Covering Haiti: When the Media Is the Disaster: Great article on how the media frames victims of disasters as criminals, primarily through labeling their attempts to get much needed supplies as “looting”. (via Gin and Tacos)
Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases. They also deploy the word panic wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of “stampedes.” Do they think Haitians are cattle? – Rebecca Solnit
Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger - Har har. There were two times this week where I found myself telling someone I read A Catcher in the Rye “not because it was required for school but because I wanted to”. Tool-ish.
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Not Vegan – I made these oatmeal chocolate chip banana cookies with ginger sugar stuff on top today. They were delicious but have the consistency of mush.
Oh, Look! A Shiny Thing! – Ainsley Drew on not letting online time vampires suck out all your productivity juice when you’re a freelancer who spends most of your day on the web. Favorite line: “Email is also a fucking Molotov cocktail thrown at the window of my ambition.” If you have an hour or ten you should comb through the Jerk Ethic archives.
Dik-Dik-Dik-Dik-Dik!!! - SQUEEE!!!
LA Gang Tours: Somewhere Between Brilliant and the Worst Idea Ever - “The New York Times reports: ‘…after careful consideration, it was decided not to have residents shoot water guns at the bus and sell “I Got Shot in South Central” T-shirts.’ If these tours are striving to be legitimate educational experiences, that was probably a wise choice.”
I’ve been listening to this Spiritualized song all weekend:
