Author: Tracy R. Walsh

by Tracy R. Walsh

Meghan Neal finds that “Facebook is officially the bad habit of internetting – that fixation you can’t seem to kick, feel really guilty about, but sneak it anyway at night while no one’s looking.” But now there’s a new system to shame users off social media:

[A] couple of PhD students at MIT—finding themselves too addicted [to Facebook] to do their actual research—developed a system that tracks your online activity and zaps you with a painful shock if it sees you’re spending too much time on Facebook. They’re calling it the Pavlov Poke, after 19th-century Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov …

However, after electrocuting themselves several times in the name of science, the pair decided the shocks were a bit too unpleasant, and decided to try a different approach: peer ridicule. They enlisted Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and paid strangers $1.40 to call them up and yell at them for wasting too much time Facebooking. The callers read from pre-written scripts: “Hey, stop using Facebook! What the hell is wrong with you? You lazy piece of garbage. You’re a dumb freaking idiot, you know that? Get it together!”

On the other hand, Janet Kornblum, after having spent several months off Facebook, delivers an impassioned defense of the site:

You know, unplugging. It’s all the rage. And it was. For a while. I felt like I was reminded of my real life, right here, right now: the dog wanting to go for a walk, me needing to go for a walk, talking on the phone with my mom, eating—all the real-life stuff.

Then I realized – I kind of missed it. I missed my friends telling me what they were doing. I missed one friend’s daily pictures of her baby. I missed a guy I hardly know who always posts beautiful pictures of his garden, which looks like Eden. I even missed the goofy advice postings like, “Life is a spiritual journey!” that I thought I hated. I do hate them. But I kind of missed them. Oh, irony. Facebook is real life, too. So I came back.

Facebook is a place where stuff happens. Hopefully it is stuff you care about, because it’s about and by your friends, people who are sometimes your Friends and sometimes just friends. In a way, Facebook is a place in the way that countries are places. It’s big and vast and maybe your neighborhood knows a little bit of what’s going on.

by Tracy R. Walsh

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Watch “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis” preview on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Why did ESPN pull its support of League of Denial – a Frontline documentary based in large part on work by two ESPN journalists – less than three weeks before the film was scheduled to air? James Andrew Miller and James Belson broke the news last week:

On Thursday, ESPN, which has spent heavily in recent years to build its investigative reporting team, abruptly ended its affiliation with Frontline, a public affairs television series that was weeks from showing a jointly produced two-part investigative project about the N.F.L.’s contentious handling of head injuries. The divorce came a week after the N.F.L. voiced its displeasure with the documentary at a lunch between league and ESPN executives, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

Marc Tracy is troubled:

If ESPN will bow to its most powerful broadcasting partner when it is doing its most lacerating journalism, we have no choice but to assume that it would cut other, lesser corners as well. What happens next time there is a National Basketball Association lockout? What happens when it’s concussions in hockey? More troubling still: What happens when it is not investigative journalism? Can ESPN be trusted to be fair-minded about soccer now that it is beefing up its soccer coverage (including with a new show) given that it broadcasts Major League Soccer? Or given that NBC is making its Premier League coverage more prominent?

Over the weekend, blame shifted from the NFL to Disney:

According to the Times, about a week before Frontline officially announced ESPN’s departure, ESPN president John Skipper had lunch with ESPN executive vice president of production John Wildhack, NFL Network president Steve Bornstein, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, where the two NFL suits made their displeasure with the documentary known. Soon thereafter, ESPN broke up with PBS for good. Both the league and ESPN have released statements denying that version of events. Skipper told ESPN ombudsman Robert Lipsyte that he terminated the partnership after he saw the “sensational” trailer, which features a series of bone-crunching hits and promises to “change the way you see the game.”

But over the last 48 hours a counter-theory has emerged, alleging that calls to dump the documentary — despite the fact that much of the research for it was done by ESPN reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru — came not from the NFL, but from ESPN’s parent company, Disney. Not only is ESPN owned by Disney, the sports cabler, which airs Monday Night Football, provides the bulk of the parent company’s profit. In fact, ESPN’s relentless, often maddening coverage of the NFL is a big reason it’s now worth $40 billion.

Robert Lipsyte, for his part, hesitates to point fingers:

So what just happened? Beats me. At best we’ve seen some clumsy shuffling to cover a lack of due diligence. At worst, a promising relationship between two journalism powerhouses that could have done more good together has been sacrificed to mollify a league under siege. The best isn’t very good, but if the worst turns out to be true, it’s a chilling reminder how often the profit motive wins the duel.

Dave Zirin reports that reporters at ESPN are demoralized:

One top [ESPN] journalist described it to me as follows. “Our corporate strategy right now is to go all-in on football no matter the cost [to journalistic integrity]. We are going all-in on football at a time when you have damn near 5,000 people suing the sports that made them famous [for head trauma]. You have empirical evidence that something is going on with this game that is really dangerous. We are now carrying water for a game that is on a deeply problematic trajectory. We are going all in on this sport and this sport is in peril.”

But Viv Bernstein, who was a contributing writer for ESPN’s women’s sports affiliate, argues the network can’t be neutral and shouldn’t even try:

Look, it was business that trumped journalism when it came to the Frontline documentary. And there should be no shame in that. After all, ESPN is a business and its success is inextricably tied to the NFL. The shame is in misleading the public by trying to maintain a pretense of unfettered journalistic integrity that simply cannot exist.

To read the Dish’s long-running thread on head injuries in professional sports, go here.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Obama thinks it should:

This is probably controversial to say, but what the heck, I’m in my second term so I can say it,” Obama said during a stop at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “I believe, for example, that law schools would probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three years because [….] in the first two years young people are learning in the classroom.” In the third year, he said, “they’d be better off clerking or practicing in a firm, even if they weren’t getting paid that much. But that step alone would reduce the cost for the student.”

Ed Kilgore cheers:

It’s been a long time since I was in law school, and I gather schools have gotten better at offering practical experience both in-class and in out-of-class placements. But it’s long been a byword among young lawyers that an extraordinarily high percentage of instruction has been irrelevant to the actual practice of law, unless you take very seriously such chestnuts as the critical importance of learning to “think like a lawyer.” For one thing, an awful lot of law students, in my experience, have been “thinking like a lawyer” since about the third grade, which made them very unpopular children. More importantly, the cult of legal education seems to depend on the perpetuation of what amounts to an intellectual hazing system, where the student’s tolerance for tedious content, arbitrary testing, and self-imposed pressure is presumably preparation for the agonies of being on the low end of the professional totem pole for years.

But Martha Nussbaum and Charles Wolf worry that two-year degree programs would worsen the quality of legal education. And Matt Bodie claims shorter programs may not offer tuition savings:

If someone magically changed the J.D. program at my law school to two years, I wouldn’t shrug my shoulders and go, “Oh well – guess we’re only two years now!” I would work with my colleagues to figure out how we could make those two years meet the needs of our students – and pack as much in as possible. If the same U.S. News rankings remained in place, don’t you think schools would continue to compete on class size, expenses per student, and educational reputation? And wouldn’t that drive up costs? What if, in the new two-year law school, we added a clinical component, an externship component, and a 10-person small section component to the basic Contracts class, and then assigned it to a doctrinal professor, two clinical professors, and four adjuncts? That would be a better class, no?  But it’d also be a lot more expensive. A school could easily justify spending $60,000 or more a year per student – again, if the market rewarded schools for offering such classes.

Meanwhile Elie Mystal, who says he spent his third year of law school drinking and playing Madden, describes Obama’s call as “literally the least useful thing he could have done” for the two-year cause:

If Obama wants oversight over things like “how long does law school have to be,” he could have instructed the U.S. Department of Education to assume regulatory authority. Or at the very least, he could have had the Education Department signal to the ABA that its rules limiting experimentation with two-year law school programs needed to stop. … [Instead,] Obama just told the ABA, “Don’t mind me, I’m just a lame duck who intends to spend zero political capital bringing about substantive change.”

The average indebted law student in the class of 2012 graduated with $108,293 in loans, Carmel Lobello notes.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Simon Owens offers a brief history of the supercut – that YouTube-ready montage of film clichés, tropes, or catchphrases:

While the supercut – a neologism coined by blogger Andy Baio – has proliferated with the creation of YouTube and its ease of use, the concept of stringing together brief clips to point out a common refrain stretches back decades. Jon Stewart almost single-handedly invented a new form of media criticism by collating the inane and vapid beltway doublespeak that plagues punditocracy. Tom McCormack, who wrote what is perhaps the definitive history of the supercut, traces the genre as far back as 1958 with Bruce Conner’s A Movie, “an early example of found-footage cinema” that “climaxes with interwoven footage of disasters: sinking ships, falling bridges, crashing cars, exploding blimps.”

Owens says it’s not just nostalgia that drives the art form:

For [supercutter Alex] Moschina, [what gives the genre so much emotional resonance is] the sense of recognition that’s triggered when the tropes and themes found through a television show’s arc or in dozens of unrelated movies are pieced together. It creates a kind of “A-ha!” moment when a Hollywood cliché that you perhaps never fully internalized is laid out for you. “It’s definitely something that everyone thinks about, whether they realize it or not,” he said. “They’ll be watching a movie and the main character will do something that makes you think, ‘Who does that in real life?’ Then you realize that if you noticed this weird cliché, other people probably noticed it as well, and so you have a built-in audience that will appreciate the hilarity of that situation.”

By Tracy R. Walsh

Well, maybe not, but this view of the Southern Lights over Antarctica is still pretty cool. Thanks, NASA:

And a few weeks ago, John Nelson used NASA images to make a GIF of the “breathing” of Earth’s seasons:

(Hat tip: Robert T. Gonzalez)