The New York Times website offers a series of five interactive images today showing scenes along the Berlin Wall around 1989, and the same scenes today. The screen shot here, showing Ebertstrasse, a street that runs from the Brandenburg Gate to Potsdamer Platz, is static, but on the Times' site it shifts from before to after as you slide your cursor left and right. Contrarian reader Judy Haiven thinks it's time we turned out attention to another wall: The Berlin wall is down, but Israel's wall is up, and divides family from family, people from their work or school or from their...

07 November, 2009

Britain's 500-year-old Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons has thrown its weight behind a new approach to the shortage of organs for lifesaving transplants: make people decide whether they want to be donors. Health professionals involved in organ and tissue donation have long been aware of a maddening statistic: Although about 90 percent of adults express willingness to be organ and tissue donors, only about half get around to signing the consent form (which appears on on the health card renewal application in Nova Scotia). Without a signed card, it's harder to get distraught relatives to agree to donation in the...

02 November, 2009

Who said this? There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another. Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize. Our soldiers are not to blame. They’ve fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills...

29 October, 2009

For a process that has (or should have) undergone intensive preparation for months, the Cape Breton District Health Authority's first public H1N1 vaccination clinic, Wednesday in Baddeck, was an organizational disaster. Here's how one Contrarian reader described it: I gathered the kids after school and navigated our way through the car-lined streets to the Masonic Hall. We grabbed a spot at the end of the line, several car-lengths back from the corner of Queen & Grant streets. It was typical Cape Breton gathering—lots of chatting and laughing between neighbours, and new friends made with unfamiliar faces. Many of us who arrived after...

29 October, 2009

The New York Times has corrected its obituary of Donald Marshall, Jr., following remonstrations from Contrarian and from one of the lawyers who represented Marshall before the celebrated inquiry that bears his name. The original Times obit, published in its August 7 edition, two days after Marshall's death, contained the following paragraph: Late on the night of May 28, 1971, Mr. Marshall and a friend, Sandy Seale, went walking in a Sydney park and tried to rob an older man, Roy Ebsary, who drew a knife and killed Mr. Seale. As Contrarian wrote to the obituary's author, William Grimes: The Royal Commission on the...

23 October, 2009

Doug MacKay, who edited the Halifax Daily News in its heyday, writes from Toronto: I am sorry to read that Rosie passed away. From the moment she peed on the editor's carpet, I knew she and her owner were of like mind. A great companion. For the record, Rosie only ever peed on the editor's carpet once, and at a young age. It is acknowledged, however, that the stain never came out, and may have played a role in Transcontinental's subsequent decision to abandon the Burnside location. UPDATE: What is it with beagles and journalists? James Cobb, Automobiles Editor of the New York...

06 October, 2009

Today's New York Times uses Flash animation to show how the financial crisis took the market capitalization of America's banking titans from this (On October 7, 2007): To this (on March 1, 2009): And then back to this (last Friday): Note that the animated version, which you really should visit, uses color to show the relative shrinkage and growth of each bank. Gray is the baseline; green is growth; reddish-brown (who chose these colors?) is shrinkage. Rollover text provides detail on each of the included banks. ...

22 September, 2009

One of the neat developments of the digital era is the rapid advance of what geeks call the visual presentation of numerical information. Just as word processors revolutionized the mechanics of writing, Photoshop revolutionized image manipulation, and Google Earth revolutionized mapping, new digital tools are giving everyday users the power to produce amazingly useful and instructive interactive graphs. Two online newspapers produced beautiful examples this week: USA Today produced this interactive approval tracker comparing the approval rating for all US presidents since Harry Truman. The crimped screen shot reproduced here doesn't even hint at the power of this tool, so...

05 August, 2009
Picture 1Oh, how embarrassing! The New York Times, which many regard as the best newspaper in the world, had weeks of warning that Walter Cronkite was gravely ill. Like most large newspapers, the Times routinely prepares advance obits of famous subjects. In this case, it prepared both an obit and an Arts Section appraisal of the anchor's life's work. Two experienced writers and at least seven editors pored over the material. Two days before Cronkite's death, after CBS News discovered errors in the obituary material it had prepared in advance, Cronkite's son Chip emailed a senior Times editor to suggest a similar preemptive review of the paper's advance obit. Despite all this preparation, the Times's July 17, front-page obituary contained two errors, and the Arts Section appraisal fully seven. The result was this embarrassing correction:
02 August, 2009
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