Lots of great stuff today in my RSS reader:
Tim Burke discusses the Africa beat for journalists:
Hardly anybody likes the mass media. Everybody likes to beat up on them, use them as an alibi for their own intellectual or political shortcomings. Academics have a particular form of that aversion: journalism appears to many of them relentlessly “down-market”, sloppy, misrepresenting subjects that academics care about.
…The more I’ve thought about it over time, the more skeptical I’ve become of most such criticism. Coming from academics, it evinces an otherworldly ignorance of both space constraints and readability, it often reeks of professional jealousy, and it overlooks the good work done by journalists in favor of the bad work. Anthropologists and other social scientists also sometimes seem to expect journalists to authoritatively represent information which academics don’t have access to themselves.
…In stories about Africa, I don’t want to just complain that reporters aren’t scholars. I’d rather be clear about what they could say instead, and say appropriately and effectively within the constraints of print or television journalism.
Cynthia Rockwell wonders if there’s a Netflix conspiracy to punish heavy users. I need more evidence.
In The Pipeline, on humanities’ folks ignorance of science:
I recall one day in my junior-year biochemistry class, with the professor telling us that we would be expected to have the whole citric acid pathway memorized for the test on Monday… Then I went straight to my Southern Literature class, where the professor came down hard on us by reminding us that we had to have finished the required William Faulkner reading by Monday, too. Groans from the English majors ensued, but I felt like yelling at them. "Look, you dolts", I wanted to say, "people read Faulkner for fun. No one memorizes the citric acid cycle because they enjoy it!"….
This is a fundamental problem that my industry has. We’re capable of making our own bad PR, of course, but even under blameless conditions we’re doing something that most people don’t understand very well and didn’t enjoy having to try….And that’s one reason why the more irritating conspiracy theories still circulate.
City Comforts on New Urbanism and architectural style:
The weakness of New Urbanism is simple: Many people — both people well-informed or not in matters of the built environment — believe (some sincerely but all incorrectly) that New Urbanism is about architectural style.
Of course, that’s not a weakness of New Urbanism as an intellectual system per se — it’s in the perception of New Urbanism. I would bet that if you ask the majority of intelligent but not architecturally-informed people to describe New Urbanism, they’d say something like "Oh! Yes, it’s about picket fences and front porches."
Mind you, part of the confusion may stem from the fact that for popularizers like Kunstler, both urban plan and architectural style both flow from a unified vision of what small-town life meant in the U.S. But I think David’s critique is spot on that the urbanism of New Urbanism should be emphasized over the architectural style.
Last but not least, Blue Mass Group has started a wiki election guide for all Massachusetts races. Kudos to them for expanding the possibilities of the online forum they’ve created.
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