I have been chasing some rather tight work related deadlines. Between that and a New York commute that has been eating up my leisure hours, RandomNotes has been getting very little attention in the last few weeks. Hope to be back over the weekend.
Dr. Delong has both a serious explanation and a not so serious explanation of why Bush administration treasury secrataries tend to be accident prone. (times story here).
Delong has had some terrific posts in the last few weeks. I am yet to digest most of them. Take a look.
Update: NYT editorial on the subject.
William Pfaff has a succint summary of the enduring influence of Leo Strauss on American conservative movement in America. Scary stuff presented quite well.
Two of the most brilliant nature photographers out there have websites of their own:
Jim Brandenburg has some fabulous pics on his site. There is also a short interview with Brandenburg in NikonNet.
Lanting also has a website. Not as many photographs there, but a lot of content that is interesting to browse through.
Steve McCurry has an absolutely awe inspiring gallery of photographs on his website. I am grateful to reader Jeff Halbrook for sending this lnk to me.
It occurs to me, that lately I have been reading a lot more writing about writing or writers on writers than actually reading new fiction. I feel a little frustrated about this. There is a stack of half finished books on my bedside. I feel bad just looking at them!
Anyway, I always wanted to check out Zadie Smith's then new book White Teeth. I had forgotten all about it, until a few days back when I read this delightful essay that she wrote, about the experience of having her book being turned into a movie.
It is not strictly true that I am not reading at all. I am in between 'Decline and Fall' by Evelin Waugh and fat WebMethods manuals. I quite like 'Decline and Fall' so far. I am not sure I can say the same about the WebMethods product line.
So I was quite looking forward to reading this essay on Waugh by Hitchens. It is well written, but ultimately disappointing. I wonder wheather Hitchens realizes that what he said about Waugh is equally(if not more) applicable to Hitchens.
Tantalizing as this may be, in conceding that moral courage may be shown by reactionaries or good prose produced by snobs, it does not make the leap of imagination that is required to state the obvious: that Waugh wrote as brilliantly as he did precisely because he loathed the modern world. Orwell identified "snobbery" and "Catholicism" as Waugh's "driving forces," ....
If you replace "catholicism" with atheism and "snobbery" with a certain kind of social insecurity, we probably reach closer to what are Hitchens' driving forces. I am not sure Hitchen would be as enjoyable a read if he did not specialize in intellectual hatchet jobs.
Incidentally, Sid Blumenthal seems to have finally gotten his revenge in his new book 'The Clinton Wars'. (For those not clued in on this, the linked story should provide the background. Also, for accessing Salon, click on the free one day pass thing. You'll have to view some annoying ads before you can access the rest of the content). The book seems to be doing well. New York Observer joked this week about the poor Clinton staffer whose job must had been to shuttle between Bill Clinton's book editor, Hilary's book editor and Sid's editor trying to make sure that these people don't contradict each others when describing the same events.
Appropos of nothing, this literary quiz in Guardian and this world news quiz in BBC are very good exercises for bruising your ego. I am not gonna tell you how I did!
This is for all those people who have been landing here via google looking for stuff on Jayson Blair.
My previous post on Blair is here. 'Washington City Paper' article that I linked to in that post has a scathing critique on the subject.
The most exhaustive coverage is now available on NYT itself:
-Article on Corrections
-The list of corrections
-The editor's note which goes on to say:
For all of the falsifications and plagiarism, The Times apologizes to its readers in the first instance, and to those who have figured in improper coverage. It apologizes, too, to those whose work was purloined and to all conscientious journalists whose professional trust has been betrayed by this episode.
Romenesko's as usual provides terrific ongoing coverage and is your best bet for keeping up on the subject. You may want to take some time to browse through Romenesko's letters forum. It has a vibrant media community.
So far as I know, Jason Blair did not have a home page.
I don't take any pleasure in seeing the Times having to swallow such humiliations. I don't think I'll have anything more to say about the Blair issue specifically.
However, this passage about Howell Raines, the edior of NYT, that Cosmo macero has in his weblog, had to be quoted:
"I am haunted by something I know in my bones," Raines wrote in 1998. "Mr. Barnicle, like this writer, is a product of a male-dominated, mostly white tribal culture that takes care of its own." The "historical bottom line of this event will be that a white guy with the right connections got pardoned for offenses that would have taken down a minority or female journalist."
Jeffrey Goldberg's 'In the party of God' (part I and part II) published in The New Yorker, (Oct 2002) got the national magazine award for best reporting given out this week. In that article, Goldberg laid out the case that the Hezbollah (not the one based in Kashmir, the one in Southern Lebanon) is the deadliest terrorist organization in the world and has a more successful trackrecord of achieving its political objectives than Al Quida. It is a spine chilling peace of journalism and very well researched.
His Iraq article was also fascinating, exhaustive and controversial. It was used as ammunition by the Bush administration, in the Beltway PR war for intervention in Iraq. Goldberg's access to, and alignment with Pentagon's foreign policy thinkers is total. (Matt Welch had some interesting comments at the time about the article and its naysayers).
It should also be noted here that Goldberg has apparently served in the Israeli army and may have probably cause for enhancing the importance of Hezbollah.
Whatever his political loyalties might be, he certainly knows his way around the murky world of middle eastern politics and that illuminates his Hezbollah articles. Go check them out.
Salam Pax's 'Where is Raed' weblog is now UPDATED. I, and most people who maintain weblogs and know of Salam Pax, gave up on this guy as dead. Well, he appears to have survived the Iraq war!
Let me take a moment to thank Prashant Kothari for including me on his blogroll.
Prashant writes interesting, pithy commentary largely on current US and Indian affairs. I thought his remarks on my last month's article on Satyacircle were on the mark.
It was also nice to rediscover two of my favourite Indian commentators (Gurcharan Das and Swaminathan Aiyar) through his links. Both write very well on Indian business and economy; though Das's Optimism Unbound can sometimes grate on people more cynical than him.
On a letter posted in the Romanesko forum on 4/30/03, Bill Cook summed up the last few months' damage:
Today, in a devastating analysis of the Jayson Blair affair published in Washington City Paper, Erik Wemple and Josh Levin provided a more nuanced analysis:
At a less perspicacious publication, Blair might not have acquired such a grotesque corrections archive.
Yet Blair's sniper coverage appears to hit the paper's mea culpa weak spot: 'fessing up to mistakes in coverage trends. Whether it's correspondent Walter Duranty's brushing off the famines that killed millions in the Soviet Union in the '30s or the late-'90s stories that overstated the U.S. espionage case against scientist Wen Ho Lee, the Times resists acknowledging that its coverage ever goes off track......
No probe, however, will excuse the full-system breakdown that permitted Blair to tarnish American journalism. Where were the line editors with the questions about the alleged interrogation videotape? Didn't anyone ask how this kid parachuted into Maryland and suddenly corralled a breathtaking scoop? "There's no system that I know of that can protect you from a reporter or editor who sets out to make up untrue things and get them into the paper," says Raines.
More pertinently, isn't it time that NYT appoints an ombudsman?
(More later)
As I read it on the train on my way to New York, I felt that this editorial was right on the mark. No one expected that the very next day Mr. Purcell will go on to prove how justified those concerns are.
I must also admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the sudden demonstration of SEC's backbone. Of course it could also be because Mr. Donaldson is set to testify before the senate next week. (Donaldson's letter here).