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Media
January 9, 2006
President or Substitute?
Recently, ESPN.com has started using linking software that hyperlinks the names of athletes that appear in articles to their player pages on the site. Thus, when a columnist like Pat Forde writes about Villanova basketball star Randy Foye, readers can click on Foye's name and find out his latest stats. It's a useful tool, but it has its flaws.
Media
January 5, 2006
Sources Strike Back
What happens when a source is unhappy about the way he has been represented in an article? The uncreative sort will bitch and moan and ask for a correction, maybe even threaten to sue. (Such as some Scientologists.) Perhaps he will write a scathing letter to the editor or try to get favorable coverage in rival media outlets. Boring. A modern and enterprising injured party blogs about the injustice, and publishes a copy of the interviews and emails with the journalist, along with commentary on what a douche the writer is.
Law
January 3, 2006
Trademarking the Scandalous
The San Francisco-based women's motorcycle group Dykes on Bikes has finally been allowed to trademark its moniker after the U.S. Patent and Trademark office reversed two earlier rulings (San Francisco Chronicle). Initially, the group's application was rejected after the office claimed that the word "Dykes" was derogatory and therefore untrademarkable, but the office reversed itself after the group submitted hundreds of pages of documents from dozens of experts testifying that the word was no longer considered pejorative. That the women had so much trouble is testament to the weird system that the government uses to decide which trademarks are too offensive to be acceptable.
Science
December 21, 2005
Penguin Fact-Check
Yesterday, Boing Boing linked to an article about a baby penguin stolen from Amazon World, a zoo on the Isle of Wight in Southern England. Alerted by readers that the story might be a hoax, BB ran an update, leaving it an open question. Curious whether the story of the missing Jackass Penguin was true or the result of jackass reporting, Gelf contacted Amazon World and heard back from manager Katherine Bright. Apparently, the story is true. Here's what Bright wrote to us:
Media
December 20, 2005
The GWOT Guru
When journalists are not too busy interviewing spinmasters and party hacks on both sides of the issue at hand in an effort to bring a false sense of neutrality to their articles, they often turn to a specialized type of source to lend a sense of authority to even the silliest of pieces. That source is the trend watcher, a man whose omniscience in his niche compels reporters to seek him out to comment on any news tangentially related to his expertise.
Science
December 1, 2005
The Evolution of Religious Thoughts
Why do an overwhelming percentage of people believe in a supernatural god? It's not as though there aren't good scientific explanations for how we came to be and why most events occur. According to a bold new theory, humans are religious because religion is an accidental byproduct of our cognitive evolution, and we're therefore predisposed to believe in religion in the face of enormous amounts of evidence to the contrary. "The issue isn't the presence of evidence," Paul Bloom, the Yale psychologist who developed the theory, tells Gelf over email. "There is already plenty of evidence, say, for natural selection, and it's understandable by any high school student."
Media
November 29, 2005
On War and Dinner
The December issue of Rolling Stone includes a fascinating story about the PR firm hired by the Bush administration to spread pro-war propaganda in the media. The article names names behind the deception that led to a war that has cost tens of thousands of lives, so it's no surprise that spin-master John Rendon, the article's subject, takes umbrage with the way he is presented in the magazine. More surprising, though, is that a lot of the dissent about the article revolves around lamb chops.
Media
November 16, 2005
I Like You! Do You Like Me?
Long before Sacha Baron Cohen arrived at the MTV Europe Music Awards earlier this month in a fake Air Kazakh plane piloted by a one-eyed man holding a vodka bottle, his Borat character had been raising the hackles of Kazakhstan's foreign ministers. With a song about throwing Jews down wells and extended riffs about the pleasures of rape, urine, and "animal liquid explosions," Borat, the clueless television presenter, entertains HBO audiences at the expense of the central Asian republic. On Monday, though, Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev shot back, suggesting that Cohen could be working with rival politicians and stating that, "We reserve the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of the kind."
Media
November 14, 2005
Plush Toys and Jungian Archetypes
After getting burned earlier this year for spotlighting a specious social phenomenon on its front page (see Gelf commentary here and here), the New York Times went back to the well on Sunday, giving A1 treatment to a story about stuffed animals tied to the front of trucks. This time, though, the editors made sure that they had the evidence to answer that most important of questions: Why are the toys there?
Media
November 11, 2005
On Eating a Horse
In a column for SI.com, Frank DeFord makes a plaintive case for the horses that are killed in American slaughterhouses—65,000 of them last year alone, he claims. DeFord is skilled at tugging on the heartstrings; his appearances on HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel generally contain equally large helpings of pathos and redemption. But in this latest missive, DeFord manages to miss his mark entirely, and somehow turn a tale about America's weird relationship with its domesticated animals into an ignorant and xenophobic screed.
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