How Reddit and Twitter got it wrong and made life worse for a missing kid’s family

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Screenshot 4 19 13 10 16 AM 2

A missing Brown student was unfortunately smeared last night in the confusion/excitement/torrent of news flowing on Twitter. At about 2:45 AM this Tweet (deleted in the last 30 minutes, or so) started getting RT'd by people I follow and it moved very quickly from there up to media members RT'ing it as well. The person who posted it said they were sharing a Reddit transcript of the Boston Police scanner broadcast. The Reddit back patting from both Reddit users and new-media members came quickly because Reddit had at some point earlier speculated on the connection to the bombers and the missing Brown student. Much criticism had been heaped on their efforts to identify bombers all week, so it'd be understandable for them to want to gloat.

Except they got it wrong. I was listening to the scanner when they mentioned the first guy's name on the BPD scanner, and did not hear the second name on the scanner at all. It wasn't said. 50K other people were listening to the scanner at the time, so maybe others can corroborate this. And it turns out the guy mentioned as suspect #1 didn't have anything to do with the bombing and was probably related to another issue BPD was dealing with last night. The guy listed as suspect #2 in the above Tweet is the missing Brown student, and as we know now, was not considered a suspect.

Last night was the first time I've heard of a police scanner driving the "facts' of a major news story for several hours, and if you listened, you now know why. There were several announcements made over the scanner that turned out to be part of the understandable confusion of a massive police chase. I went to sleep right after hearing about officers being directed to a specific area for a supposed foot chase between Newton police officers and the suspect. One of the last messages I heard broadcast was, "Uh, just talked to Newton police. There was no foot chase."

Some other thoughts:
-General term "Reddit users" tossed around a couple times in this post which obviously lumps them all together. Too tired from staying up most of the night to write more artfully, but I know there's no way to describe all Reddit users as one.
-Not sure whether the scanner transcript on Reddit mentioned the missing student or if the Tweeter above just added it in to a Tweet.
-I'm not usually a fan of Tweets being deleted, but the Tweeter above did the right thing by deleting his Tweet. Before it got deleted, I noticed the RT number going down, so people were obviously trying to disassociate themselves from this message.

I don’t know

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I don't know what to say about today. Earlier I was raw. I couldn't watch the news without tears welling and I don't know when I got so emotional because this stuff didn't used to impact me so deeply. This stuff. This stuff happened about 3 miles from where we live, around the corner from where my wife used to work, and around the corner from where she works now. It's a block I've walked down, driven down, rode my bike down countless times. I don't think that has anything to do with it. I grew up in a town along the Marathon route and can't remember ever not going to cheer the runners on. I was just wondering this morning if we'd bring our baby (who will more than likely be born in the next few days) to watch the race. I don't know if that has anything to do with it either, though it must. The baby is to be born at a hospital that was closed for several hours after the bombing because of either persons of interest or threats or both.

Did you see how quickly people ran towards the explosion on the video they keep playing over and over. The bomb explodes, there's a beat when people look around stunned, and then almost instantly, they're tearing at the fence to get to the injured. Later, over a thousand Bostonians signed up in a few hours to open their homes to out of town runners. Seeing that did help me process a little bit. One person or a group of people left the bombs at the Marathon, but so many more people were ready to help. So many more reached out with compassion to people they didn't know. I hope that's what I remember most about today. I know that at least.

Mad Men Season 6 Episode 3 recap

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MadMen DoingSomethingYouLove

Every week, Chris Piascik (@chrispiascik) illustrates a moment from the episode and I write up a recap. We've got no baby yet, so I'm still doing the recaps. We'll see about next week.

I didn't immediately know what to write about tonight, but I'm starting to center around 3 major themes from tonight: prostitution, advertising, and war. First let's get some plot details out of the way.

-Megan had a miscarriage. She didn't want to tell Don because she didn't necessarily want to scare him away by bringing up the conversation about whether to have kids or not. Ever helpful Don does not answer one way or another. "You have to know I want what you want. Is that what you want?"
-Peggy is still having a hard time managing people, this time getting management advice from her secretary. I wonder if this will continue all season. And getting pranked/hazed by her employees. I was surprised, naively perhaps, that her employees would prank a superior in this manner. (Also, did that firm get Clearasil last year when SCDP got Dow Chemical?)
-Don and Mrs. Rosen continue their dalliance and talk about their feelings. When Don feels her pulling away, he seems even more attracted. To me there were huge similarities in his "You want to feel shame right up to the point I take your dress off" speech and when he forced his hand up Bobbie Barrett's dress (also in a restaurant.) Don goes after these women who have rebellious streaks, but not too rebellious. Don seems to want to be found out, a trait he's exhibited consistently in the series.
-Pete uses his Manhattan bachelor pad to seduce a woman from down the block. Her husband abuses her and Trudy finds out about it. This leads to a conversation where she acknowledges she knew about Pete's philandering. "It's all about what it looks like, isn't it." Pete also seems like he wants to get caught.
-Don and Pete, Don and Pete, Don and Pete. Their stories are so entwined. Pete wants to be Don, wants to live like Don. Don maybe sees that in Pete and despises him for it. "Why can't you just follow the rules?" Dunno, Pete, why can't you?

-War, advertising, and prostitution were big tonight. Advertising compared to prostitution, prostitution on its own, advertising compared to war, war on it's own, advertising on its own. Advertising has often been compared to prostitution, and it was tonight in various ways. Intimations to prostitution have come up previously, and comparisons to advertising, but right now I can't remember where war themes were so abundant, both metaphorically, and literally in the radio accounts and the conversation with Rosen at dinner.
First the references to prostitution:
-It's in Don's nature to be hamfistedly helpful, so him whipping out a wad of bills to give to Mrs. Rosen after they finished probably didn't have too many undertones to it in his mind, but I was surprised how willingly she took it. I think if I was sleeping with my neighbor and she offered me money, I'd at least make a joke about it.
-Don moving in to a brothel with his uncle and stepmother(?). I got the sense that this era's flashback would be present throughout the season…
-'Just a Gigolo' playing at the end of the episode. (David Lee Roth covered this later on.)
-The Jaguar/Joan storyline came back as well.
-Pete saying, "It's all about what it looks like, isn't it." could be describing prostitution or advertising, in the same way as Don's "I wish you handled the clients as well as you handled me." And Pete again, "I really have to get back, can you move it along a little." Her time was up.
-The title of the episode is The Collaborators, the name given to war-time citizens who cooperate with invaders, but what do you call the people you work with? This was just the beginning of the war references.
-It's the end of January, 1968, and the Viet Cong have just launched the Tet Offensive. (District Attorney Garrison was on Carson on 1/31/1968. Here's audio of the interview. The Tet Offensive occurred when a cease fire was signed for the Tet New Year. Trudy signed a cease fire with Pete by letting him get an apartment in the city and then he ambushed her.
-When Ted Chaough gave Peggy the Heinz account to research, pretty much everything he said compared advertising to war. "He's not your friend, he's the enemy." "This is how wars are won." "Blow their mind." Except for one part where I picked up a prostitution reference, "Maybe you need a friend more than you need a job. I didn't know that, I'm in advertising."
-But then this, "Your friend's mistake was underestimating you," which was talking about Don as much as it was talking about Don as much as it was talking about Stan. (If I ever have to micro-analyze a Ted Chaough paragraph, I will be upset.)
-"This is Munich" comparing the Jaguar/SCDP relationship to the appeasement of the Nazis is about a clear war reference as you can get, while Roger Sterling's 'self-immolation' comment was a hair more nuanced. Was Roger just saying Don had burned up, or was he saying Don's protesting the client's idea was similar to the protesting Vietnamese monks. In the third season of Mad Men, Sally saw a news report about a self immolating monk, so it's ground Mad Men has covered before.

The following points don't really tie to the above.
-The firm gets introduced to the Heinz Ketchup account, but is instructed to ignore it. Ken doesn't know why, but Don explains it says they have to, "Dance with the one that brung ya." It's crazy how loyal Don is to the clients (Mohawk Air) while knowing only infidelity in his marriage. He has more control over his professional life and can live it the way he feels like he should live his personal life. For some reason, he's not able to do this.
-I liked the line, "It's the Coca Cola of condiments!"
-The Jaguar plot about always saying yes to Herb was contrasted by the Pete / Trudy conversation which included, "I have never said no to you."
-This recap took a little longer than usual because I spent time trying to track the origins of "blow their mind," "dance with the one that brung ya," and "x is the y of z." Seems like all of those would have been in use in the 60s, but maybe not in heavy rotation.

Wu-Tang Forever – 20 years since 36 Chambers

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Here's a story on NPR's Morning Edition celebrating Wu-Tang's long career and focusing on Rza's 20 year plan. A major part of the plan was allowing individual members to sign with different record labels. This would spread the promotion money around, while also opening up door at record labels for other rappers.

One of the first record execs to come sniffing around was Steve Rifkind, who had a new label called Loud. The RZA got him to sign an unprecedented deal: For only $60,000, Rifkind got the Clan as a whole. But the RZA also convinced him to allow each individual in the group to become, in essence, a free agent. They could sign a solo deal with any other company, and take the Wu-Tang name with them.

"When Def Jam wanted to sign Method Man, they wanted to sign Method Man and Old Dirty," says the RZA. "And Old Dirty wanted to be on Def Jam — everybody, that was like the dream label. But if I had Old Dirty and Method Man on Def Jam, that's two key pieces going in the same direction, whereas there's other labels that needed to be infiltrated."

The RZA's plan was to spread his group's sound as widely as possible. And just a few years later, members of the Wu-Tang Clan were recording for five of the six major labels, back when there were six major labels. Sales from those albums enriched each label — which meant they saw more potential in hip-hop made by street kids.
[…]
"I recall telling GZA, 'You'll get the college crowd,' " because he's the intellectual. "Raekwon and Ghost, all the gangstas" — their metaphors read like a police blotter — "Meth will get the women and children — and he didn't want to do women and children. He didn't know that, though. Method Man is a rough, rugged street dude, but all the girls love him." Method Man is playful. "Myself, I was looking more like that I bring in rock 'n' roll," says the RZA, whose rhyming style is the opposite of laid-back.



Via @graysky

Mad Men Season 6 Episode 1 and Episode 2 recap

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Don Draper astronaut by chris piascik

Every week, Chris Piascik (@chrispiascik) illustrates a moment from the episode and I write up a recap. This season should be an interesting one for the flash recaps as my wife and I are expecting our first child to be born sometime between now and Episode 3. There will still be illustrated recaps on a weekly basis, but from time to time, they may be written by someone other than me.

-That was a startling fade in. Who did you think it was going to be getting resuscitated? I thought it was clumsy how they eventually came back around to that scene, maybe too quick of a cut from present to flashback. Almost certainly on purpose as they do. Jonesy the door guy had a heart attack or something and after being resuscitated by Arnold Rosen, was back at work when Don and Megan returned home. Rosen asks, "Jesus, what's his real name?" and maybe Don imagines himself dying without anyone knowing who he is.

-Before the premier, there had been plenty of speculation about when this penultimate season would take place. There is every year Part of the speculation is because people want to know how far the show will get into the 70's. Part of the speculation is because Matthew Weiner guards the timeline of the season so jealously. So everyone was right. We're about to be in 1968. (The first heart transplant, joked about on the Tonight Show, was in October 1967.) You get your Summer of Love, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, and coming up at the end of January, the Tet Offensive. At least ONE of those things will be featured this season.

-Just a quick catch up on where everybody is at the moment. Don and Megan are a few more months into their marriage, and Megan is a regular on a show called To Have and To Hold. Betty is a little heavy, though not as heavy as last year, and her and Henry have taken in a ward of some sort. Sally's 14, and has a deeper voice. Bobby is, again, played by a new actor. Roger (sideburns!) seems smitten with a 29 year old, and Peggy is busy putting out fires. We didn't get an update on Pete (except for his sideburns and continued hairline recession) or Joan.

-The problem with titling an episode 'Doorways' is that every single doorway in the episode takes on monumental importance. On the other hand windows, doorways, elevators have always had lots of importance on Mad Men. Here are a couple of the more memorable doorways: Betty tearing her coat on a hook in the doorway of the house at St Marks, Don and Megan coming in after vacation, Jonesy coming out of a doorway, Sally closes the door on Betty.

-Don was reading Dante's Inferno on the beach in Hawaii. Dante, you may recall, passes through the Gate of Hell (a doorway), which has the inscription, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Heaven and Hell, or fire and ice, were referenced several other times in the show: Hawaii is like Heaven, Jonesy "checking the steam," Betty getting pulled over because it was so icy, Roger's daughter wanting him to invest in refrigerated trucks, "Heaven's a little morbid" during the pitch.

-Don's watch didn't work when they were on the beach because time literally stands still in Hawaii. If you want to be like Don and Megan, you too can stay at the Royal Hawaiian.

-Don met a PFC Dinkins on R&R from Vietnam who was in Hawaii to get married. "You some kind of astronaut?" "One day I'll be the man who can't sleep and talks to strangers." Somehow Don ends up giving the bride away, and they exchanged lighters it's revealed during a scene where Don was peeved at being photographed. The lighter had the inscription, "In life we have to do things that are just not our bag," which has actually never applied to Don. Exchanging the lighters really shook Don, as if the two of them had exchanged lives. The photographer says, "I want you to be yourself," and obviously this is difficult for Don. (Eugene Dinkin was a PFC stationed in France. He went AWOL in Nov 1963 and showed up in Geneva talking about a plot against JFK. Just an aside.) In 2003, Phil Kline researched the poems GIs inscribed into their Zippos and included the 'not our bag' quote above. That phrase wasn't on the internet anywhere else until last night.

-The Francis house is always, always so dark, and all the scenes from this week were no exception. I guess it would be dark if you had to live with Betty. I've been writing this next sentence for 15 minutes and I am moving on. While, Betty graphically details a rape she encourages Henry to commit of a 15 year old girl staying with them her eyes have this crazy look. The look says, "I'm kidding, but not really, Henry, I'm jealous of this violin player, don't don't get any ideas and I don't know how inappropriate talking like this is because I'm a sociopath." But then also, "It makes me feel so much."

-Roger's in therapy this year, which replaces dictating his book as the device to just let him expound on everything and anything. He mentions the doors and paths and windows and gates, but says they're all the same, and they all close behind you. He hardly reacted to his mother's death, but sobbed when he found out about the shoe shiner. Sort of a cliche, but I'm OK with it for the glimpse into the real Roger. "Talk to Joan, she'll know what to do."

-"I smell creativity." Stan and Ginsberg are still there, along with another dude and another woman.

-Glad to see Peggy playing a big part. She's pitching clients (or calming them down in emergencies), and still coming up with good copy. "You're good in a crisis." We already knew that, Ted. One thing I noticed was both Abe (he's been around a while now) and Ted subtly mentioned Peggy's management style. Abe said she shouldn't be so mean, and Ted said she should have let people go home. I can't decide if this was done to show that Peggy's over her head (unlikely), or to show she's sort of clueless about how other people work. She works tirelessly and expects her bosses not to sugarcoat things, so why doesn't everyone? I like how her and Stan still work late together over the phone.

-"This is my funeral." It was as if Roger was throwing a party, not a funeral. I'm don't know why Don got so drunk at the funeral, but he started to lose it it when Roger's aunt emphasized the word "Wit" and "Man" in her eulogy. "Roger Sterling, no matter what you do, everyone loves you." Roger thought it was hilarious his mother left all her money to the Zoo and someone else can leave a comment below about the significance of the jar River Jordan water.

-"So, you'll still love me if I'm a lying cheating whore?" Don's cheating. Again. This time with the (older?) wife of his new friend, Arnold Rosen. (Did you see the look on his secretary's face when Don introduce him as a friend? Like, "Uh, you don't have friends.") Don feels bad about the cheating, but it hasn't stopped him yet. The two men, Draper and Rosen, are fascinated with each other's professions. Rosen said something like, you get paid to think about the stuff people don't want to talk about, and I get paid to not think about it. "Please don't compare what I do with what you do." Rosen made several comments comparing their two professions and Don kept avoiding it. People will do anything to alleviate their anxiety.

-But anyway, Don's cheating again. He does his best work when he's brimming with self-loathing, so that's good for Sheraton, I guess. I can't imagine we're back to self-destructive Don, since we've already seen that, or maybe I just hope we're not back there. I guess more on this next week.

-The part where Don asked Stan if the ad made him think of suicide and Stan saying that's why he liked it.

-A brief mention of Bob Benson, a new ass kissing character to keep an eye on.

-There were a lot of different references to photographs/pictures this week: The slide show of Hawaii (itself a reference the carousel of the first season), Rosen came to get a camera, the firm's partners being photographed, Betty showing a picture of the missing girl.

-It did snow in NYC on 12/31/1967.

Game of Thrones stretching television’s story telling ability.

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Television critics have discussed how cable shows like The Wire and The Sopranos showed how television could be like books in the storytelling and character development. Scott Meslow joins Alyssa Rosenberg to discuss how Game of Thrones might be pushing the envelope on the novelization of television, or how, at least, Game of Thrones might be too much book to effectively transfer to television. I just finished book 3 and 4 of the GoT series, and… There are a lot of new characters and stories. Where as the story of the Starks and Lannisters might be enough to fill several seasons of television on their own, the GoT series actually contains at least 6 or 8 other stories going on by the end of book 4. I really liked this thought: "Sprawl, for good and ill, is a characteristic of books in a way that it never can be of television."

Now, obviously Martin’s books have been released on a cycle that by the standards of television look leisurely. But they’re also able to give much more space to each character—sometimes for good, sometimes for ill—unconstrained by the production budgets, writing, production, and editing cycles, and standard length of a television episode that inevitably provide structure to the show. That means he writes a fair amount of digression and worldbuilding into the books, but also that he’s not bound by anything except how many pages his publishers can bind into a single volume, and even then, if he’s got to spill over into more volumes, they’re going to be nothing but happy. And those digressions, and the amount of time it takes to read the books, just give readers more hooks into the stories, the characters, and the settings. Sprawl, for good and ill, is a characteristic of books in a way that it never can be of television. I’m not saying that means the books are better than the show. But I do think that they expose some of the irreducible differences between reading and watching television once you reach a certain scope.



Via @tcarmody

Can someone please do something about the bees

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Bees are important because they pollinate fruits and vegetables and if you like fruits and vegetables, you should worry about why all the bees are fucking dying.

Precisely why last year’s deaths were so great is unclear. Some blame drought in the Midwest, though Mr. Dahle lost nearly 80 percent of his bees despite excellent summer conditions. Others cite bee mites that have become increasingly resistant to pesticides. Still others blame viruses.

But many beekeepers suspect the biggest culprit is the growing soup of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are used to control pests.

While each substance has been certified, there has been less study of their combined effects. Nor, many critics say, have scientists sufficiently studied the impact of neonicotinoids, the nicotine-derived pesticide that European regulators implicate in bee deaths.

The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked rising bee deaths.



I also like this guy who would have been insulted to be called an environmentalist previously, but gee, maybe they were on to something now that all his fucking bees are dying. You think?

Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.

Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”