More good stuff on the journalism beat. Nicolas Lemann’s “Paper Tigers” reviews new biographies of media moguls past and present, including a marvelous pivot between the flashy Hearst and Pulitzer to the double-breasted world of The Wall Street Journal’s Barney Kilgore:

Kilgore and his colleagues did figure out how to publish a home-and office-delivered daily newspaper nationally, something that was far more difficult to accomplish in the nineteen-forties and fifties than people who have grown up with the Internet can imagine. The Journal’s circulation, which was thirty-two thousand when Kilgore became its managing editor, in 1941, rose to just above a hundred and fifty thousand in 1950, eight hundred and twenty-five thousand in 1962, and almost a million when Kilgore died, of cancer, at the age of fifty-nine, in 1967.

When Kilgore started out at the Journal, reporters sometimes sold advertising, and Kilgore’s own early work as a reporter entailed experimentation with forms carried over from the nineteenth century, such as articles written as letters to an imaginary friend. By the time the Journal had come to full maturity, it had helped establish the journalistic norms of reportorial nonpartisanship and of independence from advertiser pressure. As Tofel observes, it was less a standard newspaper than a news-and-business magazine published daily on newsprint, closer to Fortune and Business Week than to either Hearst’s New York Journal or the Times, both of which were edited on the assumption that they would be their readers’ sole source of news.

Still, Kilgore did much more than develop the manners and mores of modern

Last week, Jack Shafer called out the idea that newspapers are essential to enlightened democracy as a big bunch of self-deluded hooey:

Until the current newspaper crisis, you rarely heard politicians or activists bleating about how important newspapers were to self-government. They mostly bitched about what awful failures newspapers were at uncovering vital data. The only group that holds a consistently high opinion of newspapers is newspaper people. They’re the ones who do the bragging about how newspapers enrich democracy by uncovering pollution, malfeasance in office, abuses of power, and unsafe consumer goods…

The insistence on coupling newspapering to democracy irritates me not just because it overstates the quality and urgency of most of the work done by newspapers but because it inflates the capacity of newspapers to make us better citizens, wiser voters, and more enlightened taxpayers. I love news on newsprint, believe me, I do. But I hate seeing newspapers reduced to a compulsory cheat sheet for democracy. All this lovey-dovey about how essential newspapers are to civic life and the political process makes me nostalgic for the days, not all that long ago, when everybody hated them.

Me, I think journalism is (among other things) good for democracy, and newspapers are a pretty good way to read things in print. So I took Shafer’s rant as half a useful corrective and half an enjoyable self-contained bit of contrarian crankiness.

But then I read this striking juxtaposition in LISNews, and I thought — hmm: maybe something less wholesome is going on with all this hymn-to-democracy talk:

At the end of last week, the New York Times Company threatened to close down the Boston Globe unless the employee unions agreed to $20 million in cuts. This comes on the heels of comments by NYT executive editor Bill Keller speaking to an audience at Stanford in which he stated “saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause.” (He clarifies his statement to relate it to the relative level of interest in the survival of the Times, not as a human rights intervention. This doesn’t change the extraordinarily poor choice of comparative terms.)

Ouch.

See also Brian Tierney, publisher of the now-bankrupt Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News, who made a whole lot of noise about the virtues of a locally-owned paper while taking on a ton of debt, extracting pound-of-flesh concessions from labor, and awarding himself raises and bonuses before it all kinda fell apart.

So to review:

1. Sometimes when people are going on-and-on about how virtuous and essential their industry is, they’re actually trying to Mickey-Finn you into letting them do whatever they want;
2. A lot of people who really like the idea of good local journalism and even really like newsprint in their hands really don’t like their local newspaper — either because of what they read (or don’t read) or because of what they know the paper is doing or has done, in many cases to people they know. We can’t lose sight of that.

The Economist just published a magazine article on the relationship between poverty, stress, and memory in childhood development. It’s a powerful thesis, and breathtaking in its scope. But Mark Liberman at Language Log has an equally powerful takedown that walks back some of the big conclusions the article suggests.

Basically, the differences found in the research are actually statistically smaller than you’d think. As debunkings go, this is ho-hum. But I’m much more intrigued by Liberman’s Whorfian idea about why we get confused when we start to talk about statistical variation among groups:

This is presumably because a significant proportion of [The Economist’s] readers would be baffled by talk of effect sizes or percentiles, while the proportion who are bothered by vague talk about generic differences is minuscule. Such things are not effectively taught or widely learned, even among quantitatively-minded intellectuals. But I also think that there’s a linguistic aspect. If Benjamin Lee Whorf were alive, he might argue that

Friend of Snarkmarket Nav at Scrawled In Wax has a thoughtful meditation on the relationship of video games to other art forms (and to reality), spurred on by playing LittleBigPlanet:

Video games can also tell stories, but many people argue that narrative — particularly telling stories, or “diegesis” – isn’t their primary function. Instead of relying on the representation of a world to tell tales, video games rely on simulation, not to recreate the world but in order to create a world as an arena for simulated action. And by collapsing both play and creation into one experience, blurring the distinction between the two, LittleBigPlanet becomes a metaphor for gaming itself in which the uniqueness of games as a cultural form becomes clear.

If literary texts work primarily through representation, and secondly by reader interaction, the inverse is true of video games: even in the most “realistic” games, it is the creative, interactive element that is paramount, and it is through this that players produce their own narratives as they move through a world that references “life” but is neither constrained by it nor bound to its rules…

And while I myself will always be partial to the intensely interior nature of literature, LittleBigPlanet suggests that, as gaming develops, its potential and power will be found in its capacity to empower players to create worlds never before imagined – and then, as was never possible before, step into them.

Let me tweak Nav’s terms a little, because I think actually that “diegesis” DOESN’T just mean narrative, and is flexible enough to cover the “reader interaction” that he’s talking about. Broadly speaking, diegesis is the interaction, rather than the story — we associate it with narrative because it’s a way to describe all the tools a narrator uses to tell a story rather than simply recount what happened. When a good storyteller hooks you in, THAT’s diegesis. (Narrative in this sense would be one kind of diegesis.)

I particularly like the idea that video games and literature/film are at opposite ends of the teeter-totter that is mimesis/representation and diegesis/reader interaction — they’re important aspects both, but actually diegesis (I guess we’d call this “gameplay”) is way more privileged in video games, precisely because of the high emphasis on interactivity.

I’ll add another wrinkle. In fancy-pants film theory we often talk about the way that a viewer is “sutured” or stitched into the mind-space of the film. Basically, when you’re watching a movie, you’ve got to take some kind of subject position — usually it’s that of the third-person who watches, taking turns identifying with one or another of the characters’ point-of-view. And traditional movie techniques are all about making that subject-position super comfortable. You’re sitting back, watching Bogart and Bergman and Dooley Wilson talk in Casablanca, one of them kind of at the center-left of the screen and one kind of at center-right, cutting back and forth, and you never stop to think, “hey! what’s going on! where the hell am I?” The movie’s doing its job, making all of this stuff transparent. While crazy art movies, like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s, flip the axis and do disjunctive montages, so you can’t get comfortable or find an easy space to identify with. And that’s the point.

Scott McCloud talks about something similar in comic books — we can identify with a character as an avatar if there’s just enough detail that he/she seems real-ish, but not so much that he/she seems like somebody else, which is weirdly uncanny. So the more precisely iconic a character is — whether Homer Simpson or Batman — the easier it is for us to say, “that could be me.”

Video games definitely work on both levels. The characters themselves have to be iconic – enough detail to distinguish them from being merely generic, not so much that we reject the ID altogether. But what really hooks us in is the gameplay, and in order for the gameplay to feel right, it, too, has to feel iconic — simple enough in its execution to be manipulable and masterable, complex enough in its representation to “feel” real. This is the difference between trying to make the character on the screen — what my mom would call “the guy” — do different things, and feeling as if you yourself were doing them. Where you can call the character “I,” or intermediately, “my guy.”

I feel like I’m venturing too far afield. Suffice it to say, this reality/representation/narrative/interaction stuff is surprisingly profound once you start to get into it. And the fact that most of it is, for us, unconscious, helps to show both how good games tap into our brain’s capacity for this kind of agent-mediated thinking and how thoroughly acculturated most of us are to the representational/interactive grammar of video games. Just like with films, when it’s working really well, we don’t even notice it any more.

Whenever I get stuck trying to explain either 1) my favorite current musical artist, 2) my musical tastes in general, or 3) my general aesthetic stance on the universe, I always fall back on Bill Callahan.

Callahan made one terrific record after another through the nineties and early part of this decade, recording as Smog – and later as (Smog). Red Apple Falls and Knock Knock are particularly atmospheric high points. They also show Callahan’s musical range — he can crank out feisty garage rock, precise minimalist folk, full-throated country gospel, and carefully arranged pop.

Somewhere in the nineties, too, Callahan shifted his singing voice downward; now he’s somewhere in that strange middle road between Lou Reed and the late Johnny Cash. And in 2006, he hooked up with queen of folk Joanna Newsom (previous paramours include Cat Power’s Chan Marshall) and shed the Smog moniker to release his first album under his own name. Woke On A Whaleheart is gentle but exuberant, roots-burnt rock and roll. Of course, then Callahan’s heart got broken again – but he kept the name, and the relative immediacy

His new album, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, is more restrained than the uneven Whaleheart, but even more beautiful. In particular, “Rococo Zephyr” and “Faith/Void” just blow me away. They officially drop at mid-month — check them out.

Read more…

Something about the Tokyo! trailer seemed pretty Robin-esque to me:

So, Sloan, how’s my Ro-dar? Planning to see this? Seen it already?

By the way, I caught this in the trailers before The Class, which is just as marvelous as everybody says it is.

I really admire Harper’s Magazine blogger/lawyer Scott Horton, not least because he is a voracious and sensitive reader, who often serves up nice chunks of older texts. This, for example, is from today’s excerpt of John Stuart Mill’s essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

‘Lord, enlighten thou our enemies,’ should be the prayer of every true Reformer; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.

I’ve heard this quote before, without attributing it to Mill, and I’m guessing you might have too; but there’s more, and it’s all worth reading.

I know, I know; my bias on this is clear, since I read and reread old stuff as a matter of disposition – an irresistable need to know – as much as because of my profession.

I think what I want to emphasize, in this case and maybe in others, is that you, gentle reader, ought to be dissatisfied with the general knowledge you have of people like John Stuart Mill, whether from a college humanities course or wherever. It’s too easy to say, “yeah, Mill, Utilitarianism, I know all about that.” I mean, be thankful that you know that. But I think that kind of checkbox thinking about intellectual history is too easily encouraged by the way we teach this stuff.

What doesn’t come through in that isn’t the deep nuances of the different philosophies or systems or biographies that scholars and specialists concern themselves with. It’s the knowledge that most of these people that we remember were really important because they were great essayists, occasional thinkers, men and women who could speak about anything great or small. And there’s nothing to replace that feeling that you get, reading someone, that you’re thinking with them, and that their thoughts and words are… irreplaceable and necessary and just.

I don’t know. I am not saying this well. These thoughts are replaceable and unnecessary and almost certainly unjust. So I will take them to their limit. You have to continue to challenge yourself as a reader – a serious reader. And as one who learns – a serious student. That you have not calcified. That you do not know what you think you know, least of all who or what or where or especially WHEN is important.

I don’t have to impress upon you the need to embrace the new. But get a library card and wander somewhere dusty. Find something real. And then blog about it — bring it into this world.

Scan that creaky wisdom, make it sing. We need many things now, but wisdom most of all.

Joshua Schachter lists several reasons why shortened URLs (those mini-links provided by TinyURL and its children), despite their convenience in some circumstances, are actually pretty bad. And I agree.

Some of Schachter’s reasons are technical, related to DNS servers and the code they’re written in, and others are more counterfactual – like what happens when a company goes out of business, and all of those links go dead?

But eventually, under the rubric of “usability issues” he gets around to the big one for me: “The clicker can’t even tell by hovering where a link will take them, which is bad form.”

I don’t know about you, but when I’m browsing the web, I hover over links like each one were a suspect public toilet — only touching down when I’m sure I know what I’m getting into. I take clicking through VERY seriously. Hovering over a link to get a peak at the URL may not always be perfect information, but to me, it’s essential. TinyURLs don’t let you do that. You’re going to the middle of nowhere. This bothers me, every time.

In response to Schachter, Jason lists what he’d like to change about the way Twitter uses shortened URLs:

With respect to Twitter, I would like to see two things happen:

1) That they automatically unshorten all URLs except when the 140 character limit is necessary in SMS messages.

2) In cases where shortening is necessary, Twitter should automatically use a shortener of their own.

That way, users know what they’re getting and as long as Twitter is around, those links stay alive.

Very reasonable ideas, all of these. In general, it seems like Twitter’s going to have to create its own rhetoric of linking as powerful as the “@username” designation for links to Twitter users. Maybe an “%sitename” HTML tag in lieu of a shortened URL? Not sure.

Untitled, by Mira Schendel; from a new MOMA retrospective of Schendel and León Ferrari.

Bad times do strange things to free, public places, especially those with internet access:

Urban ills like homelessness have affected libraries in many cities for years, but librarians here and elsewhere say they are seeing new challenges. They find people asleep more often at cubicles. Patrons who cannot read or write ask for help filling out job applications. Some people sit at computers trying to use the Internet, even though they have no idea what the Internet is.