This photo makes me laugh so much. It ran on the front page of the NY Times, and shows Specialist Zachary Boyd of Fort Worth, TX fighting in Afghanistan in his pink boxers. He had been sleeping when the compound he was in was attacked, and he ran out to help fight in [...]

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I love looking at NY Times photos. They have a certain sophistication, a sense of subtlety that is matched by few other publications. It’s a testament, not only to their photographers but also to their photo editors. That is the kind of photography I would like to see myself doing in the [...]

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When does dissent become Untruth and lose the rights and respect due to “legitimate dissent”? Who decides—and how—what dissent deserves to be heard and what doesn’t? When do journalists have to “protect” readers from Untruth masking itself as dissent or skepticism?
I found myself thinking about this when I came across an unexpected disjunction in the [...]

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Unlike the English Whigs and the American Founders, the modern liberal regards suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be corrected by up-to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it.
Barack Obama, [...]

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Imagine if the current crop of public figures had grown up during the Facebook era. We might have photos of John McCain in Florida slurping body shots off his stripper girlfriend. Barack Obama rolling a joint on a beach in Hawaii. George W. Bush passed out at a Yale frat party, 40-ounce beer bottles duct-taped [...]

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The few seconds of mild shaking during Tuesday’s earthquake didn’t do much damage, but CNN’s coverage did. My daily productivity was cut in half when I had to spend all afternoon answering calls and e-mails from my parents, grandmother, cousins and everyone else I know on the East Coast to tell them I was a [...]

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WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS PROFANITY. IF YOU ARE BOTHERED BY PROFANITY, PLEASE DON’T READ IT.
So there’s this mini-saga going on across the pond from us. Apparently a writer for the Guardian The Times (thank you for the correction Mr. Commenter) didn’t appreciate it too much when his sub-editor removed a very important “a” [...]

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In response to this article by the Intl Herald Tribune (Literacy debate: Online, r u really reading?):
My one issue with printed media is that I don’t like being immersed in the author’s bias for too long when it comes to contentious issues in religion, sexuality, gender/race issues, culture, philosophy, or even some scientific theories. I [...]

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Slate has a video slideshow discussing fighting in movies, and how it now has progressed to the choppy, blurry, “the cameraman has epilepsy” style. A very engaging read.
⇒ Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan, and the rise of the choppy fight scene (Slate.com)

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Yes, the underbelly of journalism involves chasing politicians out of seedy hotels in the dark of night, taping conversations and nosing through quasi-personal records, but it should most definitely not involve stealing personal appeals to higher powers.
Yep, while Obama was at the Western Wall, he left a prayer, as is the tradition. Someone [...]

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As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
But others say the Internet has created a new kind of [...]

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NINE years ago, Ahmad Batebi appeared on the cover of The Economist. He was a 21-year-old student, one of thousands who protested against Iran’s government that summer. He was photographed holding aloft a T-shirt bespattered with the blood of a fellow protester. Soon afterwards, he was arrested and shown our issue of July 17th 1999. [...]

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Often, we learn about risks and remedies by relying on the media to interpret medical research and other data that purport to tell what is bad (or good) for us.
The incessant dire warnings – about trace chemicals in the water supply, carbon monoxide in our homes, pesticides used in agriculture and even plasticizers in rubber [...]

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ONLINE databases of scientific journals have made life easier for scientists as well as publishers. No more ambling down to the library, searching through the musty stacks and queuing up for the photocopier. Instead, a few clicks of a mouse can bring forth the desired papers and maybe others that the reader did not know [...]

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The bogus trend story thrives thanks to the journalists who never let the facts get in the way when they think they’ve discovered some new social tendency. Take, for example, the story on Page One in today’s New York Times titled “A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss.” Its first sentence declares, “Eating [...]

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