How to Take a Picture of a Severed Head Or not. IS is working very hard to manage its media presence, and it’s working. By Sebastian Meyer and Alicia P.Q. Whitmeyer at Foreign Policy. H/t Alex Horton. Photo via Reuters via Foreign Policy.
Mirwan was recruited to document IS’s recent attack on the town of Sinjar, he says – the same takeover whose aftermath has prompted U.S. airstrikes in Iraq. There, he was photographing fighting until a few members of ISIS called him over. Thirty men lay waiting facedown on the ground, hands bound behind their backs. Three or four women were standing by, watching. It was an execution.
Take the pictures, he was told.
Speaking of PR, the pay gap between journalism and public relations is growing. But the scarier part is how badly journalists are outnumbered.
The salary gap between public relations specialists and news reporters has widened over the past decade – to almost $20,000 a year, according to 2013 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by the Pew Research Center. At the same time, the public relations field has expanded to a degree that these specialists now outnumber reporters by nearly 5 to 1 (BLS data include part-time and full-time employees, but not self-employed.).
Google’s autofill algorithm seems to think women can’t teach themselves calculus. But this woman wrote the book on it. By Ben Lillie.
Google’s algorithm is based on cues from what other people are searching for and uses context to try to figure out what an user meant. But algorithms, “are never as neutral as they appear.” So while no one thought “only men would teach themselves calculus,” it’s also true that that’s what the culture as a whole has decided, at least in aggregate. Whether we like it or not, we associate something about that phrase with men more than women. This has happened before, and will likely happen many times again. One of the wonderful things about relying on computers to help us is that if we’re not careful they’ll tell us who we really are. In this case that we’re living in a quite deeply sexist culture.
The deep irony, though, is that while people are responding to this quite strongly, Ouellette’s name isn’t in the tweet that’s going viral. The same algorithm that held up this rather unfortunate mirror ensures that neither Jennifer Ouellette’s name nor the name of her book, The Calculus Diaries, is getting attached to that mirror.
Two essays examine how artists — Hemingway and Beethoven — cut things near to the bone:
Hemingway’s Hidden Metafictions in “The Sun Also Rises”. Ian Crouch, at The New Yorker.
All of this was cut at the suggestion of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, after reading the version that Hemingway had sent to Perkins, wrote a long, dismayed-sounding letter to Hemingway, in which he said, “I think that there are about 24 sneers, superiorities, and nose-thumbings-at-nothing that mar the whole narrative up to P. 29 where (after a false start on the introduction of Cohn) it really gets going.” Though Hemingway would later downplay Fitzgerald’s editorial influence, the published novel begins with the sentence: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.”
In the letter, Fitzgerald also criticized Hemingway for injecting his own writerly persona into the text: “That biography from you, who allways believed in the superiority (the preferability) of the imagined to the seen not to say to the merely recounted.” With this fragment of a sentence, Fitzgerald gives Hemingway the familiar writing-class advice—show, don’t tell; less is more; and what is left out can sometimes be more meaningful than what is included. Earlier versions of the novel contained even more of this “biography”; Fitzgerald had caught the remnants of nervous self-consciousness that Hemingway himself had curtailed as he wrote.…
Jeremy Denk, writing on a new Beethoven biography, considers some dangers of minimalism that apply to writing too.
In Mozart and Haydn, these same units, these triads and scales, are lurking behind the surface; but generally there is a film or veil concealing the girders from view. In Mozart, the ends of phraselets are often decorated with little dissonances, elegant deflections; in Haydn, the same role is often played by witty cross-accents, or unusual figurations. But you can notice, more and more, in later Beethoven — for example the slow movement of the last violin sonata, or of the “Archduke” Trio, both of which should be on any essential listening list — the way he purges his music of these artifacts of elegance, and prefers having harmonies on the main beats without decoration or deflection.
There is a danger in relying on rudimentary materials. They can be felt as an emptiness, a skeleton, a mere outline — Beethoven sometimes uses this expressive effect, calling our attention to the flesh that isn’t there. But more often they are felt as a strength, a frame, something to hold on to. By the late years, an uncanny duality develops: On the one hand, the sense that Beethoven might do anything, harmonically, that he would venture to the far ends of the musical earth; on the other, always there, rock-solid, the triads, the tonic and the dominant, the familiar landmarks of classical harmony. The sense of the world dissolving into the modern, the ground disappearing beneath your feet, and yet … the ground reassuringly remains. Beethoven somehow gets to have it both ways — absolute liberty and total control.
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