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Julian Beever’s three-dimensional sidewalk drawings are the new salvia. (Via.)

Note 1: Robin very subtly outed me early last week, but I needed a little while to get my groove on before announcing myself: I’m augmenting my blogging here with a blog about journalism, which will contain the insights and discoveries I encounter while doing a year-long research fellowship at the new Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. I’ll probably cross-post this over there, but I needed some of the brilliance of the Snarkmarket hive mind to help shape my thoughts on what follows. You’ll find a little background for this post here.

Note 2: What follows is an attempt to thread several very obvious lines of reasoning together into something possibly slightly novel. Not at all assured of success, so consider this a preemptive apology.

I’ve often heard expressed a lamentation for the disappearance of a news commons. When we all no longer look to oracular information sources like Walter Cronkite and the New York Times, the thinking goes, we stand in danger of retreating into our narrow ideological corners. Under this model, the front pages of a daily general-interest newspaper form the foundation for civic dialogue.

In an intriguing paper, Indiana University professor Mark Deuze reminds us that this notion of a news commons was not presented hand-in-hand with the idea of democracy. Until recently, newspapers were constrained into having one front page for everybody. Over time, we’ve come to view this constraint as a feature, not a bug.

Under the news commons model, we aim for our citizens to come to the voting booth (or the city council meeting or the church supper) armed with the same information from a few reliable sources. So democracy means weighing our common set of facts against our diverse values, and reaching a conclusion respected by all. Cf. David Mindich, so you don’t think I’m beating at straw men:

“One of the most powerful things about journalism itself is that it can communicate to a large audience and then we can have discussions about facts and where the facts bring us; but if we no longer are paying attention, then the facts don…

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Mpls wonder-blogger Max Sparber offers a peek at some of the most fascinating esoterica in the permanent collection of my beloved Walker Arts Center. Sample:

The Walker has dozens of pieces by Pettibon; this particular one is an ink-spattered sketch of the most self-reflective character in the history of comics, Batman, facing a woman with a gun while disconnected passaged from his endless internal monologues crowd his head. Most of the quotes a vaguely sexual, or explicit, such as a comment from Robin saying, “I have studied the bats trying to understand Batman’s complex psycho-sexuality.” This actually seems intended as a retort to Batman’s first quote. “Robin,” he says, “you came too soon.”

The Believer interviews Matt Bai. (Oh, and speaking of the NYT Magazine, I highly recommend David Leonhardt’s cover story on Obamanomics if you haven’t read it.)

The Walker Art Center recently concluded a spectacular exhibit called “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes” (they’ve helpfully catalogued the whole exhibit in a wiki; oh Walker, how I love you). Among the highlights of the exhibit was this photo collection by Paho Mann, images of former Circle K convenience stores that have been transformed into other types of businesses — tattoo parlors, Mexican restaurants, tuxedo rental places — all taken from the same distance in similar light, all bearing the Circle K’s suprisingly distinct form. (Also available as a Google Maps mashup, natch.)

I mentioned this to an architect friend, and he pointed me to the delightful NotFoolingAnybody.com: “a chronicle of bad conversions and storefronts past” — photos of former chain restaurants lightly altered to house new businesses. (Such as “China Hut,” the bastard offspring of — what else? — Pizza Hut.)

OMG I love the Web sometimes.

MPR’s Midmorning show today was about politicians flip-flopping. A tired subject, and nothing non-trite can be said about it. Still, I had to let this out:

What the news media often neglect in their coverage of the candidates is attention to their underlying governing philosophies. I think these provide a much more accurate guide to their behavior in office than their tendency to make shifts on small-bore, particular issues.

For all the media hullabaloo around “flip-flopping” in the Bush/Kerry election, we would have had a much keener idea of President Bush’s flavor of governance had the media focused our attention on the core philosophies animating his team of advisers. Bush’s reliance on and deference to those advisers, their belief in the unitary executive, their dogged insistence on loyalty

Kottke’s plug for the Independent Documentary Association’s list of the 25 best documentaries reminds me to recommend one that was underhyped last year — The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. I like Keith Phipps’ perceptive review best; he calls it “a film about what it takes to make it in America.” It’s hilarious, a bit sad, and enormously revealing.

Via Reddit:

Some anglerfishes of the superfamily Ceratiidae employ an unusual mating method. Because individuals are presumably locally rare and encounters doubly so, finding a mate is problematic. When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were the remains of male ceratioids.

At birth, male ceratioids are already equipped with extremely well developed olfactory organs that detect scents in the water. When it is mature, the male’s digestive system degenerates, making him incapable of feeding independently, which necessitates his quickly finding a female anglerfish to prevent his death. The sensitive olfactory organs help the male to detect the pheromones that signal the proximity of a female anglerfish. When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then atrophies into nothing more than a pair of gonads, which release sperm in response to hormones in the female’s bloodstream indicating egg release. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available.

Robin previously called out Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight for excellent coverage of this campaign season. Now I’ve gotta lend a hand to the gang at Obsidian Wings, especially Hilary Bok, a.k.a. Hilzoy. It first came to my attention when one of the A-Listers plugged this post about Barack Obama’s legislative record. I subscribed, and ever since I’ve been impressed by the quality of thought, research and analysis there.

Yesterday, for example, Obama and McCain both gave major foreign policy speeches. This generated very typical news coverage and hyper-typical punditry. But it also fortunately generated a typical post from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, in which you get the sense that not only did she reserve comment until reading/hearing the speeches in question, but that she understood the deeper mental framework at play behind each speech. She’s solidly liberal, but seems to make few assumptions about her audience.