The Course of Empire

In a blog post titled "Evolution of every medium" Seth Godin makes an observation that, based on my experience, feels right but—as with researchers who find evolutionary imperatives for various human behaviors, such as shopping—there is no way to actually test his assertion.

(While we're at it, I'm hoping someone can explain why that branch of "science" is taken seriously, since it is immune to the rigors of the scientific method.)

Quote of the Day

“Those who unfeelingly push and jostle one another all the rest of the year smile on each other today, tell of the dangers they escaped, exchange addresses, and walk along with new friends. The squares are mountains of snow over which the icy lacework clinging like filigree to the branches of the trees glitters in the morning sun.”

—José Martí, “New York Under the Snow” (1888)

If I Were a Betting Man

I'd put my money on this: it's just a matter of minutes before Fox News starts a feedback loop about how today's Nobel announcement brings shame to America. (I wonder if there are people running virtual office pools using PayPal.)

In the Nothing New Under the Sun Department

It turns out the insanity that takes hold of the news cycle in August (angry health care haters, birthers, shark attacks) was identified in the late nineteenth century. The British call it Silly Season, and in Germany it's Pickle Time.

First the Good News

While newspapers and magazines elsewhere are cutting back on crosswords, the Harrisburg Patriot-News is adding more puzzles to the paper.

Now the bad: they're adding sudoku and KenKen®.

I'm quoted in the article and, FYI: I do not say "play crosswords."

W(h)ither Crosswords?

Anne Trubek, writing for Good magazine online, asks if crosswords are destined to go the way of the newspaper. (Along the way she mentions my skepticism about the ability of crosswords to protect us from dementia.) I think her question is worth asking. Her post has prompted more than 70 comments and counting, many in vehement disagreement.

Not That I Condone Violence

but …

among my major regrets in life, one is that we did not act a little more like the Iranian people after our own presidential disaster in 2000.

I did try to stir up outrage with the hope of organized protest. To this day, I can't shake the memory of a left-leaning colleague who counseled me, condescendingly, that it was important to “move on.”

Such terrible advice. And hindsight is not required to know it. At the time, even, that line from Yeats replayed itself in my head like a stuck record. I wish the poet were alive today so that I could argue with him: if they truly were the “best,” then they wouldn't lack all conviction, would they?

As the 2002 midterm elections approached, it was time to vote again, and for the life of me I couldn't see the point of it. Unless all votes are counted, the exercise is empty.

The weekend before election day, I tried to argue my case to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo. (Click here and then fast forward to 1:39 to skip past the show intro and listen to the interview. Sorry, but WNYC still requires RealPlayer.)

I bring this up again now to set the record straight. The governor characterized my position this way: “I [Dean] didn't get what I want when I vote, so why should I vote? They're not really listening to me.”

I can't remember what happened next in the raw, unedited interview. There are two possibilities. The first is that I wasn't quick enough on my feet to press the point. The second is that I did press the point but a producer took it out, thinking it unimportant, and I wasn't hovering closely enough to make sure it was left in.

What needed to be said next was this: “No, Governor. That's not it at all. Actually, in November of 2000, we didn't have enough information about George Bush to hate him yet. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt about compassionate conservatism. It has nothing to do with what I want. The disaster was that when all the votes were counted, the American people had voted the other way. When all the votes were counted—and this point has never sunk in, perhaps because it's too horrifying to contemplate—Gore had won not only the popular vote but also the Electoral College. I would shut up about it if Bush had really been the candidate America wanted in 2000.”

Of course, then came the 2004 election, which rendered me speechless. But that's another matter.

One thing the governor said seems alive again in light of Iranians' response to their election results. He said: “This is a system that rewards involvement and punishes aloofness.” I hope to have a chance in my lifetime to witness if that is true.

The Left Hand Doesn't Know What the Left Hand Is Doing

If the cover story in this weekend's N.Y. Times magazine seems familiar, that's because the paper ran essentially the same piece on its front page in November of 2007.

It's nearly impossible to imagine what the editors were thinking when they commissioned the current article. For sure, Steven Pinker is a brand-name author, but it's not as if the first go-around failed to grab attention: it was part of a series that earned the reporter, Amy Harmon, a Pulitzer Prize.

Perhaps the most astonishing part of the whole thing is that both articles share identical headlines.

Clearly, the paper's institutional memory spans less than 14 months.

In the bad old days when a newspaper archive was kept on paper--in a filing cabinet, in the morgue, in the basement--such a thing might be understandable. But a blunder as big as this one makes me wonder: don't they have Internet access in the newsroom?

2008 Will Be Remembered as the Year I Finally Gave Up on the Print Edition of the New York Times

Or did it give up on me?

The Housatonic at Stockbridge

from my riff on Three Places in New England by Charles Ives.

Check It Out

New, original reporting in sound by my grad students, at The End of the Dial. They've got some pretty cool stuff going on, including, this week, a piece from Upper Darby, PA, on the "reverse Bradley effect."

A Documentary Installation

And I'm looking forward to being part of it, this week at the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Evanston, Illinois. Three Places in New England opens Thursday.

Stand Up for the Filter

Katie Couric has rehabilitated herself. This is the moment to acknowledge why the filter is essential to democracy. Let us please take Katie's lead and vow to do a better job of filtering.

Field of Dreams

I Just Can't Imagine How It Would Be Possible

since skulls are so much harder than fingernails.

Now I REALLY Don't Know How to Fill Out Those Forms

I'm referring to the forms that ask you to list your ethnicity. I usually put "Other," just to push us one nanometer closer to a post-racial society. And now I read in The Rest Is Noise, by Alex Ross, a confusing description of the music scene in New York during the 1920s and 30s, when "Jewish, African-American, and even Caucasian composers were working shoulder to shoulder, trading ideas, borrowing themes, plundering the past, and feeding off the present." Did I miss something?

Henry Louis Gates, Chris Rock and I

going mano a mano (a mano) in the Guardian.

Although they probably don't know it yet.

Well That's Odd

Just when I was starting to get used to bylines in the New Yorker magazine (yes, I know, I'm a little slow on the uptake), along comes an unsigned article. Why? Perhaps it has something to do with the unsettling subject matter: the plain truth, first revealed by D.T. Max in the Times Magazine in 1988, that what we love about Raymond Carver is really what we love about the editing skills of Gordon Lish.

The decision to write anonymously here seems especially freighted, less a mere throwback to the Shawn years and having something more to do with the nature of Lish's initially invisible and essential influence.

The revelation was so powerful when it appeared nearly 20 years ago because it went to the heart of a gut-wrenching ethical dilemma: sure, we say we believe in the right of the artist to have final say over his or her own work, and yet the fact is, it was Lish who made Carver's stories into the masterpieces that they are. Carver's later stories, where he resisted editing, lack the same punch.

It will be instructive to go through the before-and-after exercise the magazine proposes by publishing "Beginners," the story as Carver wrote it, before Lish turned it into "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." I promise to be open to the possibility that I will appreciate Carver's original vision. It will be hard, but I hope to have my mind changed.

Those are the moments of transformation I wait for nowadays. Usually they follow a pattern: some assertion is made and then quickly overturned. Just a few months ago, I was walking down the street, thinking how I needed to admit I had little appreciation for Mozart's music. Just putting it into words, unspoken as they were, prompted a compulsive three-day binge of listening to nothing but the andante from his "Jupiter" symphony.

Correction below, in comments.

Compare and Contrast

The intro as submitted (title of piece, "Middle of the Road"):

"Until science comes up with a definitive theory for why humans are drawn to music, writer Dean Olsher is sticking with his: because it induces time travel."

And as it appeared this evening on All Things Considered (along with the piece itself):

Listen.

Housewarming Party

I wish to direct your attention to the new home of audio reporting done by the workshop I started at NYU's journalism department. It's The End of the Dial. Two pieces have been posted so far, each taking a different approach.

In addition to the critiques that were raised by our first attempt, a third has come up: several people said they really don't want to have to look at anything. They want to just download the audio to their iPods or, even if they're sitting at the computer, they want to do other things while listening, like make dinner or veg out on the couch.

In this case, there is information that gets alluded to in the narration, but not spelled out. Our hope is that by putting that information on the blog post, you'll be properly prepared for when the moment arrives. Does it work? Tell us.

How Can We Make It Better?

Thanks to John for weighing in on this week's experiment in sound reporting.

Here are two other issues that have been raised by colleagues in NYU's journalism department:

1.) How do we create the expectation in the end user that this is not going to be a movie? One person thought, upon first playing the piece, that something had gone wrong: that, perhaps, only the titles had been rendered but the video track had been erased. After all, you see the little arrow and the black screen and that makes you think a movie is about to begin. We experimented with putting an ear behind the arrow but it looked a little gruesome. Hey, it is Halloweek [sic], after all.

2.) Are we overloading the part of the brain that processes words? I find, for example, that when I'm writing, I can listen to instrumental music but not songs with lyrics, and certainly not news or talk. (It always seemed remarkable how many visual artists told me they listened to The Next Big Thing while making their work; I guess they really do operate from a non-verbal place.) Is looking at text and hearing different words simultaneously the same as patting your head and rubbing your tummy?

The Start of Something New?

I've been struggling to solve a problem regarding what's still being called, until a better name comes along, the Medium Formerly Known as Radio. The problem is: how do we meet the internet's demand for visuals in a way that is true to who we are? After all, working in sound is superior because it requires the listener to supply the pictures. If we wanted to do our audiences' seeing for them, we'd have become filmmakers.

So far, the "enhanced" audio podcast seems to consist of slapping up a still photo corresponding in some way to the piece being heard. Unimaginative at best.

Instead, I see the internet providing an opportunity to make up for radio's main weakness. As many of us have learned over the years, it is a terrible medium for communicating information. To properly hold our listeners' hands, we load our scripts with necessary facts that encumber the storytelling.

For some time, I've imagined a kind of internet audio reportage that leaves the main narration to the reporter and offloads some of the overly specific information into visible text, i.e., constantly changing titles that can be read while listening and that don't do your seeing for you. And, when needed, these titles can give a leg up to tape that might be hard to grasp on its own.

One of the students in a weekly sound reporting workshop I run, Anne Noyes, has published what I think might be the first example of this new form. Give a listen to A Basement in Queens and tell us what you think.

Now You Know

the REST ... of the story.

Update

That piece I did about my battle with the beavers is airing on these stations at these times. My portion starts about 20 minutes into the fifth episode.

Never Forget

Long before enemy combatants, there have been all kinds of legally suspect ways to ruin innocent lives. I remember the morning Carl Kasell announced to the world that Richard Jewell had been named a "person of interest." I went to the office that day (I was working at NPR at the time) and asked the managing editor if it we, as a news organization, were really willing to go down that road. His answer was that since the FBI had released the name, it was our job to report it.

I've often wondered what it would have taken to get all news organizations in America to say no, sorry, we're not going to do your dirty work for you.

Listen.

My Next Big Thing

This will come as a bit of a surprise, but a week from today I begin a visiting professorship in NYU's journalism department. It's a one-year appointment. Friday was my last day on the air at Martha Radio.

At NYU I'll create a concentration in radio journalism. From scratch.

It's a pretty exciting thing. This coincides with an anniversary: 30 years on the air. I still have my third class radio operator's license from the FCC. Yes, it's framed.

When I first started talking with Brooke Kroeger, the journalism department chair, about the possibility of coming on board, she asked me to write a statement outlining how I'd proceed. What follows is a portion of what I presented to her:

Each year, the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago attracts dozens of aspiring young producers involved in radio projects for organizations such as Blunt Youth Radio in Portland, ME; Youth Radio in Oakland, CA, and Radio Rookies in New York City. They tend to share early memories of growing up with NPR during long family car rides and a more recent fascination with public radio programs that target younger audiences, such as "This American Life" and "The Next Big Thing." They are excited about the medium and the possibility of injecting new life into it. They make me hopeful about radio’s future. I also think there is every reason to believe the Internet will provide expanding opportunities for journalistic audio production.

Recently a vice president at NPR told me that he thinks it is no longer feasible to create new programs for the nationwide system of affiliate stations; instead, he finds himself directing his energies more and more toward advertiser-supported podcasting and indeed discovering there is already a sizable audience for audio content over the web. I myself have come to refer to "the medium formerly known as radio.”

At its founding, NPR was dedicated to the notion that radio journalism is its own discipline, not merely print reportage that happens to take place on the air. It was understood that sound gathering was integral, not incidental, to the process. As a result, you will always get more facts from reading The New York Times, but radio allows you to feel a story as no other medium can.

As NPR became more of a primary news source—around the time of the Persian Gulf War—a large number of print journalists were hired in the belief that they possessed superior reporting chops. Those who espouse radio journalism's unique and special qualities became scarcer. There grew a cultural divide within the institution between news values and radio values.

I believe this is an unnecessary dichotomy, fostered by an educational landscape that offers training either in reporting or in broadcasting, but rarely a substantial experience in both, together. I propose to introduce radio in a way that gives equal emphasis to each word in the term radio journalism.

There are many ways to practice radio journalism. The style that interests me most, and which I believe is the most useful in a teaching environment, is the use of sound-gathering to capture stories as they unfold, where listeners witness events as they happen (rather than hearing after-the-fact narratives). In the truest sense of the word, we should call this documentary. And yet it is a loaded word. As practiced by filmmakers, it often implies a mixture of fact with fudge.

This addresses the question of form. As for content, I return to the idea that radio allows listeners to feel a story the way no other medium can. To that I wish to add the original description of All Things Considered: a radio magazine of the human experience. While it may sound a little grand, it does capture radio's unique strength as a medium. Radio is intimate. It reaches in through your ears, deep into your heart and soul. It encompasses the large and the small, the public demonstration and the quiet personal epiphany.

Advertisements for Myself

I've contributed a piece to a series called Stories from the Heart of the Land. It's the tale of one man's struggle with Castor canadensis (a.k.a. beaver). The series is airing at various times in different cities so, as they say, check local listings.

What I Did During My Winter Vacation

Listen.

One More Thing and Then I'll Shut Up About It

NPR fixed the link.

The Heterodyne Principle

In the absence of a live link on the NPR page, here is the piece that aired this evening.

MELISSA BLOCK INTRO:

It is called the Heterodyne Principle: a poetic sounding name for a discovery that led to a chain of events culminating in me, talking to you, right now. Reginald Fessenden made the discovery in the early years of the twentieth century. A Canadian by birth who began his career working for Thomas Edison, Fessenden figured out that by combining two frequencies together, radio could do more than simply transmit Morse code. It would be possible to SPEAK over the airwaves. Thanks to him, radio became a sound medium.

It happened one hundred years ago Sunday. And as writer Dean Olsher tells us, the first implementation of Fessenden's principle is one of radio's creation myths.

Listen here

MELISSA'S BACK ANNOUNCE:

Dean Olsher is a writer in New York. We heard violinist Christina Smith, and Chris Brookes as the voice of Reginald Fessenden.

Sorry About That

To be complete and correct, I ought to have specified that it was likely but not certain that my piece would air at 5:50 pm ET. As it happens, All Things Considered ran it an hour earlier. So sorry if you ended up listening to unwanted segments of the show. Under normal circumstances, I'd be able to direct you to a link so that you could hear it online, but for some reason that file is blank. A jinx? Perhaps.

Back on the Radio Again

I came to Yaddo to try new things. As fate would have it, being here inspired me to make a radio piece—my first since the The Next Big Thing went off the air. Thus does my 18-month sabbatical come to an end.

The piece is a meditation on the first broadcast of music and speech on the airwaves, which took place one hundred years ago this Sunday. My piece will air tomorrow, December 22, on All Things Considered. If you'd like to hear it, start listening around 5:50 pm ET.

Happy listening and Merry Christmas!

Now I Get It

I have a feeling the editors at Harper's included "Gendered Like Beckham" ("from a June 3 Der Spiegel interview with philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, on the occasion of the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in Germany") in the September issue in order to ridicule his ideas that the human attraction to sports and shopping is a modern remnant of hunting and gathering. I would venture to say that because of this brief interview, those two baffling activities make sense for the first time in my life. Sadly, the text is not available online so you'll have to scrounge it at your next visit to the dentist.

It Pays to Read the Fine Print

Since James Naughton first took the stage as Billy Flynn in the current Broadway revival of "Chicago" in 1996, the silver-tongued lawyer has been played by movie stars and TV stars, singers and dancers, and George Hamilton.

—Caption in today's Times

Now That's What I Call Irony

The time: this evening shortly after 9pm

The place: Film Forum

The film: Ace in the Hole, which features a reporter with compromised ethics and a catastrophic cave-in

Could that really have been Matthew Cooper holding the door open for me?

Ouch

With a last line as self-aware as this one, I would have thought she'd have the presence of mind not to hit the Send button.

Trifecta

Betty Friedan was dead just a couple of days and already the naysayers were out.

Why do I care? It's just that I can't help but see a trend—one I first noticed in March of 2005, when, just three months after Susan Sontag's death, Terry Castle, in the London Review of Books, aired a list of personal grievances succinctly described by one friend as "very funny but rather nasty." It says something about Sontag's fierceness, and Castle's cowardice, that she waited to print it until the moment when no rebuttal was possible.

And then there was Terry Teachout's more measured consideration of how he did not like the plays of Wendy Wasserstein, although he found her exceedingly friendly as person. Fine. But the day after she died?

Why the new willingness to poop on the dead? And so quickly after they're gone. To be sure, the opposite extreme is no better. Witness the sickening hypocrisy of Ronald Reagan's apotheosis in death—by people who knew better—as if he had been a great president.

Could it have anything to do with the fact that they were powerful women?

While I'm At It: Birth of an Adverb?

"The prospect of reinventing oneself tabula rasa has always been one of America's foundation myths."

—Michiko Kakutani, also in today's Times.

He Was More of a Zealot Than Anyone Realized

"Once he got his hands on Paris, he embarked on a rebuilding and beatification program that left it with the glorious Place des Vosges in the Marais."

—William Grimes, writing about Henry IV, "the red-blooded Gascon who converted to Catholicism to secure the throne in 1589," in today's Times.

Can You Spot the Boldface Lie?*

Here, let me help.

From the New York Post:

SCALIA RAPS GORE FOR '00

By FRANKIE EDOZIEN

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says the high court did not inject itself into the 2000 presidential election.

Speaking at the Time Warner Center last night, Scalia said: "The election was dragged into the courts by the Gore people. We did not go looking for trouble."

But he said the court had to take the case.

"The issue was whether Florida's Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court [would decide the election.] What did you expect us to do? Turn the case down because it wasn't important enough?"

The conservative justice, who grew up in Queens, contended there would have been a difficult transition had the court not stepped in.

He also pointed out that studies by news organizations after the election showed Bush still would have won a Florida recount.

NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc. NYPOST.COM, NYPOSTONLINE.COM, and NEWYORKPOST.COM are trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc. Copyright 2005 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.

*Pre-emptive strike against the language police: I know it's "bald-faced lie," but sometimes incorrect usage works to your advantage. --ed.

THE TIMES, CONSISTENTLY FAILING TO SPOT THE BEST QUOTATION OF THE DAY

“GEORGE Bush hates midgets.”

CHRIS ROCK, on Friday’s “Shelter From the Storm” telethon for Katrina relief. [E7]

"Sculpture" as a Verb?

Ick.

Next thing you know, they'll start using "pleasure" as a verb, too.

(Oh, right....)

Cancer Schmancer

There are very few things that keep me from going first to the puzzle every morning, which often happens at the expense of getting through the news. This morning, though, one of those things came along. It was the chance to read every detail the Times saw fit to print regarding the resolution of a decades-old mystery, one that had gone on for the large majority of my time on Earth. Woodstein confirmed it: “W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat.” What is a crossword puzzle other than a compact little mystery story played out on a 15x15 grid? Here was a mystery that had carried on for 15+15 years.

But what sad details they were, having less to do with the family’s apparent desire to beat Bob Woodward to the profits (“Mr. Felt’s daughter, Joan, spoke of the money it might make to help pay tuition bills for her children”) and everything to do with Felt’s original motive to leak to Woodstein in the first place, which was not to cure the cancer on the presidency as we understood it. After all, Felt himself was convicted for authorizing illegal break-ins to investigate the Weather Underground. No, we're left to conclude that what we have here appears to be a case of spite and/or an attempt to punish the president for grabbing power from the FBI: “Mr. Felt spent more than 30 years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a protégé of its legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover, and was bitterly disappointed after Hoover’s death in May 1972—a month before the Watergate break-in—that Nixon went outside the agency for a new chief.”

It’s enough to drive one to the crossword puzzle.