“We tried to make a strong visual theater for the eye as well as the ear, making what you see more intense,” Hockney says. David Hockney died yesterday at the age of 88. Here’s an article I wrote when he came to visit Northwestern to discuss his work on Turandot. Ever grateful to Jim Arndorfer for the assignment, which came out of the blue! “Hockney repeatedly describes himself as a practical man.…
I was re-reading this essay from Edutopia recently, and it stands the test of time. “ Inundated with disinformation, students seek truths they feel too frequently stay hidden—and need reliable methods to separate fact from fiction. A journalism class revolving around a web publication empowers students to participate in truth-telling by sourcing, reporting, and writing stories themselves. They can…
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Drew Harwell (@bydrewharwell) Here is the original story: We checked DHS’ videos of chaos and protests. Here is what they left out. What backs the sentiment of this story up are the numerous other news stories with stats about crime, protests, etc, etc in these cities over the past year. This should be the workflow template for the modern journalist: An…
Occasionally, I like to share some articles I come across that I think are amazing feats of journalism. Here’s one where the graphics are amazing. Author: Sophie Lin, Produced by Ying-Yu Chen, Steven Yeo, Sylvia Lee, Silva Shih.
Imagine having your "best" friend or your therapist reveal your most personal details to anyone online. That's what could happen in a world where apps and AI are increasingly replacing human relationships.
A junk! I remember the oo-ooo calls of the koels through the trees. And the songs of dozens of different kinds of birds echoing from the skies. The trees with heart-shaped, floppy, paper-thin light-green leaves. Koel The humid warmth of April in Hong Kong. My cousin Charlie as a small, fat little boy Practicing how long I could hold my breath underwater in the pool as I swam its lengths. Racing to…
Is language and complex thought and planning “uniquely human?” Have we forgotten that we’re all children of “Mother Nature?” You might get a laugh and a few Deep Thoughts out of this piece. Listen to this piece I filed for KALW and Stanford’s Philosophy Talk ! View this post on Instagram A post shared by Philosophy Talk (@philtalkradio)
From The New Yorker : “The researchers found that a single bag from CVS leached more than thirteen thousand compounds; a bag from Walmart leached more than fifteen thousand. “It is becoming increasingly clear that plastics are not inert in the environment,” the team wrote. Steve Allen, a researcher at Canada’s Ocean Frontier Institute who specializes in microplastics, tells Simon, “If you’ve got…
The Atlantic: Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids “As children grow, parents must move from the role of boss to that of consultant.”
Amazing! From KQED.
David Lesher, CalMatters Senior Editor, Mike Madrid, Political Consultant and Julián Castro, CEO, Latino Community Foundation at the CalMatters Ideas Festival 2024. Photo: Sarah Lai Stirland Last month, I saw a brilliant skit of two potential Latino voters who were barbers being interviewed about their 2024 choices for president. They were being “interviewed” by the journalistic performer Dan…
Podcasts to listen to and discuss with your family while on the road.
From the March 25 edition of The Columbia Journalism Review , by Feven Merid.
A Silicon Valley emergency room doctor reports from Rafah, Gaza.
Young voters explain why they’re bailing on Biden — and whether they’d come back Young voters were key to President Biden’s victory in 2020. The MSNBC story above discusses the everyday bread-and-butter issues, but there are tons of other big picture issues that young voters care about — gun control for example, where there’s been no movement. There have already been a large number of mass…
Terrible news from Palo Alto … again. As a commenter in this Reddit thread points out, the cause could have been anything. This is what I have discovered in the course of my reporting on teen mental health over the years. You wouldn’t believe the kind of stuff many of them have to put up with — just from life in general, and from their parents. So check in with your teen — and anyone else you…
Reuters reports that Reddit cut a deal to sell its community-user-generated content to Google to train its artificial intelligence efforts. While it appears to make financial sense, this about-face, this monetization of its community and the cutting off of the API for research and other purposes is worrying. It feels exploitative of users’ unpaid time and efforts, and social media companies tend…
Fonda visited SF in the summer of 2023. Among other things, she discussed being an archaeologist of the self, receiving coaching from Katherine Hepburn, and the need to enable men to mature emotionally.
The Financial Times recently published a piece on “How some artists are incorporating DALL-E, Midjourney, and other AI tools into their work, while others remain anxious about AI’s impact on their livelihoods.” For a fun and informative listen on how AI (artificial intelligence) is likely to permeate the world of art and creativity, listen to this piece “ AI, Art & Jobs: How Can We Adapt In the…
As compiled by the NYT. A couple of great, eye lists of eye-opening stories.