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September 10, 2009

Tim's thoughts: I *absolutely* wish I still had access to my MSU and UChicago email accounts. I remember on Septe... >>

Kleinfeld's Got the Past Futures Beat

I'm sure you saw this, because the NYT's been promoting it: Remembering a Future That Many Feared by N. R. Kleinfeld. The idea is to look back to September 12, 2001, and recall the widely-shared fears and assumptions of the moment:

New York would become a fortress city, choked by apprehension and resignation, forever patrolled by soldiers and submarines. Another attack was coming. And soon.

[...]

If a crippled downtown Manhattan were to have any chance of regeneration, ground zero had to be rebuilt quickly, a bricks and mortar nose-thumbing to terror.

First: What did we think would happen? Then: What actually happened? The reporter's job is straightforward. Interview the past. Report the present.

This setup is so good it made me gasp—really—as I started in on the first few grafs and realized what Kleinfeld was up to. Talk about context. We can't improve our decision-making, our foresight, if we never go back to look at the decisions we made—the futures we feared—and compare them to reality.

This kind of story—maybe it's more "history light" than journalism, I don't know—ought to be standard practice. Let's look at the wailing and teeth-gnashing of just nine months ago, re: the economy. First: What did we think would happen? Then: What actually happened?

Our memories are so short. Our imaginations are so... adaptable. We don't notice them changing. This story totally represents a kind of Long Now thinking, if you ask me—in the sense that it says our vision of the future is something we can inspect, analyze, criticize, report. I mean, that headline says it all, and some copy editor should get a prize for it: "Remembering a Future." Exactly.

Anyway, this is all to say, big ups to N.R. Kleinfeld and the NYT. This was a great idea.

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Posted September 10, 2009 at 11:30 | Comments (2) | Permasnark
File under: Journalism, Recommended

August 19, 2009

No New Tricks

I love the actor/magician Ricky Jay, not least for his terrific supporting turn in the first season of Deadwood (understated on a show where nobody was understated). I resisted reading an old New Yorker profile of Jay when John Gruber at Daring Fireball linked to it earlier in the week, even after linking to an interview Jay gave Errol Morris about deception and talking up Jay's history of magicians and irregular stage entertainers Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (JG: "simply one of the best books I