Yesterday as part of NBC's Olympic coverage, Ryan Seacrest did a segment on tweets. First he told us how Tuesday night's competitions fared, in total number of tweets generated, compared to other recent big events; then he broke down Tuesday's tweets into subject. Michael Phelps inspired the most. Never were we told what any of the tweets said. It was all about numbers, quantity over quality. The audience was not amused or entertained or enlightened as to anything other than what is popular (which most people watching could have figured out for themselves). Thanks to the Internet, journalism (and not just television) now worships at the altar of popularity, which makes life tough for wit, nuance, the idiosyncratic, the exquisite and, sadly, the educational.
Also yesterday (in an unrelated matter) Terry Gross interviewed a writer for The New Yorker and said, as she always does when interviewing New Yorker writers, that the article under discussion "appears in the current edition of The New Yorker." It's not the guest's place to do it, but could somebody else, perhaps someone on the "Fresh Air" staff, please tell Terry Gross that books have editions, magazines have issues?
Our French neighbors have departed on their annual summer sail around the Bahamas, and before they left Claudine dropped off some magazines, including Paris Match.
Paging through it last night I saw some stunning photographs: wounded children in Syria, a communal apartment in Moscow, bathers in Rio de Janeiro (turning their backs to the polluted bay and crowding around an artificial lake), another aerial view - this one of Hong Kong - showing a building resembling a cruise ship in the middle of a high-rise neighborhood.
I was reminded of LIFE, which I loved as a kid and sorely miss as an adult. We no longer have a magazine that, through words and pictures, brings the world into our homes. National Geographic, which never covered current events, now runs cover stories on health. The travel magazines show us only the hotels and restaurants and sights - the tourist quarters - of faraway places. And the closest we come to a magazine with remarkable photography - strangely, in this visual age - is Sports Illustrated, which every week devotes six pages to three brilliant photos. Though they're almost always taken in the U.S., and they're always, naturally, of a sport.
All the Paris Match pictures are probably available somewhere on the Internet, but I'd have to search specifically for Syria (Rio, Hong Kong) and even that wouldn't guarantee I'd find them. The beauty of magazines is that they allow us to find things we didn't know we were looking for. They may be dead trees, old media, but they are irreplaceable agents of serendipity.
Readers of the Sunday New York Times Op-Ed page might have wondered yesterday what had happened to copy editors.
Thomas L. Friedman began his column on the rise of popularism with this: "Traveling in Europe last week, it seemed as if every other conversation ended with some form of this question: ..."
While halfway through Nicholas D. Kristof's column on Iran readers found this: "While interviewing people on a lovely Caspian Sea beach, a plainclothes policeman bustled forward."
Kristof's grammar lapse was more egregious than Friedman's, even though Friedman led with his. We assume "it" is not traveling through Europe, while it's conceivable that an Iranian policeman was interviewing people on a beach.
The true interviewer was revealed in the next sentence. But it would have been so easy to avoid, in each case, the dangling participle. Friedman could have written: "Last week I was traveling in Europe, where every conversation seemed to end in some form of this question: ..." And Kristof should have said: "While I was interviewing people on a lovely Caspian Sea beach, a plainclothes policeman bustled forward."
Both columnists had important things to say (don't they all?), and perhaps they felt that their messages were more important than the words that conveyed them. That's the thinking of a lot of high school students, who now have two high-profile journalists to trot out to their teachers as exemplars.
Sitting at Wales Garage this morning, waiting for our Honda to be serviced, I picked up a copy of a local magazine called Think. As writers do, I turned to the masthead, where I found the name of the publisher on top, followed not by the editor but by the copy editor. Below the copy editor was the advertising manager, and below the advertising manager were the account managers. At the bottom of the list, below the art and design and web people, appeared the names of two writers.
Leafing through the magazine I found, not surprisingly, more ads than articles. The articles that did appear carried no bylines, so I had to assume that they were written by one of the two writers listed at the bottom of the masthead, though of course there was no way of telling which writer wrote which article. Perhaps the magazine should change its name from Think to Guess.
I thought Pinterest was a service that deals in meaningful pauses.
The Australian travel magazine get lost arrived in the mail yesterday with my article on travel in 70s, those halcyon, pre-Internet days when total separation made total immersion a whole lot easier.
Immediately preceding my piece is one you would never find in an American travel magazine, as it lists the 10 countries with the most beautiful people. The authors write about the men as well as the women, shielding themselves from charges of sexism. Still, judging nations on their citizens' attractiveness is not something an American publication would dare to do.
Lebanon was #10, giving credence to stories my old newspaper's foreign correspondent used to tell me. Japan was #9, an uninspired choice (I would have chosen Korea). They were followed by Ethiopia, Italy, Israel and Colombia (Secret Service men are no dummies). Denmark was #4, which perhaps explains, better than a culture of low expectations, why the Danes are also said to be among the world's happiest people. Argentina was #3, Ukraine #2 (though almost any Slavic country could have taken its place) and Brazil was #1, giving South America three of the top 10 countries for male and female pulchritude. Regarding the latter, I found one glaring omission: India.