We need to consider what will become of those people, both at home and abroad, who depend on such journalistic enterprises to keep them safe from various forms of torture, oppression, and injustice. “People do awful things to each other,” the veteran war photographer George Guthrie says in “Night and Day,” Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play about foreign correspondents. “But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.” Ever since James Franklin’s New England Courant started coming off the presses, the daily newspaper, more than any other medium, has provided the information that the nation needed if it was to be kept out of “the dark.” Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of “light” that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat in John Dewey’s tradition may not wish to see answered.
1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. 2. Learn how to learn (rapidly). 3. Work backward from your goal. 4. Always have a long-term plan. 5. Make contingency maps. 6. Collaborate. 7. Make your mistakes quickly. 8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols. 9. Document everything obsessively. 10. Keep it simple.
The road was not really a road. Its two ruts led into Darfur, to the war in western Sudan, from the unmarked border of Chad. So much of the Sahel was like this—unmapped, invisible, yet a boundary nonetheless. The land stretched away in a monotony of gravel pans and dried grasses so translucent—so brittle—they seemed made of blown glass. The iron horizons never budged. Yet we were crossing boundaries with every passing hour, mostly without seeing them.
After I was arrested and imprisoned in Darfur, an American soldier told me, shaking his head in disgust, “You fly over this place and all you see is miles and miles of nothing.” But that was an outsider’s delusion. Every outcrop and plain was parsed by unseen tangents, lines, ghostly demarcations. They portioned off the claims of tribes, individuals, clans. They bulged and recoiled according to war and season. No-go zones encircled water holes. Certain unseen lines, masars, dictated the migration routes of nomads. There was nothing haphazard about any of this. To cross one line or to venture too far from another might invite retribution, even death. And that was the ultimate line of them all in the Sahel: the one between knowing and ignorance.
The Sahel itself is a line.
The word means “shore” in Arabic, which implies a continental margin, a grand beginning and a final end. Stretching across northern Africa roughly along the 13th parallel, the Sahel divides—or unites, depending on your philosophical bent—the sands of the Sahara and Africa’s tropical forests. It is a belt of semiarid grassland that separates (or joins) Arabs and blacks, Muslims and Christians, nomads and farmers, a landscape of greens and a world of tans. Some 50 million of the world’s poorest, most disempowered, most forgotten people hang fiercely on to life there. And for 34 days in Darfur we joined their ranks.
Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable TV, emotions and hamsters.
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . War of the Worlds | PBS
Topic: Society
6:28 am EDT, Mar 24, 2008
Here, buried in my sixth paragraph, is the most important nugget: we've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.
Preparing for Their Future: A Look at the Financial State of Gen X and Gen Y
Topic: Society
7:07 am EDT, Mar 21, 2008
Members of Generations X and Y, acknowledging that they need to pick up the slack when it comes to planning for their futures, are thinking about retirement and have defined financial goals according to a report released today by the Divided We Fail group (AARP, Business Roundtable, National Federation of Independent Business and the Service Employees International Union) and the American Savings Education Council (ASEC).
According to “Preparing for Their Future: A Look at the Financial State of Gen X and Gen Y,” three out of four Gen Xers and Gen Yers said saving fo retirement is a personal financial goal, and an overwhelming majority (92 percent) feels that they can achieve their most important financial goals in the next ten years. However, many younger Americans grade themselves poorly when it comes to saving money (42 percent gave themselves a D or F) and investing their money outside the workplace (47 percent gave themselves a D or F).
While most of the nation’s top universities—including Harvard—still slant their curricula heavily toward the liberal arts, the effect is that many students spend their college days reading about everything from dinosaurs to Descartes, but then leave Cambridge for jobs completely unrelated to their course work. This dichotomy of the education and subsequent lives of Harvard students begs the question: amid the growing emphasis on professional preparation, just how relevant are the liberal arts to the lives of undergraduates?
