Hillbilly armor

A question from my personal gadfly, Rachael:

"is Pitts completely unethical or a brilliant journalist? What say you?"

My thought is that the answer, as you might have guessed, lies somewhere between the two poles you offer, Rachael, though I do lean toward "brilliant journalist." In fact, I think I might clear him entirely if he had disclosed in his article that he had planted the question. Of course, the waters are muddied again because the soldier told some newsweekly--Time, maybe--that he thought the question up himself. That would, of course, absolve Pitts of ethical wrongdoing, but would also strip him of any credit for getting the quote.

In general though, I think the principle you need to follow is that if you can't get access yourself, there's nothing at all wrong with using proxies--so long as the proxies get their credit, and you practice full disclosure.

Game Theory

All hail the video game critic!

Now I don't play video games much myself. I leave that to my personal video game adviser, Jason, who, frankly, does play video games much. And yet, even though I have no real need for a video game reviewer, I find myself, almost weekly, turning to the "Game Theory" column of the New York Times's Circuits section. Charles Herold is the reviewer there, and he has forged what, for me, is the perfect voice for a critic. He is personable and first-person. He acknowledges conflicting points of view, but stands by his own experience. And he accepts that he has a really fun job.

While I'm at it, I want to give similar kudos to the New York Observer for its movie reviewing (even though I've let my subscription drop). The Observer, the pleasantly pink weekly, also gives its two reviewers real columns where they can develop trustworthy (or otherwise) personae. Of the two, I find the venerable and aged auteurist Andrew Sarris to be a cinematic soul mate, at least when it comes to enjoying movies or not. I rarely ever agree with his counterpart Rex Reed. What's fun is that the Observer lets them overlap from time to time, unlike more staid papers that take an official position.

In short, I like a bit of personality in my criticism. I think it's charmingly old-fashioned--and more accurate.

Saul Survivor

This week's New Yorker has a story by Roger Angell about the Red Sox winning the World Series. The accompanying illustration is a colored-pencil drawing of a fanciful, physics-defying ballpark. As the work of Saul Steinberg goes, I actually like this piece. And the fact that Steinberg has been dead for five years doesn't change how I feel about the drawing--at least that fact on its own doesn't.

But the late Saul Steinberg may very well be the most frequent contributor to the New Yorker. A couple of weeks ago, he even had a drawing on the cover. Some of these primitivist drawings work for me; some don't. But I'm sick of seeing them.

Steinberg is probably most famous for a cover drawing he did, with Manhattan in the foreground, and everything east of the Hudson river reduced to insignificant specks. While that may accurately reflect my worldview, I don't think it's grounds for continuing to run the man's works approximately every two weeks. And I don't think I'm exaggerating. I find more of the drawings downright bad than good enough to be running in the country's best magazine.

So to the art department of the New Yorker: let's give some living artists a try. I know there are some good ones out there.

Howl, howl, oh Howell!

My class and I have been discussing Howell Raines, Jayson Blair, and that whole fiasco this week. And since it's verging on a month since I've posted anything to this blog, I thought it appropriate to share this parody I wrote of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."


Howell

By Kevin Lerner, with appropriate apologies

I.
I saw the best writers of a new generation destroy with plagiarism, borrowing
hysterical faking
dragging the gray lady through the negro—not that it mattered that he was negro—streets
at dawn
who passed through the University of Maryland without degree,
who cowered in apartment in Brooklyn, cell phone expense report
West Virginia claimed
who described tobacco fields and interviews never had, cell phone to photographer
lied I’m coming
who racked up corrections, setting A2 records, earning weeks off for mental health,
warnings from Landman
who despite said warnings earns promotion to National, sniper coverage,
Maryland officials exclusive source ghosts
who read avidly the San Antonio Express-News
who told the Observer idiot editors couldn’t catch fabrications and borrowings,
anonymous sources from whole cloth
who refused to fade silently, feeding Pappu Romanesko chatrooms
pundits for weeks
who fueled Jay’s jokes, laugh lines from Letterman, a town hall meeting of those who
strive to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose
who brought down the Raines from heaven and Boyd who stand before you speechless
and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul.

II.
What Sphinx of talent and burnout and too many second chances bashed open our skulls
and brought ignominy to the mighty Ochs and Sulzberger trust, and yet could still
Bragg about his wiles?
Jayson! Jayson whose mind is pure machinery! Whose fingers are ten armies destroying
the Power and the Glory!
Jayson! Jayson! Jayson of Brooklyn, whose mind is running book deals!
Jayson! The low point of 152 years of history!

The Curse of the Bamb-me-no

Red Sox fans are supposed to be the ones blaming themselves for 86 years of misery, not me. But I'm growing more and more convinced that I'm to blame for the lack of a championship in the Bronx since 2000.

In the Spring of 2000, just before the start of the season, I was interviewed for a job as an editor of Yankees Magazine, the souvenir program. After the first person offered the job had failed a background check, I was given the offer. I thought it over for an evening, and then called back to turn it down. The pay and the working conditions were going to be terrible, though had the Yanks won, I would have gotten a cut of the World Series check and my very own ring.

That summer, I wrote and published an article about that interview experience. It ran in New York Magazine in July. That Fall, the Yankees lost to the Diamondbacks in the Series. They haven't won since, and a few minutes ago, they collapsed monumentally against the Sox. Am I to blame? Probably not. It would be a delusion of grandeur to put myself on a historical plane with the Babe. But when you're a miserable fan--and when all of the world is rooting for you to lose--it's hard not to kick yourself.

Poll-itzer Prizes

A day after I commented on the Washington Post's Daily Tracking Poll, the New York Times ran its own poll (in conjunction with CBS). But I'm more interested in the sidebar article that tries to explain the methodology behind all of the various news organizations' polls.

I'm thoroughly ambivalent about the idea of polls as journalism, but I do like the fact that this article admits to their being an inexact science. I only wish that the poll itself had been a sidebar to this.

Survey says

I'm addicted to the Washington Post's Daily Tracking Poll, and I would get the DTs if they took it away.

But I'm convinced it's bad for journalism. Other pundits have talked about how stories covering campaign tactics to the detriment of policy take away from the seriousness of political coverage. I agree, and I think that polls turn politics into a sport. I say this while I'm watching the Yankees. Reason tells me that I should hate the Yankees. They're overpaid, even by Major League Baseball standards. They win more often than any other team. They're inherently unlikeable. And yet I live and die by Yankees games. Several of my New York City colleagues today commented on how they went to bed at 1:30 a.m. today, after watching the Red Sox steal a game from the Yanks. We have an undeniable emotional connection, though, and no amount of reason (including calculations of hours of sleep) can convince us to cheer for another team.

And the same, I believe, is becoming true of politics. I believe that the unwavering certainty that Ron Suskind ascribes to George W. Bush in yesterday's New York Times Magazine is also infecting the electorate--and on both sides of the aisle. And all we care about is win or lose. I'm as much of a victim of this attitude as anyone.

Republicans are sure W will win. Democrats are sure W will win. Bostonians are sure the Sox will lose (and they're right). But despite the positive blip Kerry got in the polls after the debates (which I liken to the Red Sox 12th-inning win last night) served only to give Democrats their requisite moment of faith before sliding back into their resignation.

I watch the Washington Post daily tracking poll like I read the sports scores. I read other papers' polls--and automatically dismiss the ones with which I disagree. Americans, for the most part, know for whom they will vote in two weeks. The rest is box scores.

Catching up

I've been buried under reading for my classes, and grading student papers, but I have been keeping at least one eye on the media. One night last week, I had to triple-task between the debates, the Yankees, and a stack of papers.

Last week, Daniel Okrent, the Times Public Editor, addressed the question of whether or not the Times is biased toward one campaign or another. I generally tend to agree with his assessment, that no, it's not particularly biased. But then, I also have to admit my liberal tendencies--an admission which may undermine my following argument, but then I don't know what to do about that, except to ask for the reader's trust.

This week, Okrent invited two guest columnists to fill his column. Of course, neither of these columnists agreed with Okrent, which was both predictable, and Okrent's point. Todd Gitlin, a sociologist and journalism professor at Columbia, took the liberal approach, using the argument that being overly "balanced" tipped things in Bush's direction.

Bob Kohn wrote from the Right. He wrote that while the Times may make a good effort to accurately portray Bush's approach to policy, the paper undercuts that evenness by running articles about political issues that fall solidly on the side Bush is not on.

My response to both arguments is the same, and one I have expressed in this space before. One side of an issue can actually be the wrong side of the issue, and mere stenography--which is what Gitlin is accusing the Times of committing--does a disservice to the public. I agree with this, but I direct Gitlin toward Kohn's point. The Times may be committing stenography when it covers what Bush says, but in its surrounding coverage, that error is mitigated. The man, after all, is technically President of the United States, and what he says deserves to be heard, whether or not it is agreed with.

--

In two other notes, the Times Magazine this week ran what I had thought until today was the most important non-covered story of the Presidential election, which is the full story, so much as anyone can access it, of Bush's faith and its effect on government policy. Frank Rich writes about the Bush administration's closed-door press policy, and does so much better than I could, so I leave the story to him.

An opinion can't be wrong, but...

The New York Times editorial in tomorrow's paper about tonight's VP debate seems to be the result of wishful thinking on the editorialists' part. The editorial seems to think that Edwards was the clear winner of the debate, and while I would wish that were so, I have to disagree.

But this blog is not about my politics. It is about the media. And as American libel law history has made clear, everyone has the right to his opinion, but no one is allowed his own facts. The Times here, seems to be guilty of a little spin of its own in its interpretation of a much fuzzier debate than this editorial describes.

The New York Times Book Review Review

This weekend, the New York Times unveiled its new designs for its various Arts & Leisure sections and the Book Review. My personal jury is still out on the revisions, but I'm inclined to like them. The general idea seems to have been to move towards a more magazine-like presentation of the material.

Any time you create a "department," as magazines are prone to do, there's going to be a shakedown period. It seems to me that that's where the Times is at the moment, but expect fuller comments from me in the future.

All aboard, America

Though it's not media in the press sense of the word, advertising does fit. I want to commend Amtrak's recent Northeast corridor advertisements. Though they're thoroughly modern, they capture something of the romance of vinatage Deco train and ship posters.

And you can buy 'em cheap, too.

Senators be damned

It doesn't pertain exactly to the media, but I wanted to be on the record with this. Assuming Major League Baseball finalizes the move of the Montreal Expos to Washington, DC, I'd like to suggest that they call the team the "Monuments."

My friend Daniel prefers that they be sponsored by the Homeland Security Department, but I stand by my choice. Daniel, however, did seem to like my suggestion that the Washington Monuments play with pointy bats.

Fair and Balanced

The Chicago Tribune's Public Editor wrote today about reader complaints that his newspaper was not fair and balanced the way a newspaper should be. His answer--which is that the news is a collaborative process and that sometimes reader complaints are valid--is true, but there is more going on, and it's not liberal bias, exactly.

(I do believe that the press has a duty to be "liberal" as part of its mission, but that's another blog. And before you dismiss me as a liberal tool, note the quotation marks; I promise to explain at a later date.)

What's going on in this Tribune case is that the public has been led to believe that journalism should be unbiased (which, in the American tradition, is the standard). But many people interpret this to mean that "there are two sides to every story" and that the newspaperman's job is to lay out all of the facts and let the reader figure out what's true and what's not. It's Fox News's slogan (though not their practice). However, that's not the case.

Not every story has two stories, and not every fact is true, just because someone said it. It's the journalist's job to serve as the filter and to some extent, the analyst of news. And if that means choosing to put one candidate's speech higher on the front page than another, that doesn't equate to bias. Calling statements into question doesn't equate to bias--as long as it's done across the board. That's what it means to be a fair and balanced journalist--not giving equal time and space to all comers.

Union Man

Here is another story I did this week for Architectural Record. This one is about the architect Thom Mayne and his new design for the Cooper Union in New York.

Tick Tock

Though CBS has now acknowledged that the Bush memos are forgeries, much about them still remains a mystery. This Washington Post article is the best reporting on the whole process CBS followed (through yesterday) that I've seen.

Inconclusive

Newspapers have an obligation to report as much information as they have in as accurate a characterization as they can manage.

This morning, USA Today reported that its own poll showed Bush ahead of Kerry. But it stuffs the news that two other polls still have the competitors in a statistical dead heat down in the 8th paragraph. The headline supports the lead (though an abbreviated headline on the website mentions both).

USA Today should not privilege its own poll over equally valid polls in order to have a scoop or even to tout the fact that it conducted a poll in the first place. Give the whole news--which is still that no one knows who's gonna win this thing.

Project Rebirth

A link to a freelance story I wrote for Architectural Record, where I used to be the web editor. The story is about a film and web site project called Project Rebirth, which will chronicle the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in time lapse photography.

The Columbia Blogcasting System

A Wall Street Journal editorial about the CBS News forged documents affair takes the whole incident over into the realm of the debate over the so-called liberal media.

I hope that this does not become that. Dan Rather has a history of being an antagonist of the Bushes, which would certainly raise questions from the right over his impartiality. And, as has been pointed out, the documents really only revived the mostly-accepted idea that Bush skipped out on his duty. This is nothing very new, and the new documents don't do much to support the story. So motives are suspect, and Dan Rather would have done himself and CBS a favor by waiting for more conclusive proof before going with the story. That's a lesson for journalism students.

On the other hand though, pundits seem to be celebrating the bloggers for somehow uncovering these forgeries. I need to point out that these documents have not yet been proven forgeries. All the bloggers did was complain and raise some conspiracy theories. And so far, that's all anyone has on any side: conspiracy theories. The WSJ editorial raised the possibility that the Kerry campaign or the Democrats fed Rather the documents. But the other side of the fence (The WSJ is notoriously conservative) is just as paranoid. In her column this morning, Maureen Dowd talked of rumors that Karl Rove is behind the documents. In this twisted scenario, Rove fed CBS the papers, knowing that they would be discredited, so that people would stop talking about Bush's lackluster service record, and talk instead about how the Dems planted these documents (see the WSJ editorial).

Neither one of these scenarios is immediately plausible, but they both seem more likely than the idea that Dan Rather or CBS is intentionally duping the American public with false documents. As the media writer Ken Auletta pointed out, 60 Minutes is still the best network TV news magazine, and its heritage certainly points toward good journalistic judgment. And CBS better figure out what happened before some enterprising blogger actually moves from skepticism and punditry and does some reporting. If that happens, then bloggers would really have accomplished something.

I'd Rather not

...to paraphrase Bartleby. I've been intentionally avoiding comment on the 60 Minutes 2 uproar about the forged--or not--documents from Bush's Air National Guard service.

There has been much praise of the "blogosphere" for uncovering this "story." And while as a newbie blogger myself, I do think that there is merit to that sort of scrambling angry personal-opinion journalism. But I just watched the follow-up to the story in which Bush's superior's secretary said she thought the documents were forged, but that the ideas were not. A sort of third way.

Is this ass-covering on Rather's part? Maybe. But we can't really know what's going on, since we weren't wherever it was that these memos made their way to CBS. I can't imagine that CBS made this up, as some blogging conspiracy theorists have suggested. I CAN imagine that someone did. But I could be wrong, and anything I say is speculation.

Which is why we need good, professional journalists, too. Bloggers may have outed the documents, but they're not going to solve the mystery.

Today's thoughts on Today

Ew, never mind. Kitty Kelley overload. A five minute segment, maybe. Three days in a row? Ew. Forget my praise of NBC. Make her go away.

Lipp service

I'm reading 'The Elements of Journalism' by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel for the class I'm teaching. I came across this quote in Chapter one, apropos of what I was saying about the reading public:

According to K+R, Walter Lippmann said, "People... mostly know the world only indirectly, through 'pictures they make up in their heads.' And they receive these mental pictures largely through the media. The problem, Lippmann argued, is that the pictures most people have in their heads are hopelessly distorted and incomplete, marred by the irredeemable weaknesses of the press."

That's really what I meant, I suppose, when I rashly accused the American reading public of being stupid. These flawed mental pictures, I think, could be at least partly repaired by reputable news organizations (though Lippmann was writing in 1922, so even radio was a new thing), but the pictures are too heavily influenced by TV for even a particularly strong photograph to change their minds, let alone a well-reported and written story.

It's worse than I thought

Daniel Fienberg supplied me with some more up-to-date figures on Fox's convention ratings. President Bush's speech apparently topped 7.3 million viewers.

The high road is under construction

This op-ed from the Washington Post was brought to my attention. In it, Bryan Keefer, an editor at CJR's laudable Campaign Desk. In it, he pleads for a a more high-minded journalism from the more high-minded papers. His enumerated suggestions for more mature coverage--in order to appeal to us younger readers (he's 26; I'm 27) are great, but I think that they're unrealistic.

While I agree with what he's asking for, which is an end to the scoop mentality, I don't think he's going to get it. And I hate to beat the same healthy, nay (neigh?) thriving horse, but it's outlets like Fox News that cause serious publications like the Times and the Post to have to address these allegations. Because the newspaper with the biggest circulation in this country, USA Today, only reaches 2 million people. Does that sound like a lot? Well, it's not. It's pathetic how few people read newspapers. And it's USA Today, which while it's more credible than its McPaper reputation would have you believe, it's still not the NYT or the WP.

Fox, on the other hand--and the other news networks--reach much bigger audiences. During the Republican Convention, Fox was reaching audiences of nearly 6 million (Reuters, via Yahoo News). And as long as anyone sees Fox as a credible news source, the so-called "news" that comes out of it is going to have to be addressed by the real papers. Maybe they haven't been doing a great job of it, but if they went completely high-minded, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant to the vast majority of Americans--who, let me remind you, are, frankly, stupid. I believe in the general goodness of mankind, but we are not a country of independent thinkers (see Mencken's booboisie). Bryan Keefer and I wish that we were.

Lauering my standards

This is a position I may someday regret taking, but feel that Matt Lauer of NBC's Today Show has become at the very least a competent interviewer. I base that on his interview this morning of Kitty Kelley, and on his interview of President Bush last week. That was the interview, you may remember, in which Bush said that he didn't think the war on terror could ever be won.

Kitty Kelley wrote a book about the Bush family in which she accuses George W. of using cocaine at Camp David. I haven't read that, so I won't comment on HER journalism. But I applaud, first of all, NBC, for pushing through with its announced interview with Kelley despite reported pressure from the White House not to run it at all. That's probably one benefit of media consolidation: if you're owned by GE, you're practically as big as the government, so you can stand up to them. Lauer also did a more than plausible job. With both Bush and Kelley, he stood his ground, thought on his feet, and was astute enough to ask a question again if it wasn't answered the first time. If I were CJR, I'd give Lauer a laurel.

Booboisie

My Bartleby daily email was late in getting to me yesterday (in fact I only got it this morning). Otherwise I would have known that yesterday, the 12th, was H.L. Mencken's birthday.

It's a milestone important to any crotchety press critic.

And speaking of crotchety, I also want to acknowledge an objection from Daniel Fienberg, a friend of mine who writes and regularly posts his work to the web. It wasn't so much that I forgot about him when I was writing the original acknowledgements in this blog, as my making a subconscious distinction between my amateur blogging and his professional work.

Another note from SPJ

One of my personal highlights from SPJ was seeing Sreenath Sreenivasan, who was never really my professor, but he was the adviser of the Columbia SPJ chapter. He gave a seminar on how journalists can better use the web, but a lot of these resources are great for non-journalists, too. A link to his web surfing tips:

Smarter Surfing: Better Use of Your Web Time

Fried Okrent

My primary newspaper is the New York Times. I feel like I should be morally obligated to read five or so newspapers every morning: the Times, the Washington Post, one or both of the major NYC tabloids, those free papers they've started handing out on the subway, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. Which is an important paper, even if it's easy to make fun of.

Today marks the return of Daniel Okrent, the Times's Public Editor. In that same ethics panel I mentioned yesterday, Al Siegal (and I'm going to fudge the quote here again), was asked why the Times didn't call the position an ombudsman.

"Two reasons," he said. "One is that the Washington Post's Mike Getler so fully emodies the term." He said it wasn't quite a copyright that the Post had on ombudsmen, but he didn't want to compete. The other reason made a little bit more sense to me. An ombudsman, Siegal said, had two primary respoonsibilities: writing a weekly column, and circulating a memo to the Post's staff about standards and practices. The Public Editor only writes the column (and it's fortnightly).

Here's what Okrent said he's going to be watching in the last nine months of his term:

"The list is long - corrections policy, book reviewing, the use of "experts," loaded language, Middle East coverage, honesty in photographs, what the editors mean by "news analysis" (not to mention "White House Letter," "Political Memo" and various other ways they say "not a news story")."

Siegal and Okrent were both results of the Blair affair, so I'll use one to answer the other on the first point. Siegel said that reporters will often come to him with a new piece of information about a published story and ask him "Is this worth a correction?" He says he responds by asking the reporters if they would write the story the same way today knowing what they know. The answer is always yes, and his advice is always to run a correction. Now whether that is policy or just a public stance, I don't know.

I'm particularly interested to see what comes out of his book review investigation, the language thing, and honesty in photographs--this last one because I'm teaching a freshman liberal arts cluster on ethics and journalism, and one of the courses I'm working with is a photojournalism course. And I'm always very interested in the creeping of opinion and analysis onto the front page, which is the last thing Okrent mentions. I have my own thoughts on whether this is a good or a bad thing.

My first clarification

At the SPJ conference today (well, technically yesterday now), Al Siegal, of the Siegal Commission that investigated Jayson Blair, made an interesting comment at the ethics panel presentation. I'm going to be completely unethical now and reconstruct his quote, but he was talking about reporters who objected to having corrections run on their stories.

"I have a hard time convincing them that it's not a moral failure to have a correction run," he said (or so he said once I've stuffed the words back into his mouth). "It's a chance to make the story more accurate."

See, now I know that's not right, since the way he said it, it actually didn't sound like a moral failure. At any rate, all of that is by way of introducing my first correction, from a "source" whose sentiments, she claimed, I misrepresented. I quote here from Rachael Goldfarb's email:

"I'm flattered and touched by the dedication (although my "claiming to like what [you] write" is arguably a poor word choice since I do indeed enjoy your writing very much -- I'm not claiming to; it's fact.)"

In my own defense (and modesty), I say that I had to regard what she said as merely a claim, since I couldn't fathom her liking my writing as much as she (that word again) claims to. (I'm tempted here to use a smiley, but it's much to early in the blog to resort to emoticons.)

First things

The occasion of doing a first of anything makes one prone to ponder infinity. But pondering infinity makes me physically naseous, so I won't. I'm more inclined to say a little something about my own writing and how I think this might help it, and to do a little bit of explanation of what I expect this blog to do. That seems only appropriate for a first post, though perhaps a little hackneyed.

So about me, first, with a promise to segue into writing, with the thoughts behind the blog as a rousing conclusion.

I used to write effortlessly. In high school, the idea of tossing off a short story on a Saturday night was just about the easiest thing I could think of--at an age when I was really expected to be thinking only of tossing off. I even wrote an 80-page "novel" at one point. It was sort of a cliched James Bond-ish spy novel with lots of sex in it (so I wasn't too far off from the expected behavior). But then something happened in college. Mostly, college happened. And fiction got left behind (and probably rightly so) for the (at the time) more important pursuits of papers and exams. And while I loved the writing I did for 34th Street magazine, which was the campus entertainment rag, I felt somehow like that should be the end of my writitng for fun. It was becoming time to earn a living. And somehow I ended up in journalism school.

There will be plenty of time to discuss my feelings on journalism school, I'm sure, so I'll gloss over that, lingering just long enough to make it clear that while I love the job I have now, I don't think that I was cut out to be a reporter, per se.

And yet then there's this blog. And Blogging is something that was discussed at the convention of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) this weekend. I think that in the right hands, a blog could actually bring a return to the more experiential journalism that I most enjoy reading. The kind that's written at a cafe table as the Nazis advance, but the writer still has a glass of beaujolais next to his Remington portable, Nazis be damned. I think that the blog has a real chance to return the meaning to the term "correspondent."

But that's not what I really want to do with this necessarily. Of course, I do hope that the blog will be somehow experiential. But I also hope, as the title I picked might suggest in its Lieblingesque way, to bring a critical eye to the world, and especially to the media. I am a journalist by training, and an academic by heart and by employment. So you can expect some journalism to show up in this blog, but you should also expect some ranting and raving--albeit informed ranting and raving--about the activities of the press, and well, anything else I damn well please. What books I'm reading. Movies I've seen. Politics. My friends.

Speaking of friends, I had started this blog several months ago with a completely different first post, and I dedicated that now-defunct, one-post blog to my friend Rachael, who is currently slogging through the first weeks of her second year of law school. I did so because she's a fellow press junkie, and because she claims to enjoy reading my writing. But I want to make a fuller dedication with this revamped blog. So it's to my Mom, who taught me to be questioning and critical (and more importantly, she instilled in me the love of a cheap pun). It's to my Dad, who in many ways is my ideal reader. It's to my sisters, one of whom is stubbornly opposed to the idea of critical thinking, on principle. The other is still celebrating her 9/11 birthday in the Central Time Zone.

And of course, everything has to be dedicated to Paul. Because he has to hear me spout all this crap first, and yet he keeps coming back for more.