Reincarnation as this owl — that’s what I want. Not merely to flaunt my aerial adroitness, fierce gaze, and stunning plumage. I like the idea of staying up all night and hooting from trees.
I found the video here via a journalist whose work I admire. But James Fallow‘s likening of owls to cats with wings borders on a slur, however unintended.
My closest encounter with an owl of such regal bearing came several years ago just after dusk. I stepped outside onto the back deck overlooking our small goldfish pond and there it was six feet away. More than a foot tall, the owl was perched atop the back of a tall aluminum chair. We stared at each other longer than I expected, maybe a minute, no sign of fear in its unblinking eyes. As if finally bored with our encounter, the owl slowly unfurled its wings. Next came two sounds: the ting of talons clicking against metal, then a whispered whoosh as the owl lifted off into the night.
Florida urologist Jack Cassell doesn’t want to treat 69,438,983 Americans. “If you voted for Obama. . . seek urologic care elsewhere,” reads a sign outside Cassell’s office in Mount Dora, reported the Orlando Sentinel, a newspaper I helped edit for much of my adult life.
Think of how shunning Obama backers could spread. When I next visit Orlando to see family, will restaurants owned by Republican zealots refuse to serve me? But this is about something much larger. Cassell is expressing revulsion for 52% of those who voted because of our political views. The revulsion is so rabid that the doctor prefers not to talk to us, not to touch us, not to treat us. For a change, a racial minority isn’t facing discrimination but rather a racially diverse majority.
Let me be the first to coin a word for this practice of avoiding, at all costs, fellow citizens who disagree politically with Republicans: Cassellism. I can already see bumper stickers, such as Proud To Be A Cassellist! and I ♥ Cassell.
I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow beingsMcCain voters. . . May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling, and may I long experience the joy of healing thoseRepublicans who seek my help.
Two years ago, I was waiting in the hallway of a small Portland high school. I was there to interview students and a teacher for a story. As kids milled about in the din between classes, many hugged each other. Some embraces looked like reunions between dear friends who hadn’t seen each other for years. The hugging was so frequent and enthusiastic that I later mentioned it to my wife and a few others.
Drawing conclusions from a distance and without asking questions makes my other observations — or suspicions — suspect. Still, sincerity seemed lacking. At times the hugs appeared to be a new, more intimate way of saying hello. Some encounters struck me as intentionally over the top, contrived to attract attention. Read More
I hope Roger Cohen of the New York Times wins a Pulitzer Prize for his remarkable commentary from the streets of Tehran. (He discusses the coverage here.) But world-stage politics aren’t his only topic. Yesterday’s gem, “The Meaning of Life,” uses a study of monkeys’ caloric intake to explore universal themes. And his image of baboons in a zoo greeting his father is as poignant as you’ll find in a newspaper column. Newspapers may be in trouble, but the journalism that Cohen practices will always have an audience.
Seeing the world through the eyes of four year olds must be like looking through a peephole. This narrow, constrained view also bestows them with blissful ignorance. Take as evidence an exchange today involving our little boy and his friend:
NPR, soundtrack of our life, blares in the kitchen. Michael Jackson’s name is mentioned, again. The friend asks how he died. “A heart attack,” my wife says. The friend thinks about this, then states with authority that “a dog attacked him, then a cat.”
Now comes the blissful part. Our son, Atticus, says, “Who’s Michael Jackson?”
Read the words. Listen to the words. Watch them sung. Then ask yourself what have — or did — we become? Ask why nearly every major news organization can’t bring itself to equate waterboarding with “torture” when, in fact, the United States executed World War II enemies for the same practice?
Maybe Jonathan Mann’s song, whose lyrics are drawn from one of the infamous torture memos, will finally awake the nation. And justice will be done.
I usually wield no club in the intensifying mainstream media bashathon. But Todd Gitlin, whose journalism bona fides make his views worth a read, rightly hammers Big-Time Reporters’ coverage of President Obama’s press conference last night.
Petulance born of arrogance is especially repugnant when it leads to stories focusing on style at the expense of substance. We need hard-nosed reporting combined with clear explanations and analyses of what’s really happening around us. Now more than ever.
Not only did we learn this week that Portland is the country’s unhappiest city, a new study says it’s among the least manly. But according to whose definition? These criteria aren’t my idea of manliness.
The Portland Business Journalreports that “cities scored higher based on the number of sports teams they have, the number of hardware stores, the number of tools purchased and the frequency of monster truck rallies. Cities lost points based on their number of home furnishing stores, high minivan sales and subscription rates to beauty magazines.” Read More
I spent a long time on the print side of newspapers and a good number of years starting and nurturing their online offspring. These days I’m online much of each day and night but still have this thing for the printed page.
It began, like many things, with a childhood ritual: plodding barefoot to the end of our driveway in Maitland, Florida and fetching the morning paper. As a kid I also fell in love with magazines, especially Life, which opened the world to me in pictures. Read More
Rarely do I find commentary as incisive and articulate as that of Scott Horton. His “No Comment” blog for Harper’s Magazine illuminates current affairs not with polemics but cohesive facts and analysis. Reading his work I see the fog of he-said-she-said media coverage lift to reveal what looks like truth. Read More
Anyone doubting the grassroots power of online social media should consider this story, which I wrote for today’s edition of The Oregonian.
Without Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, a son’s heart-warming attempt to help his mother’s financially ailing bookstore would have never reached and connected with so many people so quickly. Read More
A Slate magazine column, The Explainer, is a must read for me. It typically explains issues in the news or suggested by the news, such as these recent entries: What do Iraqis find so insulting about shoes and feet? Can you be a gay Mormon?
Reading through the archive of questions answered this year is a refresher course on what’s transpired, from the important (Can Blagojevich still appoint a new senator?) to the absurd (Who first put lipstick on a pig?). Read More
One of my favorite web sites is proof once again that simple ideas can produce breathtaking results. The Big Picture, a seven-month-old photo-journalistic blog of the Boston Globe, demonstrates how so-called old media can do a much better job via new media. Too bad that truth has taken so long to sink in. (I worked on the print side of newspapers for many years before moving to the online side in the heady, pioneering days of the 1990s.)
Two recent features, each with more than two dozen stunning photographs, are stark reminders that the United States is waging two wars in distant lands. The pictures make real what for most of us are distant abstractions in Iraq and Afghanistan. These collections of well-composed single images pack more wallop than any video. They create a lingering truth, a truth not easily blinked away.
