That day when you spend 5 hours in state data sets looking at data and trying to answer some questions. And everything finally is clean and works 😀 And you learn that black boys are 10x more likely to be suspended than white girls 😔
I know it's nothing new, but it's sad how pernicious it is.
Vibe.
I mean...rather naive? Civics education took a back seat to math and reading a few generations back, and we pay for that daily.*
But...I find "Hey, did you know" to be a message that goes down easier than "Hey, you're dumb."
*Also, inscrutably, still not great at math and reading
ICYMI: Time is running out to comment on Bondi's proposed rule to protect DOJ attorneys from being disbarred for unethical actions. lawandcrime.com/high-profile...
This is extremely predictable, and started quite some time back. In some training data, the Natural News alt-health site vastly outranked credible medical sources like the Mayo Clinic. www.jmberger.com/extremism/li...
Fighting misinformation is a wicked problem:
lies move fast and fact checks crawl.
In this week's UnSpun Journal Club, I look at a paper that tackled the problem a different way. It worked, and YOU can be part of the solution.
UnSpun, here or where you pod.
bit.ly/UnSpunPod
Have you tried the bookmark feature?
Click on the link and read it before you share challenge.
2/ Most of my students are averse to microblogging like Bsky/X/Threads. I do find that the character limits force a lot of quick revision, so I wish they liked it more.
Working on assignment this morning that has students look at feedback on writing, identify where they're good and where need to grow and then make a specific plan for that improvement.
What do you like about your writing?
What do you want to improve?
💡For me, it's convoluted sentences.
Sunday Sillies: Spring Forward edition. Add a little silly to your doomscroll when you find the cartoonist here: @jess-a-creates.bsky.social
New subscription = new gift links. Here's one. Interactive multimedia on a serious topic.
www.wsj.com/us-news/immi...
So this is at once:
a) A useful service piece
b) Dystopian, and not in a fun read kind of way
It's a gift link if you need the advice.
wapo.st/3OU6jY6
4/ I teach writing for a living, and I know stories have so much power. They make us know and can make us feel and can help us hold a mirror up to ourselves - if we are willing to look.
Anyway, a good read. So are Larson's other books.
3/ It's non-fiction, and Larson does such an amazing job of turning mostly archival research into a narrative as good as The Diplomat or Star Wars or [insert your favorite].
We know the true story ended with a country deciding it could use force in other countries at will, all to placate a madman.
2/ Larson tells the story of the U. S. Ambassador to Germany during Hitler's rise to power. It's about him, but it's also about all the people and how they didn't acknowledge what was happening to them as Berlin changed into to a place where goons grabbed people and state power punished dissidents.
Saturday reading recommendation: When I was trying to figure out how to write narrative non-fiction in order to do the We are #AltGov book, my agent suggested looking at Erik Larson's work. I started with In the Garden of Beasts.
It's not new, so it would not be $$ and a lot of libraries have it.
Proof by assertion is um... not proof.
Certain social media accounts are posting content that looks like it was conceived and edited by teenagers. And not the nice teenagers. The ones from prominent families who have never dealt with consequences before.
If you read the bill, it attaches liability to the chatbot answer ONLY IF the same answer would attach liability to the person making the same statement.
Complicated new issue but seems AI companies want Section 230 type immunity. I don’t think that’s where the public (and juries) are, at all.
7/ And, in any case, I think social media serves its purpose in some ways here by letting us discuss possible explanations.
Also @thebandcake.bsky.social: big fan 😀
6/ So we can try the social media route. @nytimes.com, was it the timing of the headlines, or something else?
(**nb Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If there's no answer, I won't be surprised since they'll allocate more resources to new journalism than to re-litigating old stories)
5/ When they first eliminated the position, the publisher said the need would be served through a combination of Reader Center and monitoring social media.
I looked at Reader Center this morning, and my mid-first-coffee scan didn't tell me how to talk back.
www.niemanlab.org/2017/05/the-...
4/ Part of the SPJ Code of Ethics is to dialogue with your readers. The Times used to have a public editor position, which you can read more about here. margaretsullivan.substack.com/p/bring-back...
They don't any more.
3/ It's also the case several complicated geopolitical, financial and cultural reasons, it's a lot more likely that US news organizations have people on the ground who can verify in Israel than would in Iran. HOWEVER
2/ As for the actor not being named, if it was early, given that two entities were sending munitions (U.S. and Israel), it may not have been clear who the actor was.
Again, I don't know the timing of the headline, so I don't know. Just a possible explanation. AND
A few thoughts 🧵
With online headlines, they can change, so it's hard from the reader end to know definitively what happened. So it's possible that the first headline was early, before a news org could independently verify, which would lead to that attribution.
He was old, then!
