A “drugstore cowboy” preparing to deliver orders on his bicycle in Texas, 1938.
Photograph by Luis Marden, National Geographic
"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."
— Martin Luther King, Jr, in his Letter from Birmingham Jail
The Chicago Colleens batting at Wrigley, All American Girls Professional Baseball League, 1948, Chicago.
(via sinker)
"I absolutely believe the tech in my example companies is important to their business. But it is not the core; it is not the star. Without the service component, the tech is meaningless. The tech is applied as the business grows to remove manual pains and scale."
— Ben Ogle, “An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first visit”
"And those words came to me: the poor, the poor. Then, right away, thinking of the poor, I thought of Francis of Assisi. Then I thought of all the wars, as the votes were still being counted, till the end. Francis is also the man of peace. That is how the name came into my heart: Francis of Assisi. For me, he is the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation; these days we do not have a very good relationship with creation, do we? He is the man who gives us this spirit of peace, the poor man … How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!"
— Pope Francis, speaking to the press corps for the first time since being elected
"The most visible journalism these days — aka the loudest journalism, namely cable news, pop culture blogs, tabloid magazines, TMZ, Buzzfeed, HuffPo, talk radio, etc. — mostly takes the form of opinionated conversation: professional media people discussing current events much like you and your friends might at a crowded lunch table. A side effect of this way of doing journalism is that you rarely hear from anyone who actually is an expert on the subject of interest at any particular time. That approach doesn’t scale; finding and talking to experts is time consuming and experts without axes to grind are boring anyway. So what you get instead are people who are experts at talking about things about which they are inexpert."
—
Jason Kottke, The challenges of conversational journalism
This is one of the many reasons I ultimately decided not to pursue a career in journalism after spending my high school and college years studying and participating in the craft. Who was I to be writing these stories about everything from new fuel regulations for light-weight SUVs to doulas? That’s not to say that there aren’t journalists who have developed an incredible amount of domain knowledge through many years of work, but it seems that these voices are also getting lost in the din.
"Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. A hundred years from now your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic."
— 10 reasons why 2013 will be the year you quit your job
(Source: TechCrunch)
"Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better."
— Robert Hooker, quoted by Sister Joan Chittister
"The good news, young writers, is that your life does not have to be extraordinarily interesting, because there are billions of people in the world who do have interesting lives, and you have the privilege of telling their stories. … Your friends, and neighbors, and community members, and people across town, and across your country, and across the world far and wide are all brimming with stories to tell. Stories of love, and war, and crime, and peril, and redemption. … All of the compelling stories you could ever hope to be offered are already freely available. All you have to do is to look outside of yourself, and listen, and write them down."
— Journalism is Not Narcissism, Hamilton Nolan
(Source: Gawker)
The Red, White, and Blue Bus
Such a sad day. Mom and I are watching Little Women, and near the beginning of the movie, the girls and their mother sing this hymn. It seemed fitting for today.
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The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them.
""Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends."
— Lewis Mumford
