One of the rules I set for myself with Hindsight is that it’s not enough for me to find great articles that are one year old, but I have to actually read them. On a day to day basis I have no compunctions about linking to stories that look good that I may not have read all the way through, the idea being “here is something I think looks interesting and maybe you will, too” as opposed to “this is a fully vetted story.” But Hindsight is meant to be different.
This week I couldn’t find the time to sit myself down and read the articles I had planned on publishing in Hindsight 3. More accurately I didn’t find the time; I probably could have. As a result I don’t have a fully fleshed out edition this week.
But I want to talk a bit about what that means. More than usual this week I felt rushed around, consumed by the Internet, quickly devouring any and all current stories I could. This week was a great reading week for me; I feel rather informed right now. Yet I am overloaded. I started the Hindsight series specifically to get away from this feeling of being overwhelmed.
Still, I think it’s important not to skip a week. In lieu of a full fledged Hindsight I want to share with you just three stories. There’s always next week. And there’s always next year.
“You’re Young. I’m 18. So what?” by Jared Erondu, The Industry, September 14th, 2012
It really amazes me how much the world focuses on one’s age and degree(s). Even more so than skill and personality, the most important factors. But today, for my birthday, I’ll try to debunk the silly notion of age > skill.
In junior high I started a business making photo montages on videotape using PowerPoint. I remember how tough it was to convince people I could reliably deliver a product, how embarrassed I was to take initiative and treat my work like a “real” business.
Erondu expresses everything I felt back then. For his 18th birthday last year, he decided to quit being ashamed of his youth and embrace it. There are great lessons in his piece for readers of any age.
“Beyond the Matrix” by Aleksandar Hemon, The New Yorker, September 10th, 2012
In the Wachowskis’ work, the forces of evil are often overwhelmingly powerful, inflicting misery on humans, who maintain their faith until they’re saved by an unexpected miracle. The story of the making of “Cloud Atlas” fits this narrative trajectory pretty well.
“The Devil on Paradise Road” by Bruce Barcott, Outside, September 12th, 2012
It started as a bluebird New Year’s Day in Mount Rainier National Park. But when a gunman murdered a ranger and then fled back into the park’s frozen backcountry, every climber, skier, and camper became a suspect—and a potential victim.
I didn’t read the above two pieces for the reasons laid out at the top of this piece. I hope to soon and wanted to make sure you, the reader, had the opportunity to check out some (presumably great) pieces from last year.
Until next week…
]]>It wasn’t easy to set aside the week’s biggest news and take myself back to September 2012, but once I did it reminded me why I started this project in the first place. I missed each of the stories below when they were originally published this week last year, probably because I was devouring every last nibble of campaign trail nonsense.
My focus in the present is on potential US involvement in Syria. Looking back on this week next year, who knows what will have passed me by as I mire in (admittedly consequential) current events. It was nice to shift my attention away from the stories that attract the most noise.
So enjoy this collection of four stories from last year and one that’s a decade old. I sure did.
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“The House That Hova Built” by Zadie Smith, The New York Times, September 6, 2012
The rapper Memphis Bleek, who has known Jay-Z since Bleek himself was 14, confirms this impression: “He had a sense of calm way before music. This was Jay’s plan from day one: to take over. I guess that’s why he smiles and is so calm, ’cause he did exactly what he planned in the ’90s.” And now, by virtue of being 42 and not dead, he can claim his own unique selling proposition: he’s an artist as old as his art form. The two have grown up together.
The best bits in Zadie Smith’s profile aren’t about Jay Z1 at all; they’re about hip-hop and America.
“At sea for science” by Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing, September 5, 2012
In a lot of ways, the Joides Resolution is like the research stations in Antarctica. Truly an international effort—”more international than the International Space Station,” as Richard Norris put it—it’s also interdisciplinary. Scientists literally cannot do this kind of work on their own. In order for a science team of 30-some people to function, they have to work alongside 20 technicians and more than 70 crew members, including cooks, electricians, and welders. It creates a different sort of community and a different sort of environment than what you’d find in a lab on land.
Lab culture is an interesting enough beast on dry land. I can hardly imagine what it’s like at sea, but then again I get impatient on ferry rides. Maggie Koerth-Baker talks to the crew of the Joides Resolution about their expedition in a one hour podcast.
“Reporting Poverty” by Emily Brennan, Guernica, September 4, 2012
In my kind of work, you don’t parachute in after some big, terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glimpse. It’s the kind of work in which you ask, what is my understanding of how the world works, and where can I go to see these questions get worked out in individuals’ lives?
The journalist Katherine Boo talks about her process with Emily Brennan and about her reporting from a Mumbai slum. I especially like her take, later, on the ethics of reporting on the plight of others to sell magazines: “…if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world.”
“Why didn’t CNN’s international arm air its own documentary on Bahrain’s Arab Spring repression?” by Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian, September 4, 2012
On 19 June 2011 at 8pm, CNN’s domestic outlet in the US aired “iRevolution” for the first and only time. The program received prestigious journalism awards, including a 2012 Gold Medal from New York Festival’s Best TV and Films. […]
Despite these accolades, and despite the dangers their own journalists and their sources endured to produce it, CNN International (CNNi) never broadcast the documentary. Even in the face of numerous inquiries and complaints from their own employees inside CNN, it continued to refuse to broadcast the program or even provide any explanation for the decision. To date, this documentary has never aired on CNNi.
Glenn Greenwald became a household name over the summer with his continuing coverage of former Edward Snowden’s cache of NSA documents, but he has been relentlessly been covering government and media hypocrisy for years. Dollars to doughnuts much of the criticism Greenwald receives from other journalists is directly related to pieces like this one. Further Reading: The same day as the above article, Greenwald dove deep into CNN’s government sponsorships and the seemingly better coverage a regime can buy with it.
“One More Vital Pagan Orgy / Sex, drugs and glow sticks: Our columnist survives yet another Burning Man, perspective intact” by Mark Morford, SFGate, September 3, 2003
OK look. Burning Man is not an orgy. It’s not a sweetly blasphemous pagan love-fest. It’s not a giant drunken drug-addled overly hot week-long rave party with lots of beer and margaritas and bikes and exposed nipples and unshowered flesh and flashing shiny things and dust and crazy nouveau idealistic neo-hippies and breathtaking starlight. Not solely, anyway.
Mark just filed a story from his “10th burn” yesterday. Odd that he now recommends downloading an iOS app for the fest he described a decade ago as an “art-filled dust-drunk city in the middle of nowhere sans money sans phones sans work sans rules…”
Photo Credit: “Mumbai graffiti”, Lindsay Loebig, September 6, 2012
The Web went nuts this summer over Hova dropping his hyphen so he’ll be Jay Z from here on out.↩
Welcome to Hindsight, a weekly collection of year-old great writing from around the Web.
When I got it in my head that I should revisit content from last year, I wasn’t sure what I might find. After all, there is so much great content being published right now. Why dwell in the past? This exercise isn’t about nostalgia, though; it’s about catching up on the trove of writing that gets lost in the daily shuffle.
The goal here is to break the news cycle, to leave behind the conversations of the day and learn something new. It’s impossible to read everything on the Web, but it seems wasteful to read only what is new. With that in mind, I’ve collected what I think are some of the most interesting stories from this week last year. Happy reading.
You can subscribe just to Hindsight posts or to the full feed of the candler blog.
“How to watch an art movie, reel 1” by David Bordwell, Observations on film art, August 26, 2012
Jaime Rosales’ Sueño y silencio premiered in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes this year, went into distribution in Spain recently, and will probably be making the festival rounds. I think it’s a good film, but my appraisal is beside my point today. I want to use the film as a sort of “tutor-text,” a handy way of talking about how such movies engage us in ways different from more mainstream films.
Sueño y silencio has not been released in the US yet, but Bordwell writes in a manner that makes seeing the film beside the point. Shot by shot, he walks the reader through the experience of learning how to watch a film based on cues from the filmmaker.
“Backyard Battlefields: The bloody business of fracking in Arkansas.” by J. Malcolm Garcia, Oxford American, August 27, 2012
Natural gas is being marketed as a clean, green alternative to foreign-oil dependency; this year, the International Energy Agency found that carbon-dioxide emissions in the U.S. fell by four hundred and fifty tons, the result of an increase in the use of natural gas instead of coal. But since the inception of widespread fracking in 1997, horror stories have slowly entered the national conscience: illnesses coinciding with contaminated wells, citizens who can light their tap water on fire, pet and livestock deaths, exploding houses.
I don’t think I could live with the noise of fracking, let alone with the particulates, headaches and rashes the people in Garcia’s piece have experienced. And that’s not even the worst of it…
“Why Johnny can’t stream: How video copyright went insane” by James Grimmelmann, Ars Technica, August 30, 2012
This is the story of Cablevision, the companies that followed in its wake, and how we got to the strange place where wasting resources on thousands of tiny antennas made you legal—but where using one antenna broke the law.
Grimmelmann does his best to untangle the Gordian knot that is American copyright law and explain why video streaming remains wildly inefficient.
“Letter from Majorca” by J. D. Daniels, The Paris Review, Summer 2012
It was at this time that the captain called me long-distance from Tunisia and said, “I need a man. Get over here.”
“I’m sick,” I said. “I don’t know how much help I can be to you.”
“All I need is arms and legs,” he said. “Do you still have arms and legs?…”
Entering Daniels’ mind makes for quite the journey.
“Turn Back the Spam of Time” by Brian Mcwilliams, Wired, August 29, 2003
A trail of Internet clues has fingered Robert “Robby” Todino as the source of the time-travel messages. In a telephone interview last week, the 22-year-old Woburn, Massachusetts, resident admitted that he has sent nearly 100 million of the bizarre messages since November 2001.
This sounds like the basis for the film Safety Not Guarunteed, which, oddly, is actually based on a different real-life tale. Further Reading: At least one blogger documented the scene in Woburn, Massachusetts on July 28, 2003, when and where Todino claimed a Dimensional Warp Generator was to be delivered.
Photo Credit: “Balance”, Chrissy Wainwright, September 1, 2012
]]>Last week, Shawn Blanc published an excellent piece on the state of RSS feed reading. Here’s the part that stuck with me:
There is so much great stuff being written and published every day. We’re subscribing to some of the sites and writers who are producing it, and we’re trying to read what we can, but a lot of great things to read fall through the cracks every day. And a lot of dumb stuff gets much more attention than it deserves.
I save interesting things I come across to Instapaper and Pinboard every day. As I explained back in May, sometimes I read the articles I cull, but more often they linger in my accounts until they’re forgotten, tamped down by another layer of links I might one day get to. And yes, I as guilty as anyone of getting caught up in nonsense that doesn’t deserve my attention at all.1
Shawn’s piece got me thinking about what I could do to prevent great content from getting lost over time. And then it hit me: just read it.
Today I’m introducing Hindsight, a weekly collection of older content you may have missed from around the Web. Hindsight will be published once a week and contain links to longer stories that are one year old. Some ground rules:
These rules will be broken, probably weekly, but I think they provide a nice starting point. Hindsight is about slowing down the news cycle. It’s about setting current events aside and catching up on great writing.
Hindsight will appear like any other post here on the candler blog. I’ve also set up an RSS feed just for Hindsight.
So fire up your read later app of choice and grab your favorite beverage; the first Hindsight is up. Happy reading.
This week is a great example: I’ve been privy to far too many conversations about Miley Cyrus. Meanwhile: the NSA is spying on the UN and we’re on the brink of entering Syria, but OMG that foam finger.↩
Numbered weeks are based on a Sunday through Saturday calendar. For example: since the week of August 25th is the 35th week of 2013, stories linked this week will have been published between August 26th and September 1st 2012, the 35th week of 2012.↩