They've done it.
The New Yorker, in a maddening meta move bound to get your Inception-sense tingling, released a list of the greatest lists on Wednesday. Judging by its placement in Shouts & Murmurs, I'm going to give the magazine the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a wonderfully satirical look at our obsession with creating lists at the end of the year. And not an exercise in forcing my brain to do seven backflips in a row.
Exponentially confounding indices aside, it certainly has been a great year for — well, pretty much everything. I mean, we're still standing here after December 21, so we must've done something right, right? Even though I have several pop culture adventures yet to go on before the clock strikes midnight next Tuesday, I've compiled my favorite things of the past 361 days. Don't go looking under your chair though, Oprah fans. There's no copy of "The Dark Knight Rises" waiting for you.
Favorite news item:
Higgs Boson found
It wasn't the sexiest story of the year. I mean, what could be sexy about a bunch of scientists in a Swiss bunker pursuing the so-called "God particle" by shooting lasers at each other. Actually, that does sound really cool, when you stop to think about it...
What really made the story interesting and my favorite of the year, though, was the attempts by lay journalists to explain what a Higgs boson was. Some failed miserably — and hilariously.
It was also nice to see those billions of dollars actually produce something. Even if it only lasted as long as it takes that impulse of dread to shoot up your spine when you see the bill for the project and the number of countries now in crippling economic straits. But enough of that, this is a best of list!
Favorite read:
"Snow Fall" by the New York Times' John Branch
It's not a story. It's not an infographic. It's not a photo gallery, nor is it a video or a GIS-powered map.
It's all of those things.
The New York Times, as only it can, combines brilliant narrative storytelling with all the bells and whistles the semantic web has to offer, and plops it down for readers, viewers, clickers to enjoy. It's a fascinating piece that is not only interesting in its own right, but shows the direction journalism is likely to go on the semantic web in a way only the most prestigious name in worldwide journalism could pull off.
And audiences responded. More than 3.5 million people have viewed the package as of this writing.
Favorite game:
You Don't Know Jack (Facebook)
There were so many triple-A titles on consoles this year. Black Ops 2. Halo 4. Assassin's Creed 3. Mass Effect 3. New Super Mario Bros. Wii.
And they all got outclassed by a free-to-play, Flash-based game.
You Don't Know Jack has always been a pleasure of mine. I love when the worlds of high and pop culture collide to create a serendipitous mess that questions you whether an item is a piece of Japanese origami or a position in the Kama Sutra. Putting it on Facebook, with new episodes to play every day, was just like sprinkling addictive drugs on a Chicago deep-dish style pizza.
The addition of themed episodes and iPod/Pad functionality only means good things in the coming year.
Favorite sports moment:
Kansas City fans boo Robinson Cano in 2012 Home Run Derby
WAAAAAH!
Here's why Kansas City fans booing Cano was awesome and not classless, as many East Coast-based sportswriters would have you believe:
1. Kansas City fans showed that, even in the midst of another losing season, they still cared about the game of baseball enough to make asses out of themselves on national TV.
2. A Yankee player was subjected to harsh criticism. You know, something they all experience daily from the New York media. Except it was Midwest-flavored.
3. Cano proceeded to go oh-fer after the rousing round of jeering.
Say what you will about the supposed importance of "tact" and "class" in a competition where the goal is to hit a ball over a fence, and that previous champions who were cheered breathlessly were actually steroid-popping cheaters. Watching Cano get what was coming to him was the highlight of an otherwise ho-hum All Star weekend.
Favorite movie:
Moonrise Kingdom
I know, I know. It's really difficult for me to conceive a world where I don't put The Dark Knight Rises or The Avengers at the top of the list. And, likely, 2012 will be remembered as one of the peak years for the comic book renaissance that has been in full gear for the better part of a decade.
But Wes Anderson outclassed every other title released in 2012, with perhaps his most precocious and accessible film to date, populated with a brilliantly familiar ensemble cast, a fairy-tale like visual style, and another hauntingly beautiful soundtrack. Well done, Mr. Anderson. Well done.
Favorite album:
Fun. "Some Nights"
This was perhaps my toughest choice. I really wanted to give it to Mumford's spirited release "Babel," which follows up "Sigh No More" fearlessly with a bevy of tracks that are just as memorable. Ben Folds Five also released a wonderful comeback album, "The Sound of the Life and the Mind," that made it sound like 1998 in my car all over again.
But Fun hit a level of enthusiasm, catchiness, and lyrical genius that just doesn't let go for the entirety of the album. While the tremendously popular "We Are Young" made my mind dizzy by mid-March with its inundation of every popular radio station and PA system in my general vicinity, the quality of the rest of the album more than makes up for being subjected to replay hell.
Favorite show:
"Boardwalk Empire"
While I didn't love the finale, it's clear Boardwalk Empire, after the death of one of its major characters in Season 2, rebounded with a series-defining season over the past three months. Showrunner Terence Winter took Nucky Thompson to places it seemed inconceivable he'd go three years ago when the show premiered. There was an epic weight lent to the events onscreen, and the decision to crucially break with reality in certain instances left the impression the show could pivot in a heartbeat to unexpected and horrifying territory.
2012 also saw the appropriate end of House, a breathtaking freshman effort for The Newsroom, a lackluster calendar year for How I Met Your Mother, the autumn absence of Psych and a slew of...hmm...reality shows. So, let's not overstep the significance of my favoritism toward Boardwalk.
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Where the heart stops and the brain begins...
Two news stories this week emphasized the role the emotional appeal has in the creation of a narrative for public consumption. The first, of course, was Tuesday's verdict in the Casey Anthony murder trial. Immediately following the jury's announcement of a not guilty decision, the social media universe exploded with reactions of anger, shock, and puzzlement.
Casey Anthony Verdict Reading (courtesy of ABC News)
Perhaps the most amusing response came from Kim Kardashian, who tweeted, "WHAT!!!!???!!!! CASEY ANTHONY FOUND NOT GUILTY!!!! I am speechless!!!" Many fellow users distilled the irony that was dripping from Ms. Kardashian's < 140 character response, including user HaHaWhitePPL, who succinctly responded, "So was Nicole Brown Simpson's family when your dad got OJ off."
What Ms. Kardiashan's enthusiastic use of punctuation illustrates is the American public's willingness to attach itself to the sentimental or emotional angle of a story that completely precludes them from approaching the issue with a semblance of objectivity. A little girl died meaninglessly. This we know. As human beings, we attempt to fill in the rest to fit our subjective image of the world around us. We simply do not want to live in a world where an evil that could allow that to happen can go unpunished.
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in 1963, "When our most tireless efforts fail to stop the surging sweep of oppression, we need to know that in this universe is a God whose matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man." Somewhere, in the aftermath of the Casey Anthony verdict and a deep-seated desire to see our own justice fulfilled through the courts, we forgot about this. That is the power of the media narrative. It can inspire charges of a complete failure of a legal system (despite the fact that there was no physical evidence linking Casey to the death of her child) built to defend against the fallibility of human reason. The jurors in the Casey Anthony case did exactly as they were supposed to do (and something no one who digested the daily news media coverage of the trial, with its bombardment of innocent images of Caylee)--dispassionately examine the evidence and render a verdict based on the arguments presented. That's a success--not a failure--of the American legal system.
Today, British tabloid News of the World announced Sunday's issue would be the last of the publication, which has enjoyed 168 years of uninterrupted circulation. In those 168 years, the tabloid has come under fire for numerous reasons, including clandestine investigative reporting schemes hatched by Mazher Mammod, who's been investigated on two separate occasions by the Attorney General. What ultimately closed down the operations of the tabloid, however, was the extension of a phone hacking controversy to the case of a 13 year-old missing girl whose body was found murdered.
"The revelation this week that victims may have included the murdered girl, the families of terror victims and of British troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, raised the scandal to a new level," states the CNN story. Loss of advertising revenue and support from high-ranking government officials and interest groups following the revelation of the extent of the phone hacking doomed the tabloid.
I don't mean to belittle the lives of the two young girls lost meaninglessly in these two stories. What should be clear is that, as a culture, we attach special significance to narratives that play upon our emotional weaknesses as human beings. Both newsmakers and reporters are aware of this. To be discerning consumers of their product, we should be, too.
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in 1963, "When our most tireless efforts fail to stop the surging sweep of oppression, we need to know that in this universe is a God whose matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man." Somewhere, in the aftermath of the Casey Anthony verdict and a deep-seated desire to see our own justice fulfilled through the courts, we forgot about this. That is the power of the media narrative. It can inspire charges of a complete failure of a legal system (despite the fact that there was no physical evidence linking Casey to the death of her child) built to defend against the fallibility of human reason. The jurors in the Casey Anthony case did exactly as they were supposed to do (and something no one who digested the daily news media coverage of the trial, with its bombardment of innocent images of Caylee)--dispassionately examine the evidence and render a verdict based on the arguments presented. That's a success--not a failure--of the American legal system.
Today, British tabloid News of the World announced Sunday's issue would be the last of the publication, which has enjoyed 168 years of uninterrupted circulation. In those 168 years, the tabloid has come under fire for numerous reasons, including clandestine investigative reporting schemes hatched by Mazher Mammod, who's been investigated on two separate occasions by the Attorney General. What ultimately closed down the operations of the tabloid, however, was the extension of a phone hacking controversy to the case of a 13 year-old missing girl whose body was found murdered.
"The revelation this week that victims may have included the murdered girl, the families of terror victims and of British troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, raised the scandal to a new level," states the CNN story. Loss of advertising revenue and support from high-ranking government officials and interest groups following the revelation of the extent of the phone hacking doomed the tabloid.
I don't mean to belittle the lives of the two young girls lost meaninglessly in these two stories. What should be clear is that, as a culture, we attach special significance to narratives that play upon our emotional weaknesses as human beings. Both newsmakers and reporters are aware of this. To be discerning consumers of their product, we should be, too.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
University Presidents-The Real Reason Liberal Arts Don't Matter
Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University, posted an interesting editorial to CNN this weekend defending the preservation of liberal arts degrees in modern American higher education. Roth argues that the modern workplace demands the kind of convergence of disciplines and broad critical thinking only a liberal arts education can produce in a newly-minted American worker/intellectual. "We should think of education as a kind of intellectual cross-training that leads to many more things than at any one moment you could possibly know would be useful," Roth insists. As the president of one of the most distinguished liberal arts colleges in the country, Roth's argument is at once poignant, self-serving and vapid.
I have no problems with the importance and perceived benefits Roth bestows on a liberal arts education. It would be difficult for me to do so, receiving a great deal of my post-secondary training in the arts and "soft" sciences. The problem is with Roth's own colleagues, who he doesn't call out forcibly enough. In fact, he applauds members of his faculty for taking the initiative to establish chairs within their departments that laud their interdisciplinary achievements. This does not lead to the convergence of the problem-solving and analytic skills of English Lit courses invading the theoretical and scientific realms of Math and Science departments on college campuses. It allows the educators to believe they're preserving the ideals of a liberal arts education while encouraging the kind of specialization Roth argues is detrimental to the American education system.
In my second semester of undergraduate work at Belmont, I took part in what was called a "linked-cohort" class. In theory, these classes were supposed to link sub-fields that would ordinarily be thought of as the two poles of academic life. Chemistry and Political Science, Psychology and Art History, Biology and Religious Studies were linked together in ways that I suppose were meant to make administrators like Michael Roth feel like throwing a self-congratulatory knowledge party (I've been to a few of those, the dip sucks). The problem was, the students I knew always viewed the classes as a bit of a joke. No serious attempt was made by anyone to tie the concepts they learned in one class to another, and (more distressingly) none of the professors seemed too interested in that goal, either. The linked-cohort was something you begrudgingly fit into your schedule, completed, and then filed away somewhere near Pauly Shore movie trivia knowledge (I mean for a normal person, not for me where it's located directly adjacent to the mechanical motions of brushing one's teeth) for safe keeping.
Education is a service. It always has been, and it always will be. I'm not saying everyone should be a Faulkner scholar (mainly because forms at the DMV would be indecipherable if that were the case) nor should we all be automatons trained in one discipline. That's kind of what this blog is ultimately about. At the same time, university administrators should not pay lip service to the preservation of a liberal arts education if that's not what is demanded by their students. By ordaining a liberal arts education structure, college administrators make the decisions about what knowledge is necessary for their students. Isn't that the exact opposite of the goal of a liberal arts education in the first place?
I have no problems with the importance and perceived benefits Roth bestows on a liberal arts education. It would be difficult for me to do so, receiving a great deal of my post-secondary training in the arts and "soft" sciences. The problem is with Roth's own colleagues, who he doesn't call out forcibly enough. In fact, he applauds members of his faculty for taking the initiative to establish chairs within their departments that laud their interdisciplinary achievements. This does not lead to the convergence of the problem-solving and analytic skills of English Lit courses invading the theoretical and scientific realms of Math and Science departments on college campuses. It allows the educators to believe they're preserving the ideals of a liberal arts education while encouraging the kind of specialization Roth argues is detrimental to the American education system.
In my second semester of undergraduate work at Belmont, I took part in what was called a "linked-cohort" class. In theory, these classes were supposed to link sub-fields that would ordinarily be thought of as the two poles of academic life. Chemistry and Political Science, Psychology and Art History, Biology and Religious Studies were linked together in ways that I suppose were meant to make administrators like Michael Roth feel like throwing a self-congratulatory knowledge party (I've been to a few of those, the dip sucks). The problem was, the students I knew always viewed the classes as a bit of a joke. No serious attempt was made by anyone to tie the concepts they learned in one class to another, and (more distressingly) none of the professors seemed too interested in that goal, either. The linked-cohort was something you begrudgingly fit into your schedule, completed, and then filed away somewhere near Pauly Shore movie trivia knowledge (I mean for a normal person, not for me where it's located directly adjacent to the mechanical motions of brushing one's teeth) for safe keeping.
Education is a service. It always has been, and it always will be. I'm not saying everyone should be a Faulkner scholar (mainly because forms at the DMV would be indecipherable if that were the case) nor should we all be automatons trained in one discipline. That's kind of what this blog is ultimately about. At the same time, university administrators should not pay lip service to the preservation of a liberal arts education if that's not what is demanded by their students. By ordaining a liberal arts education structure, college administrators make the decisions about what knowledge is necessary for their students. Isn't that the exact opposite of the goal of a liberal arts education in the first place?
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