The New York Times can really memorialize the dead in the war of/on terrorism.
See Portraits of Grief for the former.
See Wednesday’s Faces of the Fallen for the latter – portraits of 498 Afghanistan war casualties since late July 2008.
Moving, but probably not motivating.
An outfit called Hot Press Tees has introduced what it call “the first wearable blog.” As if the millions of readable ones weren’t enough.
From their press release:
HOT PRESS TEES ( http://www.hotpresstees.com ) plans to blur the lines of fashion, pop culture, and guerilla journalism like never before with their newly-launched street-wear clothing brand and website (informally dubbed the first wearable blog) that asks its visitors to “Hijack the Media,” by wearing their designs.
Available online, and within select boutique retailers, Hot Press Tees will release one new tee per week playing on the most engaging media coverage dominating the worlds of entertainment, politics, popular culture, and sports.
Representative samples:
You can “Hijack the Media” selectively at $20 a pop, or take the collect-them-all-trade-them-with-your-friends route by becoming a Hot Press Hot Mess, to wit:
For $60 each month receive all four of our weekly tees…with FREE SHIPPING! It’s similar to how you would subscribe to any other service…The New York Times, Netflix, and Hot Press Tees…that’s it!
So, to review: the way to “blur the lines of fashion, pop culture, and guerilla journalism like never before” and “Hijack the Media” is to pay twenty bucks for a tee shirt that’s the news equivalent of the Times?
Murrow! thou shouldst be living at this hour: America hath need of thee.
UPDATE: BTW, is that really what we want to be doing – blurring the lines of fashion, culture, and journalism even more? All this time I thought we should be brightening those lines up.
For the past four years, the New York Times has included a Jeopardy! Clue of the Day in its Arts Section (promo here).
From a January, 2006 Adrants post:
As part of the agreement, The Times will be included periodically as a category on the television program. Also, the show’s Brain Bus, staffed by the “Jeopardy!” Clue Crew, will appear Feb. 25 from 10a.m. until noon at the New York Times Travel Show, held at the Javits Center in New York City. A category called “All The News That’s Fit to Print,” about news articles and features of The New York Times, will be part of the simulated game played at the event. Clues in that category will come from various sections of the newspaper.
In addition to the Jeopardy! Clue o’ the Day, Tuesday’s Times featured an ad headlined:
Don’t miss The New York Times Letters to the Editor category today!
When These Champions Compete It’s All About THE TIMES
I dunno – is this seemly?
Contact Campaign Outsider’s Late to the Party bureau with your reaction.
In the never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American clay-free litter box, those madcap felines at Cats Against Clay are at it again.
In the wake of this sweeping public protest, the hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider has done a little investigative reporting to find out who’s behind this movement.
And what did we turn up? The investigative reporting of someone else – namely Brian Quinton at The Big Fat Marketing Blog, who wrote this at the end of last month:
If you’re the type of person who knew that Friday, April 30, was National Hairball Awareness Day, then Feline Pine wants your attention. And they’re trying to get it by making you just a bit suspicious that your cat is plotting against you.
That’s the explanation behind a series of roadside billboards and sidewalk stencils purporting to come from a mysterious organization Cats Against Clay, and reaching a new peak in a full-page ad in the New York Times promising a struggle against some unnamed feline injustice. “Cats will have the last word,” the ad read. “Victory.”
Too soon to tell whether this marketing campaign is a winner. But it is fun.
Considering that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder testified on Capitol Hill last week about a ten-page bill he hadn’t even read, the hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider set the bar kinda low for his Commencement Address at Boston University Sunday afternoon.
Holder didn’t disappoint. (Text here.)
Let’s stipulate, as the lawyers say, that someone did Holder’s homework for him. His address was sprinkled with references to the BU beach, Allston basement parties, and “Stew-vee-two” (Student Village 2, BU’s luxury student residence complex that comes with an $8000 premium).
Holder’s address also featured the obligatory nod to BU alum Martin Luther King, Jr.
On the eve of his assassination, in a cramped Memphis church, he posed this question in his legendary “Mountaintop” speech, which began with a journey through the ages. At each stop – whether Mount Olympus or ancient Rome, Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation or Roosevelt’s call to fear only fear itself – Dr. King asked himself what era he would choose – if he could make such a choice – to be part of. His own, he decided, explaining that happiness comes from embracing the blessings and burdens of fate and the opportunities that accompany living in times of unprecedented challenge. “I know,” he said, “that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”
In that same chronological spirit, Holder gave a shoutout to the BU Class of 1970, which had its commencement cancelled because of the violent outburst in the wake of that year’s Kent State killings.
“I love you all,” he said to the crowd at Nickerson Field, “but these are my people.”
(Fun fact to know and tell: Ted Kennedy was scheduled to deliver the BU Commencement Address in 1970. Talk about clueless.)
In the end, Eric Holder’s commencement address was mostly boilerplate. Appropriate, perhaps, in a year when most of the available jobs for college grads are in the boiler room of corporate America.
(Photo: Boston Globe)
So Paul Levy, embattled chief executive of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, has finally deigned to talk to the press about stashing his – we’re just guessing here, because Levy “declined to detail the exact nature of the relationship with the woman” – girlfriend on the hospital payroll.
And who did he talk to first? The Boston Globe, of course. From Saturday’s Globe piece headlined, “Levy ignored warnings to end relationship”:
Levy, in his first interview about the controversy, said he made a “big mistake’’ by believing that he could hire and employ his “close personal friend’’ for years at the Harvard teaching hospital without upsetting other employees and potentially damaging the reputation of the institution.
But wait! From Saturday’s Boston Herald piece headlined, “Medical center chief will not step down”:
“My plan is to stay on,” Levy told the Herald yesterday in his first public comments about a scandal that’s swept the hospital in recent weeks.
So who got Levy’s “first” interview?
Everybody!
One thing the Herald did have first, though: Levy’s financial connections to Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who is, according to Saturday’s Herald, “probing Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s handling of the scandal surrounding CEO Paul Levy even though she’s gotten big campaign bucks from Levy and other hospital brass, the Herald has found.”
Details:
That includes $3,800 Levy himself gave to her recent unsuccessful U.S. Senate bid.
Records show that Levy also gave $200 to Coakley’s 2006 attorney general’s campaign, while he and the attorney general are friends on Facebook.
Oooh – Facebook friends.
It’s good to live in a two-newspaper town.
Well, that was one Campaign Outsider Official Prediction™ we wish had been wrong.
The Great Boston Bruins Chernobyl (losing a 3-0 lead in games and a 3-0 lead in Game 7 goals to the Philadelphia Flyers) now joins the Ultimate Choke Club with the 1941-42 Detroit meltdown v. the Toronto Maple Leafs and the 1974-75 Pittsburgh Penguins beatdown by the New York Islanders.
Oh, yes – and the 2004 New York Yankees Wagnerian downfall to the Boston Red Sox.
Except in NPR Land.
Friday’s All Things Considered featured a piece by the normally reliable Mike Pesca that contained this optimistic passage about the upcoming Bruins-Flyers Game 7:
The Bruins were the better team over the duration of the season. Boston can also draw inspiration from their home fans, from the local example of the Red Sox . . .
Memo to Mike: In Friday night’s scenario, the Red Sox=THE FLYERS.
Thanks for jinxing us.
From our Forewarned Is Forearmed desk:
The New York Times Magazine cover story this Sunday features Cass Sunstein, director of “the White House’s little-known Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs” and a leading apostle of behavioral economics, the “libertarian paternalism” (aka nudge-ocracy) that skews public policy to push people’s choices in a particular direction.
If you’re looking for a smart, engaging exploration of the topic, this isn’t it. The Times piece earned three zzz’s from the hardworking staff.
Representative sample:
Sunstein, who is 55, has an almost childlike excitement — his e-mail messages end in long strings of exclamation points, and when other academics talk about his mind, they do so in the way people talk about the ballet, as something precious that ought to be preserved.
Even worse, there’s this:
“Hardly anyone would isolate Section 553 of the Administrative Procedure Act” — the law that governs the public notice-and-comment period for most federal rules — “as the greatest invention of modern government,” Sunstein told me in his office late last year, his eyes filled with life. “But I see it as having potential.”
Yikes.
But worst, the Times piece gets bogged down in the minutia of “the discount rate – the deprecation of money over time” regarding solutions for global warming.
Total snooze.
You can find the behavioral economics wake-up call in last month’s Weekly Standard under the byline Andrew Ferguson and the headline:
Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink
Behavioral economics—the governing theory of Obama’s nanny state.
Representative sample, regarding Sunstein’s book Nudge, coauthored with Richard Thaler:
Thaler and Sunstein know that libertarians find their philosophy too paternalistic and paternalists find it too libertarian, and that’s just fine with them. They cast libertarian paternalism as the via media, the third way, moderate and reasonable, avoiding political extremes and the snares of ideology. It’s Gergenism for the thinking man. The oxymoron, joining two incompatibles, perfectly encapsulates the promise of Obama himself: something fresh, exciting, and highly improbable.
Better:
In the grander areas of public policy, in the environment, financial reform, and health care, the administration’s hoped-for libertarian paternalism is nowhere to be found. In place of gentle pokes and prods and nudges, the administration is hoping to levy taxes and bans, impose mandates and caps, set prices and restrain trade to make people behave properly—all the command-and-control methods from the Old Kind of Democrats’ handbook. Removed from the nurturing environment of the university, soft paternalism stiffens up considerably.
Best:
One cognitive bias that the behavioralists don’t mention, though its lure seems irresistible, is the bias that makes human beings swallow uncritically the declarations of social science. The bias deters the layman from snooping around to see if the science makes sense. This is the well-established “chump effect,” a name I just made up. It accounts for the breathless reception given to the books by [Malcolm] Gladwell and the other popularizers of sociological and psychological research. “Findings reveal . . .” “Scientists have uncovered . . .” “Research has shown that . . .” And we swoon.
You won’t swoon over Ferguson’s piece. But it will affect your cognitive bias.
Thursday’s Boston Globe reported that Massachusetts wants to “force stores to post graphic signs vs. smoking.”
Such as the one to the left, which appears in New York City stores.
The signs are modeled on a nothing-left-to-the-imagination campaign in New York City, where signs showing the health effects of smoking began sprouting in 11,500 shops last December. Massachusetts health authorities provided copies of the New York City posters as an illustration of what their campaign will look like.
Discuss among yourselves whether this is all well and good, but note the penalty for defying the proposed state mandate:
Retailers who refuse to display the signs within 2 feet of tobacco displays and cash registers could face fines of $100 to $300.
Great, except is that $100 to $300 a day? A month? A year? A lifetime?
Makes a difference, no?
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