Put another way, the company that owns The Washington Post is almost entirely at the mercy of the Federal Government and the Obama administration -- the entities which its newspaper ostensibly checks and holds accountable. "By the end of 2010, more than 90 percent of revenue at Kaplan’s biggest division and nearly a third of The Post Co.’s revenue overall came from the U.S. government." The Post Co.'s reliance on the Federal Government extends beyond the source of its revenue; because the industry is so heavily regulated, any animosity from the Government could single-handedly doom the Post Co.'s business... --
Glenn Greenwald examines WaPo's entanglement with for-profit education
posted by hippybear
on Apr 12, 2011 -
27 comments
And the winner of the Good Sex Award is... "...recognizing the best sex writing in fiction from the past year. We've
[salon.com] convened a panel of literary star judges -- Walter Kirn, Maud Newton, Louis Bayard and Salon's own Laura Miller -- to reward the best-written, most interesting and most convincing piece of sex writing published in a novel in 2010."
No 2.,
No. 3,
No. 4,
No.5,
No. 6,
No. 7,
No. 8. The
2010 Bad Sex Award Winner.
posted by Fizz
on Feb 15, 2011 -
15 comments
Journalistic
flamewar erupts over secret chat logs. It's a disagreement between Salon's Glenn Greenwald and Wired.com's Kevin Poulsen over the proper use of IM chat logs between Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo. Revelant links within.
[more inside]
posted by chaff
on Dec 29, 2010 -
171 comments
The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.
posted by Joe Beese
on Dec 8, 2010 -
80 comments
I ended up not taking my meds on the weekend to conserve them for workdays in case something went wrong when it came time to renew, as it always seemed to, and so the character of "Mike on the weekends" became much more sweary and unpredictable -- but even I had to admit, weirdly entertaining. I was known to unload a series of f-bombs on people wearing shorts (why shorts?) and the behavior was weird enough that I never got beat up.
When Tourette's took over my life
posted by defenestration
on Oct 20, 2010 -
16 comments
Death to the spoiler police! Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams takes a stand against people who insist on spoiler alerts: "[O]nce a work enters the pop culture vernacular, it is not society's responsibility to provide you with earmuffs until you finally get around to experiencing it. ... But for the love of God, if you really don't want to know about a book/movie/television show, do the rest of the world a favor and stop hanging out in the online discussion groups about it." Via
Roger Ebert.
posted by mcwetboy
on May 20, 2010 -
151 comments
Natalie Portman has been a vegetarian for twenty years, but was recently inspired to become a vegan by
Jonathan Safran Foer's first nonfiction book,
Eating Animals. Portman wrote
an essay for the Huffington Post in which she compares the book favorably to Michael Pollan's
The Omnivore's Dilemma (
previously on the blue), and makes this specific criticism of the latter book:
But he reminds us that being a man, and a human, takes more thought than just "This is tasty, and that's why I do it." He posits that consideration, as promoted by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore's Dilemma, which has more to do with being polite to your tablemates than sticking to your own ideals, would be absurd if applied to any other belief (e.g., I don't believe in rape, but if it's what it takes to please my dinner hosts, then so be it).
[more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack
on Oct 28, 2009 -
283 comments
The Obama administration has repeatedly threatened to conceal future information of terrorist threats from the British government, unless the British government disobeys the High Court ruling requiring them to release information about the US government's acknowledged torture program. This may be a breach of the Convention Against Torture.
Glenn Greenwald has new evidence.
Previously.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94
on May 12, 2009 -
282 comments
The death of the news. What is really threatened by the decline of newspapers and the related rise of online media is reporting -- on-the-ground reporting by trained journalists who know the subject, have developed sources on all sides, strive for objectivity and are working with editors who check their facts, steer them in the right direction and are a further check against unwarranted assumptions, sloppy thinking and reporting, and conscious or unconscious bias.
posted by adamvasco
on Feb 17, 2009 -
94 comments
“I wanted to try to capture the intelligence of the design, not just the outcome of the design.” “In 1977, [Donald] Knuth halted research on his books for what he expected to be a one-year hiatus. Instead, it took 10. Accompanied by [his wife] Jill, Knuth took design classes from Stanford art professor Matthew Kahn. Knuth, trying to train his programmer’s brain to think like an artist’s, wanted to create a program [
TeX] that would understand why each stroke in a typeface would be pleasing to the eye.”—from a
profile of Knuth in the
Stanford Magazine (May '06).
Salon calls him “
computing’s philosopher king”
(Sep '99). NPR’s
Morning Edition interviews Knuth as “
the founding artist of computer science”
(Mar '05). Perhaps a MeFite somewhere has one of
these?
(Previously)
posted by Ethereal Bligh
on Apr 23, 2007 -
40 comments
Paglia's back. "I had certainly assumed the Web was surfeited with more than enough material, but evidently many others beside myself find the partisan polarization of the blogosphere numbingly predictable and its prose too often slapdash, fragmentary or drearily prolix." If you like that sentence, you'll love the
return of Camille Paglia to Salon.com.
posted by staggernation
on Feb 14, 2007 -
61 comments
Websites that changed the world? This Observer piece lists fifteen websites that aught to be considered the best of the web. It's a bold claim and although the potted histories are excellent, I'm wondering the extent to which it mostly includes website that have broken the public recognition barrier in the uk rather than changing the
world. How many are simply pioneers in their field? Where for example is
flickr?
posted by feelinglistless
on Aug 13, 2006 -
69 comments
Rollback. Media critic Jay Rosen rises above the McClellan/"shake-up" foofaraw to put several pieces of the puzzle together and show how the Bush administration has significantly altered the long-standing relationship of the press to the White House. (More from Rosen
here.) Another piece that fits: Donald Rumsfeld's
bold, frequent, and rarely-challenged assertions that the American press is being expertly "manipulated" by Al Qaeda
"media committees" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
posted by digaman
on Apr 20, 2006 -
19 comments
Salon Video Dog: (Reg. Req'd.) After squandering an entire decade on all-too-often embarrassingly cerebral journalism, online publishing
pioneer
Salon.com has clearly decided to finally get serious, making a concerted push to join the ranks of the internet's
pillars of
innovation and
originality. Good thing too, because it's all too hard
these days to find quality mirrors for the Star Wars Kid, the Exploding Whale, and freshly ripped clips from last night's
Stewart/Colbert broadcasts. Thanks, Salon!
posted by MaxVonCretin
on Dec 6, 2005 -
21 comments
Why Your Wife Won't Have Sex with You. That quack Dr. Phil says that while sex is only 10% of a marriage, it's 90% when you're not getting it. Or words to that effect. There's some truth to that.
This site discusses, from woman's point of view, why a wife might not feel like sex--often for years at a time. She also goes into greater detail (with insights taken from her own life and experience) such issues as
some causes and what a
man can do.
posted by John of Michigan
on Oct 23, 2005 -
55 comments
Blinked is Malcom Gladwell's latest short, concept driven book about how instant judgements are often correct, but equally often dangerous. Two reviews on
S****.com and
S****.com [ad thingie to watch] make for great reading themselves. Gladwell's long been a
favorite of mine, and I
don't think I'm alone here. Previously cited works include one of the best essays I've ever read, about the ultimate
pitchman.
posted by allan
on Jan 13, 2005 -
33 comments
The real-life Edna Mode - If you aspire to cartoonish superhero proportions, where your massive muscles and barrel chest allow you to leap computer-generated buildings with single, animated bounds, you should take a lesson from Mr. Incredible: Sew your underwear to your shirt.
Salon link; advertising supported free access
posted by GriffX
on Dec 21, 2004 -
15 comments
Patrick "Ask a Pilot" Smith opines on "Terror in the Skies, Again?" Smith: I, for one, fully admit that certain acts of airborne crime and treachery may indeed open the channels to a debate on civil liberties. Pray tell, what happened? Gunfight at 37,000 feet? Valiant passengers wrestle a grenade from a suicidal operative? Hero pilots beat back a cockpit takeover?
Well, no. As a matter of fact, nothing happened. Turns out the Syrians are part of a musical ensemble hired to play at a hotel. The men talk to one another. They glance around. They pee. That's it? That's it.
posted by skallas
on Jul 20, 2004 -
68 comments
The Newsweek-Fahrenheit wars - Michael Isikoff's "seven errors, distortions and selective omissions of crucial information" detailed by Craig Unger, "
House of Bush, House of Saud" author (read excerpts of his book
at Salon.com, for members or by a "day pass") Isikoff has heavily cited Unger's book but, it seems, not bothered to read Unger's generously provided
source files. "Liberal" PBS is not excluded, as credulous (or ignorant) "On the Media" host Bob Garfield's July 2 interview with Isikoff
demonstrates. What shall we call such
pervasive, ongoing and seemingly willful patterns of inaccuracy, distortion, and selective omission?
posted by troutfishing
on Jul 7, 2004 -
34 comments
America's laziest fascist Inside Michael Savage's hatefest. I can't tell if this is offensive or just sadly pathetic. Salon: But if the first half of the event showcased Savage's ability to stir the faithful, the second half was an object lesson in how a performer can take his audience -- and his talent -- for granted. Basically, he bombed. He spent nearly 20 minutes sitting in a stuffed chair in front of a television set, free-associating as he channel surfed. Seeing footage of Jordan's King Abdullah, he screamed, "Kiss my ass! Shut the hell up!" To a soccer match in Spanish, he quipped, "Reminds me of my gardener." It was about as entertaining as watching a middle-aged man yelling at his living room TV. Savage eventually realized things weren't going well. "You don't like this shit," he said. "It's a bad act."
posted by skallas
on May 19, 2004 -
49 comments
Joseph Wilson interviewed at Salon. They've also tried to portray you, and all the other whistle-blowers who have spoken out against the administration, as partisan democrats. Do you think that has been an effective technique?
It hasn't worked with me. People are touched by this story because it gives a human face to a whole host of lies and deceptions that only now are becoming apparent to the American public. Americans don't like this attitude. Americans don't like to see their women taken out and beaten up.
posted by skallas
on May 3, 2004 -
71 comments
Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it's tea. In Africa it's milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer. Salon talks with Neal Stephenson.
[premium/free day pass]
posted by xmutex
on Apr 21, 2004 -
9 comments
Thou shalt not make scientific progress. "Medical research is poised to make a quantum leap that will benefit sufferers from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, diabetes and other diseases. But George W. Bush's religious convictions stand in its way."
posted by homunculus
on Mar 24, 2004 -
45 comments
Howard Stern's new found liberalism. "The potential impact is huge," says Charles Goyette, talk-show host at KFYI in Phoenix. "And it's not just with the 8 million people who tune it, it's that he breaks the spell. Everybody's been enchanted by Bush, that he's a great wartime leader and to criticize him is unpatriotic. Now Stern pounds him every day and it shatters that illusion that the man is invincible and he shouldn't be criticized."
posted by skallas
on Mar 12, 2004 -
50 comments
