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Saturday, May 11, 2019

Sands: Forks in the Road and River


JIM TREACHER IS A NATIONAL TREASURE:
White Sands, New Mexico: Mesmerizing Landscape Photography by Navid Baraty Protogrist 

That “Game Of Thrones” Accidental Coffee Cup? After Internet Ridicule, HBO Has Erased It


While the big, bad Night King failed to “erase the memory of Westeros,” as Bran Stark put it, HBO was able to do so using the magic of digital editing. – The New York Times

 The afterlives of philosophers. Nietzsche’s reputation fell almost immediately into disrepute; Kierkegaard, on the other hand, became an inspiration for “mindfulness.”  Why? 
Making ends meet as a book reviewer: $250 here and there, $1,000 from The New Republic. Jacob Silverman on the “foolish pursuit of an intellectually engaged life”  ... Engaged Life  

 EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: CNN Interviews Paul Ehrlich, Author of Debunked 1968 Population Doomsday Book.






Study: Major media outlets’ Twitter accounts amplify false Trump claims on average 19 times a day

 
Media Matters: “Major media outlets failed to rebut President Donald Trump’s misinformation 65% of the time in their tweets about his false or misleading comments, according to a Media Matters review. That means the outlets amplified Trump’s misinformation more than 400 times over the three-week period of the study — a rate of 19 per day. The data shows that news outlets are still failing to grapple with a major problem that media critics highlighted during the Trump transition: When journalists apply their traditional method of crafting headlines, tweets, and other social media posts to Trump, they end up passively spreading misinformation by uncritically repeating his falsehoods. The way people consume information in the digital age makes the accuracy of a news outlet’s headlines and social media posts more important than ever, because research shows they are the only thing a majority of people actually read. But journalists are trained to treat a politician’s statements as intrinsically newsworthy, often quoting them without context in tweets and headlines and addressing whether the statement was accurate only in the body of the piece, if at all. When the politician’s statements are false, journalists who quote them in headlines and on social media without context end up amplifying the falsehoods…”
Oxford University Blog – “…Punctuation-wise, most of us fall between these two extremes. We are neither staccato nor breathless. Instead, we use punctuation to establish a comfortable pace for readers by grouping and emphasizing certain chunks of information. And as we edit our own work, from first to final draft, we see how small differences in punctuation come together to create larger effects. Here are two versions of a paragraph from the opening chapter of my book Sorry About That. The section describes the encounter between Oprah Winfrey and writer James Frey after the deceptions in Frey’s A Million Little Pieces had come to light. Oprah had defended Frye at first, felt betrayed as the facts of the deception came to light, and angrily led him through his lies on her program. She later felt bad and invited him back for an on-air apology. The paragraph begins with the assertion that we share some traits with Oprah and James Frey…”



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