The media entrepreneur’s vision for the future of content and journalism:
DENTON: The Panopticon—the prison in which everybody is exposed to scrutiny all the time. Do you remember the website Fucked Company? It was big in about 2000, 2001. I was CEO of Moreover Technologies at the time. A saleswoman put in an anonymous report to the site about my having paid for the eye operation of a young male executive I had the hots for. The story, like many stories, was roughly half true. Yes, there was a young male executive. Yes, he did have an eye operation. No, it wasn’t paid for by me. It was paid for by the company’s health insurance according to normal procedure. And no, I didn’t fancy him; I detested him. It’s such a great example of Fucked Company and, by extension, most internet discussion systems. There’s some real truth that gets told that is never of a scale to warrant mainstream media attention, and there’s also no mechanism for fact-checking, no mechanism to actually converge on some real truth. It’s out there. Half of it’s right. Half of it’s wrong. You don’t know which half is which. What if we could develop a system for collaboratively reaching the truth? Sources and subjects and writers and editors and readers and casual armchair experts asking questions and answering them, with follow-ups and rebuttals. What if we could actually have a journalistic process that didn’t require paid journalists and tape recorders and the cost of a traditional journalistic operation? You could actually uncover everything—every abusive executive, every corrupt eye operation.
In 1727, a lady named Helen Morrison placed a personal advertisement in the Manchester Weekly Journal. It was possibly the first time a newspaper was ever used for such a purpose. As it happens, Morrison was committed to an asylum for a month. Society was clearly not ready for such an autonomous practice, especially on the part of a woman. But personal ads quickly became an institution. Heinrich von Kleist’s celebrated novella The Marquise of O, first published in 1810 (and said by Kleist to be “based on a true incident”) opens on the newspaper ad placed by “a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children,” to the effect “that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.” Read more…
Matthew McNaught | Syria Comment | June 2013 | 18 minutes (4,615 words)
Matthew McNaught taught English in Syria between 2007 and 2009. He now works in mental health and sometimes writes essays and stories. This piece first appeared in Syria Comment, and our thanks to McNaught for allowing us to republish it here. Read more…
“Gaiman owes a lot to his fans. Once shrugged off as merely goth kids who liked comics, they’re now as diverse as the characters in his stories.
“Gaiman spends a lot of time on Twitter forging relationships, albeit fleeting ones, with his nearly 1.9 million fans. He also regularly posts on his blog, answers questions on his Tumblr, and updates Facebook.
“‘I just tweeted at him,’ longtime fan Tania Richter says, showing off a photo from CONvergence of Gaiman’s poster with googly eyes pasted on. ‘I’m hoping this’ll get a retweet.'”
A 10-week investigation into Carissa Carpenter, a self-described entertainment executive who has proposed building a $2.8 billion movie studio in a small farming town in Northern California:
“So who is Carissa Carpenter?
“Those who have encountered the California native – in City Council chambers and in the courts – have widely divergent views, with descriptions ranging from visionary to fanciful dreamer to fraud.
“This much is clear: Carpenter’s quest to raise millions for a movie studio in Dixon is the sixth time in 16 years that she has embarked on a similar fundraising mission in Northern California, with an additional pitch in South Carolina.
“Former investors and past business associates describe a distinctive pattern: lots of initial hype, promises of a big money stream from unnamed investors, enthusiasm among local officials – then missed deadlines, delays and, ultimately, failure.”
In the essay “Freedom Is Overrated,” the theologian and scholar Sancrucensis contrasts the humanism of Jonathan Franzen with that of David Foster Wallace. A transcendentally beautiful and heartbreaking meditation on self and other.
I’ve enjoyed a number of essays from The American Conservative this year, but my favorite may have been Mike Lofgren’s “Revolt Of The Rich”. It’s a blistering reproof of our moneyed classes and their disconnect from the historic aspirations of our country.
The tagline of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, is “Biased and Balanced.” An earlier incarnation of the Dish bore another, equally good: “Of No Party Or Clique.” I consider Sullivan an indispensable companion, not least because his views so often diverge from my own. I can’t choose just one entry from his heady, rapid-fire mix of opinion, reporting, photographs, jokes, poems, ideas. But Sullivan’s great heart, his compassion and intellect, are a salutary test of my own convictions most every day.
The scholar Aaron Bady exposes the fatal weaknesses in the arguments of those promoting “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, in a resoundingly persuasive and passionate essay in Inside Higher Ed. Absolutely crucial reading for anyone remotely interested in the academy.
Mike Konczal, known on Twitter as @rortybomb, led a breathtaking debate on debt relief at the Boston Review that blew my wiglet sky-high. In the lead essay, Konczal makes an ironclad case that a strong social safety net, including debt relief, is crucial to the economic health of the country. Splendid, limpidly clear, beautifully reasoned.
It’s scarcely too much to say that The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson single-handedly rescued my sanity from the maelstrom of this year’s election. I pretty much hop on Twitter and start banging out exclamation points every time she posts, but her recent column on the public confrontation of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by a gay Princeton University student will serve as well as any to demonstrate her unwavering clear-mindedness, her sensitivity, fairness and brilliance.
A look at the Ugandan gay rights movement and how it received international attention:
“But it was the funeral, not the murder itself, that confirmed Kato’s transformation from a beloved friend to a hero of gay liberation, Longjones says. Uganda’s gay community converged in Kato’s home village for the ceremony — only to find that the local pastor Thomas Musoke wanted to use his death as an opportunity to berate his survivors. ‘After everyone had given speeches, this guy comes up and says, “I knew David and talked with David. And he cannot repent anymore. But you people can, and you must. And we pray that his whole clique perishes.” That is where problems started, and we could not tolerate this man anymore.’
“‘Do you know what it means when you lose someone you love so much, someone you see as a mentor?’ Longjones asked. ‘You just… get tired. You get fed up. And you don’t care what consequences come your way. What happened at the funeral just made everyone get sick and tired.’
“Kato’s death made international news, and served as confirmation of Uganda’s reputation for gay-hatred. Much of the Western diplomatic corps attended the funeral and watched appalled when the pastor called for the death of Kato’s mourning friends. And by turning the mentor into a martyr, it moved the Ugandan gay rights struggle into its next phase.”
A writer meets with “grinders”—people who are obsessed with human enhancement through the manipulation of their body with technology—and then decides to implant a magnet in his finger:
I chatted with Warwick from his office at The University of Reading, stacked floor to ceiling with books and papers. He has light brown hair that falls over his forehead and an easy laugh. With his long sleeve shirt on, you would never know that his arm is full of complex machinery. The unit allows Warwick to manipulate a robot hand, a mirror of his own fingers and flesh. What’s more, the impulse could flow both ways. Warwick’s wife, Irena, had a simpler cybernetic implant done on herself. When someone grasped her hand, Prof. Warwick was able to experience the same sensation in his hand, from across the Atlantic. It was, Warwick writes, a sort of cybernetic telepathy, or empathy, in which his nerves were made to feel what she felt, via bits of data travelling over the internet.
Hailey and Olivia Scheinman are seven-year-old twins with an unshakeable bond. Olivia was born with epilepsy and cerebral palsy, and Hailey spends much of her time raising money for her sister’s care, and awareness about families with children who have disabilities:
It wouldn’t be hard to imagine a scenario in which the trajectory of the sisters’ lives simply continues to diverge. But something in Hailey has resisted that. She seems determined not to lose her grip on the being to whom she is closest in the world. Her mom thinks that because of Hailey’s efforts, the sisters are closer now than ever.
What makes a good sister?
Hailey Scheinman doesn’t have the answer. She’s 7.
Hailey and Olivia Scheinman are seven-year-old twins with an unshakeable bond. Olivia was born with epilepsy and cerebral palsy, and Hailey spends much of her time raising money for her sister’s care, and awareness about families with children who have disabilities:
“It wouldn’t be hard to imagine a scenario in which the trajectory of the sisters’ lives simply continues to diverge. But something in Hailey has resisted that. She seems determined not to lose her grip on the being to whom she is closest in the world. Her mom thinks that because of Hailey’s efforts, the sisters are closer now than ever.
“What makes a good sister?
“Hailey Scheinman doesn’t have the answer. She’s 7.
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