content analysis

slow news (Sept. 18, 2008)

You Just Can’t Kill It

By Cintra Wilson (NY Times)

Those who know me know that I am a great afficionado of the Times Style Section.  The sheer preposterousness of the proported “trends” they cover is a delight.  This article fairly insightfully and humorously discusses the allure of goth subculture to young people.  The Goth subculture is at least vaguely familiar to those of us who have attended high school within the past thirty years.  But too often people focus on its outward signs — the make-up, the black clothes, the overt pathos — without understanding what values might lie behind the symbols.  Of course, neither this article nor the fashion exhibit nor the referenced coffeetable book are comprehensive examinations of the meaning behind the Gothic subculture.  But it’s an interesting window for the uninitiated.

One of the best parts is the final line, which I read as a direct potshot at me.  I own plaid shots and I love Nirvana.  Does that mean I’m not cool enough to smoke cigarettes behind the high school?

slow news – May 21, 2008

The Giant Pool of Money

By Alex Bloomberg and Adam Davidson for This American Life

A can’t-be-missed, utterly fascinating examination of just how the housing finance crisis happened (put into baby words for the non-economists among us).  As always, TAL is able to put a human face on the issue.  One of the conclusions of the piece is the next few years are going to be a lot like the 1970s malaise era, but not quite the 1930s.  I fear this is optimistic.  After listening to this episode, I had the overwhelming feeling that the U.S. government is going to have to implement some kind of broad debt relief program.

What think you, readers?

slow news – May 13, 2008

Clinton’s Universal Bargaining Chip

By Katharine Q. Seelye (NYT Web Only)

I try to steer clear of pure political posts on slow news, but, sweet jesus, I hope this is true.  Healthcare has been an issue where I felt great ambivalence over Senator Obama.

slow news – May 12, 2008

It’s the End of the World as the Knicks Know It

By Harvey Araton

In one of the recent signs that (Ladies and Gentlemen) your New York Knickerbockers might return to the world of the living, recently hired GM Donnie Walsh hired Seven Seconds or Less ex-Suns coach Mike D’Antoni.  D’Antoni, a former star player and coach in the Italian League, has innovated a run-and-gun system of beautiful basketball in Phoenix over the past several seasons.  In this article, Araton discuss how the Knicks, located in the world’s most cosmopolitan city, have resisted the globalization of the NBA in recent years.  As foreign-born players — like Dirk Nowitzki, Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, Steve Nash, Andres Nocioni, Mehmet Okur, and many others — have come to dominate (often with big men who can actually shoot), the Knicks have been a provincial backwater.  D’Antoni’s arrival might just change that.

Of course, ca desperately hopes that D’Antoni and Walsh will be able to bring one of the best homegrown players to NY in 2010: LeBron James.

slow news – May 8, 2008

The Aria of Chris Matthews

By Mark Leibovich (New York Times)

This article came out almost a month ago and I have been talking about it constantly ever since.  But since nobody else I know has read it, I thought I’d feature it here.  This is an incredible profile of MSNBC enthusiastic political superfan and host of “Hardball,” Chris Matthews.  Now, most people I know didn’t read this because they have no interest in pundits.  However, this story not only blasts the hell out of Matthews and reveals that most of the NBC news staff can’t stand him, it also exposes the growing divide between those old-style politicians and pundits who embrace politics for its maneuvering, strategy, and give-and-take (think Matthews, the Clintons, Bushies, Machiavelli) and those who are cynical about politics and simply care about progress and social transformation (Keith Olbermann, Stewart/Colbert, Obama).  This philosophical difference, which appears to break along generational lines, seems to be one of the great
political changes occurring in American society right now.  We all been more cynical about politics than TV pundits for a while, but maybe people (especially young people) are becoming more interested in policy and progress than pundits, too.

slow news – May 7, 2008

I’m Not Lying, I’m Telling a Future Truth. Really.

By Benedict Carey (NY Times)

We’ve all known a couple notorious liars.  For most of us, lying makes us feel uncomfortable.  However, according to a new study, for some people, lying helps them perfect or smooth over past failed performances and is actually comforting.  Or something like that.  While I’m usually skeptical about newspapers’ take on “a new study suggests…”, this one seemed interesting.

This is the first in what I hope will be a daily feature. I have named it slow news in a nod to the “slow food movement.” According to Slow Food International, the movement aims to “to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.” Likewise, in an age of high speed, low thought journalism, I hope to highlight articles (perhaps radio segments, too) that reflect a broader consideration of an issue, an event, or trend. Any topic is up for grabs. Readers are invited to submit their own suggested articles in the comments section.

slow news (April 22, 2008)

Time magazine is hardly known as a vanguard publication in the fight for progressive publication. However, since the early 1990s, Time has consistently covered environmental issues with less of the doubt about global climate change that has plagued the rest of the mainstream media. With climate change already a very serious threat (bigger than Iran, I dare say), few publications have gone beyond saying that climate change is something we need to discuss. While several people have suggested policies that help address the problem, I’ve yet to see a clear blueprint that maps out how we can solve the problem (not even from Al Gore who suggests tighter regulations and investing in technology and that’s about it). Now, Bryan Walsh of Time offers one in “How to Win the War on Global Warming.” This is up there with George McGovern’s plan to get out of Iraq on my Top 5 Best Socio-Political Blueprints of the Past Five Years list.

content analysis is still a work in progress and one unexpected reality of blogging is that it’s sometimes hard to think of some thing worthwhile to say.  In order to provide the loyal reader(s) of ca with something to read on a daily basis, I have decided to implement the following changes:

• the sunday reads closes up shop: I think we can all agree that this planned series that only happened once was a well-intentioned failure.  Truth be told, it takes away from my beloved Sunday if I have to post a whole collection of the articles that I’m reading.  In place of the sunday reads, I will post a carefully chosen article every day in a section called slow news.  For a full explanation, see the coming debut.
• america for europeans: This may well be a harebrained idea, but I came up with this watching last week’s great Frontline special on healthcare around the world.  The basic idea is to briefly discuss things that are, for better or for worse, uniquely American and slowly document what it is to live in  America in the early 21st century.  I’m pretty sure that’s kind of the idea of This American Life, but I’m stealing it.
• marx’s diary: In the February issue of Dave Eggers’ The Believer, Sam Stark had a disorganized, but interesting article about a 96 page violet notebook written by the young Karl Marx.  Marx’s notebook included poems, the first act of a Hamlet-like play, a novel about constipation, and, apparently, a lot of nonsense.  In the marx’s diary section, I will highlight some aspect of sociologists’ lives other than our work.  It could be something creative by a sociologist or something silly.  This column could be really fun or really short-lived.  Keep an eye on it.

Also, this week: look out for a tirade on the life and supposed death of newspapers in response to Eric Alterman’s fantastically dumb article in The New Yorker a few weeks back.  For more on Alterman, see here (on him becoming the “Aging-Lefty Lindsay Lohan”), here (on him just being wrong a lot), and here (on him being self-aggrandizing and picking stupid fights).