Ill Doctrine on the Little Hater inside us all.
The anticipation of what will come is typically so much worse than the reality. And yet it’s so hard to get started time and again, due more to self-criticism than any bystander’s judgment.
Monthly Archive for June, 2010
I’ve been enjoying the trail of MEDIA DIET posts over at The Atlantic and was especially thrilled to find out what Ezra Klein reads a few weeks ago.
I’m a bit of a news junkie myself, so I thought I’d take a walk through what I read on a regular basis with the help of Google Reader trends. It is probably best to start by saying that I don’t own a TV, so RSS feeds are the basis of my news world.
As a night owl, I do most of my media consumption between 7 p.m. – 1 a.m. because it’s uninterrupted reading time once I’ve made it home from the gym and whatever afterwork commitments I have on a given day.
I start any news dive with a visit to the Huffington Post to see what’s trending. I love using it as a starting point because as I begin following the aggregated content back to its home source, I wind up pinging across a number of news sites I wouldn’t necessarily visit daily otherwise. It is also rare for me to miss the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC (videos are released online about an hour after the show ends each weeknight), and I catch most episodes of The Daily Show.
As I write this post, there are 167 feeds in my reader, so this post is hardly exhaustive in reviewing what I read. It is impossible to keep up with everything, but I find that each time I remove a feed, I somehow wind up adding a few more. So I let my topics of interest ebb and flow over time.
For current events I follow parts of the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones, ProPublica, Washington Post, Salon and TreeHugger. For tech news, I head to TechCrunch and Mashable.
The blogs I read are disparate to say the least. I read Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, Center for American Progress’s Think Progress, BoingBoing, BigThink, Jezebel.
Paul Krugman, Nicholas Kristof, Ezra Klein, Michelle Goldberg, Robert Reich, Jon Taplin and Jay Smooth provide lots of food for thought.
In case you hadn’t noticed, I find culture and politics fascinating, so Talking Points Memo and the latest Pew Research statistics are regular reads.
I also read for entertainment value – Indexed, ChartPorn and Joy the Baker.
The most surprising item in my reader is probably Michael Hyatt‘s blog. He’s the CEO of a Christian Publishing Company who writes excellent posts on leadership.
I’m not a huge fan of print magazines. They tend to stack up for 3 or 4 months before I finally flip through them. It is a rare day that I read a magazine cover to cover. Current subscriptions: Wired, Fast Company and Ode.
And, of course, there’s my 50-book goal each year.
In between all the reading, I keep up with some TV thanks to the Intertubes and Netflix: Bones, House, Vampire Diaries, 30 Rock and How I Met Your Mother during the regular network season and Rescue Me, The Closer, Leverage, In Plain Sight and True Blood online and by DVD in the off season.
That’s a basic overview of my media consumption. What about you?
For those of you who aren’t inclined to read all 688 pages of Rifkin’s sweeping retelling of human history and the role empathy plays in our interpersonal and intercultural affairs, here’s a video providing a brief overview of The Empathic Civilization, which was published earlier this year.
CNN recently worked with a University of Chicago psychologist to update a classic study. They asked black and white children to use a cartoon graphic of children with varying skin tones to identify the smartest, dumbest, meanest, prettiest, etcetera child.
It tends to be assumed that Gen Y is a more colorblind subset of the population. Certainly, for those growing up in areas with more diverse populations, they’re more likely to be exposed to a variety of cultures and races throughout our childhood schooling, which potentially has a mitigating effect on internally-processed race disparities. But kids still pick up subtle cues from their family members and are watching a tremendous amount of television, both of which can mean the introduction of stereotypes and biases depending on the relatives and the programming.
Planet Green’s Chief Ocean correspondent Philippe Cousteau Jr. sat down with Bill Maher on Friday to discuss the seriousness of ocean pollution.
The Florida Keys, third longest barrier reef in the world, is a dead zone. Ninety percent of the big fish, the tuna, the sharks, and other things, are already gone in the oceans. There’s a dead zone in the Gulf Of Mexico every summer the size of New Jersey, where there’s not enough oxygen for things to live. So it’s not a question of ‘Can the oceans take any more?’ The oceans can’t take any more. They couldn’t take any more fifty years ago. The question is, when are we going to stop?
Watch the full interview here.
Unsurprisingly, BP’s “Top Kill” maneuver, consisting of plugging the oil gusher with heavy mud and kill shots of shredded tires and golf balls, failed. And now the failed drilling zone is spilling an Exxon Valedez’s worth of oil in the Gulf of Mexico every three and a half days.
Unplugged, it will take 7 years for 2.1 billion gallons of oil to drain from pressurized undersea site. That’s roughly 3500 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of oil poured into the fragile Gulf Coast ecosystem. With nearly 4000 oil and gas platforms in the vicinity (as of 2005), we risk further devastation daily. In 2008, Hurricane’s Katrina and Rita leveled 113 such platforms.
While we can hope repercussions for BP will be steep, the odds are that it, much like the banking system, is too big to fail. The EPA could do as little as provide a slap on the corporate wrists to, at the opposite end of the spectrum, pull the plug on its US operations and federal contracts, which account for 39% of the company’s oil and gas revenue annually. Given BP has 22,000 oil and gas wells in the US, punishing BP would also be punishing local economies that rely the jobs BP creates and the disposable incomes that those jobs yield. Oil-coated greed does not scale well when a company reaches a size that allows it to act as it pleases, knowing that there’s very little regulators can do to enforce compliance and punitive measures
Undoubtedly, the government has culpability in creating the situation. When BP filed with the U.S. Minerals Management Service, their exploration plans offered assurances that the company could handle a spill 60 times larger than what is currently playing out in the Gulf, while neglecting to provide any details as to what could be done to staunch the flow from a damaged well head. Government regulators meant to be on the side of the American people should have asked for more detailed filings before further consideration and licenses were granted. Which of the other platforms in the Gulf are ticking eco-bombs waiting to self-destruct, having been approved with such loose emergency plans in place?
There is one upside to this disaster. As more photos (here, here and here) or the environmental impact of this spill makes their way online and into newscasts. The importance of environmental stewardship is, once again, trending as an important environmental issue. Per a new Gallup poll, Americans are realizing the cost of our oil dependency, even in the most superficial manner, and recognizing we actually need a planet to live on.
Unsurprisingly, as Mother Jones points out, self-identified Republicans still overwhelming support sourcing energy over keeping the planet a healthy enough place for the people living on it.
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