– Alberto Manguel
Most of the fastest-growing jobs in the US don’t pay enough for the recipient to afford the average apartment.
↩︎ The Outline
Monster mortgages: How Sydney's trophy home owners pay for their houses ...
Millennials In The Legal Academy: 'Innovative Narcissists Lead The Way'
Wall Street Journal, Winning Bid to Have Lunch With Warren Buffett: $3.3 Million
Forbes, Why A $3.3 Million Lunch With Warren Buffett Is A Good Tax Move In 2018:
Earlier
this week, a charity auction to have lunch with Warren Buffett resulted
in a winning bid of $3,300,100. The winning bidder, who has chosen to
remain anonymous, won the right to eat with the billionaire at Smith
& Wollensky steakhouse in New York City. The annual lunch with
Buffett benefits Glide Foundation, which offers food, shelter, health care and other services to homeless and low-income people in San Francisco.
Exclusive access: Inside Sydney's supermax jail for terrorists
IT'S Sydney's most secure prison complex — a remotely controlled, razor-wired compound built within ...
JOHN STAPLETON: Surveillance in Australia; Part One: Who’s Watching the Watchers?
Beyond the daily media coverage of the frenetic efforts of a failing Prime Minister, the biggest unexplored story in Australia of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership has been the massive expansion of state surveillance under his watch. Continue reading
GREG BAILEY. John Lloyd and the IPA: Friends of the Public Service?
As if the Public Service did not have enough pressure placed on it – over the past three decades it has been politicized, it has been continually downsized and its professionalism has been called into question by an homogenous collection of party hacks, consultants and lobbyists, perhaps picking up on a long-standing public disdain for the efficiency of public servants. If this is not enough, it is now under attack from John Lloyd, Commissioner, Australian Public Service Commission, and at times an IPA member.Continue reading
This had already picked up the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize(which is: "is awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best"); I haven't seen it yet, but see for example the publicity pages from Tramp Press,Canongate, and Soho Press, or get your copy at Amazon.comor Amazon.co.uk.
MetaFilter's financial future is not looking good (tl;dr: ad revenues from Google are way down
*The Limits of Expertise
PwC fined millions over BHS audit BBC
Fall in fraud prosecutions linked to police and CPS cuts Financial Times (UserFriendly). Carillion alone makes this look like a false economy.
Khrista McCarden (Pepperdine), Till Offshore Do Us Part: Uncovering Assets Hidden from Spouses and Tax Authorities, 62 St. Louis U. L.J. 19 (2017):
This
paper explores how U.S. tax authorities may assist spouses in the
uncovering of offshore assets in divorce proceedings and thus decrease
the ability of some of the wealthiest taxpayers to use offshore accounts
to escape taxation.
'Being evidence-based is really, really hard': shifting
evaluation culture
Too often evaluation is an afterthought and the report sits in a drawer. Two experts discuss how to shift attitudes to make evidence-based policymaking meaningful.
Too often evaluation is an afterthought and the report sits in a drawer. Two experts discuss how to shift attitudes to make evidence-based policymaking meaningful.
New York Times, Seattle Officials Repeal Tax That Upset Amazon:
Seattle
officials scuttled a corporate tax on Tuesday that they had
wholeheartedly endorsed just a month ago, delivering a win for the
measure’s biggest opponent — Amazon — and offering a warning to cities
bidding for the retailer’s second headquarters that the company would go
to the limit to get its way.
Omaha World-Herald, Creighton Law School Seeks to Move Past Conflicts That Consultant Says Created 'Toxic' Atmosphere
What's the worst thing a latitudional source has called you?
“You’re a piece of trash.”
That piece of invective, hurled at Atlantic reporter Elaina Plott by
an EPA spokesman on Wednesday, is part of the price journalists face for
keeping a constant eye on public officials to ensure they are honest.
Plott told me it was the worst thing she'd been called by a
public official. When asked, Poynter readers, rushed to share what they've
been called, and they offered advice for responding — or not responding.
OK, so just exactly what were you called, Ziva Branstetter? Eva
Braun, a black widow and a scorpion, Branstetter recalled, with the last two slurs coming
from the same Tulsa County commissioner. “He had an arachnid fear I guess.”
Tina Cassidy found a box with dead
animals on her stoop the morning after her husband, also a journalist, had
written a tough story.
Joel Mathis had the district attorney in his Kansas town grab
him on Election Night and pull him over to her mother, who was on an oxygen tank.
“Mom,” the DA said. “This is Joel Mathis. He’s the one who writes all the
terrible stuff about me.”
It gets better:
Before you launch a rocket back — as tempting as that rocket
might be, veteran Texas Tribune reporter Jay Root counsels prudence.
“My instinct is to never engage, never take it personally,"
Root emailed me. “I think reporters should resist being baited into a tit for
tat. We should almost always let our stories do the talking in these instances.
When they call us names, I think people generally see it for what it is: an
insult hurled for lack of real answers.
“It’s a different story if we are physically or legally blocked
from doing our jobs. In that case, we must fight back with legal action and by
documenting and publishing the attempts to stop us."
Root has a final thought: Use the anger from slights and slurs —
less than imprisonment or worse faced by reporters in some other societies, we
should add — as motivation for better journalism.
“When they attack us with insults and profanity, it’s tempting
to fight back on Twitter, turn the tables, call it unfair and dangerous,"
he says. "But if we took that energy and instead put it into more original
reporting — on Puerto Rico, campaign finance, inequality or a million other
worthy topics — I believe we’d all be better off.”
Quick hits
SEIZING A REPORTER'S EMAIL, PHONE RECORDS: The Trump Department
of Justice secretly took years of email and phone records of
now-New York Times reporter Ali Watkins in a case that prompted the arrest of a
former Senate Intelligence Committee aide. The former aide, James A.
Wolfe, 57, was charged with lying repeatedly to investigators about his
contacts with three reporters. The seizure of a reporter's data, the first
cataloged under the Trump administration, suggests the U.S. will maintain the
aggressive tactics used under President Barack Obama, writes the NYT's Adam
Goldman.
BUZZFEED FRANCE TO CLOSE: At least 12 staffers have lost their
job in the latest cuts to BuzzFeed, reports The Wrap’s Jon Levine. But BuzzFeed
is hiring more in other places, it says, via Recode's Peter Kafka.
ONE MORE STOP: Vivian Schiller, a former news executive with Twitter, NPR and
The New York Times, will be the first CEO of the Join Civil Foundation, a
platform using the blockchain technology and the Ethereum
cryptocurrency in hopes of promoting local and niche news sites. She’ll
focus on governance of the new foundation and philanthropy. In her note of introduction,
Schiller quotes Clay Shirky’s decade-old observation: “No one
experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news
on paper. But over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might
give us the journalism we need." Background: What's Civil?
HOW, EXACTLY, ARE WE SUPPOSED TO MAKE A LIVING?: How one journalist
has done it by economizing through shopping at Asian grocers,
pregaming before going out and limiting restaurant meals. Julia B. Chan has
been able to save enough to get a company match on retirement and
pick up a mortgage in the Bay Area. Meena Thiruvengadam writes
on this, side hustles and new horizons in this piece for Poynter.
JAILED, BUT AWARDED: Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo did
their jobs reporting on a genocide of Myanmar's Rohingya minority. For that,
the two Reuters reporters have been imprisoned since December. On
Thursday, they were awarded the Don Bolles Medal of courage from
Investigative Reporters and Editors. "These two dedicated journalists
were interested in one thing: the truth," IRE President Matt Goldberg
said. "The pursuit of the truth should never be a crime, in Myanmar or in
any country." The 1987 killing of Bolles, an Arizona Republic
investigative reporter, prompted nearly 40 reporters to head to Arizona to work
on his investigation. Their message: Even if you kill a reporter, you
can’t kill the story.
A NEWSLETTER JUST FOR YOU: The personalized newsletter, based on
past preferences and algorithms, has long been an El Dorado of publishers.
NYT’s Elisabeth Goodridge believes the Times is on the path, with Your Weekly
Edition, a 3-week-old experimental newsletter. By Laura
Hazard Owen of Nieman Lab.
AJ PLUS CLOSING S.F. OFFICE: It’s unclear how
many of the Al Jazeera unit’s 68 employees will make the move to
Washington, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
STRONGER WITHOUT FACEBOOK: A Facebook
experiment killed traffic to a Guatemalan site, forcing it to deal with a question it hadn't wanted to
address. So the investigative outlet Nómada found other distribution channels
to regain readers. “At the beginning, we were very upset," founder Martín Rodríguez Pellecer told Nieman
Lab. "But at the end, we can thank it because it exploded the bubble we
were living in.”
RELATED: Facebook book says a software bug affected 14 million who
thought they were sending messages privately but (whoops!)
weren't. Recode's Karl Wagner reports.
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT TRUMP AND RUSSIA?: If you work in
spreadsheets, you may love this from PBS NewsHour. Four
hundred data points contextualizing and connecting key players and moments in
the attempt to influence the 2016 election.
FAST COMPANY, NEW YORKER GAIN SUPPORT FOR UNIONS: The vote by Fast Company and the
decision by New Yorker employees (note the understated New Yorker headline) are the
latest moves in an industry-wide effort for worker protection. Here’s a recent industry-wide union update by
Poynter’s Rick Edmonds. Can't leave you without this logo:
Screenshot
DESTROY THE EVIDENCE: That’s Sean Hannity’s advice to
anyone who gets called to testify before the investigation into President
Trump’s association with Russia and criminal elements. Hannity, a frequent
phone chatter with the president, referred specifically to destroying
smartphones. Upon reflection, Hannity later said he was kidding.
CLIMATE GENTRIFICATION: It’s happening in Miami, where
real-estate speculators are moving inland and to (relatively) higher ground to
balance luxury coastline investments as sea-levels rise. What does that
mean? The Takeaway reports that rents are
rising and housing becoming scarce in neighborhoods such as Miami’s Little
Haiti.
TRAINING A PSYCHOPATH: Feed a robot with violent content on
Reddit, and artificial intelligence will do the rest, a team of MIT scientists concluded.
THE DAUGHTER WHO TAUGHT ME: Unexpected — and
arriving relatively early in Elizabeth Bruenig’s adulthood — this
little girl brought a lesson every journalist should get: don’t worry all the
time about time. “I was glad to put aside the prescribed order of things, the
whole notion of organizing my priorities along some received set of principles,
and to have the imperative to do so presented to me by this marvelous conspirator inside me,”
Bruenig writes on her daughter's second birthday.
HE
IS 5 YEARS OLD: Half a country away
from his mom. Cried himself to sleep at night. Then "just moaning and
moaning," says his new "mom." Here is the picture of a
once-intact family that he tucks under his pillow at night, via Miriam Jordan of the NYT.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND GANGS: That's how the cycle of aggression
and violence has been amplified and speeded up, The
Washington Post's William Wan reports.
Whistleblower's tip-off sparks second Robodebt review
The Commonwealth Ombudsman Michael Manthorpe has agreed to investigate Centrelink’s debt recovery program for a second time.
‘Pose’: An ode to 1980s New York, diversity, and a time when Donald Trump was just a businessman
Whistleblower's tip-off sparks second Robodebt review
The Commonwealth Ombudsman Michael Manthorpe has agreed to investigate Centrelink’s debt recovery program for a second time.
‘Pose’: An ode to 1980s New York, diversity, and a time when Donald Trump was just a businessman
