A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
Trudeau briefly worked for a Broadway producer, and when that project fizzled out, he volunteered to do some graphic art for the reelection campaign of the New York City mayor, John Lindsay. "I knew his nephew George from St. Paul's," he tells me. "That summer is memorable for one thing I didn't do—drive up to Woodstock with everyone else in Lindsay's office. I'd heard it was going to rain."
-Joshua Kendall, Trudeau and Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned The News Into Art
1) "We are living through the first alt-war: a conflict in which the war fought online and the war fought in reality have diverged so completely that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information, it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality — one that confirms what they already believe."
Another of our friends of 76 is gone, my dear Sir, another of the Cosigners of the independence of our country. And a better man, than Rush, could not have left us, more benevolent, more learned, of finer genius, or more honest. We too must go; and that ere long. I believe we are under half a dozen at present; I mean the signers of the Declaration. Yourself, Gerry, Carroll, and myself are all I know to be living. I am the only one South of the Patomac. Is Robert Treat Payne, or Floyd living? It is long since I heard of them, and yet I do not recollect to have heard of their deaths.
-Thomas Jefferson, from a May 27, 1813 letter to John Adams
There are many types of newspaper editors. Some are crusading ideologues . . . Some are the opposite: they like power and their proximity to it . . .
And then there are those who are charmed and amused by the world and delight in charming and amusing others. They tend to be skeptical of both orthodoxies and heresies, and they are earnest in their desire to seek truth and promote public betterment (as well as sell papers). There fits Franklin. He was graced—and afflicted—with the trait so common to journalists, especially ones who have read Swift and Addison once too often, of wanting to participate in the world while also remaining a detached observer. As a journalist he could step out of scene, even one that passionately engaged him, and comment on it, or on himself, with a droll irony. The depths of his beliefs were often concealed by his knack for engaging in a knowing wink.
-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
When I think I am getting too caught up in daily events, I do two things: First, I wait 24 hours (or at least overnight) before starting to form an opinion. Second, I try to think like a historian and put myself 50 or 100 years in the future and frame the disagreement that way.
Our brains haven’t evolved to handle the deluge of bad news we now receive on a regular basis. Before 24/7 news, social media and alerts on our smartphones, most people simply weren’t aware of all the bad stuff occurring in the world.
............................to big questions.
Reading this article on the James Webb telescope took me way back in time when the news was news with no embellishment, slant, or agenda other than informing. I found it very refreshing and recommend it to you.
A few interesting snippets:
By comparison, it takes light about 1 second to travel from the moon and 8 minutes from the sun. Therefore, we see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago. If it were to disappear, we would find out 8 minutes later.
Webb also doesn't orbit Earth, like its predecessor Hubble does, but rather orbits the sun 1 million miles (1.5 million km) from our planet at what is called the second Lagrange point or L2.
The Earth is not visible in any of the images. That is because the bottom of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is a tennis court sized shield, is always facing the sun to block it out. It means that the Earth is always between James Webb and the sun as well, so would never be captured by the telescope.
When a telescope looks further away, it is also looking back in time. It takes time for the light the telescope is receiving to travel through space. Therefore, we see objects not as they are now but as they were at the time when they released the light that has travelled for billions of years across the universe to reach us.
What we are seeing is just a minor glimpse of images, science, knowledge yet to come.
........with the always interesting Martin Gurri:
But the beginning of any human structure is an uncertain affair. The present is always a tangle of contradictory visions and conflicting interests. What appears to be of all-consuming importance today is forgotten tomorrow—and even the supposed clarity of hindsight is mostly an illusion. We know exactly when and how Rome fell, but why such a backwater of a city became one of history’s greatest empires remains a mystery. . . .
Mir insists that the disappearance of the newspaper must mean the end of journalism. I agree. A model formed to exploit scarcity can’t be expected to function in an era of overabundance. The facts of the world, it turns out, are virtually infinite in number and incoherent in pattern. The digital age resembles the Tower of Babel—an uproar of mutually unintelligible voices. The New York Times and CNN merely contribute to the din. In such an environment, conspiracy theories can become plausible explanations for the behavior of scientists. The more information we absorb, the less we understand.
-two excerpts from his essay, The Fall and Rise of the Mediators
...............when I thought I wanted to be a journalist. Once given the opportunity, however, I found I didn't want it as much as I thought. Anyway, this chart may be of interest:
One day in 1933, Arthur Krock, the Washington correspondent of The New York Times, met Huey Long coming out of the Senate. Huey stopped Krock and said that he could not understand the paper's treatment of him: it opposed him editorially but carried lengthy accounts of his speeches. "Why do you print what I say?" he demanded. "We have this foolish idea that the news columns should be honest," Krock explained, "and since you make news, we print it." The Kingfish seemed dumbfounded. "Godddamn it! I wouldn't run a newspaper that way if I owned one," he said.
-T. Harry Williams, Huey Long
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