Month: January 2013

Look, I’m not a football fan, but this Deadspin piece is so devastating about the gullibility of the legacy media it makes Jayson Blair look unimaginative.

Ayun Halliday spotlights a charming short film on master coffee roaster Gerry Leary, who happens to be blind:

On a related note, Joel Rice recently interviewed blind skateboarder Thomas “Tommy” Carroll:

The area I focus on is muscle memory. I’m always listening to the sound of my wheels—what surfaces they’re reflecting off of—because that helps me determine whether I am going off course or not. Like, this ramp puts you this way and puts you at this angle. Hearing I use as a reference. I can say, okay, I have this much room to 50-50.

Additionally, in this video, blind film critic Tommy Edison explains how he uses Instagram. You can follow him here.

A reader writes:

I am a graduate of Sidwell Friends, in the same class as Chelsea Clinton (1997), so I know what I’m talking about on the issue of Presidential protection on campus. To respond to your misinformed readers, a few points:

St. Albans and Sidwell have never had armed guards on campus. At Sidwell, this claim is particularly noxious, as it is a Quaker school. There was a great deal of uproar within the Sidwell community as to how to address the security needs of the President and his daughter against the school’s core value of nonviolence. An accommodation was made, but for the most part, Agents did not accompany Chelsea to classes, and were not visible on campus. A detail sat in an SUV in the parking lot, another monitored what happened in the building in an office with CCTV. While I am sure they were armed, it was not obvious, so the claim of “armed guards” is ridiculous.

Indeed, the greatest controversy arose in preparations for the final meeting for worship for graduating seniors and their families. President Clinton was in attendance, but the Secret Service agreed to keep all weapons outside the room in which the meeting was held.

Sidwell’s own “Special Police Officers” are simply security guards that you’d find at any school. They are not armed with guns, nor do they have access to guns (whether this is because of DC’s restrictive gun laws, the school’s Quaker values or a recognition that arming people increases the likelihood of negative outcomes, I’m unsure). There are eleven of them because they operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I’d expect that no more than four including supervisors would be on duty at any given time, and that’s to protect a campus of 5th through 12th graders, approximately 800 students.

This issue is so fraught with emotion, even moreso now that the NRA has brought the President’s young girls into the discussion. So please, please verify the claims of your readers when they’re adding fuel to the fire with claims that Sidwell runs a special ops unit.

A video claiming to show a chemical weapons victim:

Raffi Khatchadourian pieces together conflicting information on the attack:

[W]as the gas used in Homs akin to sarin? No and yes, it seems. Sarin is odorless, and people in Homs reported smelling the chemical. Sarin is hyper-potent, and some people apparently inhaled a lot of this gas without dying. If these details are correct, then the compound surely differs from sarin in significant ways. And yet, there are similar chemicals out there that cause the same symptoms but are not nearly as potent and do have an odor. They are orgaonphosphate pesticides, which happen to be among the most common pesticides in the world and are also cholinesterase inhibitors. They can cause symptoms identical to their military counterparts, including death, and are treatable with atropine. If the chemical used in Homs was a commercial pesticide, then it appears that someone has manufactured a crude, poor-man’s chemical weapon out of a commonly available item.

Kevin Drum connects lead exposure to crime rate racial discrepancies:

Both gasoline lead and lead paint were most prevalent in the postwar era in the inner core of big cities, the former because that’s where cars were densest and the latter because slumlords had little incentive to clean up old buildings. Because African-Americans were disproportionately represented in inner-city populations during the high-lead era, they were disproportionately exposed to lead as children. The result was higher rates of violent crime when black kids grew up in the 70s and 80s.

More of the Drum-lead thread here.

A recent study [pdf] used automated content analysis to assess gender bias in the news media. Trevor Butterworth makes the case that the rise of “Big Data” will precipitate the decline of the anecdote:

[Before], you might have had pundits setting the air on fire with a mixture of anecdote and data; or a thoughtful article in The Atlantic or The Economist or Slate, reflecting a mixture of anecdote, academic observation and maybe a survey or two; or, if you were lucky, a content analysis of the media which looked for gender bias in several hundred or even several thousand news stories, and took a lot of time, effort, and money to undertake, and which—providing its methodology is good and its sample representative—might be able to give us a best possible answer within the bounds of human effort and timeliness.

The Bristol-Cardiff team, on the other hand, looked at 2,490,429 stories from 498 English language publications over 10 months in 2010. Not literally looked at—that would have taken them, cumulatively, 9.47 years… instead, after ten months assembling the database, answering this question took about two hours. And yes, the media is testosterone fueled, with men dominating as subjects and sources in practically every topic analyzed from sports to science, politics to even reports about the weather. The closest women get to an equal narrative footing with men is—surprise—fashion.

Speaking of gender bias in the media, Tessa Simonds surveys the male-dominated landscape:

White men own most broadcast TV and radio outlets. The FCC’s own data show that women own less than 7 percent of all broadcast licenses. And people of color own just 7 percent of radio stations and just 3 percent of TV stations. To make matters worse, the percentage of minorities in newsrooms has declined every year since 2006… Men wrote 72.1 percent of the print articles in major publications during the time of the study. Men were seven times more likely to be quoted in major newspapers and TV news programs. (Yes, even for stories on “women’s issues” like abortion, birth control, Planned Parenthood and women’s rights. No, really.) And as my colleague Amy Kroin pointed out, this trend held true for both conservative and liberal media outlets.

(Video: An analytics company breaks down the coming data deluge)

Packer thinks Dixie’s political power is in decline. Bouie isn’t so sure:

Yes, whites in the South are implacably opposed to Democrats, and President Obama in particular. The lack of exit polls for November’s election makes deeper analysis more difficult, but judging from pre-election public opinion polls—particularly those right before the election‚ Obama’s support among white southerners was close to twenty points lower than his support among whites as a whole.

Even still, if the coastal South remains on its current path, it will—at the very least—become a contested political space in national elections. And it’s hard to imagine that this won’t spill over into the actual culture of the South, which is often more fluid and open than it seems from the outside.

Morgan Clendaniel is ambivalent about Coca-Cola’s new commercial:

The ad makes the point that the only thing that matters is that you burn more calories than you take in. And while this is fundamentally true (you won’t gain weight if you are at a calorie deficit), a liquid, high-fructose corn syrup calorie is not the same–health-wise–as, say, a calorie from an organic vegetable.

Marion Nestle is less forgiving:

The video—how much do these things cost?—argues that the company is producing lower-calorie products in smaller sizes and promoting community activity, that all calories count, and that it’s up to you to fit Coke into your healthy active lifestyle. The ad is an astonishing act of chutzpah, explainable only as an act of desperation to do something about the company’s declining sales in the U.S.

Update from a reader:

This isn’t your mistake, but the quote from Marion Nestle talks about “declining sales in the US” and links to a Reuters article that says no such thing, only non-US declining sales. It’s the emotional high-point of her piece (“astonishing act of chutzpah”), and so of course it falls flat.

A new drug could potentially allow individuals to “cut their sleep requirements to as few as 2.5 hours a night without a decrease in mental acuity.” Yglesias ponders the implications of widespread use:

The most important place to start is probably just to remember that the world is a great big place full of enormous diversity. People in certain kinds of high-status professions—CEOs and Ezra Klein and such—will presumably be de facto required to work 18 hour days if they can get by on two hours of sleep. All the way at the other end of the spectrum, people like migrant factory workers in China (or whatever the new China is in terms of sweatshop work) will probably do the same, working super-long workweeks in order to save up money and go back home.

But beyond that … I dunno.

Derek Mead tallies the cost of dirty air:

According to a report from Greenpeace and Peking University’s School of Public Health released in mid-December, deaths attributable to high levels of PM2.5 pollution totaled an estimated 8,572 in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xi’an and Beijing in 2012. The total economic losses in those cities during that span was estimated to be $1.08 billion.

That cost is nothing to blink at, and it’s one that’s will only get worse of air quality doesn’t improve. So while leaving construction sites and factories idle is a blunt short-term solution, Beijing needs to look at healthier long-term growth drivers–giving up coal, developing cleaner facets of China’s economy to counter its heavy reliance on manufacturing, construction, and infrastructure development–if it wants to develop a more sustainable economy.

Alexis Madrigal compares modern-day Beijing to 19th century Pittsburgh:

[N]ext time you see one of the photos of Beijing’s pollution and say, “Geez! The Chinese should do something about this!” Just know that it took American activists over a century to win the precise same battle, and that they’re losing a similar one over climate change right this minute.

The screenshot above is from NASA’s comparison of Beijing satellite images from January 14th (on the left) and January 3rd (on the right). Interactive version here. Earlier Dish on China’s smog here.