Seth's Blog

Alana Taylor, a journalism student at NYU, blogged about one of her classes:

Quigley [the teacher] tells us we have to remember to bring in the hard copy of the New York Times every week. I take a deep sigh. Every single journalism class at NYU has required me to bring the bulky newspaper. I don’t understand why they don’t let us access the online version, get our current events news from other outlets, or even use our NYTimes app on the iPhone. Bringing the New York Times pains me because I refuse to believe that it’s the only source for credible news or Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism and it’s a big waste of trees. . . I am taking the only old-but-new-but-still-old media class in the country.

Yeah. The same thing goes on all over campus where students are required to buy a heavy glossy textbook that costs about a semester of paper New York Times. As if the same info wasn’t free on the Web.

Long ago, textbooks were a fantastic bargain because they cost so much less than private tutors. And private tutors disappeared.

After Taylor’s unflattering piece, her thin-skinned professor, who had said “it’s essential for journalists to blog”, banned blogging about the class.

In November, a Tsinghua undergraduate killed herself by jumping out of a building. She kept a blog. After her death, a friend of mine read her blog — as did a few thousand other people — and told me it was full of sadness. My friend, a Tsinghua student, was puzzled that the friends and family of the dead girl had read her blog and done nothing. Will you translate some of it for me? I asked my friend (who translates other things for me). She begged off. I was puzzled: Surely the girl had wanted others to read what she had written, I thought.
I found another translator. After a few minutes of translation I had to stop: It was unbearably sad, maybe the saddest writing I’ve ever come across. I could see why my friend didn’t want to translate it.

Here is one entry. It takes the form of a questionnaire:

Question 1: Which student phase [primary school, middle school, high school, college] do you miss the most?

Answer: High school. Get together with a lot of friends. I know where I should go, even if it turns out to be wrong.

Question 2: Talk about your current life.

Answer: Listless. Feel half asleep. Do not want to wake up. I want to kill the people who wake me up. I love this world. I live for my goal.

Question 3: Do you have dreams? What are they?

Answer: I have many dreams. Make a movie . . . performance art [she was an art major]. Her [she was gay]. Forgive me. Dream this day will come. Believe.

Question 4: Which kind of friend do you like best?

Answer: Any kind is fine. Understanding me a prerequisite.

Question 5: Could you give up going back to your hometown to be with your parents, to be with your lover?

Answer: No.

Question 6: What do you most want to do right now?
Answer: Sleep, dream. Find her. Just dream, do not want to meet anyone.

Question 7: Up until now, what is your happiest event?

Answer: I didn’t lose my past.

p.s. I don’t want any blessing. [A custom/game among Chinese teenagers is that after you answer a few questions you are "blessed" by your questioner.] Wish everyone happiness. Don’t ask me these boring questions again.

News of the girl’s death was posted on the student forums. What was the response? I asked my friend. Most of the comments were “Bless,” she said. The English word bless. That’s a customary thing to say when you learn someone has died.

From It’s Raining Noodles:

Before the next batch of snapshots and corresponding captions [on a screen at a fast food restaurant in Singapore] were revealed, a simple message against a plain background read, “To all the great and wonderful mothers out there…” as a sort of enigmatic prelude to the marvels to come, and because I am a cynical bitch with a very gloomy worldview, I asked out loud, “What about the other mothers?” To which Maria put on an affected frown as if she’d been hurt that her loved one was being left out by the onscreen message, and gleefully responded, “What about MY mom?”

More. Not to mention this:

The past three hours can only be adequately described by the word SIGH. Thinking that I was taking a step towards improving my relationship with God, no this is not a long preachy thing so please stay with me, I agreed to sit through a session thingy with a very Christian Mrs. In-Law and a very reluctant Neptune. . . . The sharing session was led by a heterosexual couple (why I am highlighting the heterosexual part will become evident later), and it was interesting because they had a different take on the religion from most that I’ve heard. In many ways it felt like a lecture in literature class, and for the most part I enjoyed it because of the different perspectives on the same ol’ concepts. . . . The only revelation for me, though, arrived when the female half of the heterosexual couple went on to preach that God gives up on people who insist on pursuing sin, such as idolatry and YES YOU GUESSED IT, homosexuality. She was all, “YES, HOMOSEXUALITY IS WRONG! God has given up on people like that.”

And I realised in that moment that God had probably just punished me by making me sit through three hours of this thingy thinking that MAYBE I had a shot at heaven when actually? ACTUALLY? NO CHANCE AT ALL. God has abandoned me to begin with right from the start. I’m damned forever. So I looked at Neptune and said, “God has given up on us!” and I was very sad. I find it very difficult to wrap my head around exactly why I deserve to go straight to hell when all I’ve done is fall in love with another person.

Part 1

Irena Briganti is a widely-feared Fox VP of media relations:

Though one of Briganti’s favorite pastimes is leaking to blogs, she’ll come to find that her detractors can do the same thing just as easily. Blogs are far less likely to cower in the face of a threat of “denied access.”

 Part 2

Before I became a blogger, I spent my entire 20′s trying to become an academic (English and critical theory was my focus). While I struggled to produce a handful of conference papers or publishable articles during that decade, in my four years as a blogger I have published about 4,400 articles that have received about 50,000,000 direct page views, 46,000 incoming links, and over 100 Lexis Nexus mentions. Had I stayed in academic, none of this would have been possible, and I would have continued to receive an endless series of rejections from the gatekeepers. The “experts” that Appell describes did not see the same value in my writing huge numbers of other people clearly have.

From Chris Bowers.

Part 3

Yoely made some compromises. He miscalculated, however, when he wired his home with Internet access. “He thought, If I give her this, then she’ll shut up and be satisfied,” Gitty says.

“Once I read blogs from people who had gotten out of places like KJ, there was no turning back. Yoely begged me to stay. It is humiliating for a Satmar man to have his wife leave him. But it was too late,” says Gitty, who would start her own blog, 1 Beautiful Stranger, where she wrote about her misplaced life in Kiryas Joel.

From New York.

I have never read a better description of the difference between being fat and not fat:

I had a gastric bypass and ate 750-1000 calories of liquid meal replacement a day.  I had complications and couldn’t swallow food.  I lost over a hundred pounds.  I regained it over a number of years.  Once I lost weight and was normal–my life did change for the better.  It’s the only reason I had my child.  For the first and only time in my life it was easy to have people in my life.  People wanted to be around me.  I had boyfriends who treated me well for the first and only time in my life.  I got married.  All this happened very quickly and easily with no effort on my part.  Being fat is completely different.  I think the way people treat a fat person is similar to being disfigured or in a wheelchair with your legs cut off .  In many instances it is better to be dead than to be this fat.

From an anonymous blogger who weighs about 280 pounds. She isn’t trying to sell anything, make a journalistic or academic point, appear to be this or that. The post goes on:

My daughter had a fat friend over for a sleep over the other day.  It’s the second fat friend she’s ever had over.  The difference between these girls and the thinner girls is striking.  The fat girls are obsessed with food.  They are more driven to eat, more interested in food, more hungry than the thinner girls.  The thin girls are interested in food far less.  It’s not that they are better than the fat girls, they are simply less hungry.  My daughter first fat friend got up all through the night to raid our refrigerator.  This child acted as if she were starving.  She ate until she was literally ill and threw up on the sleeping bags.  Then later she peed on my daughter.  My daughter is fastidious and she was completely revolted.   That was the end of the friendship.

I came across this because she is trying the Shangri-La Diet.

As I blogged earlier, Tyler Cowen said that on his blog he can say what he really thinks, unlike other economists, who are often unable to say what they really think. Here is another example of the same thing from a blogger who writes about stuttering:

At least four [researchers] have told me that they try not to provoke or openly criticize work by a big name [researcher], because they are scared of having a paper rejected or getting no funding. Actually, they like me because I say what they do not [dare] to say [for] political reasons! So view my blog also as the voices of some in the research community!

This blogger isn’t a researcher so his situation isn’t the same as Tyler’s. But my point is the same: Blogs allow uncomfortable truths to be said that otherwise would not be said.

In the past this was much harder. To say some uncomfortable truth about this or that field of expertise (such as stuttering research or economics), the truth-speaker had to be (a) close enough to the field to understand it (which usually omitted journalists, with a few exceptions, such as Gary Taubes and John Crewdson) and yet (b) outside the field, so as to not suffer professional damage. There was also the problem of publicizing the uncomfortable truth. These requirements were hard to meet. Richard Feynman’s O-ring demonstration was a rare example where they were. Feynman knew what he was talking about yet was outside the industry, so he could say what insiders could not. (His criticism came from insiders.) Saul Sternberg’s and my criticism of Ranjit Chandra is another example. We knew enough about the sort of data Chandra had collected to criticize the work but were outside nutrition so we could say what we wanted to without risking professional harm.

A Philip Weiss example.

BC, AD, and BB. Before blogs, exactly how often could you read something like this — Philip Weiss (a Jewish journalist) criticizing pro-Israel bias among powerful (Jewish) journalists? Exactly never. Illustrating Tyler Cowen’s point that blogging allows him to say what he really thinks.

The Greatness of MondoWeiss.

If I had said to someone twenty years ago, “In twenty years there will be a way for you to say what you really think about everything related to your job, with a big audience” they would have looked at me as if I were crazy. Now, as Tyler Cowen pointed out, that’s actually the case, thanks to blogs. It’s a kind of psychological miracle. It’s due to technology, sure, but the achievement is essentially psychological.

It’s not the only psychological miracle that blogging provides. Consider this account of being in a mental hospital:

K, so since the night I got there, I would get a whiff of this nasty smell. It ‘s hard to describe, it was just nasty and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.
One day, I’m in my room with two roommates and I smell it.
“There it is again!” I yelled.
“It always smells like this.” The older lady said.
“OmG, you’ve been here so long, you’re used to it,” I said, repulsed. However, I still couldn’t figure out where it came from. Some times I would smell it, then go back to that same place and it would be gone. It was making me (excuse the pun) feel like I was going crazy.
After using the bathroom, I went to wash my hands. Maybe it was the soap? No.
Later, I took a shower and sniffed the shampoo that came out of the pump on the wall.
It was the friggin shampoo! No wonder I got a whiff here and a whiff there. Everyone in the building (32 people) had that crap in their hair!

Vivid, easy to read, even enjoyable to read. Now you know a little — very little, but more than zero — about what it’s like to be in such a place. I read Girl, Interrupted. Lots of movies include scenes in mental hospitals — as stylized as a Dove ad. I didn’t see Titicut Follies. Maybe Sylvia Plath wrote about it, I don’t know. It’s been nearly impossible — or actually impossible — to get an accurate idea of what it’s like to be in a mental hospital without actually visiting one. But now it is.

Day after day I read Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss’s blog, even though his main subject — Israeli treatment of Palestinians, how this is enabled by Jewish Americans, what a mistake that is — is not something I read about elsewhere or think about when I’m not reading Mondoweiss. It would be too self-congratulatory to say now I care more about it but it is undeniable that now I know a lot more about it. Without any effort at all.

It’s like a really great column in a newspaper or magazine except it’s much better than that: Weiss can write anything he wants at any length at any time, unlike any columnist. The whole thing has a raw and impassioned and narrow and personal aspect unlike any column I’ve ever read. And it’s so easy to read, even though it’s unfamiliar and complicated. Here’s an example why:

I heard a crushing story about Aaron David Miller. He’s from Cleveland and a big Jewish family. He went to a synagogue there recently and spoke from the pulpit and said, The problem’s simple, two peoples fighting for a disputed piece of land, there will have to be a compromise. There was dead silence in the synagogue and the rabbi came up and said, “In Numbers 34, God promised the land of Israel to Moses, from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean….”

What a chilling story.

Did the professionalization of science — people could make a living doing science — cause harm because although more science was done scientists — the professional ones — were no longer free to pursue the truth in any direction? Because their jobs and status were at stake? It’s plausible. Recall that Mendel and Darwin were amateurs. A more recent example is Alister Hardy, the Oxford professor who conceived the aquatic ape theory of evolution. He didn’t pursue it because he feared loss of reputation. The more sophisticated conclusion, I suppose, isn’t that professionalization was bad but that loss of diversity was bad. We need both amateur and professional scientists because each can do stuff the other can’t. Right now we only have professional ones. No one encourages amateur science; there is no way they can publish their work. (Unless, like Elaine Morgan, who wrote several books about the aquatic ape theory, you’re a professional writer.)

These thoughts were prompted by this remarkable blog post, which has nothing to do with science. What an amazing piece of writing, I thought. I don’t even agree with it, and here I am staring at it. A work of genius? No, lots of blog posts are really good. This one was merely better than most. Would something this brazen and effective appear in any major magazine, newspaper, TV show, radio ad, etc.? No, not even. Do we realize that, all these years, stuff like this has been missing from our media consumption? No, we don’t. Before there was news, there was gossip, I realized; news (such as newspapers) was a kind of professionalization of gossip. The blog post I admired was a bit of riveting creative gossip. Blogs are just new-fangled gossip. Bloggers are endlessly scandalized, indignant, judgmental, just as gossips are. Just as gossip is usually “passed on,” most blog posts have links and many posts consist almost entirely of “passing on” something. Just as gossip can be anything, bloggers can say what they really think, as Tyler Cowen pointed out. That’s why they’re so successful, so easy to write and read. Gossip is good for our mental ecology, just as science is. Mark Liberman’s Language Log blog is a blend of (good) gossip and science; as you can see from my interview with him, it filled a gap. I hope blogs will provide a kind of support structure on which amateur science can grow.