Jeff Jarvis: . . . I have long believed that the real job of journalism is to add value to what a community knows — real value in the form of confirmation and debunking and context and explanation and most of all reporting to ask the questions and get the answers — the facts — that aren’t already in the flow. The journalist’s and journalism organization’s ability to do that depends on trust over traffic. NBC’s Chuck Todd, responding to... Read more
On This Week in Google, Mike Elgan, as is his wont, expounded upon the reasons for Google+’s superiority as an online platform. This is his thing, of course. He’s a really great largely-freelance tech writer and pundit, but be does all his personal online publishing right from Google+. No blog, no Twitter, everything is born in Plustown. And he makes a compelling case. The fact that Google+ allows for simple filtering of which groups of people can see what activity... Read more
I’ve asked this question on Twitter a number of times, but no one will respond, and it’s making me feel like I might be going crazy. So I’m going to sully my blog and hope one of my five or six readers will have an answer. Here’s the thing. For some reason, all but two email clients on iOS do not include the original sender’s email address when one forwards an email. In other words, I get an email from... Read more
This story about an out-of-the-blue attack in Riverside Park by a guy with scissors, slashing people up, stabbing a guy in the stomach, a woman in the neck, and even cutting a 2-year-old, well, it makes my heart race. After having actually experienced something like this (a beating by two assailants, not a stabbing, thank goodness), even reading just a cold telling of the facts sends me into fight-or-flight. (Incidentally, I just found out that my wife knows a sibling... Read more
Henry Porter, like me, can’t believe the U.S. populace puts up with its gun insanity epidemic, and wonders whether the rest of the civilized world should put up with it: That’s America, we say, as news of the latest massacre breaks – last week it was the slaughter of 12 people by Aaron Alexis at Washington DC’s navy yard – and move on. But what if we no longer thought of this as just a problem for America and, instead,... Read more
A little while ago I posted about Claude S. Fischer’s piece exploring the phenomena of sympathy, and how our “moral circle” has expanded over time to allow us to feel sympathy or grief for the misfortunes of strangers and foreigners (in all senses of the word), and, incidentally, how at least in the West a fetishization of “public grieving” (or as I termed it, “garment rending”) developed, even over losses not directly our own. Hemant Mehta pointed me to a... Read more
Before I even start this post, I want to be clear: I really, really like iOS 7. I think that overall it’s a great leap ahead for Apple’s mobile OS, with features both blatant and subtle that show that Apple is still on the right course. It looks great, with a design aesthetic that I find refreshing and even inviting. Jesus, just the fact that I can now turn on the flashlight with a flick and a tap is enough... Read more
As you might already know, as horrible as we humans are to each other, we used to be much, much worse. In the Boston Review, Claude S. Fischer takes a quick trip into the history, not of callousness, but of sympathy; primarily, why are we getting nicer to each other? Before roughly the 1800s, sympathy was less common and more restricted in scope, overwhelmed as people were by practical needs and circumstances. Cruelty ran through everyday life—animal torture, bloody brawling,... Read more
Blah blah really long iPhone reviews blah blah. Who cares, ’cause I’m not upgrading this year. But in a footnote to his review of the new iPhones, John Gruber does us all a service: Let’s get this capitalization thing out of the way, too. Yes, I’m using 5C and 5S, with uppercase letters, and Apple is using 5c and 5s. Why? These names are initialisms, words where you pronounce them by spelling out the letters of their names. In an... Read more
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