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Media
January 26, 2006
Foyer the Antechamber
This week's winner of the "Well, duh" award goes to this morning's article in the New York Times, "Lobbyists Oppose Efforts to Impose New Restrictions," which for all intents and purposes should have been titled, "Lobbyists Lobby Against Lobbying Reform."
Science
January 25, 2006
Placentophagy
"Any behavior you can think of," says Mark Kristal, a professor of psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo, "somebody, somewhere, has done it." That includes placenta eating, though Kristal is pretty sure that it has never been a common practice in any extant human culture. But while I was working on a recent piece for Slate about patients taking home keepsakes from surgery, I kept coming across stories about the practice, known as placentophagy (Wikipedia).
Media
January 25, 2006
Henry Wade Rolled Over in His Grave
Gelf previously has taken issue with Metro, one of New York's free daily newspapers aimed at commuters. But it was Metro's generally superior rival, amNewYork, that ran a front-page headline Tuesday on par with the New York Post's Kerry/Gephardt ticket (Smoking Gun). Quoth amNewYork: "The prez vows fed abortion ban will be overturned—many New Yorkers disagree."
Media
January 24, 2006
So Long, Plagiarists
Among the highlights of this week's edition of Oops, Gelf's quasi-weekly round-up of media corrections: Holocaust numbers; that 'Friends' apartment; and two longtime journalists get fired, prompting questions about overreaching from the plagiarism police. Here's one of our favorite corrections this week:
Media
January 22, 2006
Sex Cells
Pherotones are the controversial brainchild of Myra Vanderhood, an iconoclastic intimacy researcher whose findings have alienated her from mainstream science. If you hear a phone ring with one of these sounds, you will be under the influence of a love potion. That's the story at pherotones.com; but maybe it's all just a stealth marketing campaign by McKinney Silver, as several commenters at Makezine.com have argued. At the suggestion of a spokeswoman for Durham, North Carolina-based McKinney Silver, Gelf instant-messaged with Dr. Vanderhood. We'll leave it to you to decide whether you should soon put on earmuffs when within earshot of cellphones, or instead install a bullshit-detector when surfing new websites.
Media
January 22, 2006
Scare Quotes
In this week's edition of Blurb Racket—the Gelf feature in which we take a close look at those critic blurbs that are a fixture of ads for movies—see breakdowns of blurbs for The White Countess, The Ringer, The Producers, and more. This week's winner of the Bogus Blurb of the Week award comes in an ad for Hostel:
Internet
January 17, 2006
The Chronic(What?)cles of Viral Video
When New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh saw Lil Wayne and Robin Thicke team up for an impressive version of the song "Shooter" on The Tonight Show, he was inspired to write an article about what he terms "cross-under hits." As Sanneh sees it, this is one of many music videos that start out as part of big-budget television, get picked up on the web, and "return to life as underground hits." But he misses the point.
Arts
January 12, 2006
Brill Had It Right
Doubleday didn't bother to fact-check a best-seller, so the Smoking Gun did it for them. James Frey chronicled his rehab from drug and alcohol addiction in A Million Little Pieces, a purported nonfiction memoir that has sold more than 3.5 million copies and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club (populated by perhaps a million little viewers). Many of Frey's colorful characters were reported dead, conveniently, in the book's postcript, so the Smoking Gun trained its investigative sights on his self-reported crimes and detailed a few days ago extensive problems with Frey's account. Why didn't Doubleday's Nan A. Talese imprint catch the problems? Because books generally aren't fact-checked.
Media
January 10, 2006
Of Farris and Ferris
As every good journalist knows, three's a trend. This helps explain why the New York Times's Week in Review article about Farris Hassan, the 16-year old student who traveled to Iraq, also mentions two other male teenage risk-takers from years past as it attempts to weave a narrative that links adolescent derring-do stunts to… well, it's unclear.
Media
January 9, 2006
The Mother of All Baby Names
In this week's edition of Zooming In, Gelf's quasi-weekly round-up of undercovered local stories from around the world: Very hungry eagles; an ad of questionable taste; and an ironic citizen-journalism blurb. One of our favorite stories this week concerns the Czechs' official baby-name minder.
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