“You have taken the undying and passionate yearning for freedom and filtered it in your own soul and fashioned it into a creative protest that is destined to be one of the glowing epics of our time.”
— The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Destroying a proven breeding ground’: Peter Carey slams Meanjin closure
Acclaimed author Peter Carey has slammed Melbourne University Publishing’s decision to cease publishing the literary journal Meanjin.
The literary journal, which has been published since 1940 and funded by MUP, ceased operations on Thursday, when MUP chair Warren Bebbington cited financial reasons for the decision, and said it “was a matter of deep regret”.
However, Carey likened the decision to destroying a creative ecosystem.
“Remember when property developers destroyed mangroves without understanding they were a breeding ground for mud crabs, prawns, and barramundi? They bear comparison with MUP, who are now destroying a proven breeding ground for Australian literary culture,” the Booker Prize-winning author said.
The world’s largest encyclopedia became the factual foundation of the web, but now it’s under attack.
The Verge: “…Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects.
Started nearly 25 years ago, the site was long mocked as a byword for the unreliability of information on the internet, yet today it is, without exaggeration, the digital world’s factual foundation.
It’s what Google puts at the top of search results otherwise awash in ads and spam, what social platforms cite when they deign to correct conspiracy theories, and what AI companies scrape in their ongoing quest to get their models to stop regurgitating info-slurry — and consult with such frequency that they are straining the encyclopedia’s servers.
Each day, it’s where approximately 70 millionpeople turn for reliable information on everything from particle physics to rare Scottish sheep to the Erfurt latrine disaster of 1184, a testament both to Wikipedia’s success and to the total degradation of the rest of the internet as an information resource…
The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department
The New Yorker – no paywall: “…The focal point of the department was the checking library, which contained reference books such as Who’s Who in the People’s Republic of China, Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage, and the Physicians’ Desk Reference for Herbal Medicines.
(New checkers are advised that you can’t trust books—they tend not to be fact-checked. But reference works help, and endnotes are a gold mine.) The library had another relic—a metal Rolodex that Calvin Trillin has said belongs in the Smithsonian. (Under “C”: “Chomsky,” “Cher (actress),” “Congo,” “Cold Fusion.”)
Every Friday, the department held a meeting in the library, where checkers discussed thorny stories and bitched about difficult writers and editors. There was a smaller library, for even more books; checkers, on especially tight deadlines, would spend the night on a cushion on the floor.
Colleagues would talk for hours with the powerful and the secretive; a conversation with Julian Assange required technological methods that we were not permitted to discuss, to discourage eavesdropping.
Yasmine AlSayyad got propositioned by Islamic militants. Fergus McIntosh, the department’s current head, got book recommendations from a Supreme Court Justice. Danyoung Kim would come to work in an astronaut costume, sit down, and call up Harry Reid. We probably took our jobs too seriously.
This was the first Trump Administration, and the work felt urgent but doable. We talked to Cabinet members and to neo-Nazis. We’d sometimes get threatened, and that only inflated our self-importance.
We were, as the writer and former checker David Kirkpatrick has put it, “intoxicated by our own busyness.” The writer had already engaged in the charm and betrayal inherent in reporting. We were in the harm-reduction business….
