Now, Lend Me Your Ears

Mr. Vonnegut on how to write a great short-story:

Not bad advice for us journalists, either, especially: Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Meditation/Calculation

"Man today is in flight from thinking," said philosopher Martin Heidegger in 1959. Thoughtlessness, he said, had penetrated human existence in a frightful way; all around him he felt that he had begun to see less and less of a certain kind of thinking--meditative thinking. Meditative thinking, as opposed to calculative thinking, is a product of the spiritual nature of man, and he rightfully questioned just where we would be without it. Calculative thinking also has its place and humanity owes a lot of its success to it, but Heidegger asked his audience to please consider what our age reflects, not just what it can churn out by way of machines.

His call for thought remains essential. What does our age, and our news, reflect? It reflects a time of change in many places, including at home. If man is in flight from thinking, as Heidegger says, where is he going? Where will we be without the comfort of our own minds taking us places we never knew existed? Where will we go when there is no television, no Facebook, nothing to distract us from ourselves?

We might never have to go there, but we should. Calculative thinking is central to journalism and to proving a point. But journalism it is also about keeping us thoughtful and connected to ourselves and the world, in flight from nothing.

World Safer Than Ever Despite Terror Attacks And Mass Shootings

Experts say, in the Huffington Post today. According to the article, "mass killings peaked in 1929 and have dropped in the 2000s" and "'since 9/11,  you are far more likely to drown in your bathtub than be killed by terrorists in the United States.'"

Most of the statistics presented article reflect violence patterns in the United States, despite the headline reading "World Safer Than Ever."

Six-Handed Journalism

The Age of the Cronut

A CNN article cites 10 things the U.S. does better than anyone else, and doesn't include anything too serious.

Here's the list:
1. Effusive greetings (can I get a wassssup?!)
2. Road trips
3. Derbies
4. Beer
5. Diversity (yeah, immigration! oh wait...)
6. Canyons
7. National parks
8. Eating (marked by this year's "gastronomic breakthrough" which is the cronut, a croissant-donut hybrid introduced in New York City)
9. Sports
10. Moving pictures

At this rate, we should be boasting about our ability to fill the streets with SUVs and pickpockets in no time. 

All hail the cronut.

Equality Wanted

A New York Times article published today addressed the unfair gender gap in the workplace--yes, it still exists. It's 2013, 93 years after women were granted the right to vote and 40 years after abortion became legal, and "over the last decade or so the typical wage of a woman in her prime has hovered around 80 percent of the typical wage for a man." 

We Are Livin' In A Digital World, And I'm Just A Digital Girl

Breaking news: online journalism can't survive without a wealthy benefactor or cat gifs (and Madonna puns, apparently).
And why should it?
In an age where we're actually deeming cell phones smart and naming our global positioning systems, "tweeting" our thoughts constantly (in 140 characters or less) and making books out of our faces, could we really expect journalism's transition into the digital world to go more smoothly than the rest of them? It's a whole new landscape, a whole new world out there filled with a site for every strange interest and a place for anyone to say anything. While I'm all for free speech, the plethora of it makes it hard to sort through the good and the bad. It's a world for everyone, and no one. Where do you go if you're not in the mood for its many options, when you're overwhelmed by the decision?

 

a plausible finish

there ought to be a place to go
when you can’t sleep
or you’re tired of getting drunk
and the grass doesn’t work anymore,
and I don’t mean go on
to hash or cocaine,
I mean a place to go besides
a death that’s waiting
and a love that doesn’t work
anymore.
there ought to be a place to go
when you can’t sleep
besides a tv set or a movie
or a newspaper
or a novel about a woman
whit her clit in her throat.
it’s not having that place to go
that creates the people in madhouses
and the suicides.
I suppose what most people do
when there isn’t any place to go
is to go to someplace or something
that hardly satisfies them,
and this ritual tends to sandpaper them
into a dullness where they can relax
without hope.
those faces you see everyday on the streets
were not created
entirely without
hope: be kind to them:
like you
they have not
escaped. 

-Charles Bukowski

Inciting Change

I'm in the library waiting for 4:30 p.m. to come around so I can go shoot a lecture on campus for Photojournalism I, when I come across this saddening, albeit not completely shocking article. A 22-year-old photojournalist raped by four men and a "juvenile" (delinquent doesn't even begin to cover it) in Mumbai, India on Aug. 22 died "from massive internal injuries from being penetrated by a metal rod" two weeks after the attack. The headline aims to report the good news, if there can even be good news at this point, that the police have filed charges against the men. In a country where incidents of rape have gone up by 873% in the past 60 years and where rape culture is obviously pervasive, we can only hope this young woman's death will not be in vain, that it might be more enlightening than her photos and reporting could have been. 


Journalists often have to face dangerous situations. She made the choice to travel to India on assignment, and tragically was a victim of the country's confusion over its values. But that doesn't change the fact that rape is is horrifically violent and sometimes fatal, as it was in this case. It is a major societal problem in India and in so many places in the world, where the treatment of women is still cause for concern. I sit here, a woman with journalistic aspirations, and wonder- what will I face? As responsible journalists, we cannot stop sending reporters to India, and other dangerous places. If we do that, we give up, and we lose sight of every journalist's ultimate goal: to shine a light on issues otherwise left unilluminated. India has a long way to go before it becomes remotely safe for its women citizens and visitors, and journalism can be an important agent for change. India's attitude towards rape will not change on its own. How many women have to suffer gang rape? How many have to die? How many stories have to be written? There is no number, only a mission. Let's change things. 

Beginnings

A few days ago, a friend and I were leaving philosophy class when we began to discuss an idea the professor had brought up in passing, on his way to talking about the event of existence and the synthesis that is the human self. He had commented on the lack of females in the classroom. "Women don't seem to be as interested in philosophy as men," he said, before moving on, silently adding an oh well. It seemed true; with the exception of my Introduction to Philosophy class, the courses I had taken in the department tended to be male-heavy, including the teachers. As my friend and I talked about it, we couldn't come up with an answer. Why shouldn't women be as interested in philosophical matters, the unanswerable questions of the world, the impossible, the infinite? Were women incapable of deep thought?

Then I discovered that The New York Times opinion pages had been thinking about this question as well. In this article published on Sept.  2, by a woman, the author contemplates the lack of professional women philosophers, which, it turns out, is statistically backed up. She cites "alienation, loneliness, implicit bias, stereotype threat, microaggression, and outright discrimination" as the discouraging factors. But many people have had to face similar obstacles in order to get where they wanted to be. Where would we be if Bob Dylan had abandoned rock n' roll when his fans were in uproar over "Like A Rolling Stone"'s electric sound in 1965? If Albert Einstein had said, "ah, screw it," after making some major mistakes in the field of physics (check out a list of them here)? 

Life is never without obstacles, and never without questions. Deep Thought tackles both and brings life into the focus--the good, the bad, and the simply absurd.