“Everyone should see this beautiful tribute from Rachel Maddow to Michael Hastings.” - @BuzzFeedAndrew
Michael Hastings was and remains a journalist for whom I have great admiration. His reporting and work were inspiring. I’m incredibly sorry he’s gone.
Mother Jones: “RIP Michael Hastings. Here’s His Advice to Young Journalists”
Okay, here’s my advice to you (and young journalists in general):
1.) You basically have to be willing to devote your life to journalism if you want to break in. Treat it like it’s medical school or law school.
2.) When interviewing for a job, tell the editor how you love to report. How your passion is gathering information. Do not mention how you want to be a writer, use the word “prose,” or that deep down you have a sinking suspicion you are the next Norman Mailer.
3.) Be prepared to do a lot of things for free. This sucks, and it’s unfair, and it gives rich kids an edge. But it’s also the reality.
4.) When writing for a mass audience, put a fact in every sentence.
5.) Also, keep the stories simple and to the point, at least at first.
6.) You should have a blog and be following journalists you like on Twitter.
7.) If there’s a publication you want to work for or write for, cold call the editors and/or email them. This can work.
8.) By the second sentence of a pitch, the entirety of the story should be explained. (In other words, if you can’t come up with a rough headline for your story idea, it’s going to be a challenge to get it published.)
9.) Mainly you really have to love writing and reporting. Like it’s more important to you than anything else in your life—family, friends, social life, whatever.
10.) Learn to embrace rejection as part of the gig. Keep writing/pitching/reading.
Read more about Hastings and his incredible career over at Rolling Stone.
Later, when Superman joins the fray, the movie turns into an orgy of gratuitous building-battering as Zod and Superman punch each other through several giant high-rises. It recalls a similar Metropolis fight between those two characters in 1980’s Superman II, only there, when Superman knocks a baddie into a building — an act that sends the skyscraper’s spire tumbling towards a crowd of people on the ground — Superman actually halts the fight to grab that spire before it lands, a quaint moment that still reminds us that the lives of innocent citizens are at stake. In Man of Steel, however, the superhero seems mostly unfazed by the people of Metropolis who are surely collateral damage to his big battle; similarly, director Zack Snyder seems to have waved it off. There is no acknowledgement that all of the buildings that are being destroyed might have people in them. It’s a bloodless massacre of concrete, 9/11 imagery erased of its most haunting factor: the loss of life.
Over at Vulture, Kyle Buchanan talks back to the major post-9/11 blockbuster trend of using massive, violent destruction of cities and faceless, nameless innocent bystanders as backdrop for superhero, action and various other Michael Bay-esque films. It’s a great takedown of the casual nature of the approach to destruction, where collateral damage is common and rarely fully acknowledged (how much of NYC died in The Avengers? how many died in the last Star Trek?). The connection to 9/11 imagery and the cheapening of the fear that accompanies the images of crumbling buildings in a terror-struck metropolitan setting is important, too.
(The point is not fully “ugh, violence in movies” although there’s that. It’s more about the fact the violence is actually largely ignored, unacknowledged and has surprisingly little long-term impact on plot. Once over, Earth or wherever usually seems to be restored. Just minus a few thousand or more people.)
An amazingly directed and important video on Everyday Sexism, its creator and the online group that has brought women together to talk about the experience of daily sexualization and harassment and are typically kept from talking about.
Via velvetlovepocket (Link here: [x]) and meenerhabi.
I hold a certain skepticism that most other rappers don’t present. If you listen to my verses on any of the so-called ‘revolutionary’ songs that were recorded during the Arab Spring, I am never too hopeful – I am always on the fence. I am there to support you, but also to ask the important questions we want to ignore. Look at the children of Iraq, how they have suffered, and how the world has forgotten them. Who is to say the world won’t do the same to Syria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, etc.? We turn a blind eye really quickly, and tend to not even see ourselves anymore in the process.
Read the full article here
The Narcicyst, who’s a pretty cool rapper, on his work and politics.
This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism. Subscribe here to receive this round-up by email.
- The death toll for the Syrian conflict is 93,000, according to the UN. 5000 people die every month.
- The US announced confirmation of Syria’s use of chemical weapons and the ensuing debate about what the crossing of this so-called red line now means for US action.
- Special UN rapporteur Richard Falk has called for an international inquiry into Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners.
- A negotiated end is sought to protests and clashes in Turkey.
- Tunisian rapper Weld El 15, on the run from a two year sentence for his anti-police song, has turned himself in.
- The AFP tracks casualties in Iraq (Google Doc).
- The polls have opened in the Iranian presidential election.
- A pre-election hacking campaign targeted Iranian Gmail users.
- President Hamid Karzai demanded on Saturday that Britain turn over more than 80 prisoners of war within two weeks.
- In Kabul, a mid-week suicide bombing in front of the Supreme Court left sixteen or more civilians dead and many injured.
- Bagram was handed over to Afghanistan three months ago, but dozens of foreign inmates, mostly Pakistani, have seen little change in their detention.
- The US disrupted Al Qaeda’s online magazine Inspire.
- Du Bin, a Chinese journalist who had completed a documentary on forced labor camps and freelanced for the New York Times, has been detained in Beijing.
- Korean officials held talks in Panmunjom.
- Threats to journalists by paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland are on the rise.
- Northern Ireland’s police have seized arms ahead of the G8.
- Colombia’s peace talks have resumed in Cuba.
- Brazilian journalist and newspaper José Roberto Ornelas de Lemos was murdered at a bakery in Rio de Janeiro on June 11.
- A group of American physicians have called, in the New England Journal of Medicine, on Guantánamo Bay’s doctors to refuse participation in the force-feeding program.
- An Iraqi prisoner named Abd al-Hadi and identified as a senior Al Al Qaeda commander has been charged in the Guantánamo war crimes tribunal.
- Microsoft and Google both call on the government to allow them to be more transparent and forthcoming to the public about the government’s information/data requests to them.
- Senator Gillibrand’s amendment that would remove military sex assault prosecutions from chain of command and hand them to independent military prosecutors was stripped from the defense bill after backlash from top brass. Gillibrand, however, plans to push the measure on the floor.
- The NSA leaker was identified upon his request as Edward Snowden, who has fled to Hong Kong.
- Will China hand him over?
- Concerned about what it might mean that the government knows your metadata? The Guardian has an interactive breakdown of what information is available from the telecom services we all use.
- ProPublica also has some tips about safer online activity.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently met with surprise success against the Justice Department in FISA court. The EFF is after court documents on government surveillance activity that was found by a FISA court to have circumvented the law, which the FISA court has ruled is legal for them to obtain, (kind of shockingly) rejecting the arguments of the DOJ. Here’s a link to the ruling.
- The ACLU hopes to see court success of its own in its lawsuit against the government over the Verizon metadata dragnet. As a Verizon customer itself, it can claim standing to sue. (The complaint itself.)
- Inside the NSA’s China hacking group.
If you would like to receive this round-up as a weekly email, you can sign up through this form, or email me directly at torierosedeghett@gmail.com.
Photo: Taksim Square, Turkey. A protester throws a petrol bomb towards the police. June 10. Kostas Tsironas/AP.
Ta-Nehisi Coates in comments to his article on teaching writing at MIT (via Jamison Foser)
Wonderful.
The old adage is true — writing is rewriting. But it takes a kind of courage to confront your own awfulness (and you will be awful) and realize that, if you sleep on it, you can come back and bang at the thing some more, and it will be less awful. And then you sleep again, and bang even more, and you have something middling. Then you sleep some more, and bang, and you get something that is actually coherent. Hopefully when you are done you have a piece that reasonably approximates the music in your head. And some day, having done that for years, perhaps you will get something that is even better than the music in your head. Becoming a better writer means becoming a re-writer. But that first phase is so awful that most people don’t want any part.
A current shot of Taksim Sqaure, where clashes are ongoing. Via @BowenBBC.
NBC’s Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel reports live on MSNBC from Taksim Square as riot police fire tear gas canisters at protesters.
A stunning photo from the Taksim Square clashes between police and protesters… a protester throws a petrol bomb towards the police yesterday.
Photo: Kostas Tsironas/AP. Via.
I think you’re misunderstanding the perceived problem, Mr. President. No one is saying that you broke any laws. We’re just saying it’s a little bit weird that you didn’t have to.
Can you hear me now? Metadata, civil liberties and homeland security
While there has been due outrage about the news regarding the NSA’s Verizon surveillance program, there has also been a loud echo of Senator Lindsey Graham’s “I am a Verizon customer. It doesn’t bother me one bit for the NSA to have my phone number.” See this Twitter account for a collection of such reactions in the Twitterverse. These responses range from Senator Feinstein’s “It’s lawful” and “It’s just metadata” to “It’s a necessary means of protecting the nation” and “It’s been in place for a long time.” And finally, the oldie but goodie, “If you aren’t a terrorist, what are you even afraid of.” None of those are valid defenses of a program of this scope, particularly not when paired with the follow-up news of PRISM, the program that tracks online activity through partnerships with Google, YouTube, Facebook, Apple, Skype, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, and PalTalk, or the news that information gleaned from data collection has been shared with British security agencies.
Infringements and violations of rights don’t happen in a vacuum, they have real effects. Whether or not this is now ingrained practice and technically legal don’t make it good policy - either in the sense that it is an effective and appropriate way of maintaining national security, or in the sense that it has legitimacy, constitutionality or morality. As Cole and Dempsey note in Terrorism and the Constitution (a good read if you want to be paranoid but very well-informed), the American homeland security model has long rested upon the practice of assigning suspicion to particular ideologies and political affiliations and perceives advocacy and violence as ends of a spectrum. So, yes, people who aren’t terrorists certainly have cause for worry over what erroneous links might be drawn between nonviolent advocacy or political affiliations and perceived potential for violence and criminal activity.
And yes, this is metadata. This isn’t en masse wiretapping, but as Susan Landau, a mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer, points out in this Jane Mayer post over at The New Yorker, imagine all the information that can be pieced together with metadata. It’s potentially more dangerously informative on a larger scale than content mining.
As to whether or not this has been worth it, what is arguably a massive breach of one version of security (the 4th amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures…”) for another, I refer you to @emptywheel’s Twitter commentary from yesterday: “Remember: Mike Rogers said the Section 215 dragnet justified bc ONE terror attack thwarted. ONE. In 7 years.” This is referencing Rep. Mike Rogers, the House Intel Committee chair, who cited one unspecified terrorist attack that he says the program thwarted. Sen. Rand Paul (yes, I know) in a Guardian op-ed today quoted then-Senator Obama on FISA in 2008…
We can give our intelligence and law enforcement community the powers they need to track down and take out terrorists without undermining our commitment to the rule of law, or our basic rights and liberties.
Yes. That civil liberties are in constant and inevitable tug of war with our safety is so axiomatic that it becomes the default explanation for rights and privacy violations. That understood tension between rights and safety seems to have been taken to mean that if a policy invades the privacy of millions, it must be working extra well. Sometimes rights are at odds with safety, to an extent, but it’s never so simple as a sacrifice of X amount of civil liberties for an equal amount of safety. Often, that trade-off is not worth it. Being asked (and by being asked, I really mean, being grudgingly told its been done for years) to trade this information en masse for limited evidence that harm has been prevented or could be prevented by these means is not a fair trade-off.
For some further evisceration of data dragnet, see The New York Times editorial from yesterday. They spare the administration nothing.
Short version of this blog post: I can’t believe I actually mostly agree with Rand Paul about something.
Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
Sketch based on photo @paulmasonnews sent me from #OccupyGezi. Will try and do lots more
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Hastings
I didn’t know Michael Hastings very well—just in that way that reporters are acquaintances over the Internet. His story on McChrystal...
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“Everyone should see this beautiful tribute from Rachel Maddow to Michael Hastings.” - @BuzzFeedAndrew
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Mother Jones: "RIP Michael Hastings. Here's His Advice to Young Journalists"
Okay, here’s my advice to you (and young journalists in general):
