Month: April 2013

A reader quotes Marah Eakin:

Serious journalists had been in Pakistan, Angola, and North Korea for years, so what made Vice think that because it sent some tattooed kids wearing jeans to a war torn area that it was reporting serious news and not just promoting “what the fuck” tourism. With [“Vice”], that question looms large and is never really answered.

True, but how much has the average or even above average person seen of that “serious” coverage.  It’s certainly not being shown on any of mainstream TV channels.  So unless you are somebody who’s really actively seeking out more on what’s going in all those places, you probably don’t know about it. People don’t always want to be informed, but they always want to be entertained.  So if you can find a way to make information interesting and entertaining, then it’s easier to inform them.  Vice may have a lot more style to it than a nominally serious journalist, but that’s what allows it to get through to people.

Another agrees:

Vice is accessible to a younger generation. When I was a younger man, long before Vice was on HBO, I stumbled onto the Vice website. I found their style of journalism fascinating. It wasn’t some Ivy League grad repeating the same form of journalism I had been watching my whole life. Vice was fresh and what felt to be fearless. I often found the humor of the reporting (staying in the North Korean hotel? hilarious) to be in stark contrast with mainstream reporting.

As for the terror and explosions, those things are real and have been widely ignored by modern media outlets. The Vice report in Kabul was a stark reminder of the hopeless year I spent there working with the Afghan government while dodging rockets and explosions.  Those are real things and they happen to real people. I guess what I’m trying to say was I love the reporting and I may not have been as curious about these places without them.

Mike Oliver debunks a common misconception about the South:

The South often gets tagged with having the most obese population. But it doesn’t appear to be true, a University of Alabama at Birmingham study suggests. The study recently published in the journal Obesity found that there’s a significantly higher percentage of obese people in a region of central and northwest states including Minnesota, Kansas and North and South Dakota.

The reason the myth has persisted? Southerners lie less:

The notion that the South is the fattest comes primarily from a nationwide telephone survey done by the Centers for Disease Control, in which the surveyor asks for height and weight, among other things, Howard said. … [R]esearchers found that most everyone fudges, or underreports, their weight when asked on a telephone. Turns out that Southerners fudge less, he said.

Havard Rugland, the star of the above trickshot compilation, has grabbed the attention of the Detroit Lions:

The Lions announced the deal on their team website, but no terms of the deal were disclosed. The 6-foot-2, 240-pounder became familiar with the sport a few years ago and he has been training with former NFL kicker Michael Husted in San Diego since November of 2012. …

But let’s not get ahead of our selves here. This is just a try out with the league. Rugland is looking to turn his sensational YouTube video in to an NFL gig, but that will be no easy task. He does have one good thing going for him, though. He has a rabid fan base that would show up to the pre-game warm ups to see what kind of trick shots he could pull off next.

Ann Friedman reviews a new book about those who choose “the joys of home” over “the demands of the workplace”:

The brilliance of Emily Matchar’s new book, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, is that it exhaustively describes what disillusioned workers are opting into: a slower, more sustainable, and more self-sufficient lifestyle that’s focused on the home. The woman who leaves the public workplace is “the Brooklyn hipster who quit her PR job to sell hand-knitted scarves at craft fairs,” Matchar writes. “She’s the dreadlocked ‘radical homemaker’ who raises her own chickens to reduce her carbon footprint. She’s the thirty-one-year-old new mom who starts an artisan cupcake company from her home kitchen rather than return to her law firm. He’s the hard-driven Ivy Leaguer fleeing corporate life for a Vermont farm.” Though the vast majority of Machar’s subjects are women, this is not just a story about gender roles. It’s about what happens when the structures we were raised to buy into don’t provide what they were supposed to provide, and the alternative values that have, for a growing subset of Americans, come to replace them.

A.A. Gill chronicles the surge in steak consumption in the US and around the globe:

Steak has become the butch foodie communion, and tellingly not just for flinty-eyed, Armani-suited leaner-than-thou businessmen, but for metrosexuals who wish to beef up their cultural testosterone.

In lean times, when we’re keeping a white-knuckle grip on the rungs of the middle-class ladder, steak comes as a small vote of self-confidence. It’s an emblem of victory, of survival. A slab of bleeding meat is symbolic of something fundamental, something pre-banking, pre-mortgage, predownsizing, prehistoric. It is a metaphor for the most basic achievement: to kill for sustenance, to be strong, to man up. Watch a guy in a suit look at his plate when the waitress brings his steak. He glares at it just for a moment. It’s not even conscious, but it’s the look of ownership; it’s the pride warning, “Don’t touch my meat.”

A lot of men do something called mantling—that is to lean over the plate, surround it with their arms just for a second. It’s body language that comes from a time before speech. The bit of our brain that deals with taste and appetite is the most ancient in our heads, the bit we share with lizards.

Relatedly, McArdle is cutting back on red meat after reading a recent study on its link to heart disease.

(Photo by Instagram user professorgreen)

Shikha Dalmia rebuts the notion that illegal immigrants suck the welfare state dry:

A 2006 analysis by the Texas comptroller estimated that low-skilled unauthorized workers cost the state treasury $504 million more than they paid in taxes in 2005. Without them, however, the state’s economy would have shrunk by 2.1 percent, or $17.7 billion, as the competitive edge of Texas businesses diminished.

Likewise, a 2006 study by the Kenan Institute at the University of North Carolina found that although Hispanic immigrants imposed a net $61 million cost on the state budget, they contributed $9 billion to the gross state product.

Alan Sepinwall asks:

In 2002 — the year “The Shield” debuted on FX — there were actually 28 original scripted dramas on premium and basic cable (some of it famous stuff like “The Wire” and “Monk,” some of it long-forgotten like “Falcon Beach” and “Breaking News”) and 6 original comedies. In 2007, there were 42 original dramas and 17 comedies. By last year, that number had ballooned to 77 original dramas and 48 comedies. And in the first four months of 2013 alone, there have been 34 dramas and 19 comedies. And that’s on top of everything that ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC and the CW are doing. That pace will slow down somewhat as we shift into summer, but I’d still expect 2013 to top the 2012 numbers, and to keep rising. Netflix is making its own original shows now, and releasing all the episodes at once. Amazon has pilots in development. The amount of television expanding, but so is our definition of what counts as “television.”

Alyssa wonders if the TV market is over-saturated.

Boris puts Barack to shame on the basketball court.