastic bottles or gallon jugs. In an approving report on the ban, the Globe and Mail...

03 January, 2013

One would like to think of human history as an unbroken march toward enlightenment in which superstition and magical beliefs are gradually discarded in favor of rational thought and evidence-based decisions. One would like to, but then one remembers the media's obsession with Mayan doomsday predictions never actually predicted by actual Mayans, and the scandalous failure of most Nova Scotia health care workers to get the 'flu vaccine (thus depriving themselves, their families, and their patients of the most effective life-saving advance in medical history), and today's numerological media trope-de-jour: the fact that today's (arbitrary) date can be rendered as 12-12-12. So...

12 December, 2012

A couple of years ago, a friend and I travelled to Inverness for a celebration honoring the wonderful author and columnist, Frank MacDonald. On the off-chance alcohol might be consumed, we sought lodging at one of the town's two motels. Our choices were Grim and Grimmer. Inverness had many charms — spectacular setting, fascinating history, unique culture, magnificent beach — but no economic engine since its coal mines shut down in the 1960s. Boarded up storefronts and seedy hand-painted signs for the few surviving businesses offered silent testimony to the community's entrenched gloom. Into this sad civic concoction came Ben Cowan-Dewer and Allie...

15 July, 2012

Federal government benefits in the US —chiefly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,  veterans' benefits, income security, unemployment insurance, and veterans' benefits—accounted for 17.6 percent of personal income in 2009. The New York Times today published another of its fantastic interactive charts, this one showing where federal assistance has gone over the last 40 years: what counties got what percentage of their personal income from which programs in each of those years. This screenshot doesn't do the actual chart justice, so click through to the original. An accompanying story concludes that, while social support programs once went mostly to the poorest Americans, the middle...

12 February, 2012

From the moment I first stepped inside one, I have regarded dollar stores as miraculous institutions, unappreciated by the cognoscenti. In this morning's New York Times, reporter Jesse McKinley describes how he outfitted his new apartment in Albany, NY, entirely from items purchased at  the various dollar stores that abound in the area (with a slide show). The daring Mr. McKinley does not observe my only rule of dollar store consumption: Avoid items intended to be ingested....

12 January, 2012

In an almost perfect illustration of Donham's Law, the New York Times reports this morning that New English fishermen are pooh-poohing calls from fisheries scientists for greater restrictions, or even an outright ban, on cod fishing in the gulf of Maine. The scientists point to new data showing cod stocks in much worse shape than previously thought; the fishermen say there's an abundance of fish. “Fishermen will almost always tell you that, and it’s not that they’re lying,” said Mark Kurlansky, whose 1997 book, “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” documented how Canada’s once-abundant Atlantic cod were fished almost...

11 December, 2011
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