Just Skimming | 4/23
A collage of my weekend news and information consumption. I hope you find it useful, informative, and even slightly entertaining
‘The patient is not well’
A scientist studies the ice sheet of west Greenland using a ground-penetrating radar device. | Silvan Leinss/Creative Commons
“Just in time for Earth Day, a team of scientists funded by NASA and the European Space Agency has released the results of what might be thought of as the ice sheet’s latest checkup. The patient is not well. Over the past three decades, the researchers found, the rate of ice loss from Greenland has increased sevenfold. In one particularly warm year—2019—Greenland shed four hundred and forty-four billion tons of ice; these tons contained enough water to flood the entire state of California to a depth of three feet. Melt from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, too, the researchers found, has been accelerating; since the early nineteen-nineties, the rate of ice loss from West Antarctica has more than doubled. The new figures ‘are pretty disastrous really,’ one of the scientists, Ruth Mottram of the Danish Meteorological Institute, told the Associated Press.”
— From Elizabeth Kolbert’s piece, “It’s Earth Day – And The News Isn’t Good” — published April 22 in the New Yorker. Kolbert writes about a new report showing “ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than anticipated, and other disasters loom.”
The end of an era?
A screenshot of the home page of BuzzFeed News on April 23, three days after its founder, Jonah Peretti, announced that the website would shut down.
“But for all its accomplishments, the news division failed to make money, unable to square the reliance on digital advertising and the whims of social media traffic with the considerable costs of employing journalists around the world. [...]
“‘I’m proud of the work that BuzzFeed News did, but I think this moment is part of the end of a whole era of media,’ said [founding editor Ben] Smith, who now runs the media outlet Semafor. ‘It’s the end of the marriage between social media and news.’”
— A New York Times report by Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson on the demise of clickbait giant BuzzFeed’s news division, BuzzFeed News, which announced on April 20 that it would gradually shut down 11 years after its founding.
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“At night Peretti would reconvene with the philosophers he’d read in college and write erudite papers for little-known academic journals. One from his first year in New Orleans, titled ‘Capitalism with Schizophrenia,”’ lamented the disorienting effects wrought by the torrent of commercial images on the internet and TV, a trend that in 1996 was in its mere adolescence. Much later the topic was fodder for myriad books and studies about how the web was shortening people’s attention spans.
“‘The increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in late capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities,’ he wrote. […]
“The essay read like the last gasp of an idealist in the jaws of the capitalist machine. Ironic, then, that within a decade the author would build a billion-dollar company catering to the world’s largest brands by preying on these very same vulnerabilities in consumers’ collective subconscious. Years later, when a reporter found the paper and asked Peretti whether BuzzFeed subverted or capitalized upon the phenomena he once critiqued, he replied ‘lol.’”
— An excerpt from Jill Abramson’s 2019 book, “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts,” in which she describes the idealistic days of BuzzFeed’s founder Jonah Peretti.
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Speaking of defunct news, the demise of BuzzFeed got me thinking about an old newspaper clipping I was sent a while back:
“There are some advocates and early historians of the village, who argue with assurance that The Maywood Herald is the descendant of the first paper in Maywood, which was started in 1884 — forty-three years ago.
“It is reliably stated by Mrs. Jannie Parrish, wife of the late Allen Parrish, who died in Maywood on April 16, 1918, that Allen Parrish started Maywood’s first newspaper in 1884. This publication, ‘The Village Headlight,’ first saw the light of day near Fifth avenue on St. Charles road, where the present Maywood Herald is published.”
— “Who Printed First Maywood Newspaper,” Maywood Herald, Friday, Jan. 14, 1927
Deal or no deal?
“As tuition and debt have skyrocketed, pressure has grown for more transparency in college pricing. [Joel Peck, a certified public accountant and expert in financial-aid negotiations,] is part of a growing class of consultants who offer advice on how best to negotiate for more merit aid. He charges $1,800 per student and says he averages discounts of more than $10,000 a year.”
— From an article, “Families Haggle for More College Aid,” published in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal ahead of the May 1 deadline for most students to commit to a college. A 2022 survey by student-loan purveyor Sallie Mae reported 40% of students appealed their aid package, negotiating for lower prices with the help of websites like meritmore.com and tuitionfit.org that are designed to demystify the college application and financial aid processes. That’s something that may not be welcomed by schools that have long benefited from an “asymmetry of information that gives [them] the edge in negotiations,” the Journal reports.
Caught checkmating
Photo by Hassan Pasha on Unsplash
“I guess I’m happier they are playing chess rather than some shoot-’em-up game. Actually, I love it. I just need them to do it at a better time.”
— From Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s article, “Teachers find kids distracted — with chess,” published in the weekend Daily Herald. The article quotes Jeffrey Otterby, a middle school teacher in St. Charles, who has noticed that his seventh-graders tend to play online chess games during social studies class. The article notes that the pandemic, popular YouTube chess personalities and shows like the Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” may be driving the board game’s rising popularity. User count on Chess.com has spiked from 1.5 million before the pandemic to “between 5 million and 7 million” afterward.
Visually speaking
— From Josh Zumbrun’s column published in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, “Buyer Beware on Debt-Ceiling Insurance.” Zombrun says credit-default swaps, whose prices are “commonly interpreted as the probability the U.S. will default on its Treasury debt,” currently cost “$9,600 a year to insure $1 million in U.S. Treasury debt, up from $1,400 at the start of the year. That’s even more than during major budget fights in 2011 and 2013 when, like now, Republicans in Congress were refusing to raise the statutory ceiling on how much Treasury could borrow unless a Democratic president agreed to cut spending.”
That’s rich, coming from you
A clipping from a Chicago Tribune editorial published on Nov. 15, 1969.
“Here’s the other thing, Mr. Johnson. You are not the only messenger, and if Americans start seeing your mayoral statements as progressive propaganda, they’ll stop listening to you or believing what you say.
“Consider this report from Chicago’s Fox affiliate, WFLD-Ch. 32, widely picked up over the weekend by national media: ‘Shots were fired near the corner of Madison and Michigan, and FOX 32 Chicago decided that it was unsafe to keep our news crew on the scene. If hardened journalists feel unsafe in downtown Chicago, let alone tourists, that’s a serious issue.’”
— The Chicago Tribune’s editorial board, the voice of the city’s corporate class, admonishing Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson for merely mouthing the words: “It is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
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The reactionary Editorial Board is probably the side that needs to tread lightest, given the history of its own propaganda and its rich tradition of demonizing young Black people.
Another clipping from that Chicago Tribune editorial published on Nov. 15, 1969. The editorial suggested that young members of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party — an organization founded in 1966 by young Black men forced to defend themselves against police brutality — have forfeited their constitutional rights.
Many decades (of racist reporting and propaganda) later, it may have been hard for an astute observer to miss the irony of a 1984 Tribune article on future Congressman Bobby Rush, which pointed out that the former Black Panther was “responsible for the party’s breakfast program for black school children, a medical program, and a food giveaway plan.” Yet, the paper’s opinion board wanted the likes of Rush dead. “Not only should the police be armed with shotguns and any other weapons they may need, but they should be ordered to be ready to shoot when approaching Black Panther suspects,” the opinion board wrote in 1969.
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“In 1987 I partnered with Patrice Johnson and Anthony Devon to launch Rap It Up, the first nationally syndicated hip-hop music show, broadcast on sixty-five radio stations. During its six years of operations, Rap It Up allowed me to play a key role in the maturation of a new African American musical genre that, in its early years, ‘sampled’ snippets of Malcolm X speeches and for a time revived the Black Power political ethos of the ‘60s.
“By the early ‘90s […] the corporate recording industry giants were in the process of swallowing up the last of the small, independent labels that had midwifed [hip-hop]. ‘Gangsta rap’ was born, not from a racist conspiracy to poison the minds of Black youth, as some believe, but as the result of a corporate label study that found hip-hop’s core audience to be the youngest of any genre in commercial music history: eleven-to-thirteen-year-olds. As every observer of childhood development knows, ‘tweens’ of both sexes, but especially males, find almost sensuous pleasure in profanity. Misogynist tirades are tween-aged boys’ reflexive way of coping with their own insecurities about how to deal with girls. The recording industry interpreted the study’s results to mean that the tween market would be most profitably served by flooding it with profane, misogynistic song lyrics.”
— From the late progressive journalist Glen Ford’s book of essays, “The Black Agenda.” In the introduction to the 2022 edition, Ford describes his role in the nascent hip-hop movement and how profiteering recording companies helped mainstream “Gangsta rap,” a precursor of sorts to today’s “Drill music,” which might be considered the soundtrack to the violence that happened last weekend.
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Everything old is new again …
A provocative YouTube documentary on the Drill rapper King Von, who was murdered in 2020. Before his death at 26, the rapper, whose legal name was Dayvon Daquan Bennett, would often brag on social media and in his lyrics about his “body count,” a euphemism for the number of people he allegedly killed.
I appreciate your insights & reflection, including environmental news (will keep looking for this critical info beyond earth day as well) — recap of last week’s happenings downtown & viewpoints from folks, including Mayor elect Johnson. Thank you, Michael.