"I have challenged a number of friends overloading on politics and permanently 'bad' news to try reading nothing but science and technology news for a week or two, then compare it to what they had read or watched prior to that."

"Almost invariably they found the science/tech news was quite positive and uplifting while 'regular' news was negative and a buzzkill."

Wrote DCE in the comments to "Start with a politics cleanse: For two weeks — maybe over your August vacation — resolve not to read, watch or listen to anything about politics."

The post title is a quote from the NYT op-ed by Arthur C. Brooks, "Need a Politics Cleanse? Go Ahead and Treat Yourself/Overwhelmed by current events? You can skip a few weeks without losing track of the plot."

Yesterday, we were talking about the demise of Upworthy, a website that was founded on some sort of idea of presenting news stories in a way that would meet psychological needs for the warm and fuzzy (while delivering a liberal, activist message). As the NYT columnist David Carr wrote in "New Site Wants to Make the Serious as Viral as the Shallow" (2012):

... Upworthy... is using strong visuals along with arch, but serious, curation to find the sweet spot between things that are both “awesome” and “meaningful.” Among the memes they’d like to start, the “17 sexiest pictures about income inequality.”

If that sounds too cute by half, remember that these are the people who took a monthsold, earnest video about gay marriage and helped it go viral with 17 million spins on YouTube by putting a clicky head — “Two lesbians had a baby and this is what they got” — on what was essentially a video of Congressional testimony.

The founders of Upworthy had their own ends, and your psychological needs were part of their process of achieving their ends. Of course, everyone writing on the web is serving interests of his own, and you need to look after your own interests (including which of the interests of others you're going to pay attention to). You can choose what websites to visit and which stories to read, making selections moment by moment and getting good at deciding what not to click. I suspect what happened to Upworthy is that readers got better and better at resisting clickbait. What worked for the site originally became deadly because the clickbaitiness was obvious.

If you're reading this blog, perhaps you can sense that I've been writing all along — since 2004 — for the intrinsic value of the experience of finding things I want to read, writing about them in real time, making a space for other people to join me in writing about the same things, and selectively reading what you write. If this blog gives you something that you select to read, thanks! That's part of the intrinsic pleasure.

ADDED: Though I write this blog continuously, I also take breaks all the time. What I do, you can do too: I make different selections. For example, yesterday, I went wandering around in The Utne Reader and wrote about hopelessness and forest bathing. Meanwhile, there are many prominent stories that I won't read beyond a glance at the headline. For example there's something about a Russian woman that has something to do with Trump troubles. I refuse to figure out what looks like a complicated tangle that the news media are promoting because it might turn into something that could hurt Trump.  If it ever does, I'll be able to get up to speed in 5 minutes. It will become simpler. But it might just as well melt away into nothing, and if I'd learned about it, I will have forgotten what I knew.

I have good skimming and selection skills, so I have a lot of control over my time and my psychological wellbeing. I won't sit in front of the television letting CNN or Fox or MSNBC control the time and continually tell me to worry about this and then this and then, after the break, this. I know what they're doing because I overhear some of it when Meade watches. I'll sometimes ask how he can watch it. He says finds it amusing, so okay. I'm very sensitive to the awful aesthetics. Like the other day, I did sit down to watch CNN with him for a few minutes and the main thing I saw — the only thing I talked about — is that the background CNN put behind all the talking heads was slanted. Slanted to the left, by the way. An unintentional metaphor. What was intentional, I'm sure, was the creation of a sense of anxiety — of a world out of kilter. They'd like that to work only subliminally, but I won't let them do that to me.

"Unlike the Washington journalists, who all but wore cufflinks inscribed with their I.Q.s..."

"... Carr never needed people to think that he was the smartest guy in the room. He could be self-deprecatingly funny."

From "Postscript: David Carr (1956-2015)," by Jelani Cobb (in The New Yorker).

... Washington journalists, who all but wore cufflinks inscribed with their I.Q.s...

Good lord! I'd love to know the details of the I.Q.-pride that Cobb witnessed. Cobb's short piece mourns the fallen media critic David Carr, and we are not told about that larger context within which Carr was an outlier. I want to hear what underlies that snarky cufflinks inscribed with their I.Q.s image. It's hard even to understand. If there were cufflinks inscribed with I.Q.s, there would be no point in displaying neediness about being regarded as the smartest guy in the room. We could check your cufflinks and see a number that everyone in a room with such cufflinks would regard as a statement of the actual fact.

I don't live and move amongst the journalists of Washington. I've been embedded in academia here in The North for 30 years. If anyone displayed neediness about seeming to be the smartest guy — only guys, Jelani? — in the room around here, he'd be regarded — I think — as a little embarrassing and less intelligent than the rest, and someone behaving in the Carr manner would be far more likely to be suspected of being the most intelligent. Self-deprecation seems perfectly normal in my habitat.

So tell me, Mr. Cobb, how insufferably obnoxious are these Washington assholes?

I mean, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should honor the humble and brilliant media critic who has departed, but it is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished media criticism which he so nobly advanced.

ADDED: In the I.Q. cufflinks system, at what point on the I.Q. spectrum would it be wise to wear cufflinks displaying a lower I.Q. than your actual I.Q.? How much would people deviate from their actual, tested I.Q.s as they sought business, political, and social advantages? What would be the optimum I.Q. for getting along and getting ahead and how would it vary from Washington to NYC to Madison or wherever? I mean, let's say the best I.Q. for these purposes was found to be 120: How far below 120 could you be and still con people into believing you're a 120? How far above 120 could you go and still pull it off? This hypo is horribly complicated by our suspicions that I.Q. isn't a useful enough metric, but deal with it. In the hypo, people believe in the significance enough to wear I.Q. cufflinks. So the subjective judgments would have a very real effect even if the numbers were junk science.

The 4 a.m. screen shot puts everything into proportion.

Here's the Phys.org article that went up on Memeorandum at 5:55 ET on Tuesday morning, where it got my attention 5 45 minutes later as I checked my iPhone for the news before I got out of bed. I captured the screen shot and imagined that would make a good blog post. Is our world about to get shaken up? Will presidential candidates be asked if they are comfortable with a universe that's been around forever?

But the first blog post on Tuesday didn't go up until 7:56, and it was about a WaPo columnist's abstruse effort to support his assertion that it's "'trivial to compare' Roy Moore's trying to stop gay marriage in Alabama to George Wallace's blocking the door to racial integration at the University of Alabama." (The columnist thought what Roy Moore was doing is a much bigger deal.)

I'm seeing the old screen shot at 6 a.m. this morning because I plugged my iPhone into my computer just now. I'm remembering what I didn't blog on Tuesday and remembering what I saw on my iPhone this morning as I scanned the latest news from my supine position under the comforter. David Carr has died! He was only 58. He collapsed in the newsroom at the New York Times. Will I blog about his death when I did not blog the death of Bob Simon, reported on Memeorandum at 12:25 a.m. on February 10, whence it was read out loud from across the room by my husband Meade, causing me to ask: "Who's Bob Simon?"?

I had to be told he's one of the "60 Minutes" people. I don't watch "60 Minutes," but I do read the NYT, and I've read and enjoyed David Carr many times. Here's his 2008 article about his life as a crackhead:

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs — you need, actually — to keep them at a remove. Let’s stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices. Beyond impairment, there may be no more unreliable narrator than an addict. Recovered or not, I am someone who used my mouth to constantly create one more opportunity to get high.

Here is what I deserved: hepatitis C, federal prison time, H.I.V., a cold park bench, an early, addled death.

Here is what I got: the smart, pretty wife, the three lovely children, the job that impresses.

That's a journalist reporting on the mind of an addict: an addict spreads around versions on the truth depending on what you think anyone listening to you seems to need. And isn't that what we've come to feel the journalists seem to be doing? [Insert reference to Brian Williams.] And isn't that what we expect the politicians to do, for example, when they are asked, as Scott Walker was the other day, about whether they are comfortable with evolution?

At the Facebook post where we have a long thread about Scott Walker's response — saying he needed to "punt" on that question and that it's not the sort of thing politicians should have to talk about —Annie Gottlieb says:

Why do we say we "believe in" evolution? That gives away the fact that "science" is our modern religion, the thing we look to for an explanation of our existence and a hope of defeating death. (The third thing religion supplies, meaning, science is not so good at, although it does somewhat justify social Darwinism if that's your cup of tea.) What's funny about it is that science itself, without the scare quotes, is exposing the fact that we don't yet understand evolution very well at all.

And I say:

Yes, this is something I notice all the time. And people are pressured to believe because of the prevalence of believers -- their domination in positions of authority -- and not because we understand and see the reasoning of the science. So it's not just like religion. It's like authoritarian religion. By the way, some physicists are casting doubt on the Big Bang theory. Will they move into the position of authority at some point? Why does it even matter whether we agree or not? We can't check their work. We can't have an independent position. We're just called upon to be sheep for the Good Shepherd. Might as well go with Jesus. He's pretty good.

David Carr questions "whether The Times can convince female employees that it is a fair place to work, with ample opportunity to advance."

He writes that he has "heard from several talented young women who are a big part of The New York Times’s future." One said: “I really don’t see a path for me here... Are we O.K.?”

Carr also reveals — or this is the first place I've seen this — that Dean Baquet, the new executive editor, laid down an ultimatum to the publisher Arthur Sulzberger, saying "he would leave the paper because he found the situation untenable" (i.e., it's her or me).

ADDED: Do you get leverage to oust a white woman when you use a black man as your fulcrum?

"My once beloved magazines sit in a forlorn pile... Television now meets many of the needs that pile previously satisfied."

Writes David Carr in the NYT:

I have yet to read the big heave on Amazon in The New Yorker...

Which I blogged here last month.

... or the feature on the pathology of contemporary fraternities in the March issue of The Atlantic...

Yeah, I already blogged that too, here.

Magazines in general had a tough year...

"Activists can and often do reveal the truth, but the primary objective remains winning the argument."

"That includes the argument about whether a reporter has to be politically and ideologically neutral to practice journalism."

The last 2 sentences in a NYT article by David Carr about the extent to which Glenn Greenwald should be regarded as a "journalist."

The NYT on CNN: "The Pressure to Be the TV News Leader Tarnishes a Big Brand."

An article by David Carr focuses on CNN's incorrect report last Wednesday that there had been an arrest in the Boston bombing. Carr is sympathetic:

The incrementalism and vamping required to fill the hours — “Again, as we have been saying, Anderson ... ” — makes everyone desperate to say anything vaguely new.

Throughout the week, I saw anchors and reporters staring at their phones, hoping a new nugget might arrive to give them something to say.... And the live environment means that at a certain point, the bosses have to quit shouting into the ear piece, trusting their staff and crossing their fingers.

Oddly — but not surprisingly — the article ends with Obama. I say "not surprisingly" because all roads lead to Obama. Everything is about Obama. But I say "oddly," because the story is about CNN, journalism, and the Boston bombing. There should not be a sense that these themes are resolved by looking to what Obama thinks or what it means for Obama.

"[T]here is a big difference between being a plagiarist — at bottom, lazy or sloppy — and being a fabulist."

David Carr on Fareed Zakaria and Jonah Lehrer.

It's tougher to make things up than to copy, and yet it's Lehrer who's screwed himself more deeply.

"Making people care" — Mike Daisey's justification for folding fake drama into a more or less true story.

David Carr analyzes the theater/journalism borderline, looking at Daisey's "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" (the subject of this week's "Retraction" on "This American Life") and "Kony 2012" (the viral video whose producer, Jason Russell, was found, last Friday, naked and ranting on the streets of San Diego). Daisey says he "was terrified" that if he "untied" the fake parts of his theater monologue (to meet the standards of "This American Life") that "the work, that I know is really good, and tells a story, that does these really great things for making people care... would come apart in a way where, where it would ruin everything."

I listened to the "Retraction" episode of "This American Life," and was captivated and repulsed by the replays of the "The Agony and the Ecstasy," with Daisey's heavy-handed phrasing and gulping passionate voice. He injects Apple is eeeevvvilll directly into the theatergoer's brain. You hear the audience reaction and feel them in his manipulative hands. This is art! But it's journalism too. All you have to do is say it has fictionalized elements, and you're in the powerful realm of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "The Jungle."

Carr says:

I am a longtime fan of “This American Life,” but I have never assumed that every story I heard was literally true. The writer and monologist David Sedaris frequently tells wonderful personal yarns on the show that may not be precisely true in every detail....

Yes, what exactly is the difference between Sedaris and what Daisey did? One is humor and the other drama? But both humor and drama employ exaggerations, composites, and invention. One is only trying to entertain and the other is trying to incite political action? That's more like it. One is an author telling stories on himself (and his friends and family) and the other has identified a target and intends a vicious attack that will cause real harm. That matters.

Now, Daisey stresses the victims of his victim: the workers in China, the people he made the audience care about by making up dramatic scenes that, it turns out, never happened, like the man with a hand that was mangled making an iPad who gets to touch, with that mangled hand, a finished iPad, and he strokes it and calls it "magical." This is a version of what is the classic melodramatic encapsulation of the plight of the factory worker: He labors over the creation of a product that he can never own.

Carr — writing in the NYT — turns to the NYT journalists who published a series of articles "investigating Apple’s suppliers... that may have contained a bit less drama, but landed hard." I presume these articles are accurate, but how do I know? Carr anticipates the reader's skepticism about the trustworthiness of professional journalists (who can't make the I'm-an-artist defense when they are caught faking). He ends his article with a coy reference to "an e-mail to someone I know who is an expert on journalistic malfeasance [askins] if, in a complicated informational age, there was a way to make sure that someone telling an important story had the actual goods." We get a quote from this character, a quote that's only worth quoting to get to the revelation that it's Jayson Blair. Somehow the NYT expects you to remember who Blair is... or they're hoping we've forgotten.

I put that link on Blair's name. It's not in Carr's article — and it's even a link to the NYT. Blair's articles seemed so good because they included vivid details that extracted empathy from the reader:

Some of Mr. Blair's articles in recent months provide vivid descriptions of scenes that often occurred in the privacy of people's homes but that, travel records and interviews show, Mr. Blair could not have witnessed.

On March 24, for example, he filed an article with the dateline Hunt Valley, Md., in which he described an anxious mother and father, Martha and Michael Gardner, awaiting word on their son, Michael Gardner II, a Marine scout then in Iraq.

Mr. Blair described Mrs. Gardner ''turning swiftly in her chair to listen to an anchor report of a Marine unit''; he also wrote about the red, white and blue pansies in her front yard. In an interview last week, Mrs. Gardner said Mr. Blair had spoken to her only by phone.

Why lie about pansies? Red, white and blue pansies. To make you care. You can't be relied upon to care based on journalistic facts alone. Those who would manipulate your political opinions know they need to pull at your heart. They give you flowers. They give you an old man with a shaking, mangled hand.

From the "This American Life" transcript (boldface added):

Mike Daisey: And everything I have done in making this monologue for the theater has been toward that end – to make people care. I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret is that I had it on your show as journalism and it’s not journalism. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc and of that arc and of that work I am very proud because I think it made you care, Ira, and I think it made you want to delve. And my hope is that it makes – has made — other people delve....

And I stand by it as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes people see and care about the situation that’s happening there. I stand by it in the theater. And I regret, deeply, that it was put into this context on your show.

Make people care. This is the what we are exposed to when we encounter text. An author is trying to make you care. And maybe you feel that upwelling of caring — empathy... ah, the twinges of humanity. Aren't you a good person to surrender to the injection of caring about the thing you've been manipulated into caring about?

Make people care. May I suggest that you shift your focus from "care" to "make"? Someone is trying to make you feel/think what they want you to feel/think. They'd like you to directly internalize the viewpoint they have chosen and do not want to try to prove on facts and reason alone. Resist!

There. Was that dramatic enough to make you care about resisting the writers who are out to make you care?

About that blogger who didn't get to use the journalist shield law...

David Carr — at the NYT — is not too sympathetic:

In the pre-Web days, someone like Ms. Cox might have been one more obsessive in the lobby of a newspaper, waiting to show a reporter a stack of documents that proved the biggest story never told. The Web has allowed Ms. Cox to cut out the middleman; various blogs give voice to her every theory, and search algorithms give her work prominence....

“I view our case as a blow for the First Amendment,” said [the man who won at $1.5 million judgment from her]. “If defamatory speech is allowed just because it is on the Internet, it cheapens the value of journalism and makes it less worthy of protection.”

"If it's Kansas, Missouri, no big deal. You know, that's the dance of the low-sloping foreheads. The middle places, right?"

It's NYT columnist David Carr, saying something aloud on Bill Maher's show the other day. I thought I'd better nail that down here because "low-sloping foreheads" is obviously already a big meme. It's the cool new way to say "flyover states."

And, to save you the trouble of trying to remember it and look it up, here's David Carr's 2008 NYT Magazine telling the story of his crackhead past.

Every addict is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first hit. Even as the available endorphins attenuate, the memory is right there. By 1985, I tried freebasing coke and its more prosaic sibling, crack.

“Crackhead” is an embarrassing line item to have on a résumé. If meth tweakers had not come along and made a grab for the crown — meth makes you crazy and toothless — crackheads would be at the bottom of the junkie org chart. In the beginning, smokable cocaine fills you with childlike wonder, a feeling that the carnival had come to town and chosen your cranium as the venue for its next show. There is only one thing that appeals after a hit of crack, and it is not a brisk walk around the block to clear one’s head. Most people who sample it get a sense of its lurid ambush and walk away.

Many years later, my pal Donald sat in a cabin in Newport, Minn., staring into a video camera I had brought and recalling the crackhead version of me.

Have a little pity on the poor man, even as he's disparaging other people's heads. Remember he has disparaged his own head.

A developing wave of revulsion.

David Carr (in the NYT) reports, amusingly, on the disgust New Yorkers are feeling about the approaching Republican conventioneers. The best quote is from The Weekly Standard's Matt Labash:

They can say that they won't even know we are here, but they will. We will plunk down our garment bags in their hopelessly trendy hotels, standing out like Good Humor men in our summer-weight khaki suits while all those hipster squirrels scramble for our tips. ... They needn't worry. The contempt is mutual."

I also liked this, from Details editor Daniel Peres:

I don't want to see a lot of bad Men's Warehouse suits and a lot of badly parted hair walking around my neighborhood. All Republicans part their hair the same way.

Note the assumption that all Republicans are not only repulsive, but male. Or do Republican women have Trent Lott hair too?

The article also contains an interesting comparison between the way power operates in in New York and in Washington, which is connected to the feelings of mutual contempt. The theory is that Washington power is all about what position of power you hold, but New York power is less "hierarchical" and more "dispersed": In New York, you can be powerful through physical beauty or controlling access to a trendy place. The notion seems to be that people who have succeeded playing one city's power game find it quite unsettling to share physical space with the set of powerful persons produced by the other city's game.